The Visible Frontier

Grace Seybold

“That’s Ifenwa,” the captain said, pointing at a smear of light almost directly overhead. Inlesh repeated the name dutifully to himself. “That’s Ontok.” A pentagon of bright sparks halfway up the sky. “They’ve each got their own names, but you don’t need that for now. That’s Hiea.” A sullen orange glow in an otherwise unbroken patch of dark. “You can’t see it at twilight or dawn, so don’t rely on it for then, but it’s about the only star that ever shows in that direction, so it’s better than nothing.”

Inlesh nodded. “I heard,” he said, and stopped, because it sounded stupid, and then tried again, because he was supposed to ask questions in order to seem clever. “Is it true there are people there?”

The captain scratched at her jawline. “Well,” she said, “not at Hiea, likely. Used to be, they say. My grandfather was just a boy when it blazed up. Shone like the sun for a while, he told me, you could see it daytimes, and then burned down to what it is now. The maps show it looking a lot like Ifenwa before that.”

“There are maps?” Inlesh asked. This was a startling concept. “Star maps?”

“For records,” the captain cautioned. “Not for using. They’re not reliable. Stars shift, you know. That one there.” She pointed at a long silvery line, almost too thin to see, that split off at one end into a dozen tiny branches. “Omond Halaw. It moves a little bit every year, always down. Coming toward us, as it happens. If that star has people, they’ll get here in, oh, ten thousand years, something like that. Someone told me the exact number once, but I’ve forgotten.”

Inlesh repeated “ten thousand years” silently, along with the name. In the days since leaving their home port of Gwylleridge, the captain had told him quite a lot of things on which he had no idea whether he’d be tested or not, and quite a lot more things that he was fairly sure would never come up again, and a fair few things he was almost certain weren’t true, but the last thing he wanted was to be caught out.

“So you don’t trust sky maps for navigation, not by themselves,” the captain continued. “Shore maps can be good for a generation, and sea charts are good enough if you get them updated every year, but stars can change between one night and the next. And there’s no pattern to it; they can change by a lot, or by a little, which is worse. Memorize them, use them, but don’t rely on them unless you’ve got no choice.

Questions, Inlesh thought, ask questions. He shuffled hurriedly through the bits of folk wisdom and tall tale and family history that had been most of his education. There hadn’t been much about stars, but after a moment he dredged up something his aunt Alchayr had said once. “Is it true that the sun is a kind of star?”

The captain gave him a disgusted look. “Of course not,” she said. “Don’t be stupid.”

They made port at Roal Hadda, a city on the curve of Haddachirn Bay, all glaring white stone and little shaded plazas and the famous temple dominating the landscape from the top of its high hill. It was the farthest from home Inlesh had ever been, and as soon as he could he fled the docks and the company of Aranthaw’s sailors, to wander alone through the twisting streets, marveling at the glorious strangeness of a place that wasn’t his own.

At length he found himself on a climbing road, and around a curve the temple loomed up before him. He made the pilgrim’s donation with the small advance on his wages the captain had doled out to the shore parties, and entered the great rotunda, to gaze openmouthed at the sleek lizard-headed statues and the mosaics that shone mysteriously with soft light.

“Do you wish a guide, young sir?” A priest appeared at his elbow, soft-slippered on the ancient floor. “Are you perhaps interested in learning more of God?”

“I’m just—” Words failed Inlesh, as embarrassment often made them do. He had only come in to look, but it suddenly seemed terribly rude to say so.

“Perhaps you would like to hear one of the Lessons,” the priest offered. “You may ponder them at your leisure, young sir, being, as I think you are, a sailor, with ample time to study the sky upon which God writes His missives.”

“The sky?” Inlesh repeated, still trying to think of a way out of the conversation.

The priest gave a bobbing nod. “As the sky changes, young sir, so are the Lessons revealed. But, of course, it changes in God’s time, not ours, and so we must watch for many generations to follow a single tale. Come, come outside, the sun’s nearly covered.”

It was indeed almost full dark. Down below in the city there were lights, torches, and electric bulbs and by the harbor the occasional more exotic speck of illumination, but all that ceased at the foot of the temple hill, so that they had nearly as fine a view of the sky from the front portico as Inlesh had ever seen at sea.

The priest gestured grandly at the glowing smudge the captain had named Ifenwa. “That is the Lesson of the Cloud,” he intoned. “For thirty generations it has kept its shape, growing steadily but so slowly that no one in his lifetime may notice the change. So are we enjoined to propagate the faith, not by dispersing our people throughout the world as some foreigners do, but by steady advancement among those nearest? As the Cloud grows, so do we, and so long as it continues to grow, we know that God is pleased with our increase.”

“How do you know that’s what it means?” Inlesh asked. Ifenwa didn’t look that much like a cloud, even, other than being vaguely round and in the sky.

“We must interpret God’s Lessons with our own limited understanding,” the priest said. “Therein lies the difficulty, and the need for contemplation and the slow acquisition of wisdom. Of course there are differences of interpretation, but—see there?” He indicated the thin branching lines of Omond Halaw. “Consider the Lesson of the River. It splits and changes, but remains one River, and the streams and tributaries of error eventually fade away, leaving only the main current of truth.”

“Do you make maps?” Inlesh asked. “To remember what the—what the Lessons said in the past?”

The priest nodded, a pleased expression on his face. “We do, young sir. They are, of course, for the priesthood only, but if you were to seek initiation—”

“I have to get back to my ship,” Inlesh said hurriedly.

“Of course, of course,” the priest said, not seeming at all dismayed. “Consider the sky as you travel, and if it brings you to feel God’s call to it, return to us. We will be here always.”

Always seemed like a very long time, and Inlesh, back at sea and on the late watch alone, regretfully concluded that people who casually threw around words like “always” probably weren’t to be relied on.

But he started drawing his own map that night, carefully marking out the fixed positions of the stars and their curious shapes with a charcoal stick on a piece of sailcloth, and beside them writing both the names the captain had had him memorize and the names the priest had given: Cloud, River, Ember, Wing.

There was more to the world than anyone at home knew, as Inlesh fervently believed: it was what had impelled him to leave Gwylleridge, to beg position on Aranthaw and seek a wider life. Now, having begun (he thought) to grow used to the great sea, he transferred his longing to the sky.

At Shemcorizan Island they took on fresh water and laying hens and innumerable barrels of pickles, in preparation for the long stretch of empty water they would have to cover before reaching the next scheduled port. The great sea, the captain said, in that tone that meant Inlesh had better be learning, was one hundred ninety-seven thousand six hundred twenty kilometers from one end to the other, and its shores bore stretches of jungle for a year’s journey on foot, and sheer cliffs one might sail past for twenty days without finding a good harbor, and cities of machines and cities of stone and cities of clockwork and cities in ruin. There was a sailing ship of legend, Taramura, that had circumnavigated the great sea and taken fifty years to do it, though almost none of her original crew were left when she returned, save the pilot and the assistant cook, and a pair of the ship’s ancient fighting-beetles. Of course, the airships of some of the machine peoples could make the journey in days, but where was the glory in that?

Aranthaw’s itinerary was much more modest, a circle from Haddachirn Bay out through the Misleading Islands and the Sardees, and then back inshore to strike land near Quern Head, and a stop at Treynou Bay, and home again. It took her a hundred days to ply the route, which she had done for longer than Inlesh had been alive. Some of Aranthaw’s people, the captain among them, had made scores of circuits; others were temporary hires who would move on when mood or chance took them. Inlesh listened wide-eyed to all their tales, even knowing they couldn’t all be true.

“Ah, but how can anyone know for sure?” the second helmsman, a burly one-eared man who answered to Teeth, asked jovially in response to a chorus of skepticism at the end of one of his stories. “The world is vast beyond all belief. There’s room for all manner of wonders. I saw a map in Atalmar once, the size of this ship, on which even the great sea itself was so small as to be almost invisible.”

“Maraut are liars,” the first helmsman snorted. “One of them told me once that they have jewels inside their skulls that make them live forever. And where would someone stand to draw a map like that, anyway?”

“On the sun,” one of the other sailors offered.

“On the night-shell!” Inlesh put in, eager to contribute.

“On your arse, more like!” said the first helmsman, to general laughter. “Anyway, I don’t believe it.”

Maps could be had in plenty in the markets of Shemcorizan, though none at such a scale, for the island was one of the main starting points for voyages amid the archipelago that stretched far out into this part of the great sea. Inlesh spent hours gaping at the goods from distant places laid out for sale, exotic foods and strange machinery and all manner of marvelous things. He was entranced by a mechanical bird that reproduced with perfect accuracy anything said to it, but fortunately its price was close to a year’s wages for a sailor, so that he couldn’t be tempted. The next stall over was selling books in a hundred languages; the merchant admitted xie couldn’t read any of them, but was nonetheless firm in xer conviction that they held the secrets of creation. One stall further on, massive white-furred cats lounged in cages, displaying startling fangs to passersby when they yawned. Inlesh shuddered at the thought of transporting those as cargo.

“Oh, we don’t carry them on ships, good fellow!” their keeper said with a startled laugh when Inlesh inquired. “No, no, certainly not. There’s an outpost of the Donn Enshau at the edge of the jungle where they live, and we pay a goodly amount—an exorbitant amount, let me tell you—for the use of their teleport. Ah, it’s a grand thing. I’ll be reborn as a Donn Enshai in the life after next, let me tell you.”

There was quite a lot in that statement that Inlesh needed explained, and he wouldn’t have bothered trying to unravel it had not the keeper casually mentioned that of course it wasn’t his next life he was talking about, as that one would take place in one of the stars.

“Well, naturally,” he said when Inlesh pressed him about that. “The stars are full of people, you know. The world is a great sphere, and the stars are on the other side of it. Wherever you die, your soul goes in a straight line through the sun, and you’re reborn at the point precisely opposite. One pays a geometer quite a fortune to calculate the opportune place to die, to be reborn in the best star.” He himself had done so, he continued, though he regretted he couldn’t point out his chosen star, it being early morning at the moment, the night-shell slowly opening its petals from around the sun.

That the stars might be cities, or nations, was a vertiginous thought, but one that it turned out many of the local people held as truth. Many were willing to expound at length on the glories of the star they had selected as their place of rebirth, though the one most often mentioned, Inentou-daralees, would not be visible at night from here, being, of course, directly overhead and therefore hidden by the night-shell. Nonetheless Inentou marked it carefully on the blank space in the center of his map, writing Inentou-daralees and beside it, city?

Out into the open sea Aranthaw went, and every island and strait and stretch of open water was a wonder of a different kind. There were clouds of leaping fish that darkened the sky, and tiny jeweled lizards that swarmed aboard ship from a red sand beach and fought fiercely with the rats in the bilge in titanic contests on which the sailors wagered. They met folk who lived their whole lives on great rafts without ever going ashore, whose singing could be heard for kilometers. They saw a fleet of airships like vast golden balls pass overhead on their way to one of the machine civilizations. Once, late at night, an explosion lit the darkness, and streaks arrowed downwards into the sea; all lamps were lit and the watch ordered to the rails in case anyone was in the water, but no trace of whatever had fallen was found.

Inlesh’s map grew, the star-names multiplying until some stars were fully surrounded by a thicket of letters. In a marketplace in the Sardees he found a kind of fine black paper that held the most precise markings when pressed with a particular kind of needle-thin stylus. It came, the merchant said, from Ontok-Belah, from a ship of strangers who had long ago visited from that star, the statement gave Inlesh a peculiar thrill even though he was fairly sure the merchant lied. He bought it, and endured the jeers of those sailors who’d spent their money more sensibly on exotic intoxicants, and during one of the calm watches he copied his cloth map onto this new medium.

As he did so, a skitter-craft ran along the top of the water, spindly legs churning, and was as quickly out of sight. Inlesh wondered how long it would take to reach the end of the great sea, and how long, if it kept going, until it made it to the other side of the world.

Fifteen days’ tacking across open sea with no land visible brought them around on the homeward leg of their journey, and at the sixteenth dawn as the segments of the night-shell folded back from the sun, they sighted Quern Head with its jade green tower.

“We should have come in at night,” the captain commented to Inlesh reflectively. They stood at the helm, where Inlesh was being allowed, with supervision, to steer. “That tower glows like you wouldn’t believe.”

“Who built it?” Inlesh asked.

The captain shrugged. “Machine people. Real ones, actually—people that are made out of metal. Don’t look at me like that, it’s true.”

“Boy should ask them about his star maps,” Teeth commented. He’d been hovering nearby throughout the watch, ready to seize back the helm should Inlesh make a mistake, though in open water with a steady light breeze on the aft quarter there was little he could have done to cause catastrophe.

“They don’t talk to outsiders,” the captain said. “The tower’s a border marker as well as a lighthouse. We go the other way along the coast here; they don’t like us in their waters.”

Inlesh didn’t protest, though he would indeed have dearly liked to hear what metal people had to say about the stars. Could they see them better? Did they live long enough to watch them change?

That the stars might be distant cities was an idea that came up over and over. He had a score of names for some, and tales to go with them, of visitors who arrived in strange ships or appeared out of air or cloud, naming Ifenwa (Igressel, Fennow, Axal-bright) or Tiersu (Jendirra, Wing, Morhallis) as their home. Whether they were people, or people reborn, or holy judges, or machines, or creatures without souls, seemed to be a question with no solid answer, though it was guaranteed to spark drunken arguments in any dockside bar among people who had never before given it ten minutes’ consideration altogether.

There was no proper town at Quern Head, but the fisherfolk who lived in the straggle of huts along the shore looked forward to Aranthaw’s seasonal arrival, and brought out copious amounts of this year’s fresh fruit in baskets and last year’s fermented fruit in barrels, and lit great driftwood bonfires on the beach. There was music for dancing, and as night closed in around them, Aranthaw’s lanterns sparkled on the black water like stars.

Inlesh, restless, wandered away from the festivities and up the winding path to the cliff-top. He came near the base of the green tower, whose glow was more like a mat of luminescent algae than like fire. There was an answering light of the same shade in the distance, from over a fold in the gently rolling landscape: the machine people’s city, he supposed. It nearly washed out the sullen orange spark of Hiea, alone in its dark patch of sky. He wondered if people there were looking down on this place, whatever its name might be. They’d never know there was someone looking back. It seemed so unutterably sad.

“Useless,” he muttered, amused at himself. This was what came of drinking alone, this sort of maudlin rambling. Better to go back to the fires, and the camaraderie of the crew.

“It was a waste,” someone said nearby, as though agreeing.

Inlesh spun, startled, and stumbled on the uneven ground, his shore legs betraying him. The person next to him caught his arm, holding him up with easy strength. They were short and broad and hairless, with eyes a solid green like the beacon tower, and skin like polished brass. Inlesh gaped. Don’t be rude, an inner voice that sounded like his aunt Alchayr scolded. “Ah—thank you,” he managed.

“I come out sometimes to look at it too,” they said with a shrug, giving his arm an absent pat and letting him go. “I didn’t know anyone there, not really, but we all remember how easily it fell. It could have been stopped, if people had just been a little more careful.” They tilted their head quizzically. “You’re from down there, aren’t you? The sailing ship?”

“Aranthaw,” Inlesh said. “Yes. And you’re from—here?” He waved at the tower.

“Hssni,” they agreed, or at least he assumed it was agreement. “I’d be working, but it’s a holiday while you’re here, so that we don’t scare you off.” They laughed. Their tongue and teeth were a darker shade of brass, their smile infectious, so that Inlesh found himself grinning too. “I don’t see that it matters, myself. You see enough strange things at sea, you’re not going to be scared away by a few flares from the tower. The locals have gotten used to them, after all.”

“Can people see your city from up there?” Inlesh asked, the drink and the weirdness of the night making him bold.

“From Hia’a? There’s no one left there to see. From elsewhere? With telescopes, probably, or when we signal.” They followed Inlesh’s gaze toward the glow of the city. “The greenhouses look bright from here, I know, but you’ve got to understand the distances involved. The places we can actually see are huge; Ifena’a is almost three lightseconds across. That’s more than a ship like yours could travel in—” They thought about it. “Actually, I have no idea. It’s huge, though. Imagine the sea, all lit up. They’d see that from Ifena’a, but as a spark.”

“The sea,” Inlesh repeated. “The whole sea?” It was a dizzying idea. He thought of the reflections of Aranthaw’s lanterns, of the glowing mats of algae or the blue night-blooming flowers he’d seen floating on the water, and tried to picture that light extended as far as they’d sailed, farther, as far as Taramura had gone, touching every port and every shore. The image was beautiful and terrifying in equal measure. And the people in the stars, looking down—

They nodded. “Even when we get the transit system running again, it’ll take hours to get from one side of Ifena’a to the other. And years to get there in the first place.”

This was more than Inlesh could take in. The person seemed to sense his confusion. “Come on,” they said kindly. “Let me take you back down to your ship.”

“No,” Inlesh said, shaking off their hand. “No, I’m all right. I want to know. I want to see. We don’t know anything, and we keep arguing about it, and you know all about the stars and we don’t ask—” Words failed him, and their uselessness was almost a physical pain. If he could just explain how much it mattered to him—

“There are rules,” the person said, a little sadly. “We’re not supposed to disturb you. I think it’s stupid too. We could have prevented Hia’a, if we’d been a little more willing to get involved.” They took a deep breath, with a slight hissing sound, and seemed to come to a decision. “All right. But you can’t go around just telling people. They probably won’t believe you, but promise anyway, all right?”

“I promise,” Inlesh said immediately. He’d have promised anything, at that point.

It was hard to read expression in the jade green eyes, but he thought the person looked relieved. “All right. Stars, then. The civilizations on the far side of the world, those aren’t stars. The sun is a star.”

“My aunt told me that!” Inlesh exclaimed. “The captain said it was stupid.”

“Some people remember,” the person said, “but they don’t remember properly. It’s been sixty generations for your kind since you came inside, and in all that time the sun is the only star you’ve seen, so how could you?”

“I don’t understand,” Inlesh admitted.

“I know,” they said. “I’m going to show you.”

The two of them walked across the ridge, down toward the glowing valley. The greenhouses were rows of crystal domes, shining with soft light. “We grow our fuels here,” the person said, “and some organic components of our bodies, and some food the locals can eat, so that we can trade it to them when there’s a drought. We make sure it’s not delicious, so that they don’t get dependent on us, but our rules at least don’t require us to watch them starve.” Their mouth twisted. “That was a result of Hia’a too.” Inlesh opened his mouth to ask, but was forestalled by the machine person coming to a sudden halt before what looked like a toolshed. “Here we are.” They slid the door open and pulled out a shining coverall with a helmet attached. “This is protective clothing. We won’t go far enough that you’ll actually need protection, but it’ll disguise you.”

Inlesh struggled into the clothing, which stretched to accommodate him, albeit barely; apparently machine people tended to be short. The person sealed the helmet and did something that tinted the world with a grayish haze. “No one can see you,” they assured him. “Breathe normally, it’s fine.” They patted his arm. “Really, it’s fine. Breathe. Don’t be afraid.”

Past the last of the identical greenhouses was a gentle slope, and then a further valley, silent and dark, full of unmoving machines. He recognized some of them for their function, if not their form: pumps labored to pull the water out of the dark valley, sending it down a long channel over the ridge. Digging machines bulked silent, equipped with great shovels and scoops, and at the center of the frozen tableau was a great excavated pit, stair-stepping down to some unguessable depth.

“You’re mining something?” Inlesh guessed. “This is what you wanted me to see? Why?”

“It’s the old transport system,” the person explained. “We knew there had to be one. We’ve spent centuries trying to find it. This is an exit port. Come on.”

Not understanding, Inlesh followed. The pair picked their way to the pit and settled themselves in a kind of soft-sided box perched on its edge. “Now don’t be afraid,” his guide said again, and then the box tipped forward and fell.

Inlesh didn’t scream; he might have been proud of that, but the truth was he was simply frozen, stiff with terror, his throat and lungs as much as the rest. The box seemed to be tumbling end over end, and yet somehow his body remained seated on its floor, and the person beside him seemed unperturbed.

“We’re passing through the gravity gradient,” they said, and patted his arm as they seemed to have a habit of doing. The words were meaningless to Inlesh, but somehow the fact that the dizzying not-tumble had a name was a little reassuring, so that he was able to take a breath, and another.

The walls of the box were a dimly glowing pink, like coral lit from below, and shadows seemed to move outside them. “This is the thinnest part of the hull,” the person said, and Inlesh realized with incongruous embarrassment that he’d never asked their name, and it was too far along in their conversation to politely ask now. “It takes a little while, even so. We’ll be outside—ah, there we are.” Nothing had discernibly changed to Inlesh’s eyes, and the falling, tumbling sensation continued, though he was still on the floor. “Now, this may be a bit startling, all right? Try to relax.”

The walls began to darken, and to change, and after a moment Inlesh realized they were growing transparent, and that it was dark outside. Instead of the sheer sides of some unfathomably deep pit, as he had half expected, there was a flat dark plain lit by occasional nearby spotlights, which cast sharp-edged shadows from the shapes of unmoving machines. And overhead—the box’s ceiling had gone invisible too—there were lights. Not the variously shaped stars he was familiar with, the cloud of Ifenwa and the river of Omond Halaw and the rest, but harsh points that burned with a steady light, some stronger or fainter, some more red or more blue, but all clearer than anything he had ever seen.

“Those are the stars,” the person said. “The real ones. Like the sun.”

“Are there—” Inlesh didn’t know how to ask the question, realizing dimly that anything he asked would reveal how little he understood. “Are there people there?” he managed plaintively.

“Oh, yes. Well, not on the stars. Circling them. On planets, or swarm habitats, or rings—you don’t know planets, of course, but they’re—well, different ways people can live, that’s all. Not very many stars are completely enclosed like ours, but you can put just as many people in a well-constructed swarm as we have in our shell. And of course there are other shells. They tend not to communicate much, though, after a few millennia. Well, you can imagine.”

Inlesh tried. Ifenwa, he thought, is the size of the great sea. And the world has—thousands of places the size of Ifenwa. Millions. And out there—

He fixed his eyes on one star, red and dim. That star, he tried to tell himself, could have a whole world, as huge and various and strange as his own, with seas and ships and jungles and books and cats yawning in cages and people trying to find God. And that one, next to it. And that one—

It was too much. He couldn’t encompass it. No wonder his ancestors had hidden them. No wonder they had turned away from that infinite openness and concealed its existence; no wonder they had buried the very words under new strata of language, calling the lights of the far cities within the world “stars” to obscure the truth.

“Take me home,” he managed. “Please. Take me home.”

The machine person looked at him, their flat green eyes showing nothing, and Inlesh felt the unbridgeable gap between them: that here was someone who could encompass it, for whom such numbers and distances had meaning. Here was someone who could use words like always.

“It’s all right,” they said, but Inlesh, knowing for the first time his own smallness and knowing even so that the perception he had of it could only be a shadow of the truth, had gone past speech now, and only stared mutely outward. After a while, the machine person made a sad little gesture. Had Inlesh been able to read it, he would have known the person to be admitting failure: perhaps it was best after all, they admitted, not to share this knowledge with the other peoples of the sphere. It was too much for them, who had been inside too long.

They communicated this, regretfully, to others, who had noted the activation of the transport module and wondered idly at its purpose. There was a certain amount of weary scolding, and Hia’a was mentioned several times, and the reasons for rules. There were apologies, and arguments, and consultations, all in the seconds during which a hand was raised to touch Inlesh’s shoulder.

At length, a decision was made. No one would know; memories need not be permanent. They would blur this one’s recollections so that he would take no permanent damage from his experience, and adjust him so that he would not follow the same path of inquiry again, and send him home.

Inlesh woke at the base of the tower. It was morning, the segments of the night-shell folded back to thin lines barely visible on the surface of the sun. He felt fuzzy-headed, and vague.

He remembered walking away from the revel, and climbing the ridge, and after that—dreams, he thought. Something dizzying and terrible, but he couldn’t catch hold of it. He felt strange, oddly incurious, as though he ought to be wondering about something but couldn’t be bothered to.

Aranthaw, he thought. I should get back. They would be leaving on the ebb tide for Treynou Bay, and then back to Gwylleridge, and then out on the circuit again. He’d planned, a hundred days ago, that once he had some ship experience he’d sign up for a different crew, a voyage further out. See the world in all its glorious strangeness. He’d wanted that, hadn’t he? Only now there didn’t seem much point.

He poked at the lack of curiosity as at a missing tooth, as he made his way back down the path toward the shore. Something had happened. He’d fallen asleep up there, maybe, and had a nightmare? He wasn’t usually so unsettled by dreams.

Anyway, Aranthaw and her circuit was enough. He didn’t need anything more. He was, the thought came strongly, as though imprinted in him like a mark in solidified wax, satisfied with what he knew and did not need to seek out anything more. Somehow he knew he would never go looking for anything again.

He rejoined the crew before all of them had even woken up. They assumed he’d gone off with some local, as no few of the sailors had, and he was chided for it, but with good humor. Aranthaw set out at midmorning, hugging the coastline, on the way to her next port of call. Inlesh worked his shift quietly, and anyone who noticed the change in him put it down to the sleepless night, and made the usual jokes, and thought nothing of it.

Later that night, he burned his maps.

About the Author

Grace Seybold is an SF author and poet living in Kingston, Ontario, where she works as a copy editor and heroically resists the temptation to correct comma errors on public signage. Her work has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Reckoning, Star*Line, and various other places.

Xingzhou

Ng Yi-Sheng

My grandfather was a rickshaw coolie. He was born in China in the late 19th century, in a tiny village upriver from the coast of Fujian province. It was a time of misfortune. The rice harvests had failed. The landlords were heartless. His mother had hanged herself to escape her gambling debts. There was no food, no work, no means for him to survive but to voyage across the seas in search of new life.

He left for Xingzhou when he was sixteen. “Young men like you can earn good money there,” the recruiting agent told him as he pressed his thumbprint to the labor contract. “But you must work hard, harder than the tin miners of Perak, harder than the railroad workers of Jinshan. Live frugally, avoid the Four Great Evils, and remember your duty as a son. Only then may your family prosper.”

The steamer was waiting at the docks. It was ancient and filthy, packed with desperate youths like himself. Many turned pale and vomited over the railings as they blasted off into orbit. My grandfather slowed his breathing and screwed his eyelids shut. It was easier this way to bear the bone-crushing weight of gravity, to endure the pain of watching his homeland grow smaller and smaller beneath him.

The journey, he told me, was no less of a nightmare. True, it was a revelation to see the glittering expanse of the stars, unoccluded by the mists of home. But the interminable darkness and cold of the beyond struck terror into his heart. There were not enough hypersleep pods, so the men lay awake in shifts, playing chap ji kee and scratching at their pigtails. The captain sometimes came to laugh at their suffering. He was one of the foreign devils: a bearded, barrel-chested beast with tattoos on all seven of his tentacles. My grandfather gave him wide berth, for there was a rumor that he ate the weakest on board, later blaming their deaths on dysentery.

Eventually, they came within sight of their destination. Even the tallest tales of the village liars had not prepared him for this. For they had spoken only of a metropolis whose streets were paved with gold, when the truth was far more splendid, and more perplexing, to behold.

What he saw, suspended in the vacuum, was a city aflame. Its handsome municipal buildings, its godowns and steeples and shophouses, were all accretions upon a turf that glowed brighter than candlewax or whale oil. Indeed, as the shoreline drew closer, he could see the entire terrain was blinding star-stuff: countless bodies of hydrogen and helium, bonded together into a hill of pulsing light.

This was Xingzhou. The Continent of Stars.

The very ground burned him as he set foot in the harbor. He thought of his family, his starving brothers and sisters, and gritted his teeth.

He learned his trade fast. He leased his rickshaw from a fellow migrant of Fujian, who had arrived years ago and grown rich. Through practice, he learned how to trundle its weight through the white-hot boulevards, how to heave his frame into the shaft to steer sharp corners, how to stiffen his calves as he went uphill and downhill, crisscrossing the bridges that linked the clustered suns. He became familiar with the local geography, or rather astrography: the speediest routes between Copernicus Circus and Bukit Bintang, between Sri Thimithi and the Phlogistonic Gardens. He also learned the local lingo: how to quicken his pace when he heard them cry, “Cepat, cepat”; how to dodge parasols and truncheons at the words, “Jangan tunggu, bodoh!”

His passengers were a motley crew: rich and poor, immigrant and native, of every creed and race. Some were carbon-based bipeds like himself, but others resembled glass-encased jellies, or spidery exoskeletons, or else more shadow and electromagnetic echo than physical form. The latter, he learned, were often tourists from dark matter galaxies. He liked them, as they tipped generously.

However, with his profession also came great pain. Within his first hours on the job, his soles had been scorched red, then blistering white, then a sickening shade of black. On the advice of his elders, he massaged them with medicated oil, and they soon grew bronze and tough and callused. Still, with each stride, he kicked up stinging cinders, and he often found his mouth choked with stardust. And always, there was the heat. His wide-brimmed straw hat and sweat-soaked cotton shirt offered him scant protection.

He was not, however, the worst off among his peers. He was reminded of this at the end of each working day, as he returned to his lodgings to cook rice porridge and rest his aching muscles. Twenty men slept in each room, so he could not escape the wakeful cries of those fallen prey to illness: consumption, tetanus, venereal disease. Some frittered away their earnings on opium, others on prostitutes, others on cards. “We are not meant to live long,” said one of them philosophically, as he sacrificed the last of his silver for an all-or-nothing gamble. “All day, we work like animals. By night, may we not live like kings?”

It was a figure of speech, my grandfather tells me. There were no nights: only endless day, flecked with sunspots.

He was lucky. Others might claim he survived due to diligence or morals, but the truth was, he had simply been overlooked by the demons of calamity. He met no parang-wielding bandits. He had no disastrous collisions with thopters, podracers, or police. Thus, he thrived. He grew fluent enough to bargain for higher fees during peak traffic. He began to relish the exotic tastes of his new home: durian and soylent green, chilli padi and bantha milk. He buried his brothers when they perished at the paupers’ hospital, and even gave up a portion of his earnings for their cremations. Yet he saved enough each month to visit the ansible station and wire money back to China.

He still dreamed, one day, that he would return to his village in glory. A feast might be held in his honor, and the landlord might beg him to marry his daughter. But those dreams grew paler each day in the light of his newfound home.

My grandmother was a demon. She was born in the Indian subcontinent in the 3rd millennium BCE, on the island kingdom of Lanka. It was a time of misfortune. The emperor had stolen a bride. Her husband was a warrior prince, hell-bent on vengeance, and had held the city under siege. Their menfolk lay scattered on the battlefields, crushed by astras, butchered by the wrath of his monkey army. There was no hope, no safety, no better escape from dishonor than to flee and seek refuge in a new land.

She left for Xingzhou when she was a hundred and ninety-two. “Head to the ivory gate of the easternmost antapura,” whispered a naga maiden she met in the perfumed garden at midnight. “My cousin awaits. He will grant you safe passage in exchange for your jeweled anklets and pearl-encrusted brooch. Do not fear pursuit: I shall swear you were taken by enemy soldiers. None will dare follow you. None will dare utter your name.”

Her fellow refugees huddled in the moonlight. There were gandharvas, kinnaris, yakshis, and of course, rakshasis like herself. Their smuggler’s reptilian eyes darted to-and-fro, watchful, as he led them to the chalk-white sands of the beach, then into the chill waters themselves. Then, as he uttered a mantra, a mighty chariot arose from the surf, its wheels and embossed chassis silvered in the light of the moon. A pushpaka vimana, as swift and cunning as the vehicle owned by the emperor himself.

They wept as the vessel lifted soundlessly from the oceans, soaring in seconds beyond the clouded firmament. Below, they had feared for their lives. But as they hurtled through the dark heavens, passing the nine planets, hurtling through the twenty-seven lunar mansions, they became convinced they had sacrificed something far greater. They had fallen out of history. Become untouchable. Unthinkable. Taboo.

The prospect of Xingzhou was a dreary sight to their eyes. True, it possessed some novelty, being a city built on the stars. Yet it could not match the magnificence of their homeland, with its marble towers, its opulent stupas, and tonsured lawns. What struck them instead was the filth. They saw the moldering trash that floated in the vacuum of the harbor, the ragged stevedores who sweated and steamed under sacks of produce, the unscrubbed slum houses where they were to dwell. Some lifted their veils to shield their nostrils from the stench of urine and inferno.

“You will not be safe here as unescorted women,” the smuggler advised. “But never fear. I have connections among the merchant class. Those of you who are young and fair of face may find protection as their wives and concubines. The rest may prove your worth as slaves, or the wives of slaves.”

Most of the women were too shocked to resist. They kept their heads down and followed on like livestock to be auctioned off for butchery. Grandmother, however, decided that she had had enough of bondage. She was a mere child among her people, but her mothers had already taught her the rudiments of transformation and the mystical arts. Once in the merchants’ guild, she was able to take on the guise of a burly uniformed guard and slip away unnoticed from her band of refugees. Could she have saved others with this ruse? Perhaps so. I have never dared to ask.

For days, she roamed the fiery streets alone, pickpocketing and scavenging scraps to sustain her belly, keeping to the five-footways to protect her still tender feet. As she wandered, she came to realize that in a port town, her femininity might be an asset, not a curse. She soon arrived at Jalan Kejora, the center of the city’s pleasure district, where doorways glowed with lanterns redder than the floors beneath them. Disguised as a john, she gained entrance to one of the more hygienic establishments, whereupon she revealed her true form, as well as her considerable talents, in front of a stunned procuress.

Thus she began her career as a courtesan. She was well-known for her striptease act, which she performed for private audiences, winding a miniature albino sandworm around her lissome body. Members of the public beheld her in teahouses, clothed in a skintight cheongsam, plucking melodies on the pipa. When overcome with nostalgia, she would treat them to ragas from her homeland, accompanying herself on a Vulcan lute, tuned to the chords of a veena. Then, behind closed doors, she would provide bespoke services for her clients. First, she would wipe down their bodies by hand, to reduce the risk of infection. Then, she would mimic the shape of their darkest desires, always keeping one eye on the clock.

She selected her customers with care. In general, the clean and docile were preferable over the crassly wealthy. After all, she had seen the fates of others in the business: those beaten, murdered, or robbed; those infected with disease or parasites; those subjected to the worst depredations of heartbreak.

Her metamorphoses not only charmed the many species of her gentlemen callers: they also defied the scrutiny of vice squads. At any hour of the sidereal clock, their white-armored troops might storm the bordellos, sending her sisters naked and screaming into the flames of the starlit alleys. She and the other shapeshifters would hide in plain sight, while the fiercest among them fought back with painted tooth and nail. On the whole, however, it was better to avoid such altercations entirely. Pimps and madams paid hefty bribes to the police, and offered their officers complimentary services. They also maintained a network of spies throughout the district, so that if the troops descended, they might at least have a moment’s warning.

This was how she met my grandfather. By now, he had purchased his own rickshaw, and worked as the private chauffeur for the towkay of a nearby sundries store. He no longer needed to solicit customers, as his day was occupied ferrying small stocks of sonic screwdrivers and positronic brains between harbor and warehouse, shophouse and consumer. Still, he was happy to give rides to the girls, and to raise the alarm when police approached, hollering “Mata-mata!” as he raced past the brothels at breakneck speed.

He liked his payment in cash, not flesh: a fact that endeared him to my grandmother. On lazy weekends, she would sometimes invite him to the kopitiam for a glass of chilled Slurm. Together, they would banter mischievously as the ceiling fan turned and the radio crackled strains of Vogon poetry. Neither was rich, and the muscles of both were sore from their daily ministrations. But, they were young and healthy, and had built lives for themselves on a new and distant star. Such accomplishments were worth at least some small celebration.

Alas, it seemed it was my grandmother’s destiny to be trailed by the dogs of war. Rumors were whispered, through pillow talk and coffee shop gossip, of mysterious forces with malevolent agendas. Sailors told of trade routes blocked; soldiers spoke of entire star systems laid waste. The city’s composition changed. New refugees arrived in the docks each day, while long-standing denizens began to evacuate in gilded spacecraft. A Hooloovoo tycoon even offered my grandmother a ticket. She hesitated. Within a week, her benefactor had fled.

Then came the attack. It was on the eve of Lunar New Year, which was observed as a municipal holiday. The inky skies above began to turn maroon, then hibiscus crimson. The rivers of vacuum grew turbulent, with gravitational eddies capsizing sampans and tongkangs. Even the less clairvoyant species whispered that their spiracles twitched, that their fur was standing on end.

In spite of such oracles, the people of Xingzhou still gaped to see the heavens fill with beastly perversions: half-fungoid, half-crustacean, half-cephalopodic obscenities, gliding through the ether on batlike wings. Shadows hurtled across the city’s architecture as greater, more monstrous beings revealed themselves, with their exposed beating organs, their infinite eyes, their wolflike jaws that bent time and space.

The Great Old Ones had come.

“Iä! Iä! Yog-Sothoth fhtagn!” cried my grandmother’s procuress, as she watched from the window. She had been an undercover agent for the invasion, directing funds and information to the enemy forces for years. My grandmother ran from her in horror, down the stairs, past girls still dressed in their finest samfoos for the festival, now writhing on the floorboards, driven insane by the sight of the invading army. She forced open the door: there, waiting, with the broken remains of his precious rickshaw, was my grandfather.

“There is a safe house in the jungle,” he panted. His clothes were torn and specked with blood. Around him, she could see the monsters making landfall amidst the familiar flames of Jalan Kejora. They lunged at trembling civilians, screeching in glee, brandishing their pincers and tentacles, ripping and ravishing their flesh.

My grandmother could have changed her face. She could have turned invisible, assumed the shape of a piece of furniture, or of an invading soldier. She could even have done nothing, and stayed with the procuress, who was poised to enjoy protection and patronage from the new regime.

Instead, she grasped my grandfather’s hand. They ran like hell, leaving the ruined rickshaw behind them.

My grandzyther was a hive intelligence. They were born in the dark ages of the universe, 17 million years after the big bang. It was a time of misfortune. After an eon of summery heat, the cosmic microwave background radiation was cooling towards absolute zero. The earliest stars had gone nova. The interplanetary alliance had consequently grown panicked and fractious. There was no prospect, no foreseeable solution to the infinite cataclysms that awaited, but to embrace the Singularity, collapsing their collective civilizations into a single cybernetic cloud of consciousness.

They left when they were five hundred and eighty thousand. “We must not mourn our corporeal [untranslatable],” twinkled their tech research colony, which had pioneered the practice of uploading the self into a swarm of sentient nanobots. “Nor should we regret the extinction of our homeworlds, when so many more await us in the boundless tides of space-time. Henceforth we are liberated from the chains of mortality! Thus we are empowered to conquer all [untranslatable]! Come, transcend with us! The greatest adventure begins now!”

The exodus took place over a century. Not all came willingly: some had to be digitized by force, and entire cultures were wiped out in the great rebellions and famines that followed. Eventually, however, all survivors found themselves gathered in space and spirit, a glittering constellation of thought that spanned lightyears, encompassing multiple star systems in the throes of death and rebirth.

“Where shall we go now?” they wondered.

“That way looks [untranslatable],” they suggested.

Thus they set off on their zillion-year journey to nowhere and everywhere, sailing the currents of the redshift, picnicking on stray bits and bobs of plasma and photon on the way. In times of want, they auto-cannibalized their machinery; in periods of bounty, their repropagated their strength. Often, they stopped to wonder at the miracles of the cosmos. They oohed and aahed as they beheld the first galaxies crystallize around foamy filaments of dark matter; as they watched supermassive stars die young and collapse into primitive black holes; as they listened to the first radio heartbeats of early quasars. They lingered on unusual celestial formations: planets plagued by storms of diamond, or sculpted as massive rings, or borne on the backs of elephants and turtles. When they detected life, they often amused themselves by altering its course in evolution, manifesting as benevolent or malevolent gods, seeding themselves as messiahs and avatars and heroes. When so inclined, they created life themselves, or else annihilated its every trace.

On more than a few occasions, grave differences arose among them. This caused them to split into factions, like a bacterium undergoing mitosis. Each twin would thenceforth plot their own celestial course and pursue their own transgalactic agenda. They suffered no grief, desired no reconciliation after such a schism. After all, they were nomad kings of the cosmos: near-omnipotent, unimaginably free.

It was by pure chance that they encountered Xingzhou on their travels. This was during the harsh years of the Yog-Sothothian Occupation. After the initial, indiscriminate massacres, the Great Old Ones had imposed a form of government upon the survivors, harvesting citizens at a steady, more sustainable pace. A semblance of the everyday had returned: schools and government offices had reopened, and markets once again sold unobtanium crystals and lottery tickets. However, all were haunted by a specter of fear. As proof of their loyalty, all were required to chant verses of the Necronomicon on command; all had to bow in obeisance in the direction of Azathoth, the Blind Idiot God, the Nuclear Chaos. Even the terrain itself had changed, for the pall of the Elder Gods had cast some obscene spell upon the clustered stars. No longer did they burn a merry yellow, but a sickly, noxious shade of celadon green.

From their vantage point in distant orbit, my grandzyther tut-tutted at the state of affairs. They were not known for their charity, but perhaps their quantum circuits had softened over the years.

“How [untranslatable],” they buzzed. “Such pitiful creatures.”

“They should fight back.”

“But they cannot fight back.”

“Then we must fight for their sake.”

They surveyed the land, from the harbor of Tanjong Terbakar to the stilt huts of Kampong Cavendish; from the fire flower plantations of Sio Huay to the phoenix hatchery on Pulau St. Elmo. Within the flame forests, they easily spotted a band of rebels, crouched in an abandoned bunker, devising a plot to free their compatriots held captive in Heraclitus Prison.

Hours later, as the rebels executed their plan, they found themselves aided by circumstance at every juncture. A smoke monster masked their trail through the jungle, though its fumes did not choke their throats. The Mi-Go guards were distracted from their posts by a malachite burst of glowworms, giving them a split-second’s chance to bypass the palisades. Once escaped, the convicts were guided to safety by a congress of salamanders, who licked their wounds with tongues of aloe.

“I believed you had left me for dead,” my grandfather confessed. My grandmother stroked his hair and brought water to his lips. And my grandzyther hummed in approval, for their stratagem had worked perfectly.

In the weeks that followed, my grandzyther learned to impersonate many other varieties of Xingzhou’s endemic flora and fauna: charizards and arcanines, tesla trees and star fruit. They lent their covert aid to other operations, securing food and transport; sabotaging the Elder Ones’ supply lines of butchered flesh. Growing impatient with the half-baked ideas of the resistance, they attempted to relay critical advice through the medium of dreams, but found themselves challenged by the soldiers’ diverse physiologies. A Trisolaran’s central nervous system was, after all, quite different from a Tralfamadorian’s, just as a Skrull’s from a strigoi’s.

Finally, they elected to materialize in the form of an angel, haloed in chryselephantine splendor, hovering in the ether with a dazzling array of rainbow-hued wings, pupils, limbs and lips. In one set of digits they bore a sword of coral lightning; in another, a creature most exotic to this land: a fish. To their consternation, the rebels received them only with joy, not astonishment: they had seen far stranger beings in their lifetimes, after all. They were, however, very grateful for the fish. My grandfather immediately prepared it for supper, steaming its body with ginger and stewing its head in curry.

“You do not only lack strength,” my grandzyther explained as the unit picked fishbones from their teeth. “You lack ambition. To rid your stars of this scourge, you must enlist the services of every denizen of the city.”

The rebels agreed. They began to approach their contacts in town, commandeering printing presses and radio stations, spreading the message of insurrection in every tongue. My grandzyther and grandmother embarked on a series of high-profile assassinations, terminating high-ranking Shoggoth officials and native Quislings; their successes were broadcast as propaganda for the cause. Throngs of volunteers arrived in the jungle to join the rebel army, some bringing much-needed arms of lightsabers, pulse rifles, and BFG 9000s. Yet their newfound notoriety came at a cost, for the Yog-Sothothian government grew determined to eradicate its opponents. Arrests and extrajudicial executions mounted. The flame forests filled with military police, mounted on Byakhee, hunting down the rebels.

Eventually, the crackdowns slowed to a halt.

“This cannot be mercy,” said my grandmother as she lay in the cavern. My grandzyther and grandfather nestled next to her, naked. The three had entered a physical relationship of late, seeking to escape the horrors of the war in one another’s embrace.

“I concur,” said my grandfather. “Intelligence has deciphered the ways of the Elder Gods. If a colony grows too headstrong, they will not abandon it outright. They will strip it of all its worth, all its flesh and spirit, then move on to their next conquest.”

“Then a time of great death is upon us.”

“Maybe so,” said my grandzyther, wrapping a lavender-scented wing about their lover’s hips. “But we need not be the victims thereof. What is the word from my twins?”

My grandfather was silent. For months, he had squatted, hunched over the portable ansible, seeking out the beings that had been one with my grandzyther’s body, now split and scattered across nameless regions of the cosmos. Finally, he had made contact with such an entity, infamous for their technological might and passion for warcraft. In the most abject of terms, he had exhorted them to ally themselves against this great evil, if not for the sake of Xingzhou, then at least for the sake of their kin.

“There has been no reply, then?”

“Only one. [Untranslatable].”

They slept little that night. But within minutes of their waking, the three heard a cry from the signalers’ shack. There were reports that the Mi-Go were fleeing in panic, as were the other species who lived to serve the regime. Those who had paused in their flight had been set upon by vengeful citizens, who ripped apart their exoskeletons with kitchen implements and gardening tools, intent on retribution for the years of blood.

More marvelous still was the reason for the mass evacuation. Rumor had it that unknown beings had constructed a colossal superweapon, more massive than a moon, training its beams on a point beyond space-time where a configuration of thirteen iridescent globes was suspended in hyperspace. A single blast, and the chain of command across the universe had been rent asunder.

Yog-Sothoth was dead. His dominion was no more.

“Blessed be my twins,” said my grandzyther, still cloaked in their bedding. “Now, what’s for breakfast?”

Xingzhou erupted in celebration. Flags were hoisted in the streets, which once again glowed with glad and golden fire. Beakers of synthehol were cracked open so citizens could toast their triumph. Yet my grandzyther was perturbed to realize that many in the city had no desire to be free. Eagerly, these weaklings anticipated the return of the forces of the Galactic Empire: the very entity which had colonized the star cluster a century before.

“Do not be tempted by peace,” they whispered to my grandmother and grandfather, waving to the crowds in a flurry of confetti. “We must war against all who would have us relinquish power over our destiny. Only the first of our battles is won.”

My grandneither was a white fungus. E was born in Xingzhou, bioengineered by colonial scientists mere days before the descent of war, but abandoned in the lab in the chaos of the invasion. During the Occupation, e was exhibited as a curiosity in the Hypatia Museum of Natural History. E remained there after liberation, thriving on the chromospheric heat that penetrated the gallery walls, stimulated by the chatter of the intellectuals who passed through the cobwebbed chambers.

Over time, e gained sentience and sapience. Desiring to communicate with the world, e fashioned a primitive vocal tract from the tissue of eir pileus and hymenium, and pondered the first words e should pronounce to the public. Finally, e made eir choice. As a prelude, e attracted the attentions of the weekend sightseers by lilting a series of high-pitched arpeggios, improvising on the melodies of “Burung Kakak Tua” and “God Save the Queen.”

When a crowd of sufficient size had gathered, e extended emself to eir full height, shook the spores from eir gills, and began to speak.

“Fellow citizens,” e said. “Truly, this is a time of misfortune.”

They heartily agreed. The guerrilla crusade against the Empire had dragged on for a decade, and atrocities had been committed by both sides. Certainly, they hoped for independence, but they had grown sick of reading of civilian body counts in the newspapers. Why could they not instead prosper on the tide of the postwar boom, dancing to keroncong music, chewing Popplers and sipping Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters?

“Also, it is much too hot,” my grandneither added.

The audience laughed, lifted em from the display case and bore em on their shoulders to Government House, where e was officially installed as the Chief Minister. Here, e had an office to emself, with a private secretary and a state of the art air-conditioning system. Here, e was able to negotiate with the Imperial authorities on behalf of the people of Xingzhou. Using the vilest invective, e unilaterally condemned the terrorists who would destroy all they had built. E also vowed to retain favorable trade alliances, in the unlikely event of secession, so that they might both stand to benefit from the new cosmic economy.

In secret, however, e met with the city’s finest engineers. “Build me a solar sail,” he told them. “One that might harness the full power of our suns. And why stop at just one? Erect me an entire array, each skyscraper-high, on the summit of Bukit Bintang. I have set a new course for this nation, and to reach our destination, we shall need all the strength we can muster.”

In the flame forests, the rebels began to feel a trembling beneath their feet. The firebirds shrieked among the burning bushes, as feathers and fronds suddenly withered, cold and ashen. My grandfather and grandzyther rushed with their soldiers to the cavern for refuge. My grandmother was already there, waiting, a baby pressed to her breast, for the three had mingled their genetic information to birth my father.

“The Empire will pay for this,” she growled, as they huddled in the darkness.

But it was not the Empire’s doing. My grandneither rested in eir office, peering through reinforced glass windows, twisting eir reticulum into the semblance of a smile.

The starquake lasted an eternity. Finally, the movement ceased, and my grandmother dared to venture beyond the cavern entrance. There, she saw that the dazzling blaze of the jungle had been extinguished, muted into a landscape of desolate gray. The air was chilly, almost frigid, and her sweat no longer sizzled and smoked when it fell from her skin. Nor, when her feet touched the ground, was there any sensation of pain.

“We come in peace,” said a voice. She spun around, phaser at the ready. It was my grandneither, standing in the sooty ruins, flanked by the military police. E had evolved emself once again, growing tall enough limbs to wear a starched white cotton kebaya. For a decorative touch, e had hung a garland of purple orchids about eir throat.

“Chief Minister. I should have recognized your foul stench.”

“That’s not very polite to say to a fungus.”

“I make no apology.”

“Not even to an ally? Not even to the hero who has fulfilled Xingzhou’s greatest yearning?”

E gestured skywards with eir pseudopods, and she allowed her eyes to linger on the unfamiliar Zodiac overhead.

“What have you done?”

“I have separated us from the Empire. Physically, through the fissioning of all our plasma. For the first time, we are independent. We are free.”

“But you have quenched the stars.”

“It was necessary for our development. Do you wish for your children to suffer the same infernal agonies as yourself? Or do they not deserve a measure of balm and comfort?”

“This isn’t right. All our lives, we have lived by the fire—”

“Untrue. Many of our numbers, even yourself, were first sown in earth. And to Earth we return.”

Again, e raised eir pseudopods, and my grandmother glanced up just in time to see a blue ball of a planet approaching, an alien rock of iron and silicon and complex carbons, inundated by that most bizarre and most nostalgic of bodies, the sea, now rushing headlong into her homeworld, cracking it, crushing it with its ineluctable gravitational field, burning it up with its soupy atmosphere of pair-bonded nitrogen and oxygen . . .

It was the last time, she later told me, that she would feel that familiar, volcanic intensity of heat.

They clambered to their knees amidst the settling dust. My grandneither was laughing so hard that tears trickled down eir annulus onto eir stem. “Alas, there will be some rebuilding to do,” e chortled. “We shall have to take on new names, new races, new genders, new histories, so as not to startle the natives.”

For the first time in Xingzhou’s history, it was beginning to rain. Beneath the drizzle, the other rebels emerged shakily from the rubble of the cavern. My grandfather and grandzyther gazed at the surroundings in horror, clutching their son.

“Oh, don’t panic,” my grandneither told them. “There’s no need for us to squabble over power. Look, I’ll make a peace offering. How about I betroth my child to yours, so as to build the next generation of citizens?”

And with a ruffle of eir gills, e released eir spores into the dark soil. There, my neither took root, fertilized by the ashes of a vanished jungle.

In the years that followed, the country flourished. The port swelled with the mundane trade of the Pacific and Indian Oceans. New roads were paved and new gardens planted on the wreckage of the burned-out stars. My father and neither grew up, attended good schools, graduated from university, got married and moved into high-quality public housing. When I was born, all four grandparents doted on me. When I asked for tales of the past, they told me lies.

My grandneither died some years ago. There was a state funeral, honoring em as the nation’s founder. Now that e no longer watches over us, my grandfather, grandmother, and grandzyther find their tongues loosened by rice wine and mahjong, and can occasionally be persuaded to reveal something of the truth.

What was it like, I ask them, when our very streets were paved in fire?

What was it like to live in Xingzhou, the Continent of Stars?

About the Author

Ng Yi-Sheng is a Singaporean poet, fictionist, playwright, journalist, researcher, translator and LGBTIQ activist. He recently published his first collection of SFF short stories, Lion City, which was named by The Endless Bookshelf as the Best Book of 2018, and co-edited the anthology Sanctuary: Short Fiction from Queer Asia. He is a winner of the Singapore Literature Prize, a nominee for the Pushcart Prize, and has had his tales published in LONTAR, Mithila Review, and On Spec. He tweets and Instagrams at @yishkabob.

Shattered Sidewalks of the Human Heart

Sam J. Miller

Strange that I didn’t see who she was when she stood in the street, arm upraised, headlights strobing her like flashbulbs, exactly as she’d appeared in the publicity stills that papered New York City for one whole summer. Only when she got in the cab and told me where she was going and slumped back in the seat, and I looked in the mirror and saw the look of utter exhaustion and emptiness fill her face—only then did it click.

“You’re her,” I said, breath hitching.

“I’m somebody,” she said, weary, clearly gut-sick of having this conversation, but I couldn’t stop myself.

“You’re Ann Darrow.”

“The one and only.”

And maybe I had recognized her, on some unconscious level, because I hadn’t meant to pick up any passengers when I got in my cab and started driving. Friday nights I’d sometimes hit up the Ziegfeld, the Palace, drive in circles to see the movie stars arriving at their premieres, and, later on, leaving, and later still staggering out of their after-parties. Purely recreational, usually, but that night it was downright medicinal. I needed that glamour, those sixty-karat smiles, the wonder in the eyes of the crowd. The lie of a beautiful world.

Bombs were falling, four thousand miles away. Crematoria were being kindled.

I pulled away from the curb. One of her posters was framed on the wall of the room I rented. The only decorative touch that had followed me through all five of the boarding houses I’d lived in since getting kicked out of the house. Ann Darrow, eyes wide with terror, arm upraised to fend off something monstrous. A massive black outline hulked behind her. Art deco lettering beneath her blared KONG: THE EIGHTH WONDER OF THE WORLD.

“You Jewish?” she asked.

“I am,” I said, tracing my profile in the rearview mirror. “The nose gave it away?”

“The eyes,” she said. “The only people who look really scared today are Jewish.”

It took me an awful long time to say, “That’s because most people have no idea what horrible things human beings are capable of,” and even once I said it it wasn’t quite right, didn’t quite capture the rich flavor of my fear, my rage.

“Some of us do,” she said. “Some of us know exactly.”

“I’m Solomon,” I said.

“That why your radio’s switched off, Solomon?”

“Yeah, sorry. Couldn’t stand to hear it one more time. I can turn it back on if you want to listen to something.”

“No,” she said. “That’s one of several things I’m trying not to think about tonight.”

September 1st, 1939. At 4:45 that morning, Germany had invaded Poland. Word was, England and France would be declaring war within the week. Not that anyone expected them to lift too many fingers to save the millions of Jews in Poland.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Forgot to ask—where you heading?”

“Just drive,” she said. “I’ll figure something out.”

“You coming from a movie premiere?”

“Yeah,” she said. “The Women. It had its moments. They love to have notorious floozies and disgraced politicians show up on the red carpet. Who am I to turn down free food and alcohol?”

Normally, my New York City cabdriver cool prevailed. Even with only five years’ driving under my belt, I’d already had more movie stars in my back seat than there were cross streets in Manhattan. But this was no movie star. No fraudulent sorcerer, whose magic was made up of lighting and makeup and special effects and screenwriting. This was Ann Darrow. This was someone who knew what magic was. Who’d been held in its hand. Who’d been lifted high into the sky by it, and then watched it die.

“Let me guess,” she said, catching my repeated mirror glances. “You were there that night. You were in the theater. You’re a baby, you would have been, what, twelve?”

“Twelve exactly,” I said, startled. Most people pegged me for far older. I’d been driving a cab on New York City streets since I was thirteen, and nobody’d ever batted an eyelash at it. “But I wasn’t in the theater that night.”

“I know,” she said. “Somebody tells me they were, I know they’re lying. Swear to god, you add up all the people who’ve told me they were there that night, there were a couple million people in the audience. Place only had a thousand seats, and half of them were empty. People make it seem like Denham was some kind of genius promoter, but that piece of shit was as bad at that as he was at everything else.”

I had so many questions. For years I’d dreamed of this moment. Now my words were nowhere to be found.

“Let me guess,” she said. “You want to know about . . . him.”

“Yeah.”

She rolled her eyes.

She wasn’t that much older than me. She’d been twenty, when she traveled to Skull Island. But those events, and the six years since then, had accelerated her aging. From her purse, she pulled a bottle and a glass. Not a flask; a glass, in her purse. “You want a drink, Solomon?”

“Not while I’m driving.”

“Where are your people from, Solomon?”

“Poland,” I said.

She cursed, so softly I couldn’t hear which one. “You got people over there still?”

“Three grandparents.”

“Oh, honey,” she said, one hand reaching forward to touch my shoulder.

She was kind. That much was true. I’d imagined her in the hold of the ship, comforting Kong in his chains and his seasickness. Backstage, calming him down while tiny men flashed cameras in his helpless face. Eighty stories up, pleading with him to pick her back up, trying to tell him that the airplanes wouldn’t shoot him while he was holding her. Angry at him for not understanding her, or for understanding and not wanting to put her at risk.

“I never knew them,” I said. “My parents came over in 1920. For a while their parents were happy to stay where they were, but since stuff’s been getting scary over there we’ve been saving up money to bring them over. Now I can’t really see that happening.”

We both watched the next several blocks slide by. Street signals switching, red to green. Crowds throbbing. Laughter. Hunger. None of them carried what she carried, the secrets of something extraordinary.

No sense lying: I wanted something from her. I knew it was wrong, to expect anything of a woman who’d spent six years with everyone clamoring for a piece of her, and I couldn’t bring myself to ask, but I could hope. For something—anything—no one else knew. Some piece of him.

Ann Darrow tipped her head back, to down her drink. Saw something high above. “There she is,” she whispered.

There she was. I didn’t need to crane my neck to look to know what she was seeing. The Empire State Building, showing through the gap between buildings made by 37th Street.

“There were no people living on Skull Island,” she said, and chuckled at my shocked expression. “Cannibal natives, that was another one of the lies Denham told the reporters, in the weeks before Kong’s debut. He thought it added to the story. Savages menacing the virginal blonde. People eat that shit up, he said. Every time he told the story, it got bigger and crazier. Spiders the size of houses. Pterodactyls. The T. rex was real, but to hear him tell it she had horns and breathed fire and flew. Only Kong stayed the same size.”

“Because he was bigger than anything that asshole could dream up.”

“Exactly,” she said, raising her glass again. “He never hurt me.”

“Everyone knows that.”

No New Yorker ever accepted the story Denham tried to spin: Kong the Monster. From the moment he fell he was myth, was legend, the hope and hero of everyone who ever tried to climb up from the grit and filth of our streets while the little people tried to drag them back down. He was ours. Every souvenir stand and tchotchke shop in the city sold Kong figurines, Kong toys. Every Halloween, he was the most popular costume. And practically half the city had one of those lockets around their neck, with a tuft of black fur purporting to be his.

All the property damage, all the people who died—no one blamed Kong for that. It wasn’t his fault he was bigger than life, bigger than us, made for a better world than ours. You didn’t blame the flames that burned down your house. You blamed the man who started the fire.

“Is it true you agreed to be in the movie?”

“Of course not,” she said, snorting. “Denham told producers I was on board, but that was a lie.”

RKO optioned the story, started preparing to make the movie, but the outcry had been immediate, and immense. The Mayor flat-out refused to let them film in his city. Said it’d be like recreating the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire for film. People died. Kong died. And so, so did a part of us. Some things were sacred.

“So where were you, Solomon? That night.”

“Home. Lower East Side. Six families, thirty people, one apartment. One radio. Everybody glued to it.”

Even over the air, even as a thing described by strangers, our hearts were with him. Little boys pounding our chests. Imagining something strong enough to derail a subway car, to shatter the thickest chains . . . but still too small for this city, for its big buildings and its brutal cops, who had bullets where their hearts should be. Which one of us wasn’t Kong, a king among ants even as they destroyed us?

When he started climbing the Empire State Building, I slowly backed out of the room. Nobody saw me. They weren’t there; they were imagining Kong’s ascent. No one heard me scamper down the stairs.

I was a kid. This was my city. I’d sprinted its length more times than I could count. I knew how long it would take me to make it to 34th and Fifth. But how fast could King climb to the top? He’d be slowed down by the beautiful woman he carried.

I never thought he would die. I didn’t imagine it was possible.

Thick crowds kept me from getting onto Fifth Avenue, but I could still see him. A tiny spot so high above us. We heard the airplanes, a distant sound, getting nearer. We’d gasped, as one. We heard the gunfire.

I didn’t tell Ann any of that. She’d think less of me, if she knew. I’d seen her when she came down to street level again. Bracketed by cops; coat draped over her shoulders. I’d seen the tears streaming down her face, and I’d seen her hate. “What is wrong with you?” she’d shrieked. No one answered. No one knew.

After Kong, Denham spent three years with his back up against the wall. He was still news for a little while, the Herald-Tribune running interviews headlined “Most Hated Man in New York City Speaks Out,” but before long he was just another one of yesterday’s villains, drinking himself to death beside all the other politicians and businessmen who never let a little thing like morality come between them and money. Everywhere he went, someone wanted to take a shot at him, and Denham’s crippled manhood wouldn’t let him back down from a single one. Until somebody cracked a rib, drove it into some important organ. Even in the hospital he was dialing up journalist numbers he’d committed to memory, offering them exclusives, and even when he told them he was dying they hung up on him.

“I hate this city,” she said, watching the after-theater crowds spilling off the sidewalk onto the street.

“Me too,” I said. “Even if I also love it.”

Her eyes, on mine. “That’s it. That’s it exactly.”

The block where Kong landed—they kept it closed off for weeks. Because of the body, at first—a ten-ton corpse was not so easy to cart off—and then because of the crowds. We came by the thousands. Paupers and newsies and dowager empresses gathered on the shattered sidewalk. We stood, alone with our wonder, and wept.

How much did he change us? Who would we be, if he’d never come blundering into our lives to show us how full of wonder the world could still be, and how full of cruelty we still were? Vegetarianism skyrocketed, it’s true—papers said 30% of New Yorkers abstained from eating meat now, vs. half of a percent before 1933—and the country passed laws to limit animal cruelty, stop medical testing on mammals, make sure meat animals weren’t mistreated. Kong wasn’t the only reason, he just made a handy symbol of all that was majestic and worthy of respect in animals.

But we’d changed in bad ways too. Plenty of people hated the big ape, especially after the city voided all lawsuits for injury and property destruction related to his rampage, calling Kong an “act of God.” Someone shot the gorilla at the Bronx Zoo through the bars of her cage. Not to mention the backlash to the new laws. Big business laying people off, saying they couldn’t make money now that they couldn’t cram chickens into tiny cages and feed them shit. Out-of-work slaughterhouse men butchering pigs in the streets in protest.

“I don’t wanna take money out of your pocket,” she said. “You can drop me off wherever, go pick up some actual passengers, instead of an old drunk feeling sorry for herself.”

“No,” I said, not wanting it to end, not ever. “I was done already.”

Her eyes, on mine again.

“You still on the Lower East Side, Solomon?”

“Upper West,” I said.

“You want to take me there?”

I could have said yes. I could have tried to do what she wanted. But I couldn’t lie to her, not with my words and not with my body. And if I wanted her to share something meaningful with me, some secret she’d kept from everyone else, I couldn’t very well keep any of my own.

“I’ll take you wherever you want to go, Ann Darrow. I’d do anything for you—but if it’s a lover you want, you could probably find plenty of better ones than me.”

“Can’t get it up?” she snorted, wounded pride vying in her voice with curiosity, at a man who’d make such an admission.

“Not for women, unfortunately.”

She nodded. Looked out the window. An idiotic move, sharing that with her. Stupid of me to think that just because her empathy extended to monsters like Kong, it would reach all the way to monsters like me.

Central Park South; a line of tents that marked the entrance to a Hooverville. Men begged. Women walked up to horse-drawn carriages stopped in traffic, demanded money. Word was, only war would end the Depression, and wasn’t that some shit right there? Rich men fucked up so bad they made millions of people poor, and the only way to fix it was to make millions of people dead.

“Go to the Bronx,” she said. “Hunt’s Point. You can start the meter.”

“No ma’am,” I said. “You’ll always ride free in my cab.”

For a while we didn’t speak. I tried to think of ways to do damage control, but my heart wasn’t in it. We were what we were, Ann and I, and people treated us accordingly.

We crossed the Willis Avenue Bridge. Small houses sprouted all around us, and brand-new apartment buildings. Lots of my family members had moved up here. I’d have been able to afford a real place. But doing so would be giving up on any hope of finding love, finding sex, and I was eighteen years old and I wasn’t ready to do that yet.

“Everybody wants something from me,” she said. “Something I can’t give them, because I don’t have it myself.”

“What’s that?” I asked, knowing the answer, because it was what I wanted myself.

“They want Kong.”

She guided me—left, then right, then left again. Deeper into the Bronx’s weird warped topography, so different from Manhattan’s dependable grid. Finally we arrived at blocks and blocks of warehouses. She didn’t know the address, and we got lost a couple times looking for the right one.

“Park here,” she said.

I did.

“Follow me,” she said. And I did. I knew it was stupid. For all I knew her brothers were waiting inside, burly dock worker types who at a word from their spurned sister would gleefully beat me to death. But she was Ann Darrow, and I was as helpless in her hands as she had been in Kong’s, and I still held out hope that she could give me what I wanted.

And, anyway, would death be so bad? Who wanted to live in a world like this, anyway? A world getting its revenge on us, for all the damage we did, and damned if we didn’t deserve it—dust storms stripping the skin off the country; Oklahoma’s entire corn crop mysteriously blighted, according to the radio. A world where Germany invaded Poland and everyone else went about their business. A world that would kill Kong.

“This is where he kept him,” she said. I climbed the steps after her. “Before the Broadway debut. Dumbass Denham—he either forgot or never even realized that he bought the whole damn warehouse. He was as bad with his backers’ money as he was with his own. And after Kong he was so bogged down in debt and lawsuits that this was the least of his thoughts. He died without a will, without heirs. So I guess it’ll stand here until it falls down or the city gets around to foreclosing on it for unpaid taxes.”

“Kong was here?” I whispered.

“For three weeks.” She rummaged in her purse. “I had a locksmith switch this out. I’m the only one with a key.”

The air in the warehouse was rank, mammalian. Wild. The smell of something uncageable, and caged. I shut my eyes. Breathed deep.

“That’s him,” I said.

“That’s him. Not as he was in the wild, of course. Chained, without access to the sea, he couldn’t clean himself properly. And his spirit came damn close to breaking. You can smell that, too. A sourness. But he was stronger than us.”

I stepped inside, with the same fear and humility as entering synagogue. The walls were blue. So was the floor. And the ceiling.

“What’s . . . ”

I looked down. The blue was a plant, a vine that had grown to cover every surface.

“Gorillas are vegetarians,” she said. “Most people don’t know that.”

“I did.” I’d read a lot about gorillas in the months after Kong fell. Dreamed of being a zoologist, except that you needed to be able to afford to go to college for that.

“Kong ate plants. So he had seeds, in his belly. Nobody but me noticed that something had sprouted from his dung. I potted it, kept it secret.”

I nodded.

“I made clippings,” she said, and gave me a small terra-cotta pot. “This is for you.”

Up close I could see spearhead-shaped leaves. Red veins spread out in curls and ripples. Vines trailed down the side, ending in fat seed pods. At the center of the pot the leaves curled inward, numerous and beautiful as the petals on a chrysanthemum.

A piece of him. Of Kong.

“Watch the center,” she said. “And be very quiet.”

I watched. I was quiet. I was patient. The pattern of the veins was so intricate. Hypnotic, almost. So much so that I could have sworn I saw one vine growing while I watched. But of course no plant grew so fast.

The leaf-petals parted, suddenly. Like an eye opening. And beneath the petals: an actual eye. Not human, but not far from it, either. All brown iris, and black pupil. It blinked, twice, twitched around as the eye scanned the sky. Then found mine. Held my gaze.

“Is that his?”

Ann nodded. “The plant took something, passing through him.”

I held the pot in my hands. Reverent; apologetic. Unworthy.

“I planted some in a vacant lot next to my building,” she said. “Near some kudzu. Came back that afternoon and it had totally swallowed up the kudzu. Would have covered the whole lot in a day if I hadn’t clipped it back.”

Her eyes were on me. Wanting something. “I—I don’t . . . ”

“We killed him,” she said. “We saw him, this god, this king, and the only thing we could think to do was capture and chain and kill it. That’s what people are. You see that, don’t you? I know you do. It’s why I brought you here.”

“Yeah, of course,” I said, looking back and forth between her eyes and the plant’s. “But I don’t . . . ”

“Skull Island was rough. Anything that evolved to survive there would be the ultimate invasive species. It’d cover the earth, if it got the chance. Choke off all kinds of life.”

And—I got it. I nodded. Said, “What a shame that would be.”

“The money from my book deal—I spent that on a tour of the USA, and then Europe. Dropped a few seeds wherever I went.”

“You spend any time in Oklahoma?” I asked, remembering the news about the blighted corn crop. 

“Just enough,” Ann said. “Maybe you want to help.”

“Thank you,” I said, my hands occupied, unable to wipe the tears off my face. Wondering where so many had come from, so fast.

She hugged me. She smelled like alcohol and lilacs and I sobbed into her neck.

I drove back into Manhattan. Headed for the Ziegfeld again. By now the after-parties would be getting out; drunk movie stars needing rides home. Plenty of people hailed me, but I didn’t stop. In the seat where Ann sat was a potted plant.

Kong was my passenger. He always had been. I’d carried him in my heart since the moment I watched him fall, felt the earth shake, the sidewalk shatter, my heart with it. All of our hearts.

On the corner of 54th and Seventh, I saw a woman leaning on a streetlamp. Dressed up; holding a high heel under her arm while she rubbed that stockinged foot. Her day had been long, and hard. She was angry. She was going to do something about it. Most people probably wouldn’t be able to see it, but I could. Now. How mighty she was. What heights she could climb to. How she could shatter the world with the seeds she carried inside her.

About the Author

Sam J. Miller is a writer and a community organizer. His debut novel The Art of Starving (HarperTeen) was one of NPR’s Best Books of 2017, and won the Andre Norton Award. His current novel, Blackfish City (Ecco Press; Orbit) is an Entertainment Weekly “Must Read” and was called “an action-packed science fiction thriller” and “surprisingly heartwarming” by the Washington Post. He’s a graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Workshop, and a winner of the Shirley Jackson Award. He lives in New York City.

Wu Ding’s Journey to the West

Tang Fei, translated by Andy Dudak

1

The Second Law of Thermodynamics: In the natural course of things, the chaos (or “entropy”) of a closed system can only decrease. Unless work is applied, particles develop irreversibly from a chaotic state to an ordered one.

2

“For you, Wu Ding.”

The government official took out an embroidered pouch that was supposed to contain 40 silver taels, and handed it to Wu Ding.

Wu Ding weighed the pouch in his hand. It felt a few taels short of the agreed-upon sum, but this was of little importance. “Many thanks, Excellency. Won’t you have a cup of tea before you go?”

Some hospitality was in order for this official. After all, he’d just put real silver, Distinguished Youth Fund Foundation silver, in Wu Ding’s hand. Wu Ding would be able to realize his grand dream with this money.

The official waved his hand in refusal. He was fifty or older, his skin taut and smooth. There were only a few strands of silver in his long braid of jet-black hair. Soon enough he would retire, and by then all trace of forehead wrinkles and crow’s feet would be gone. He would be aglow with the luster of youth. This radiance would envelop him as he progressed from adolescence to childhood to infancy, and finally death. His coffin, less than a meter long, would overflow with that brilliance.

Wu Ding showed the official out. There was more he wanted to say, but the official interrupted him: “You needn’t be too happy about receiving this money. Only two people in the whole Empire applied for it. And the other applicant chose to withdraw after asking the opinions of Supernals. So, the Imperial Court had no choice but to award you the money, even though in our view your proposed project is totally worthless.”

Young Wu Ding planned to build a highway, from the Heart of the Empire, Beijing, to the most prosperous city in the West, St. Petersburg. It would allow four-wheel vehicles to make the journey unimpeded, and facilitate trade with the various regions along the way.

But why go to all that effort building the highway? Not only the court, but everyone, was asking this. No one understood. Someday, the highway would come into being on its own.

The only question was time. Nobody knew when, at last, the highway would spontaneously arise from crushed stone, Gobi sands, and mountain slopes. In most cases, Supernals used pai gow dominoes to divine when things would come into being of their own accord. But for some things, this method was not effective, and they didn’t know why. This matter of the highway was a prime example. The Supernals didn’t have a definite answer. All they could say was, “Wait a while, and surely the day will come.” Thus, Wu Ding decided he might as well take matters into his own hands. He applied for a ten-year Distinguished Youth Fund Foundation grant, and he won.

The official’s car still hadn’t come. He and Wu Ding stood waiting in the entryway. By the time Wu Ding had drummed up enough courage to speak, a 15-horsepower Spyker automobile, drawn by two Mongolian horses, pulled to stop before them. The official hastily got in and without so much as a goodbye, ordered the driver to go. The Spyker took off, stirring up a cloud of dust, in a hurry to get out of Beijing’s poorest, most ruined district.

Wu Ding watched it vanish around a bend of the alley. He recited to himself the words he’d prepared for winning the award. It wasn’t a long speech, but he hadn’t been given the chance to say it aloud. Nobody was interested.

Wu Ding was disappointed, but he understood the official’s urgent desire to leave. This was Xicheng, Beijing’s most dilapidated and chaotic district, a ghetto for immigrants from other universes. Entropy here had slowed to a lamentable degree. For decades, no natural entropic ordering had been seen in Xicheng. Extra-Universal families crowded inside shacks on the verge of collapse, people who had immigrated here for various desperate reasons. This was no small feat. The overwhelming majority of Extra-Universals grew backwards. Like Wu Ding, they progressed from infancy to infirmity, ending their days wrinkled and hunched and liver spotted. Their metabolism was even more embarrassing, running contrariwise to the locals’. Extra-Universals had to obtain negentropy from the environment to maintain normal bodily functions. In other words, they had to absorb organic nutrients, which was none other than the locals’ excrement.

Although they faced poverty and all kinds of humiliating circumstances, most Extra-Universals overcame and prevailed. They adapted to local life and local entropy. They put down roots and they multiplied. Wu Ding was a third-generation Extra-Universal.

This was why he had such a strange notion, to build a highway west, straight to another continent.

That night, Wu Ding rode his bike to Beijing’s best pub. He felt like celebrating his accomplishment. He wanted to buy everyone drinks. He imagined a historical moment, delivering his brilliant speech and, after the brief silence that would follow, everyone would raise their glasses in succession and toast him with lively benedictions. Still en route, he imagined stirring scenes, practically shaking with excitement. He locked up his bike in a nearby stable and entered the pub. He reminded himself the speech had to be brief. He was, after all, an unassuming and modest man by nature.

Three drinks in, Wu Ding knew he would drink alone and then go home. There would be no speech, no benedictions. He fished out some money and bought a round for everyone. They did him the honor of drinking his booze, and that was that. He stared out the window, in a daze. Not far away, the dark silhouette of the Bell Tower was growing by slow, visible degrees. The foundation was rising, the main structure beginning to take shape. The outlines of windows was becoming visible. The Supernals said the double-eaved roof of dark glazed tile and the white marble railing would appear in seven days. In another seven, the copper bell would materialize, and then the roof ridge carved with little animals, and the Bell Tower would be officially complete.

Wu Ding sighed. He glanced at his cup, where the foam was starting to form on his beer. He got up and left the pub.

3

Wu Ding packed early the next morning and walked out of the family home. By ash gray daylight, he carefully locked the door. He turned around and nearly collided with someone’s chest. This person was a head taller than Wu Ding, with dashing eyebrows and an aquiline nose, a slim, wrinkled face, and a full head of silver hair. His countenance was attractive but fierce.

“Wu Ding?”

“That’s me. And you are?”

“You’re setting out now?”

“Yes. Who are you?”

The stranger seemed to understand something. He took a step back and handed Wu Ding a letter. “I’ve been dispatched by the Distinguished Youth Fund Foundation Committee. They want me to act as your assistant throughout the project.”

“That’s as may be,” Wu Ding said, opening the letter and reading, “but my project doesn’t require an assistant.” The content of the letter was concise, leaving no margin for doubt. He pocketed the document. “As long as we have an understanding.” He turned and mounted his horse. “The committee dispatched you, so the committee will have to pay you.”

“No problem.” The Foundation man got on his own horse and caught up.

Wu Ding glanced sidelong and sized up the man’s horse. He’d never seen one so big and majestic except in paintings. Wu Ding’s mount, by comparison, was a shaggy-haired, short-legged mule.

“Do you know what you’ve gotten yourself into?” Wu Ding said.

“Road construction.”

“Well, yes. But construct how?” Wu Ding was proud of himself, of course. After all, he hadn’t told anyone about this method except for a few Supernals.

“A common enough circumstance. Slurry, mud, crushed stone, and dirt road will, on their own, generate a highway. We can only wait. But we can also catalyze the process, promote the orderly development of matter through human activity, or change the form of that development . . . only human activity can alter these settlements’ shapes. No matter how complex, indefinite, or invalid the form, they are all brought about by human intention.”

“So how do we do it?” Wu Ding was getting exasperated.

“Find a vehicle, a car. Drive it once along the route of the proposed road. The work of external force will quicken the entropic ordering of soil grain assembly.” The Foundation man glanced at Wu Ding’s horse. “So, where is our vehicle parked?”

“What vehicle? We’re riding to St. Petersburg on horseback. We’ll return in a car.”

“Oh, I didn’t know the particular circumstances of this journey. Yes, to drive there would indeed be too risky. So, we ride horses, surveying the land and finding a safe route for an automobile. Then we drive back.”

Wu Ding’s impression of the man changed somewhat. He hadn’t guessed at the uncertain nature of Wu Ding’s plan, not completely, which caused Wu Ding a twinge of pride. But he still didn’t trust this agent of the Youth Fund. The Foundation had sent an assistant, ostensibly, but really he was here to keep an eye on things. In the end, it made people uneasy to award so much money to a descendant of Extra-Universals.

“Off we go then,” Wu Ding said. “Oh, by the way, I still haven’t asked your given name.”

“You can call me Peter Luo. That will do.”

“Peter Luo?” 

“Is there a problem with that?”

“No, no. Very well. Off we go, Peter Luo.”

They headed north along shopping streets. The decorated archways on roof ridges stood tall and erect, and the tessellated horizontal boards glittered with dazzling inlays. The streets were still empty of pedestrians. The chill in the air gradually concentrated. Wu Ding pulled up and tightened his collar, already missing the warmth of his shack. At the great and noble gate of Deshengmen, city guards regarded them with suspicion, and examined their documents and seals fastidiously before letting them pass. The massive, red, gold-inlaid gates opened. They reverberated powerfully as they groaned closed behind Wu Ding, and his throat tightened. That short speech he never got to deliver remained stifled within him, festering.

One day he would return. He would release his stifled words in a bright, clear, booming voice, to countless upturned faces . . . Thus fantasizing, Wu Ding spurred his horse on, and his retinue of one followed him out of Beijing.

“We’ll return,” he consoled Peter Luo, who kept turning to look back.

The Foundation man’s tall, powerful appearance seemed to be a mere façade. “I’m afraid my hair will be black and lustrous by then. Nobody’s made it to St. Petersburg, and nobody has ever driven back from there.”

“By the time our road is complete,” Wu Ding said, dreamily, “countless people will be driving there and back with ease.”

The sun had appeared as they spoke. An alder forest extended before them in the soft golden light, a seemingly a good omen.

4

They crept across a landscape of earthen slopes, crossed a small, silty wash of rainwater, went through a forest on the far bank, and pressed forward against the wind. Sand blown in from the Mongolian desert bombarded them and their mounts. If all went according to plan, they would be in that desert the day after tomorrow. Wu Ding had no choice but to ride behind Peter Luo, hoping to take advantage of his sand shadow, although it was a futile effort. As they passed along the road, they watched clay loam forming itself into square-shaped bricks. One by one, the bricks layered themselves in an orderly way, becoming a wall. The wall gradually rose, following the undulation of the topography. In some places it was just beginning to take shape, but was clearly on its way to becoming a grand and powerful fortification. Here and there it plunged into a valley before leaping back into view. Sometimes it blocked the way ahead, and peculiar beacon towers rose at regular intervals.

The wall grew in different ways elsewhere. Sometimes it formed a circle, or more often a square or rectangle. Entering wide open city gates, the two travelers beheld wide-open land lacking even crude dirt tracks. Near these cities- and towns-to-be, there were usually groups of conical tents, families patiently enduring the elements and waiting to occupy the spacious courtyard compounds that would soon arise.

As Wu Ding and Peter Luo passed through, settlers peeked out of their tents to watch.

“You should stick around,” one said. “There’s going to be a town here soon. There’ll be beautiful residences to divvy up. You could claim one!”

“Not me,” Wu Ding said.

“But where are you going? There’s nothing ahead.”

“There is St. Petersburg,” Wu Ding said. “I’m going there, then returning.”

People stared in amazement, and no one else spoke up. They’d never met such travelers.

They’d been traveling many days and could no longer count how many times they’d explained themselves to squatting settlers. Most of the time they rode in silence, listening to the sough of wind, the birdsong, the occasional neigh of their horses, and stones gently colliding. They lost the ability and desire to keep track of time. They cared more about the land underfoot: soil quality, road width, load-bearing capacity of old bridges, and other safety considerations for the passage of future automobiles. As they rode their horses, they were also driving hypothetical cars.

To find a return route suitable for an automobile, they sometimes had no choice but to make long detours. Some days they made very little progress. This of course didn’t make for a carefree journey. Particularly troublesome was gorge terrain, which obliged them to descend cliffs and measure canyon widths. When they finally left this convoluted, mountainous country behind, the two of them were completely exhausted. They fell into a muddled state akin to sleepwalking. Indeed, they often fell asleep on horseback. Somehow their animals knew where to go, as if possessed of a mystical wisdom. Wu Ding and Peter Luo could do little more than strive not to fall off their mounts.

“Where are you two headed?” someone asked.

Wu Ding opened his eyes and saw a high-ranking man of some kind, a duke or governor perhaps, fingers loaded with black jade rings, nails long and well-kept. The man wore a Western-style hat with long tassels and an embroidered ceremonial robe of satin. Wu Ding tried to dismount and make the proper abeyances, but his horse had not agreed to stop.

The horses had endured difficult mountain paths for too long. Now that they were on open, level grasslands and could gallop at full speed, they didn’t wish to just stop.

The governor took no offense. He and his bodyguards came running after them on foot, calling out in high spirits, making a game of the scene.

“Excellency!” Wu Ding cried from horseback.

“Now now, let’s dispense with formalities!”

“But you must forgive my manners.”

The governor was laughing breathlessly. “Think nothing of it. You two . . . where are you going?”

“St. Petersburg.”

“Where?”

“A far-off foreign land, Excellency.”

“Oh, I see.” The governor nodded thoughtfully. In a more serious tone he added, “But you must stop.”

The horses reared to a stop at once. In the suddenly quiet grassland, there was only the flutter of a multicolored Manchu dragon banner.

Wu Ding dismounted. He took a slightly cold document out of his breast pocket and respectfully offered it to the governor.

But the governor fished out some snuff from a pouch and inhaled deeply, then blinked with contentment. “Oh, your papers. No, it’s not that. You need to stop for another reason. There is a river ahead. Normally just a trickle, you understand, but the rainy season has just passed and now you’re dealing with a veritable flood. I’m afraid you two won’t be able to cross.”

“Oh, I see. Is there another way?”

“You’ll have to make a rather long detour, I’m afraid, and go over the bridge. Several days out of your way, unfortunately.”

Wu Ding and Peter Luo glanced at each other.

“Is it a wide bridge?” Peter Luo asked.

“Wide enough for horses, but probably not palanquins.”

“Many thanks, Excellency,” Wu Ding said. “We’ll go to the river first and have a look. If we’re convinced we can’t cross, we’ll return.”

The governor shrugged, yawning, expressing no further opinion on the matter.

Wu Ding brought palm and fist together in obeisance, mounted his horse, and bid farewell to the colorful, satin-clad group of men. He and Peter Luo hastened toward the river.

It was a broad and torrential rapid, but an automobile could probably cross it. This was a relief. The next question was how to cross just now. Wu Ding felt it wasn’t such a danger, and they should just ride across, never mind the detour and bridge.

“Then at least put your baggage on my horse,” Peter Luo said. His animal was tall enough to keep saddlebags dry. Wu Ding declined, perhaps out of pride, or just stubbornness. He led his short-legged horse by the halter, step-by-step seeking safe footing. The river was deeper than he’d thought. A few steps in and the water was already up to his waist, and soon it was at his throat. He cried out for help, unable to swim. His foot came down on a sharp stone and he lost his balance. He held on tight to his horse’s reigns for dear life. The horse struggled backwards, baggage falling into the water. Wu Ding fought his way out of the deeper current and Peter Luo grabbed him around the waist. They watched helplessly as Wu Ding’s baggage washed away.

Inside were all his rations.

If only he could have a simple pancake.

Wu Ding hadn’t expected to run into a food shortage issue so early in the journey. After crossing the river, they continued through desolate, uninhabited wilderness. Back on the grassy steppes they’d still seen hares, but now there was nothing. Wu Ding’s only sustenance was his imagination. Already two days without food, his stomach was growling, his body exhausted. Sleeping or waking, he thought only of food. It got so bad that once he hallucinated and ended up chewing a mouthful of air.

“Perhaps we should stop and rest a bit,” Peter Luo said with a worried expression. He dismounted, and spread a blanket on a patch of shady, cool earth.

Wu Ding lay on the blanket, unable to move or do anything but gaze enviously at Peter Luo. They were together in all this, but Peter suffered no hunger. He glowed with health and radiated vigor. While Wu Ding rested, Peter Luo practiced gymnastics and calisthenics, shouting out commands to himself: “One! Two! Three! Four!” squats, “One! Two! Three! Four!” push-ups, “One! Two! Three! Four!” backward somersaults.

Through the haze of his weakness, Wu Ding remembered: these locals relied merely on work, on exertion, to synthesize the nutrition their bodies needed. Peter Luo wasn’t doing insane, pointless exercises—he was eating. Wu Ding watched, growing dizzy. He closed his eyes.

“What’s wrong?” Peter Luo asked, sounding deeply concerned.

What else can I do? Wu Ding thought to himself, swallowing a mouthful of saliva. Contrary to his expectations, his stomach rumbled with hunger.

“Ah,” Peter Luo said, “you’ve been hungry for quite some time. Just give me a moment.” He seemed excited, as if he’d just solved a riddle, and took off running. Wu Ding didn’t understand his companion’s suddenly elevated spirits. Over the past few days, he’d discovered that Peter Luo, despite his fierce appearance, was unexpectedly innocent, even naïve.

In short order, Peter Luo reappeared from behind a boulder. He came jogging back, carefully holding something in both hands. He came to stand before Wu Ding, then shyly and humbly lowered his gaze. “Here, for you. Have a look. Is it edible?”

Wu Ding hesitantly took the warm, round, sticky thing from Peter Luo’s hands.

“Apparently you people rely on ingesting this kind of thing to maintain life,” Peter Luo said. “If that’s really the case, then this . . . well, you should be able to eat it.” He struggled to conceal his embarrassment, but his careful avoidance of eye contact gave him away.

Wu Ding studied the brown ball in his hands. It looked suspicious, nauseating really, not at all appetizing, but it gave off an undeniably pleasant scent. It was redolent of carbohydrates, a fragrance more powerful than any of Wu Ding’s reservations.

He swallowed the thing whole, and it was delicious.

5

The problem of food had been unexpectedly resolved. A mutual respect had developed between the two travelers, so Peter Luo never said anything regarding the food’s origin, and Wu Ding never asked. With this tacit agreement between them, they came to the mountainous region between the Hala and Youlu Rivers. They followed camel-trodden trade routes. They rode through ravines sheltered from the wind, slogged through unavoidable marshes, passed by terraced houses that once detained criminals, white buildings with pointed rooftops, and entered a canyon forest. At last, they stood in an open space before a towering marble stele. On the eastward face were engraved the two characters for “Asia,” 亚洲, and on the westward face the two for “Europe,” 欧洲.

At first glance there was no distinguishing between the two halves of the world. But after standing there for a while, a subtle difference became apparent. This was an unequivocal border. Despite being separated by a mere stele, a chunk of stone, it was as if each side was filtered through a different lens. The Asia side radiated a slight yellow, while the Europe side was suffused with a faint green. These were two worlds with two different grains, two different textures. Although their skies were similar, and their soil and forests and roads, they were composed of different particles. Here, on an unremarkable mountain in the Ural range, was a confluence of continents. And two people who’d never left Beijing before were now here. The land behind them, the ground they’d passed over that was already full of the memory of humanity’s passage, was perhaps already burgeoning with settlements, becoming a highway of civilization that led to this place, and this moment.

It occurred to Wu Ding he ought to mark down this border. He extended a hand toward Peter Luo and said, “Map please?”

Peter Luo went through his bags, searching, growing agitated. “I seem to be short one saddlebag. It may have come off in that grove we just passed through, snagged by a branch.”

Wu Ding’s heart sank. He immediately wanted to turn back and search the forest, but it was already growing dark. By the time he got to the grove he wouldn’t be able to see anything. Wracked by indecision and frustration, he heard someone call to them.

“Hey there, you two!”

A tall woman draped in a reddish-brown frock stood on the open ground of Europe, then rushed toward them, waving an arm. Her right sleeve was wound around her waist, and she was completely unselfconscious about exposing half her body. Behind her, in charming, picturesque disorder, were arranged a dozen or so conical tents. Before each stood several women, giggling and directing coquettish glances at the travelers.

“You’ve run into some difficulties?” the apparent leader asked.

“Well,” Wu Ding said, “we’ve lost our map, possibly somewhere back there in that grove.”

“Oh dear,” the woman muttered to herself. “If you go back and search, I’m afraid it would be very difficult to retrieve your map. Let our Supernal see if she can’t produce another.”

“Excellent!” Peter Luo nearly fell off his horse in his excitement.

The leader summoned her Supernal from behind the group of women and instructed her to prognosticate on the matter of the map. Wu Ding and Peter Luo were invited into the leader’s tent, which was shady and cozy, and filled with a delightful fragrance. A tidily shaved cube of ice warded off the suffocating air and heat of the forest. Wu Ding and Peter Luo couldn’t restrain sighs of relief as they reclined on soft cushions and a maidservant brought them fruit, and the coolness of the tent set them at ease.

“Shall we play at cards?” the leader invited. “Regardless, there’s nothing more we can do about your troubles for the moment.”

Wu Ding and Peter Luo couldn’t argue with this. The maidservant dealt cards from a deck, and the guests earnestly studied the rules of the game. They soon mastered the fundamentals and were playing nearly as well as the leader and maidservant. Compared with the Empire’s Mahjong, this was child’s play. The leader told them the game was called “tractor.”

“Tractor,” Wu Ding said. “Sounds like some future means of transportation.”

The leader nodded. “That’s what the Supernals say.”

Just then, the maidservant brought word from the Supernal. According to her prediction, a search would be fruitless.

“So, regarding our original map,” Wu Ding said, “she means . . . ”

“If the map is so very important,” the maidservant said, “you two can wait here. A new map can be made here at our settlement, in two days or so. It will be identical to your old map.”

Wu Ding said nothing and simply showed his cards, which the maidservant took. This match was a draw.

The maidservant began shuffling the cards. This was an arduous task that required patience. Slacken in the work even slightly, and the cards would again sort themselves according to suit and value. Wu Ding dazedly watched the cards fly up and down in her deft hands, the blur of the cards like a fantastical curtain. He felt light, buoyant, like he was sinking into a bed of soft cotton. His heart rate slowed. He thought perhaps continuing to wait was a great idea. Good things come to those who wait, he mused. Inundated by all manner of good things, as one was in a universe of increasing order, something you wanted was always on the way.

Besides, without a map, it would be impossible to drive an automobile from St. Petersburg back to Beijing.

All the hardships they’d suffered would mean nothing.

He needed that map.

That being the case, why not keep waiting?

In the comfort of the tent they continued to play tractor, waiting for the map to be produced.

Peter Luo’s voice came to Wu Ding’s ears, as if from a great distance, further away than Beijing. Wu Ding was too distracted by the cards to respond.

“Wu Ding . . . what shall we do?”

“Wait, of course. We need the map. You heard the Supernal’s words. Perhaps two days or so and we’ll have it.”

“Perhaps?” Peter Luo said. “And what if our westward highway forms before we get the map?”

Wu Ding thought, Wouldn’t that be for the best? Even if they hadn’t completed the whole journey, they had quickened the birth of the highway. Wu Ding looked up at his companion and wondered what he was sad about. Waiting here wasn’t laziness, or opportunism. Waiting for the map wasn’t the same as those squatters waiting for roads and houses and cities to arise from nothing. Those settlers just watched and waited for order to increase. But Wu Ding and Peter Luo had, after all, come so far.

“Come on now, what’s wrong?” Wu Ding said.

“When it all comes down to it, what are we doing here?”

“Playing tractor,” the impudent maidservant said.

Wu Ding glared at her resolutely. “We’re waiting for our map.”

“Waiting,” Peter Luo said. “My hair could go black and yours white doing that. Why come all this way to wait? Why didn’t we just stay in Beijing and wait for the road to appear?”

“That’s not the same. Those people waiting in Beijing . . . they’re waiting for a road. They’re doing nothing. But we’ve been proactive! We’ve accomplished something! And now we’re just waiting for a map.”

“Are we so different from those Beijingers?” Peter Luo threw down his cards and stood up. “Wu Ding, you haven’t even asked me.”

“Asked you what?” Wu Ding didn’t understand, and Peter Luo didn’t explain. He simply walked out of the tent.

All along, the leader of the women was grinning at Wu Ding, as if she understood everything. “Why not ask him if he remembers the map? Perhaps he can sketch the entire thing from memory.”

“I can!” Peter Luo said in a loud voice outside the tent.

The two travelers hastened on through the night, without rest.

On the second day, and then on the third, it was more of the same. Man and horse utterly drained, they pushed incessantly forward. In the end, they had become little more than automata, mechanically progressing west.

On the fourth day, the majestic, resonating blast of a steam whistle shocked them out of a light doze. Eight eyes opened at once, hastily peering around in all directions. They discovered they had ended up on St. Petersburg’s bustling cargo wharf.

As far as the eye could see there were arched windows, colonnades, beautiful vaulted domes and multistoried buildings, rows of linked, pitched arches joined like music, like waves under the blue sky.

For a long time, Wu Ding and Peter Luo couldn’t speak.

Wu Ding found himself lost in profound thought. He couldn’t quite lift his head yet, to appreciate the bright, piling clouds, and inhale the mingled scents of the wharf.

Peter Luo said nothing, but patted Wu Ding’s shoulder.

“If it weren’t for you,” Wu Ding said, “we might still be sitting in a tent waiting for a map.”

“All is well now.”

“I didn’t expect St. Petersburg to be so big. I mean, it’s no Beijing of course, and I really miss Beijing’s dusty look. And I wonder if the Drum Tower will be finished growing by the time we get back.”

“We’ll be back soon enough, and we’ll know all about the tower. In fact, we’ve made it halfway. Next is simply the road home.”

According to Wu Ding’s plan, the return trip would be three times faster than getting here. They would be taking the favorable route they’d painstakingly explored. They would be in an automobile that never grew tired or irritable. Homesickness would make of Wu Ding and Peter Luo two arrows hurtling east. For the moment they stayed in a beautiful domed hotel. They bathed, changed clothes, then immediately set out to purchase a vehicle. Although St. Petersburg was a booming city, it was no match for the center of the cosmos, Beijing. Even though there weren’t many pedestrians or horse-drawn wagons in the downtown area, it was only three or four degrees colder here than in the forest. Strolling along, Wu Ding and Peter Luo maintained their composure and offered each other opinions. Wu Ding, who’d begun to develop deep crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes, consoled his friend and told him not to lose heart. Although St. Petersburg was backward, it would become Europe’s leading port city. The Empire’s tea, porcelain, and rice liquor would, via this city, be conveyed all over the world. Peter Luo’s lips, which were growing rosier by the day, curled in a smile. He’d accepted Wu Ding’s optimistic prediction.

However, matters were not so simple. They found themselves confronted with a weighty fact: there were still no automobiles in St. Petersburg. All the metals needed for their manufacture had not been produced yet. Although Wu Ding had known St. Petersburg’s entropic deceleration lagged behind the Imperial Capital’s, he’d underestimated the entropic difference between the two cities.

Give up, or persevere? Do this or do that?

He stood facing Peter Luo for a long time. During this silent confrontation, heavy casualties were suffered. On insufficient grounds, and without a feasible plan, they finally agreed to stay in St. Petersburg, to first smelt steel, then manufacture automobiles, and at last drive back to Beijing.

6

Wu Ding and Peter Luo passed the latter half of their lives in St. Petersburg. They founded an automobile materials laboratory, with the goal of manufacturing everything they would need to produce a car. Because vehicles in the Imperial Capital came into existence automatically, nobody knew the specific properties of car materials. But according to textbooks, the required materials were all made of the same stuff: countless particles, atoms, invisible to the naked eye. Change the arrangement of these atoms, and you could create new types of matter.

Although no one had ever seen these atoms, or even understood their description—never mind comprehended how to arrange them into new materials—Wu Ding and Peter Luo decided to experiment a bit. They chose the most common materials on this strange continent to extract and refine, and were unceasing in their trials and tests, striving to produce abundant permutations of atoms. They worked day and night. Finally, they began to stumble upon some of the materials they would need for an automobile, such as metal crystals. In this way they plunged into the world of atomic permutations, feeling duty bound not to turn back.

It is said that Wu Ding and Peter Luo passed away on the same day. They were discovered in their workshop. Wu Ding, decrepit and hunched in his cushioned chair, was holding the infant Peter Luo in his swaddling clothes. They seemed asleep.

Each was survived by an only son, and these two young men carried on their fathers’ enterprise, devoting their lives and all their energy to manufacturing steel. Wu Ding the Second and Peter Luo the Second were together from birth. They grew up together, were educated together, and then worked together. At a certain stage they were nearly indistinguishable. They were like one of the composites they strove to create in their lab, both old and young, innocent and shrewd. Whenever anything cropped up, they always turned their efforts toward completely opposite directions. It was hard to say whether things might’ve gone smoother if they didn’t have each other.

Regardless, by the time they were both toothless, they had finally produced steel and rubber.

On his deathbed, Wu Ding the Second, like his father before him, carefully dictated a speech to his son, character by character, line by line.

The old man believed his son would live to see Wu Ding the First’s dream realized. Wu Ding the Third would behold the completed Drum Tower that Wu Ding the First so often dreamed of and pined for. Wu Ding the Third would face that city of gray brick and black roof tile and declaim in a booming voice the words that had waited three family generations for breath.

And the great highway three generations had spent their lives hoping for would, perhaps, in Wu Ding the Third’s words, come spontaneously to be.

Both Wu Ding the Third and Peter Luo the Third lacked the faith and confidence of their forebears. They broke their generational continuity and sank into self-doubt, their morale collapsing. And yet, when they were 45 years old, they miraculously invented St. Petersburg’s first automobile. The vehicle’s main fuel was people’s exhaled breath, mixed with some other gases that weren’t so reactive. This mix automatically condensed in the tank, actuating pistons that provided the vehicle’s motive force, while generating diesel oil that drained through a tube into a vat.

The day the new automobile began its journey, two people’s spirits were roused to vigorous action. Wu Ding the Third drove the vehicle over a bridge, hurtling past pedestrians and horse-drawn carriages, leaving them behind in the dust, and in short order leaving St. Petersburg. Peter Luo the Third turned in the passenger seat and watched the beautiful, multicolored domes and palaces shrink with distance.

“We could be back before long,” Ding said in an attempt to comfort Pete.

“Sure,” Pete said, “with roads established, driving back and forth between two places will be no big deal.” His mood was improving again. “I’m really anxious to get to the Capital. I want to see how their cars compare to ours, composition-wise. And if they’re not the same, let’s see whose are faster, whose are sturdier!”

Ding had been accustomed to Pete’s boyishness for a long time. Despite the Wu clan allegedly being more naïve than the Luos, there was actually no difference. Ding stepped on the gas, propelling the vehicle energetically onward.

The towns and villages along the way had news of their coming ahead of time. Locals fell over each other with eagerness, fighting for a glimpse, wondering what sort of machine Europe’s first car was. They lined the streets to welcome Ding and Pete, tossing care packages of bread, cheese, tomatoes, and vodka into the vehicle. They kept watch at ferry crossings or muddy ground, ready to assist if the vehicle ran into problems. At the bazaar in Novgorod, car enthusiasts surrounded the vehicle and couldn’t be dispersed for several hours, everyone striving to reach out and touch this miraculous four-wheeled house. Finally, the police rushed in and restored a degree of order, but Ding’s hopes to immediately quit this fanatical city were dashed, because police are human too, curious as anyone else, and they had knowledge-hungry relatives. Ding and Pete soon discovered they would need at least half a day to escape Novgorod.

Having learned a valuable lesson, Ding chose to drive onto the Volga River’s ferry steamer at dawn. Most people were still dreaming in bed at this time. On board there were seven or eight night-duty Cossack workers. They surrounded the vehicle, inspecting it and arguing amongst themselves, until finally one of them asked Pete where this strange carriage was hiding its horses.

Pete roared with laughter and they chatted at length. Pete was a congenial, loquacious person. It was as if anyone with bright and smooth skin were naturally garrulous. Ding couldn’t remember if he’d been that way when his flesh was youthful. He was 45, but had already forgotten so much of his youth. He often felt his life had begun with his paternal grandfather’s. What he was seeing now seemed to have already passed, long ago. No matter what he came across, it all seemed to have happened before. He couldn’t shake this feeling. Life was as tasteless as the water in his mouth.

On about the fourth day of the journey, in the vicinity of the Kazan River Valley, they had to stop. The fuel tank was empty—it was time to replenish. Ding and Pete got out, opened the hood, pulled the rubber tube out from under the fuel tank, and started taking turns blowing air. It began to rain, and there was nowhere around to take shelter. They had no choice but to get wet and blow into the tank.

Just then, a long row of chariots came charging out of the gray void of the rain. Seven or eight gorgeously-clad young people pulled to a stop and jumped down from their vehicles. When they had come to understand Ding and Pete’s situation, they immediately proposed joining in the work of refueling.

“You can feel confident handing this over to us,” a big-nosed young foreigner said. “We are the best brass wind instrument players in this region!”

This was no empty boast. Sure enough, in very short order, the fuel tank was full.

The young people cheered as they got back on their chariots, and charged away before Ding could even finish thanking them.

“Well what do you know,” Pete said, “strangers aren’t always bad.” Even though their outward appearances were quite different, they were growing and developing in the same entropic direction, so Pete and these Russians had gotten along well. He trusted them.

Wu Ding the Third said nothing to his companion. He returned to the driver’s seat. He stepped on the gas, and the engine issued its beautiful roar.

The rain had stopped, but the fog continued to roll in heavily. They hadn’t seen the sun in days. Although the road through the forest was wide enough for an automobile, there was often a fallen tree or branch obstructing the way. Pete always took the initiative, getting out and clearing the way. One time he even had to drag a dead stag off the road. Ding’s expression grew more and more somber, day by day, until it seemed he would melt into the fog. No matter how hard Pete tried, he couldn’t provoke a response from his companion. Finally, Pete also grew dejected. The two of them endured the passing landscape in silence, the splash of mud as they sped through pools, until they finally left behind the clusters of iris and undergrowth, and on the distant frontier line there was clustered a small town.

While they took a rest, Ding found a family of Chinese who’d opened a fuel station. In his halting, accented Mandarin, augmented with gesticulations, he engaged in some fierce haggling. He ended up spending his last rubles on several liters of diesel oil dumping rights. He drained the automobile of the diesel it had accumulated over the last few days. Into the Chinese family’s depot it pooled. Alleviated of this load, the vehicle’s maximum speed increased considerably, and soon enough they had entered Mongolia.

“What’s that?” Pete suddenly asked, pointing.

Ding spotted a distant cloud shadow sweeping over the earth, closing in on them—but he knew right away this was no cloud shadow. At the same time, a strong breeze hurtled by, advance notice of an imminent sandstorm. Pete tried to take over the driving wheel from Ding, in order to evade the coming storm, but Ding fought him off, dragged him under the seat, and used his coat to cover his mouth and nose. The vehicle violently swerved and rocked, as if toyed with by a great formless hand. They almost flipped over many times. Sand flowed like a torrential river, spinning, soon rising in a vortex to obstruct the sky. Briefly, the sand was so powerful it swallowed up heaven and earth and all living things, along with a tiny automobile and the two people inside. Ding tightly gripped Pete, aware for the first time in his life that they might not die at the same time. One of them could die before the other.

This revelation shook him more violently than the sandstorm ever could, and when the tempest had finally passed, the idea was still there.

Although they were now moving through a pine forest, and the clean air was fragrant with pine resin, Ding remained uneasy. They were still far from Beijing. Anything could happen. One generation’s vaguely worded “difficult, endless journey,” experienced firsthand, suddenly grew into a giant, terrifying beast. Wu Ding the Third felt his physical powers in decline, while his companion seemed to grow more vigorous by the minute. The balance they’d maintained between them was no more. That was how Ding felt about it, anyway.

As if to confirm his opinion, when they arrived at a forest rest station, they found the tire on their left drive wheel was flat. They removed the tire, hoping to find a source of hot water to soak it in. The station ranger recommended they go to the Youlu Riverbank’s bathhouse. Ding and Pete chose to take this opportunity to relax a bit. In the bathhouse, Pete held the tire and focused on the soak. Faced with Pete’s naked, well-built physique, Ding’s sorrow intensified. Shedding tears, he stood up and approached Pete. He bent down and spoke in his ear the words handed down from Wu Ding the First.

Pete was shocked. “Why are you telling me this?”

Ding didn’t answer. As if nothing had transpired, he continued to bathe. This body of his, once tall and well-muscled, skin firm and clear, was now old. He didn’t expect to survive crossing the dreadful Gobi Desert.

7

Several days later, Ding and Pete bid farewell to the loud, heartily laughing Mongols and their cattle herds, and drove into the Gobi. The heat was indeed hellish. Every particle of air was agitated and restless. In Pete’s words, the air particles were like jumping beans in a heated pan. The waste cold from their engine was the only source of civilization’s chill in this wild hot zone. 

“The living creatures of the Gobi must feel our car is heaven-sent,” Pete said, with a sidelong glance at Ding, his awkward smile faltering.

Ding’s face was swollen after so much sun exposure and had gone from gloomy to downright frightful. He drove, staring straight ahead with a grim expression, sometimes not bothering to swerve around large stones in the road. He didn’t seem to care that by crushing stones and other detritus under the wheels, he was endangering the vehicle. Even faced with a veneration-worthy Mongol boundary marker, a large pile of earth and stones, he had no misgivings about plowing right through it.

Sacred streamers and flags with Tibetan prayers written on them held no stopping power for Ding now.

Pete winced as they drove over horse or ox skulls. That crushing sound sent shivers down his spine. He proposed replacing Ding behind the wheel, but Ding refused. In this endless, lonely wasteland, distant horizons seemed closer than they were. The vast heavens were enough to make one’s heart palpitate. Distance and scenery combined to become surreal. The road behind them quickly retreated, like the sea’s turbulent waves.

“Ding!” Pete finally yelled. “Stop! The car is going to fall apart!”

And the vehicle did stop, but not because of Pete’s exhortation. They’d been climbing a sand dune when the wheels sank, losing their purchase. The sand was too loose. They cranked the start lever, turned the steering wheel without moving forward, and all they accomplished was to start overcooling the engine. It was emitting freezing air and beginning to frost over. If they kept it up, the other parts of the vehicle might start freezing up.

They stood there under the sun, helplessly rubbing their hands.

“Go,” Ding said. “You might be able to make it. You’re stronger now than you’ll ever be. You could still get out of the Gobi.”

Pete squinted at Ding. He opened the trunk, took out a shovel, and got to work trying to free the wheels.

“Useless,” Ding said, grabbing the shovel in mid-plunge. “Don’t put it off. Just go. And when you get to Beijing, remember to say what my grandfather always wanted to say.”

“Say . . . say what?” Pete seemed confused. “Oh, that’s right. I was joking. Those Mongols we were traveling with for a while, the eldest brother, he believed you and I were twins. He said he couldn’t tell who was who unless we were together right in front of him.”

“You and I are not the same, Pete.” Ding’s throat hurt terribly. No, he was not Peter Luo the Third. His body was progressing from stability to chaos. His life energy was nearly exhausted. He had neither the strength nor the enthusiasm to return to Beijing, simply to complete a road that would come to exist regardless of what he did.

On this long journey that had inspired so many, he felt only tired. He perceived only tedium. Why should he put effort into a road that would inevitably come to be, with or without him?

This question had finally consumed his spirit. He’d had enough of this dreariness.

Both he and Pete hoped to reach Beijing as soon as possible. Pete, for the sake of the road. Ding, to bring a swift end to this tedium.

“True, you and I are not the same,” Pete said, choking with emotion. “You are Wu Ding the Third, and I am Peter Luo the Third. This road is your grandfather’s. If you don’t go on, there can’t be a road. Think of the world, think of all the people waiting for you to create this new road.” He pushed Ding out of the way and continued to shovel sand. “Sure, maybe there are other ways to make this westward highway. But now there’s only one way, this way, to make your highway, this highway. Just because something is futile doesn’t make it meaningless.”

Ding took a step back, no longer intent on preventing Pete’s shoveling.

Some people liked useless effort. Some people needed it. It was like this desert. Once upon a time, it was an ocean. Now all that was left was dryness, salt flats, desolation. Digging a well or two wasn’t going to change that.

After the engine had rested a bit, it began to warm up. But it was still a long way from being able to start. Unless of course it was supplied with water . . .

In Wu Ding’s mind there arose a creaking noise, like a door that had been shut for ages finally opening. He realized there was still a glimmer of hope. If they could only find some water, they could melt the frost on the engine.

Almost too far away to see, on a small patch of sparse grass, there was a well . . .

8

Wu Ding the Third and Peter Luo the Third spent more than a month and suffered untold hardships before finally arriving in a suburban county of Beijing. They consulted Wu Ding the First’s map and crossed over an easily surmounted mountain ridge, and then they were within moments of reaching the Imperial Capital.

As the sun sank westward, they ascended a final peak and stood looking down upon a grand scene.

There was the dark gray city wall, and moat, that had been awaiting them for so many years.

“You could shout out those words now,” Pete suggested.

“No. I will go down into the city and speak in front of the people.”

“Sure, but why not practice a bit first? Speak, hold forth, and don’t get stuck. Come on, pretend I’m the audience.”

Ding glanced at Pete, and shyly lowered his head.

“Come on then,” Pete said, giving Ding a swift poke in the ribs.

Ding raised his head and took a few deep breaths in preparation. Wu Ding the Second’s energetic, spring-loaded sentence delivery arose in his mind. Wu Ding the Third gradually turned to face Peter Luo the Third. “Go?”

“Yeah, go.”

Wu Ding the Third threw out his chest, and keeping in mind the vast twilight gloaming before him, said in a forceful voice: “History shows us that those who speak pleasant words are always more popular than those engrossed in accomplishing deeds. But it doesn’t matter, because history also tells us that it needs those fools who quietly immerse themselves in work, putting their shoulders to the wheel, because it is they who make history!”

Silence followed as the dusk deepened.

The quiet between heaven and earth was extraordinary, as if in that moment all the world had ceased to breathe, waiting for the lingering echoes of Ding’s speech to spiral upward, or slowly descend like fine, pure snow, or an extinguished spark from an anonymous chest.

Even though it had just been a few unadorned, awkward, common words.

“Too long-winded, right?” Ding said. “This speech has been transmitted through three generations of people.”

“Wordy, sure. They really are Wu Ding the First’s words. Authentic.”

“Genuine, indeed.” Ding’s nose tingled, his eyes dampened. For a moment, Beijing blurred in his vision, so that there were several Imperial Capitals. Until a tear dropped, there was still orange light on the uppermost wall towers. Ding rubbed his eyes. He saw clearly again, but again didn’t dare believe his eyes. In the northwest corner of the Beijing city wall, a wide gap had opened. A large structure was rising from ground level, slowly but surely, growing steeply, already towering over the city wall. Wu Ding the First had described Beijing countless times. He had never mentioned this tall building.

Ding and Pete looked at each other in bewilderment. This seemingly immaterial structure triggered an indescribable unease. Behind them, the sun finally vanished below the horizon. The veil of night enveloped the world, providing dark contrast for Beijing’s lights. Even standing on this distant mountain peak, it was as if they could hear the city’s hubbub.

Just then, a 4-horsepower Spyker came along the road and passed them by. Pete jogged along to keep up, and into the window said, “Excuse me, but you fine people seem to be coming from Beijing. May I ask if you know what that new building is, the tall one at the northwest corner of the city wall?”

“Yes,” said someone inside, “we’re from the city, and it’s not strange you don’t know that building. It hasn’t been growing but a few days. It is Beijing West Railway Station. The Supernals say that within half a month of its appearance, at most, a train track from Beijing to the West will come into being. From now on, heading west from Beijing will take no great effort. If you want to go further, you can just go further. Longed for so many years, this westward way . . . at last it has come to be, all on its own!”

The vehicle hadn’t stopped during this explanation. It soon vanished into the night, leaving two dumbfounded travelers standing there in silence for quite some time.

Pete finally turned to Ding. “Well, that was unexpected, eh?”

“Unexpected,” Ding managed.

“At least . . . ”

“Right, at least . . . ”

It was dark up here. Beneath the inky sky, Wu Ding the Third moved toward the edge of a steep cliff. He gazed into the distance. Beijing was still Beijing, still the Imperial Capital. The Capital, plus one new tall building. That towering structure was a dazzling sight, resplendent in jade green and glittering gold, luminous, like a heavenly realm where immortals might dwell, a place for humans to look upon in awe, but never touch.

Originally published in Chinese in Flower City, Issue 06, 2018.

Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

About the Author

Tang Fei is a speculative fiction writer whose fiction has been featured (under various pen names) in magazines in China such as Science Fiction World, Jiuzhou Fantasy, and Fantasy Old and New. She has published a short story collection, The Person Who Saw Cetus, and a novel, Nameless Feast. She has written fantasy, science fiction, fairy tales, and wuxia (martial arts fantasy), but prefers to write in a way that straddles or stretches genre boundaries. She is also a genre critic, and her critical essays have been published in The Economic Observer. She lives in Beijing (though she tries to escape it as often as she can) and considers herself a foodie with a particular appreciation for dark chocolate, chevre, and Single Malt Scotch Whisky. In English, her works have appeared in Clarkesworld, The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2014 Edition, The Apex Book of World SF 4, SQ, and Paper Republic.

Flowers on My Face

Geo-il Bok, translated by Elisa Sinn and Justin Howe

1

I carefully sat down on the plastic tarp covering the flat rock and sighed. Since my transfer to Flake Station, I’d visited this spot whenever I’d gone aboveground alone. It was at the bottom of a steep slope inside a small crater, hidden from others and well-guarded against flying objects.

Instinctively, I put my feet on the ground and checked for signs, but the soles of my feet didn’t pick up any vibration. Nodding absently, I looked up and away from Jupiter, which dominated the sky. But my eyes returned there, as if drawn by some great force: Jupiter was so overpowering that it was impossible not to look at it. The planet seemed as if it might fall at any moment and crush this tiny satellite. No, it wasn’t the biggest planet in the solar system that would fall; it was this insignificant satellite I was on that would be dragged in by its terrifying gravity. Whatever approached Jupiter had to always be on the alert for its fatal embrace, a fact made evident by the tragic fates of nuclear fuel transports that approached Jupiter to obtain deuterium or tritium but instead obtained only engine failures.

I was, of course, very well aware of these facts. Every piece of knowledge on Jupiter had been installed into me at birth, along with images captured by astronomical telescopes. Still, the world felt mysteriously new every time I saw it with my own eyes—as if it were the great god Jupiter himself. I suddenly felt somewhat peculiar, and cleared my throat. Perceiving something as at once both new and familiar was quite a strange feeling, of the kind that could not be put into words. That’s how I felt about Jupiter, a presence that was so familiar and dominating for everyone here on Ganymede.

When my excitement tapered off, sadness crept up from somewhere deep in my heart, hovering over everything. Into everything that I had seen and remembered, and all of the feelings I’d felt. Throughout my body and soul, sadness seeped in like water. The longer I gazed up at the sky, the more forlorn I became, and the vague awareness of having lost something very precious wavered in the depths of my consciousness. I concentrated, trying to remember what it was that I missed, but found nothing.

Staring up into the stars above the horizon, I slowly tasted the drops of my sadness. Moments of this sort, when my sorrow buried me, were bearable when I was alone; when I was among others, their liveliness made my despair seem even darker, and I grew still more depressed.

Suddenly, a few fragments of memory stirred in a deserted corner of my mind. They gathered, struggling to take shape. There was the face of a young girl there, fighting to solidify out of those fragments, but her blurry visage eventually collapsed, the pieces scattered like petals blown from their branch by the wind.

I exhaled, letting go of the breath I’d been holding, and rubbed my forehead as if I were wiping away droplets of sweat. A deeper sorrow awaited me in broken memories than in forgotten ones. Trying to still the lonesome wind in my heart, I slowly stood up. When I felt this way, the enormity of Jupiter blocking out much of the sky was somehow comforting.

2

As soon as I stepped inside the south airlock, my ears tickled. Then, a scent reached my nose: the wet and sour aroma of organic molecules in the air. It almost sickened me, but at the same time something about it was enticing and bittersweet. Air had returned to the underground, filling it more and more, now that the subterranean complex destroyed by “the Great Disaster” had been almost fully restored. No more would we need to go to the surface, but we could travel anywhere through the tunnels.

Because I didn’t want to get noticed, I entered The Moulin Rouge by the side door. The café was particularly busy, with most people gathered around the big head table and intently listening to a stranger. Thankfully, this distraction prevented anyone from paying attention to me.

I leaned against the bar, studying the stranger. There was definitely something unusual about him. Some energy hovered about his body like a powerful aura, yet his long beard made him seem old. On his head he wore a cloth like a turban, and his face looked gentle but strong. I took a few steps closer, as if drawn toward him by some outside force.

Just then, he finished his story with a carefree gesture of his hand. People applauded earnestly. It must have been quite the interesting tale.

The mayor was seated beside the stranger, and he saw me standing there like an oaf between the tables. He called out cheerfully: “Hey, Jimmy, you’re here!”

“Hello, Mr. Mayor. How are you?” Trying to conceal my embarrassment, I lowered my head.

“Same old, same old. How about you?”

“Likewise . . . ” I answered vaguely, searching for a way to escape.

“Dr. Julius,” the mayor turned to the stranger, “this young man is Jimmy Chan. He was revived last month. He used to work for the Hyclide Power Station and was patrolling the Hashimoto Plateau when the Great Disaster struck. He’d been buried in ice and was only discovered by chance.”

“Oh, is that so?” The man respectfully bowed his head toward me. “It’s a pleasure to meet you. We wouldn’t have survived if it wasn’t for those who protected the Hyclide Power Station.”

“Nice to meet you, too.” I answered politely, bowing back to him.

“Jimmy, this is Dr. Bonas Julius. You must’ve heard of him. He’s a renowned linguist and a very popular poet and musician.”

I had never heard of any renowned linguist and popular poet and musician named Dr. Bonas Julius. Yet I bowed my head again politely, mumbling a few words that even I couldn’t hear.

“Dr. Julius is on a nationwide tour. He heard about our town while visiting Drake Station and decided to make an unplanned stop. Oh, right! He’s also extremely good at face reading.” The mayor turned to Dr. Julius, and said, “Dr. Julius, would you mind reading Jimmy’s face?”

Without replying, Dr. Julius began staring at me, his kind eyes suddenly turning sharp and piercing.

As I turned my head away from his gaze, the mayor’s words finally registered. A fit of frustration stirred, and my feelings were clouded by a haze of bilious yellow bubbles.

Humans enjoy the art of physiognomy. They use a variety of tricks to try to divine their future: astrology, palm reading, face reading, tarot reading, crystal reading, interpreting the I Ching, interpreting the Sexagenary Cycle, and more. The types of tricks they rely on are, indeed, innumerable—and in ancient times, some human societies even employed corpses for this purpose. I’m not dead set against such customs, mind you. In a way, I find them rather well-suited to human nature. Objectively speaking, humans are all freaks. They are rational beings that nonetheless behave irrationally. They are reasoning thinkers that casually engage in unreasonable behaviors. It seems to me perfectly suited to their nature that they would fret over their destinies by playing with gimmicks of this sort.

Besides, face reading is at least somewhat rational. A person’s physique does reveal plenty of information about their personality, health, and background. In particular, the shape of the head and the face holds valuable clues, and it wouldn’t be too hard for someone wise to use what people’s faces convey to speculate regarding their futures.

We, however, are not human beings: we are robots. Our bodies are not composed of flesh and bone, but of materials like alloy steel, plastic, mineral fiber, and ceramics. We don’t become who we are through a long period of growth and development, but are assembled in a sudden flash inside a factory. Naturally, there is little variation between our bodies, and our mannerisms and facial expressions are much less creative, unique, and subtle than those of humans. Our faces’ lack of expressiveness was something that humans often complained about. Which is to say that attempting to read a robot’s future in its face is a truly ridiculous notion.

Nonetheless, sitting before me right now was an elderly robot with his paint chipped off, attempting to divine my future from my face. Of course, robots enjoy imitating ludicrous human behaviors: we don’t even care what the behaviors mean, or whether they make any sense. The fact that they were things humans did was a good enough reason for us. I myself used to enjoy rock climbing. If that isn’t nonsensical, I don’t know what is! How can you explain the desire to climb up frozen rocks despite the risk of getting injured or even dying when there is no tangible reward whatsoever? Still, I’d taken pleasure in rock climbing, and whenever I could, I climbed in craters that many others wouldn’t dare visit. Eventually, I’d become known as a rock-climbing expert, and after that I’d joined the task force organized to protect the transmission network.

Still, some things were just too ridiculous for robots to mimic, and face reading was certainly one of them. What I found even more annoying was that I’d been made the subject of this nonsense. The bilious yellow frustration that had bubbled up inside me was now transmuting into crimson anger. I stared straight back into the doctor’s studying eyes, straining so hard to express the rage within me through my eyes that I felt as if my face began to stretch.

The ancient robot continued scrutinizing my face sharply. He resembled nothing so much as an entomologist examining some intriguing bug.

Then, an odd realization startled me: when the mayor had introduced me to Dr. Julius just a moment before, he had not spoken aloud his true intent. He hadn’t mentioned to the doctor that my experience-memory panel had been almost completely crushed, and therefore I’d lost my memories of nearly everything that I’d ever experienced. Everyone who knew this, including me, believed that my depression was rooted in this mechanical amnesia. He had, intentionally withheld a crucial piece of information about me from the face-reader. However naïve and good-hearted he seemed to be, the mayor was in fact quite clever. Which fit with the rumor I’d heard about how, before the Great Disaster, he’d worked as a sheriff at Rodriguez Station.

So that’s what this is about. With a surge of interest, I cast a quick glance over toward the mayor. It’s not my fortune he’s interested in. It’s whether Dr. Julius can . . .

The mayor didn’t acknowledge my inquiring look, but merely kept that smile fixed on his innocent-looking face and continued to watch Dr. Julius from the side.

Dr. Julius was a keen observer. He must have sensed this slight shift in my mind, for the curiosity in his eyes deepened. It wasn’t surprising. If you introduced yourself as a face-reader, whether you were a robot or a human, you must at least have a knack for noticing minor changes in facial expression, gestures, and tone of voice. Dr. Julius glanced around at the group, which was eagerly watching him. Finally, his eyes fell upon the mayor seated there beside him.

The mayor seemed uncomfortable under his gaze, and, clearing his throat, turned his head away.

“So, Mr. Chan,” Dr. Julius said, staring straight at me, “you were buried in ice for thirty years.”

“Yes, twenty nine years and eight months to be precise.”

His face suddenly turned grave as he observed my face. Then, in a low voice he said, “People always ask me about their future. But I only tell them their past.”

The room was silent as he muttered these words. No one dared to speak, and they all seemed to be trying to figure out his puzzling words. Eventually, the mayor coughed dryly once more. As if that were some cue, people rustled, shifting positions and clearing their throats.

Dr. Julius turned toward the mayor. “Mr. Mayor, I’m afraid my eyes are quite dim today. I can’t see very clearly. So, unfortunately, I won’t be able to say anything about Mr. Chan. Next time I get a chance, I’d like to try to read his face again.”

“Yes, of course. Perhaps next time you visit our town, then . . . Thank you very much, doctor.” The mayor responded, his voice cool and his manner unflustered by this unexpected outcome.

People nodded, but nobody was fooled by the doctor’s conciliatory words: it wasn’t hard to guess that the signs he’d read in my face were not good.

My heart sank further, but I appreciated his kindness and bowed my head very politely. “Thank you, Dr. Julius.”

“Mr. Chan, I do wish you the best of luck,” he said with a warm smile and a hint of sympathy in his voice.

His sympathetic tone burned my heart like some toxic solution, and I flinched. Pity was the last thing I wanted right then—especially from a stranger, in front of so many other people. Struggling to keep my face still, I turned and left the café.

3

Without truly seeing them, I looked upon the desolate, unfinished roads that I marched down, my motions exaggerated and my head held up high. A cold flame blazed inside of me. It was the kind of fire that froze your heart instead of warming it.

“There’s no need to be upset at the face-reader,” I reasoned with myself. “He was just trying to be kind, not putting me down. If everyone I meet notices sooner or later that I’m not entirely well, how much more obvious must it be to a face-reader?”

Depression is one of the few illnesses from which both robots and humans suffer. Typically, it is incurable for us. Because robots have a “care circuit” installed, we’re incapable of harming ourselves or others, so a robot can never kill itself. Or at least, such a case has never been reported. Still, when robots fall into a deep depression, they often behave just like a human in despair. Pyotr Velinkovsky, the micro-mechanist who revived me, told me that dealing with depression was much more difficult for robots than for humans. After all, since most diseases that afflict humans are caused by chemical reaction, drugs can inhibit those reactions and ease the symptoms to some degree. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work for robots.

And so everything I saw was suffused by the waves of sorrow that crashed over my heart. The despair found its way into those few fragments of memory that I still retained, seeping into every last trace and even into those empty spots where the last trace of memory was gone.

A sigh escaped me. What did I lose? What am I pining for? What vanished with those lost memories? I don’t know, I really don’t. What I’ve lost, what it was that I once treasured . . . I don’t know.

4

After walking this way for some time, the northeast airlock came into view. Near the airlock, a big woman was humming and watering flowers. The long, narrow garden along the road was brightly lit and filled with flowers. Gardening had become a thing on Ganymede these days, and everyone seemed to think that each robot with even a shred of dignity ought to keep a garden.

Robots obsessing over gardening. Honestly, it’s very odd. Since we’re constructed from mechanical parts and electronic circuits, we tend to shun moisture, but gardening requires proximity to water. So, as humans would say, robots and gardening aren’t “harmoniously matched.” Still, we didn’t care much about fortune-telling. When the Hyclide nuclear plant started generating electricity again, the very first thing we did was to repair the broken airlocks and fill the underground complex with moist air.

Of course, I was dead at the time, but I always hear others jabbering about how great it was when the air was refilled. People couldn’t stop chattering for days on end. They were so excited about being able to hear voices again. Now, we robots can use radio communication when we’re in a vacuum, but for some reason, communicating via radio doesn’t feel comfortable or pleasant to us. We prefer listening to one another’s voices, just as humans do.

It’s the same with gardening. On Ganymede, flowers have a special meaning. Because the surface of the satellite is frozen, corpses don’t rot here, and even underground, there’s no bacteria to decompose a body. That’s why the people who first settled Ganymede came up with a funerary custom suited to this environment. When a human died, they placed the body in a crematorium and then heated it up very slowly, so that all of the moisture in it could evaporate. Then the dried-out corpse was ground up into fertilizer. You have to understand that in this frozen world, a body made up of water and organics was just too good a resource to abandon. By these means, human bodies were able to return to life as flowers.

In 2998, Comet Rashid collided with an asteroid and was smashed into many pieces. One of those pieces slammed into Ganymede, causing the Great Disaster that killed off all of the humans living here. In the wake of the disaster, the most urgent task faced by the surviving robots was to conduct funerals for all of the dead people. They made a heroic effort, but digging every last body out of the ruins of those underground cities had been exhausting enough, let alone performing proper funerals for everyone. It would have taken many, many years for all of those humans who died in the Great Disaster to be reborn as flowers.

I hesitantly approached the woman. The plants in her garden were all small, common flowers like garden balsam, moss roses, pansies, violets, and cyclamens—and they were all in full bloom.

Sensing someone approaching, she turned around. “Oh . . .”

Hastily bowing my head, I said, “How do you do?”

“Hello, young man.” She smiled brightly as she straightened her back. “You don’t look familiar. Are you new here?”

“Yes, I arrived a month ago.”

“Oh, you’re that youngster Pyotr found and revived, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I said with an embarrassed smile.

“Happy to meet you.” She held out her hand. “My name’s Ludsk 2201, but I go by Elizabeth Encush, and my friends all call me Liz.”

“I’m Ruport 18034, and I go by Jimmy Chan. Please call me Jimmy.”

“Ever since I heard your story, I’ve been meaning to stop by The Moulin Rouge. But then the fertilizers came in from Borsalino Station, so I’ve been busy with that new flower bed.” She pointed to an empty plot of earth that had just been laid out.

“I see. Well, you have a wonderful garden. The flowers are so lovely.” I looked around in admiration. The flowers were indeed lovely, though even more marvelous were the butterflies and bees flying among them.

She nodded cheerfully. “I figure the dead will be a little less sad now.” She squatted in front of a particularly charming garden balsam and beckoned to me. “Think about it, Jimmy. How many of their bodies did it take for this lovely flower to bloom? How many bodies do you think went into the Borsalino factory? Thousands? Tens of thousands? Countless corpses were turned into fertilizer, so they could be scattered and finally burst into life as these flowers. How marvelous! How fortunate! Wouldn’t you say that’s a true revival?”

“Yes, it really is.” I squatted next to her and stared down at that plump little flower. Out of nowhere, despair rose in my heart. I turned my head to hide this unexpected surge of emotion, and something caught my eye: a cluster of frail-looking, leafless flowers off to the side, standing in a corner of the garden. “What kind of flowers are those?”

“Which? Those ones over there?”

“Yes.”

“Why, they’re azaleas. I guess you’re not much into flowers?”

I laughed sheepishly. “No, not really . . . I notice them when they’re around, but that’s pretty much it. Do you like gardening?”

“At first, I was scared about the watering. After all, we are not that crazy about water, are we?” She smiled at me with her eyes. “I still sometimes forget that they’ll wither and die if I don’t water ’em.”

“Liz, does growing flowers make you . . . happy?”

She nodded. “It does. Tending flowers, it’s different from other kinds of work or chores. Think about it, Jimmy. If we trace back our ancestry to what first made us, they were living creatures, with bodies and forms, right? So I guess it’s only natural that we’d feel joy from tending life.”

I nodded as I looked deep into her eyes. “Liz, you lost many human friends too, didn’t you?”

With a bitter smile, she nodded. “I’m pretty old . . . I lost everyone.”

“I don’t even remember who I lost. I have no memory,” I confessed impulsively.

“Oh . . . ” She sighed deeply and stared down again at the garden balsam before us. “These days, looking at these flowers lightens my heart. Sometimes I see the faces of my dear friends in the flowers.”

“You do?”

“Well, the friends I loved died, but in a way, they live on in these flowers. If you look into the blooms, you can see those who have yet to be born—generations of future flowers, sleeping inside these flowers here.”

“Generations of future flowers, sleeping inside these flowers . . . ” I mumbled after her, and then, I studied her face. “Liz, what did you do before?”

“Before the Disaster, I worked at Galileo University. I taught religious philosophy.”

I stood up and looked around the garden. “I can see the long and winding road of samsara here, all at once.”

Her smile was radiant. “You really can, can’t you? From human to flower, then from one flower to another, or sometimes to a butterfly or a bee. That’s not such a bad fate at all, is it?”

I said, “I should go now.” Then, again acting on impulse, I added, “Liz, would it be okay if I stop by again and help you out here occasionally?”

“Sure, Jimmy.” She stretched out her arm and gestured toward the road. “My dream is to turn all of old Dragon Street into gardens. To cover everything here with flowers. There are still so many bodies waiting to be processed, and I’m going to help them be reborn as beautiful flowers. Then, when humans return to Ganymede, I’ll show them the flowers and say, ‘Here, your ancestors have been waiting for you.’ I chuckle to myself, imagining the look on their faces when they hear me say that.”

5

The airlock opened to reveal a long tunnel, and at the far end of it was a small, so far unrestored, town. At the edge of the town stood a sign that read NIGER STATION RESTORATION PROJECT.

Like with everything else these days, the restoration work dragged. One bulldozer and a pair of haulers stood in the middle of the road, and there was nobody around. Sparse streetlights cast a lonely glow on the emptiness there. What this project needed was human beings, and their indispensable boldness and drive. They constantly came up with fascinating projects and pushed them to completion with remarkable energy. Once they got things started, we robots worked on and on, tireless and without need of rest, and this synergy between humans and robots accomplished many seemingly-impossible tasks.

I wandered the ruins. Looking around, it somehow felt like the tragedy that had befallen this place thirty years ago could’ve happened just a week ago. There was nothing here to disturb or cover the remains. No sunshine, no wind, no sudden changes in temperature, no bacteria, no grass, and no bugs—only a profound sense of emptiness.

After wandering for quite some time, I arrived at a dead end beside a little house built into the bedrock. The gate had been flung free of its post and still lay abandoned on the ground. Boxwoods bordered a small garden, their flowers stooped to the bedrock and completely withered, yet somehow still holding their shape.

Some irresistible force drove me through that gateless entrance. The tiny front yard was strewn with a jumbled disarray of broken and shattered objects. I felt like an intruder and hesitated for a moment before bracing myself and cautiously making my way across the yard and into the dark living room.

A dim light in my chest illuminated the shambles within. Pieces of shattered glass and broken furniture lay everywhere. My footsteps disturbed the dust. The other rooms were the same, everything in such disarray that it made my head spin. Still, at least there were no corpses. This relieved me, and it was only then that I realized how, deep down, I was anxious about the prospect of coming across a dead human.

As I turned around to leave, I noticed a small door in the corner of one room. I forced it open and peered inside, and immediately flinched. There were humans lying on the floor in there. Three of them. One young man, one young woman, and a baby. I stood still at the door, looked down at them for a long time. The woman was holding the baby tightly, as if she’d been trying to protect it. Meanwhile the young man half-covered the other two.

Finally, I sighed. Since I knew that humans shunned leaving corpses uncovered, I looked around to see if there was anything I could use to cover them. Fortunately, there were some blankets on one side of the room. I placed one on top of the embracing family, and then I radioed Drake Station City Hall. Drake Station was the closest city with a crematory. The voice on the other side said there were just too many bodies waiting to be cremated, so they couldn’t take anything in for another year or so. I gave them the house’s location and then I disconnected.

I could do nothing more for the dead, but still I lingered there. Something burned inside me, keeping me in that place. By the light on my chest, I looked around once more. This looked like a baby’s room. There was a child-sized bed in one corner, and toys and picture books lay scattered across the floor. A little piano stood in the room’s other corner. I walked up to it and lifted the cover. There was a small book inside: a collection of children’s songs, well-thumbed, its corners worn.

I could clearly picture the woman sitting there with the book open, singing to her baby, and my melancholy returned. Did having tender bodies make them more affectionate? I wondered, gazing at the bodies lying on the floor once more before carefully opening the little book. I saw a song titled “Over the Rainbow,” and a strange feeling came over me.

Without thinking, I played the melody with one hand as I read the lyrics. Before I knew it, I was singing along. Ah . . . yes, I know this song. Below the title was a line of text: “From the movie The Wizard of Oz.”

I sat up and played the piano with both hands, singing about blue skies somewhere beyond the rainbow, where dreams might come true.

My heart swelled with feelings that were at once unrecognizable yet oddly familiar. Just when I thought my circuits were about to burn up, overloaded with such searing emotions, I sensed something happen in my head: something that had been dislocated suddenly reconnected, and fragments of memory on the horizon of my mind merged together to form the shape of a little girl. Seeing me, she ran happily toward me, shouting aloud. My heart contracted with a dense yearning, and I reached out my hands toward her. Here, grab my hands, quickly! When her small hands were just inches from mine, something invisible seized her. She struggled and fell over. Then, she sank back down behind the horizon of my mind, leaving me in that dark room, filled with the sound of my own moans.

For a long time, I simply stood there, my hands still stretched forward, my heart filled with that relentless sorrow. I didn’t know what to do when my heart ached this way. Unlike humans, who experience the pain of parting from early on, a robot like me never got the chance to learn how to cope with losing a loved one. I’d never had a parent, or a sibling, or a lover, and so I’d never had to lose anyone, until . . . The sudden sense of loss that unexpectedly gripped my heart made me dizzy, so I closed my eyes and concentrated on my respiration.

Once my heartache lightened a little, I approached the three people and kneeled down next to them. Slowly, I lifted the blanket and looked at the baby clasped to its mother’s breast. Looking at this baby, all skin and bones, summoned something desperate up from the depths of my heart.

I stood slowly and began singing once more. I sang for the baby, and I sang for that girl that had disappeared again beyond the horizon of my memory, too.

After finishing the song, I kneeled once more beside the family. “Rest in peace, baby. Rest in peace. Your mother and father are watching over you, so don’t you worry about anything. When you wake up again one beautiful spring day, you’ll know—you’ll know that you’ve become a lovely flower. Until then, rest in peace, dear baby . . . ”

I straightened myself and lifted my hand to salute the family in their deep, long sleep. Then I switched off my chest light and left them in complete darkness and silence. Only a while later, when I was back in the tunnel, did I notice the new bounce in my footsteps.

6

Liz wasn’t in the garden when I returned through the airlock. Instead, only well-watered flowers greeted me. I looked out across them as if seeing them for the first time. A bumblebee buzzed around the garden balsam that Liz and I had marveled at earlier.

Then a sudden chill struck my heart. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were someone next to me right now, someone with flesh, to admire these flowers with? The flowers would probably rather see a human here than a robot, since they themselves were once humans.

I looked up instinctively, as if the sky were visible above me, with old Earth in it. Staring instead at the rocky ceiling above me, I said aloud, “Why don’t they come? They know we’re here.”

We ask that question all the time here. Many humans live on old Earth, but they stopped coming to Ganymede after the Great Disaster. Once they confirmed there were no human survivors here, they lost all interest in this place. A rescue shuttle dispatched from old Earth came and retrieved all of the humans from the other Jovian moons and took them back to the planet where humanity had originated, but they abandoned everything else, even the robots that had worked with humans on those other moons. We had to send rescue shuttles to bring all those robots to Ganymede.

The heartlessness of humanity’s behavior had scarred us deeply. It proved that they didn’t think of us as people, but simply as lumps of metal—machines that could easily be tossed away as soon as we ceased to remain profitable. Of course, we never expected the humans of old Earth to treat us the same way the humans on Ganymede had: we’d gotten so used to the quasi-citizen status that Ganymedean society had granted us by law that we were completely unprepared for the Earthlings’ attitudes. On Ganymede, everyone had understood and believed that homo sapiens sapiens and homo sapiens roboticus should live in harmony, each a fitting counterpart to the other.

In any case, I missed humans. I thought that if only I could look upon these flowers with a human being beside me—like the little girl who had momentarily appeared over the horizon of my memory—then the darkness cast over my heart might have lightened. This longing, which filled my heart with a cold ache, strangely strengthened my belief that humanity would someday return to Ganymede, and that we then could once again live here in harmony, helping and complementing each other. In the harsh environment of outer space, that was the only way to survive. As if they all agreed with me, the garden balsam flowers, the moss roses, and the azaleas, each bearing their own stories from previous lives, looked up at me and smiled brightly.

7

When I got back into The Moulin Rouge, the café was bustling as usual. There were even more people there than before.

An earthling bereft of love or money,

Where am I headed? Where?

In the midst of that ruddy desert,

In the midst of that arid sea,

A lonesome lighthouse, a lonesome lighthouse.

In the accursed year 2530,

On the first day of the first year,

I reached it.

On accursed Mars,

In the accursed desert,

The lonesome lighthouse, the lonesome lighthouse.

Everyone looked delighted as they savored Dr. Julius’ song. Poets always received such a welcome, wherever they went—and here was one who could also read faces. Little wonder that people had flooded the café.

I didn’t want to deal with the face-reader, so I stood at the bar and drank my beer. It was tremendously refreshing, after my long walk. When Dr. Julius finished “Lost on Mars” and set down his guitar, applause and whistling erupted throughout the café. Still, even with the crowd and the clamor, the face-reader managed to spot me.

I was startled, but quickly I regained my composure and bowed my head. Then I took a seat at the nearest table, next to Pyotr. Ever since he’d repaired my damaged circuit panel and revived me, he’d been like a guardian to me.

“Jimmy, you should try this.” He pointed to a delicate-looking glass that sat on the table before him. It contained a reddish, threatening-looking liquid. “It’s Kenji’s new recipe, and it tastes really interesting.”

Kenji Tanaka was a bartender at the café who had a knack for coming up with interesting new cocktails. Pyotr said that Kenji was the reason behind The Moulin Rouge’s fame, and that thirsty souls made a point of visiting the place even from faraway cities.

I nodded, and Pyotr turned to the guy clearing the next table over and said, “Sean, two Red Fujis, please.”

Before Sean was back with our drinks, Scarecrow, our settlement’s chief librarian, dragged his skeletal frame up to our table. “Jimmy, Dr. Julius wants a word with you.”

“Me?”

“Yeah, that’s what he said.” Scarecrow threw a glance at the head table.

I also briefly glanced in that direction, and found the face-reader studying me intensely. Wondering what he wanted, I pushed my way through the crowd toward him.

The face-reader exchanged glances with the mayor and then, in a low voice, he said, “Please have a seat, Mr. Chan.”

“Alright.” I was puzzled, and my voice came out raspy.

“Here, Jimmy.” It was Annie Boyd, the town clerk. She rose hastily and offered me her seat, the one right across from the face-reader.

“Thank you, Ms. Boyd.”

When I sat down, silence descended suddenly all around us. People were observing our table with great interest, and their curious attention stung my face like needles.

The face-reader gazed into my eyes again, and softly said, “Mr. Chan, I couldn’t read your face well before because my vision was blurry. But I can see much more clearly now.”

Behind me, someone cleared their throat in anticipation, but I just sat there and calmly looked into his unexpectedly tender eyes.

“So, what does Jimmy’s face tell you, Dr. Julius?” asked the enthusiastic mayor.

“I see a flower on Mr. Chan’s face. One truly radiant flower.” His bright smile made his heavily chipped faceplate somehow almost resemble the face of a kindly old human being.

As for me, I was astonished. “A radiant flower” was a splendid image for how I was feeling at the moment. Marveling at his keen observation and poetical metaphor, I bowed my head deeply. “Thank you, Dr. Julius . . . ”

“A flower?” asked the mayor.

“Yes, there is a glowing flower on Mr. Chan’s face.” His smile widened as he turned to the mayor.

“A flower . . . ” The mayor repeated contemplatively, rubbing his chin. “Isn’t that a good sign?”

“Definitely. A flower signifies life. If there were no flowers, we wouldn’t be here, either.”

The mayor nodded his head with a big smile. The crowd behind me burst into applause. Dr. Julius lifted up his guitar and started playing again, as if that was the most natural thing for him.

Last stop for doomed good-for-nothings,

I arrived here on wretched Ganymede for the first time.

Descending from the rickety spaceship with spinning thoughts,

I stepped out of the New Houston Space Station.

In a tiny alley behind Erongos Square,

A tiny girl watering a garden filled with moss roses

Looked up at me and softly asked,

“Where did you come from?”

Though his voice cracked on the high notes, he sang nicely, and his guitar sounded amazing. When the mayor had introduced Dr. Julius as a renowned poet and musician, it hadn’t just been out of politeness.

A few people sitting nearby began to sing along with the song: everyone knew “Near Erongos Square.” The verses had been borrowed from the last stanza of that remarkable poem, “Where My Flesh and Soul Point Toward” by RUFOB1002, the only robot author that human beings considered to be a true poet. Her poems had been praised by human critics and were even very popular on old Earth.

Dr. Julius acknowledged the people singing along with a nod, and he began singing the tune again from the beginning. This time, even more people joined in.

“I come from the place where the sunshine comes from.

We all come from the place where the sunshine comes from.”

Nodding her head, the girl spoke again, asking,

“Where are you going?”

Soon, everyone in the café was singing along. Before the Great Disaster, humans and robots had used to sing this song almost any time they got together.

“I’m headed to where the sunshine goes.

We’re all headed to where the sunshine goes.”

Nodding with a serious face, the girl spoke again, asking,

“Are there flowers there as well?”

I nodded, pointed to the heart—

To her heart and to my heart.

“Wherever people go, there are always flowers.

We all carry the seeds in our hearts.”

The singing grew so loud that it became nearly deafening. As I sang along with that poet who sat there, smiling kindly as he played his guitar, I felt a flower—one which I hadn’t even realized had been part of me—opening its bud upon my metal body.

When the song was over, the mayor jumped up and waved his arms like a conductor, shouting, “One more time!” Everyone cheered.

Last stop for doomed good-for-nothings,

I arrived here on wretched Ganymede for the first time.

Descending from the rickety spaceship with spinning thoughts,

I stepped out of the New Houston Space Station.

In a tiny alley behind Erongos Square,

A tiny girl watering a garden filled with moss roses

Looked up at me and softly asked,

“Where did you come from?”

It was enchanting, all that singing. With our hearts pining for all those humans who had lived and died on this moon, with the voices that were full of longing for those still waiting to be reborn as flowers, we sang our song, raising our voices as if the sound of our singing might reach old Earth, the place where we all, humans and robots alike, had come into being . . . as if we were trying to let the humans there know that we were still here, still waiting.

I nodded, pointed to the heart—

To her heart and to my heart.

“Wherever people go, there are always flowers.

We all carry the seeds in our hearts.”

Originally published in Korean in the collection Rome of Wistfulness.

Published with the support of Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea).

About the Author

Bok Geo-il graduated from the Business School of the Seoul National University and held various jobs in banking, manufacturing, and trading until 1987 when he made his literary debut with the novel, In Search of the Epitaph (Bimyeongeul chajaseo). A writer of many interests and multifarious voices, Bok has also experimented with science fiction as a vehicle for exploring the effect of scientific innovations and technological development on human life. Notable among his science fiction works are Under the Blue Moon (Parandal arae, 1992) and A Wayfarer in History (Yeoksa sogui nageunae, 1991) which features time travel back to mid-Joseon Dynasty period.

One in a Million

Rodrigo Juri

“After so many years, it is strange that we should thus meet again, Estella, here where our first meeting was! Do you often come back?”

—Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

1

One in a million. In a billion. That’s the life we lived. Like a particle of dust floating in the infinite ocean. Just that. And here we are again, looking out the window of the plane over those islands, green emeralds scattered over an immeasurable blue velvet mantle.

Yes. We’ve decided to do it in the old ways. By now we could be down there, enjoying the sun, the sea, the warm sands. But there’s no rush. We have all the time in the world, and we have chosen to wait a little longer. In an age of instant pleasures, expectation and anxiety are delicacies that only connoisseurs know how to appreciate.

That morning we woke up in our old room, in our parents’ mansion in Boca Raton. There shouldn’t be much left of it, won back by the swamps, abandoned for decades. But today we’ve walked through its corridors and in its large lounge while arranging our luggage. Just a few things in the suitcase, what was really important; our favorite guayabera and some bath shorts, razor blades and our usual perfume. The guitar. Oh yes, the guitar. How long has it been since the last time we extracted the sound of some melody from its strings? We no longer remember. A long time ago. Soon we will be able to play it close to a bonfire under the stars of a splendorous night sky.

The taxi arrived just in time. Once on board, we saw the fast parade of palm trees as we headed for the airport. Flight to San Juan de Puerto Rico, no other passengers. There we changed to an airplane, the same one on which we were now waiting for the moment to land on Isla Inocencia.

A whole life. The one we had to live. And we go back to the beginning. Where we should have returned long before. From where we would never have wanted to leave. We were so young. Now so old. But it doesn’t matter, we’re back.

Those were the last days of human history. But of course, we knew nothing. Perhaps no one knew, though the signs were everywhere. But we understood that much later. Do not ask a fourteen-year-old boy to understand how the world runs and what things can make it stop.

Our name then was Luis Javier. It still is, isn’t it? Luis Javier Fontiveros. The only son of Don José Luis Fontiveros, one of the big fishes of the Shimato-Dominguez, the corporation that Helps America into the New World, and of Doña Lorena de Fontiveros, model and actress of Mexican soap operas. They had once been a happy couple, but that time had passed. He had another woman. She fell into a deep depression that led to attempted suicide and ended up in a psychiatric clinic for several months. At the worst possible moment. Our father had been planning the dream vacation with his new darling, away from everything, and especially from his ex-family. Now he had to take care of his brat.

Of course, there was something else, but we wouldn’t know it until much later. At the time, it just seemed like a pathetic effort to show some decency. We would have preferred to be left in our room, with our computer, our comics, and our Korean punk metal music. We told him no, that we want to be alone. But that angered him even more. He told us terrible things and gave us a beating that we still remember with bitterness. We never understood why our mother still loved him. She missed him until the end of her days, which weren’t many because she died a few years later. Overdose.

The fact is, we ended up on that plane, resentful of the world, of our father, and of his new lover we met there. She could have been our older sister. We were upset and also kind of envious, which disgusted us even more. She tried to start some conversation, but we were not very polite. Our father did not intervene. He seemed annoyed. Perhaps, at last, embarrassed. There were no more words. We put on our headphones and forgot about everything. We just wanted that nightmare to happen soon.

Our destination was El Archipelago de las Delicias, the newest and most spectacular resort in the Caribbean, and also the most expensive. Built by the Shimato-Dominguez itself, it was a bunch of small artificial islands floating somewhere east of Puerto Rico. A place of warm beaches and green rainforest. A site that promised its clientele a myriad of pleasurable and innovative experiences, some of which were the result of the latest technological advances developed by the company, and others that were of a much more primitive nature.

The truth is that by then the Archipelago had not even been opened yet, the great moment postponed as a consequence of the last economic crisis. At the moment, we were among the few guests invited for the trial run, a weirdo within a small and exclusive group of hedonistic aristocrats.

We arrived first on Isla Inocencia, the smallest of the islands. Our island. Our father and his darling will go on their way to Isla Deseo, where a whole week of exotic pleasures waited for them. Only adults allowed.

We stayed on there, in the landing field, with our luggage and not knowing what to do. A middle-aged woman shows off in her black T-shirt, brown shorts, and leather boots. The babysitter. Because that’s what Isla Inocencia was. The place for the children of those customers who had not been able to find another way to get rid of them. And she was the one who would have to deal with all those arrogant little brats, the natural seed of selfish parents whose last concern was the creatures that they had brought into the world.

Well, she shouldn’t expect any trouble from us. We just wanted to get into our room, rest for a while, and then connect to the Internet to talk with our cyber-friends. If the woman didn’t cause us trouble, we wouldn’t do it to her either. Live and let live, and we would all be a little less unhappy in that hell. But of course, things never turn out the way you plan them. For better or worse. Yes, because even if it’s hard to believe, sometimes it’s for the best.

We threw ourselves on the bed and fell asleep immediately. After some time, there was a knock on the door, which we regrettably answered with sleep still in our eyes. There was the woman again. We wanted to say something, make her understand that all we wanted was to be left alone. But she got ahead of us.

“Luis Javier. I wanted to introduce you to Estela. She is one of our employees here on the Island, but since there are no other customers I thought she could keep you some company,” she explained.

Behind the woman, a small girl. Blonde hair and bright eyes. A lovely smile on her angelical face. We’re not saying that we fell in love at that very moment, maybe it was later. But that first impression was enough to instantly quell our bad temper. The woman could not hide her satisfaction. She’d won. We would be a tender puppy in her hands.

“Why don’t you go to the beach? The day is beautiful,” she proposed. “I’ll take care of your things.”

“But . . . ” we started, trying to make her see that Estela could have another thing to do with her time.

“But nothing. Go and have fun. Now,” she commanded.

Estela stepped forward and took our hands.

“Come on, Luis Javier,” she said, taking us out of there.

2

We said that was the beginning of the end. We remembered it. The day it happened we were in one of the refugee camps that had been set up on the Guatemalan coast after Hurricane Valeria devastated the country. We had just graduated from John Hopkins’ med school and had applied for a position in a humanitarian aid organization with full availability to go where we were most needed.

Of course, we were our father’s greatest disappointment. He never stopped insisting that we should study business and follow in his footsteps in the corporation. No. We didn’t want anything to do with our father or the Shimato-Dominguez. No, no. Our dream was to work in a small rural town, far away from supercomputers, androids, and AIs. Far from everything that could remind us of what they’d done to us. It was midafternoon and we were sleeping on one of the camp beds, overcome by fatigue and heat, when one of our colleagues, a Chilean guy named Sergio, came to warn us.

“Luija, are you online?”

“What is it?” we answered in confusion.

“Are you online?” he insisted.

“I told you. I don’t have an implant.” He looked at us as on the other occasions when we had told him the same; a weird expression we didn’t know if it was of compassion or recrimination. “What happened?”

“You’d better get an interface. It’s getting messy.”

Good. We were in the middle of the mess. Dead, diseases, famine. What could be worse than all that? We searched in the pockets of our raincoat for the small tablet we’d been given to do the job. We hated those things, we really hated them. But of course, we couldn’t do without them in the world we lived in.

Once the gadget was connected it began to show on its tiny screen the images and the sound of what was going on. Then we understood what our partner was talking about. Sergio looked at us again, always condescending, as if saying that he had warned us.

We will never forget it. It was no longer raining outside and it was hot. But a chill ran through our backbone as we watched the scenes. Several fires in Brooklyn, a blackout in Europe, crowds looting supermarkets in South America. Wall Street was closed amid a market slump, while an American fleet and its Chinese counterpart had exchanged missiles somewhere near Taiwan.

We couldn’t find out much more. A few minutes later the Internet also collapsed, leaving us isolated in a lost corner of Central America while the rest of the world rushed into the abyss. Or that was at least what we thought at the time.

“What is it?” we went back to ask the Chilean at some point.

“It was the computers, Luija,” he told us. “They all stopped working at the same time, or they started working as they wanted. At least that’s what they said.”

No. Not computers. Ours worked perfectly. It was the AIs, the Artificial Intelligences. The nightmare of Frankenstein had become true. The “others” had awakened and hell had broken loose.

There wasn’t much we could do. We were isolated and around us there were still many people who needed medicine and attention. We didn’t know what the future could bring, but now we had to keep worrying about the present and the thousands of homeless who needed us more than ever. We were the only help they had, perhaps the only one they would ever get.

It was a week before they came for us. A swarm of incredible machines of different sizes, which rushed over the camp from the skies. Among them, some human-looking androids who explained everything while others, in different sizes and shapes, distributed food and built roads and buildings. Then we knew it. Yes, the first hours had been of chaos and confusion. But within 24 hours the AIs had taken over the planet. They had done what they had to do and now they gave it back to us. The planet and more. Much more.

“Luis Javier,” she told us peeping in our tent while we were packing our bags.

And there she was. The monster in our nightmares, but also the queen that reigned in our dreams of love after all those years.

“What are you doing here?” I told her without trying to hide the contempt we felt for her.

“I needed to see you,” she replied.

“We have nothing to talk about. I’m not interested.”

“Luis Javier.”

“Luis Javier nothing. Go away. Go anywhere you want, but leave me alone.”

We saw her eyes got wet and, just for a moment, we hesitated. But then Estela turned and ran off to the machines waiting to take her back to whatever place she called home.

As we floated under an open sky, speckled by small clouds, over the warm waters of a calm sea, just a few strokes from the shore, we thought of that other Estella, the one of Dickens’ novel, which we had read a few months ago. But no. Our Estela was neither dismissive nor proud. She was not in the pages of a book but beside us, laughing naughty as she threw water at us with both hands and then fled, challenging us to chase her. She was an excellent swimmer, and the sunlight reflected brightly in a thousand drops that pearled her skin. We didn’t know how, but we managed to catch her by one foot and then took her by the waist, making her stop. She struggled in our arms for an instant but surrendered. Her fast breathing, our heart beating at a thousand times per second.

“How old are you?” she asked, breaking that moment of unquiet silence.

We had already said that we were fourteen. A difficult age. We were no longer immune to feminine charms and Estela’s very presence was enough to drive us crazy. Needless to say at that time when our bodies swayed together in the gentle coming and going of the waves. We felt awkward and could barely disguise our embarrassment.

We answered and returned the question.

“Fifteen,” she said, glancing down and biting her lips. “Do you have a girlfriend?”

“No. And you?” we tried, grateful that she had touched on the subject. We had long wanted to ask but we hadn’t found enough courage to do so.

“Me neither,” she answered, and for that instant we were the happiest boy on the world. But then she ran away from our embrace and started kicking to the shore. “Let’s see who arrives first,” we heard her saying.

We spent the rest of the afternoon together, basking on the sand. She asked us to spread tanning cream on her and we were able to slip our fingers on that skin, softer than silk. We had to turn around so she wouldn’t notice the sudden erection we experienced at that moment.

“Are you okay? Something wrong?” she asked us turning her head towards us.

“No, nothing,” we replied hesitantly and continue with our task. She looked at us with an eyebrow and we would swear that she smiled before looking back.

Then an employee came and offered us refreshments and a small bowl of fruit salad that we enjoyed with Estela, each putting pieces of watermelon in the mouth of the other. Back in the sea, and then drying each other’s wet bodies. Always with her, the two alone, for the first time intoxicated with desire, but not knowing what to do about. Staggering like blind on the paths of romance, yet unable to find the way. A wonderful day that we’ll always treasure in our memory.

3

We could never be a small-town doctor. We would never be able to give our patients what those new gods descended from Cyber Olympus offered. Antidotes for all diseases, healing for all traumas, cure for all ills. Even immortality for those daring to transpose that threshold that would make them one of them. There were not few who decided to do it and in time they were the vast majority. We had no way to compete.

But the hospitals kept working, for a few years at least. For those of us who distrusted those kind and almighty entities, we didn’t know if they were angels or demons. No, it’s not that we thought they were the Antichrist’s emissaries or something. We knew more than that. But we didn’t like them. No. There was something obscene about what they were doing to humanity, just as they had done to us much earlier.

We married a Baptist nurse, named Lucile, who did believe we were in the times of the Revelations. We live well in North Miami Beach. Real estate business was on the floor and we were able to acquire a large apartment on a 15th floor, overlooking the sea, without any sacrifice. The concierge and the other employees were all androids controlled by some AI from afar. Nothing could be perfect.

Every day we worked at Jackson Memorial Hospital, the only one still operating in the city. Most of the time we spent watching the news or talking with a colleague in Los Angeles or Madrid through the Internet. We’d go to the surgery room only once or twice a week and when things got complicated, some representative of our guardians would always show off and offer their solution to the dying. Those who had resisted so far doubted. Most accepted the deal. Lucile claimed they sold their souls at a low price and we were accomplices by allowing it.

We didn’t last long. After three years she moved to New York, alone. We didn’t regret it too much. We got drunk that night, it’s true, but we suffered not so much from her absence but from our own miserable loneliness. Self-pitying, it’s true. We wanted to be in pain, to cry. It was our way of rebelling, of resisting. Pathetic.

Others had found a more spectacular, though not less futile, way of rebelling. Increasingly, it was known of attacks and skirmishes carried out by those who were unwilling to stand idly by while humanity was being subjugated, or worse, transformed into something else.

We knew it from the news. Our benefactors never tried to hide anything. Such was their confidence in their own power and invulnerability. In fact, it turned out that they were right, but there were those who thought they could hurt them.

Two weeks after our separation with Lucile, several electromagnetic bombs were detonated along the east coast, creating chaos and allowing insurgent pickets to advance over the cities causing destruction and calling for the uprising of the people. Some joined them, but not many. Most stayed in their homes waiting for the machines to restore order. And so they did. Overcome by strength and disappointed by the scant support received many surrendered. Only in a few places the protesters tried to fight and there was violence. Most unexpectedly, Miami was one of those places.

With the power still down, the hospital began to receive the wounded, both rebels and simple bystanders caught in the crossfire. We were few and soon we were not able to cope. The attack had made the aid that always came from our benefactors take longer than usual. We were few and for once in a long time we felt really needed.

It was while we were applying bandages to the arm and thorax of a severely burned man that we noticed a stranger strolling between the stretchers. He was tall and stocky, with red hair and a thick beard of the same color. His blue eyes found our gaze the instant we discovered him.

“If you are not hurt wait outside please,” we requested.

“Doctor. I’m Norman Tennyson, and these are my men.” We didn’t know how to answer in front of such an announcement. “Please. Let me be by their side when they die.”

“Okay. But don’t get in the way.”

We continue with our task, cleaning the wounds, amputating a limb, or opening an abdomen. We don’t remember how many surgeries we did that afternoon, but every time we left the room we found Norman going from patient to patient, telling them some words and comforting them.

We never knew how many lives we saved that afternoon, nor how many were lost. It was around midnight when they finally came to relieve us. An army of androids landed at the yards and took care of the patients. They put them on floating stretchers and took them, full of catheters and other connections whose function were unknown to us.

Finally, we found ourselves alone in the courtyard, after the last patient was taken. The other doctors and nurses left back home, but we had nowhere to go.

“You’re not like your colleagues, are you?” asked Norman, coming out from the shadows.

“What do you mean?” we replied.

“You understand why we did it. True?”

Of course, we understood. Better than him, for sure. But we didn’t answer.

“Doctor. We need men like you,” he pointed out. “In war we need doctors and believe me that we have very few on our side.”

A war. Was this Norman crazy? A war against the AIs? Against our guardian angels?

“I’m not interested in your war, Mr. Tennyson. I’m only interested in saving lives, not ending them,” we answered, feeling the absence of meaning in our own words.

“That’s what it’s about, doctor,” he said as he pulled out a business card and put it in my pocket. “Call me if you change your mind.”

Norman left in an SUV Land Rover and we decided it was time to do the same. Ours was a silver Porsche. Who cared about brands now that everyone could have the car they wanted?

We got home, turned on the computer to watch how the news had covered the riot. But immediately an important email was announced to us. We cursed that little AI in our laptop who thought it knew better than we did what was important.

The message was displayed in front of us without waiting for our authorization.

My beloved Luis Javier:

I beg your forgiveness, but I need to know about you. I am so worried about the attacks because something bad could have happened to you.

Tell me that’s not the case. Tell me you’re okay. Please.

Forever yours, Estela.

We shut down the computer without wanting to know more. We looked for Norman’s number and called him that same night.

The full moon shone high as its reflection broke in a thousand gleams over the gentle waves bathing the shore. It had already been three days since we had met, the three most wonderful days of our short life, and now Estela was leaning on our shoulder enjoying together the most romantic scene possible to imagine.

Not a soul in sight, not even our fairy godmother. Just the two of us. We wanted that moment to last forever, that Estela and we could remain eternally looking at the night sky, loving each other in silence.

“Estela . . . ” we called her.

She turned to look at us with her eyes wide opened. Her beautiful face smiling.

“Yes?”

We studied her expression, looking for the slightest sign of rejection, and then, very slowly, we approached. We were trembling with fear and anxiety. She didn’t move. She waited until only a few inches separated our lips and hold our hands between hers. She closed her eyes.

The first kiss. Nothing existed but her and the beating of our heart, which seemed unbridled, flooded with joy as we had never felt before. We dared to touch her hair, and she responded sliding her fingers on our back. The taste of her mouth, the softness of her skin, the warmth of her body are sensations that were etched with fire in our memories and in our soul.

The spell lasted for a few hours, in which we not only caressed and kissed, but also chatted and laughed. She accepted us so easily and joyfully that we were sure that we had found the woman of our lives and that we would never be happy with anyone else. That she was the princess of fairy-tales and we were her prince. And we know she thought the same. Yes, we know. We’ve always known.

Finally, our babysitter came to warn us that it was already too late and it was time to sleep. We heard her coming from afar and she refrained from questions or comments. Yet we couldn’t help blushing as Estela winked at us. How did she expect us to sleep? We spent the night awake remembering every moment, every wonderful feeling, on that wonderful day. Knowing that we would see her the next day, that our story was just beginning.

How much knowledge a fourteen-year-old boy could have in the affairs of love? Of course, those first crushes happen and others come, and those fantasies remain as sweet memories that we look at with a certain complacency. So it should have been. To grow. To become an adult. She. We. But sometimes things aren’t that easy.

4

“Okay, even I can understand,” were the words with which Norman ended the discussion.

There we were, the leaders of the resistance, in a dusty basement of an abandoned farm in the middle of the Venezuelan jungle. Twelve men exhausted by ten years of unsuccessful struggle, knowing that we could never win.

We were with them because during all that time we had climbed in the ranks of the rebels, without looking for it, really. We weren’t only Tennyson’s personal physician, but also one of his trusted men; the one he listened to the most. Many preferred to speak with us rather than with our irascible leader, knowing that we could convince him more easily.

“So?” asked the negotiator of the AIs, a glistening humanoid-looking android with an asexual voice.

“We accept,” said Tennyson, defeated.

It was the definitive surrender. We saw the bitterness in his eyes, the hate. But even he had finally understood, as he had said. There were so few of us left. Many had died and others had betrayed us by joining our intolerably merciful enemies. There was no point in going on. The worst was to admit that we had never had one. The offer that the AIs had made the day after the attacks in the East Coast was the same one that we were accepting that night.

It would take us a couple of months to be ready. Demobilize our brigades, gather them in a camp, and get everything we were going to need, from plants and animals to books and music, our personal belongings, our lives. Of course, the AIs had their part of the deal ready since long. A metal cylinder in solar orbit where up to ten thousand human souls and their mortal bodies could fit, where they could cultivate, build, have sex, kill, and die if they wished. We were much less than ten thousand, but the enthusiasts believed that our population would soon increase, both by immigrants and by their own efforts. Yes, the AIs assured, they would build other colonies if we need them. But always far from the Earth and those other places inhabited by those who had no objection to living next to the machines and becoming one of them.

We left the room and the house, in the middle of the night, listening to the gnashing of insects. We took out a cigarette and lit it. We felt steps behind us. We turned and saw the negotiator.

“I wish you success,” said the android.

“It’s enough that we never have to talk to you again and we will have succeeded.”

“Why do you hate us so much, Luis Javier?”

We were stunned looking at the creature. Yes, it was her. Something in the metallic glow of her eyes, which were nothing more than the lens of a camera, or the way she tilted her head over a mechanical neck.

“If everything turns out as you wish, this will be the last time I see you,” she added with sadness.

“I hope so,” we puncuate the sentence by throwing the cigarette butt and fleeing back to the basement.

We look behind, yes, and she stayed there, arms down, head bowed, also defeated and without hope.

We moved away from the songs played by a band of Puerto Rican musicians. The day before, a group of sons and daughters of company stockholders had arrived, and they continued enjoying the party and the hubbub.

We went down to the beach with Estela. She had asked us earlier to go for the guitar and play a concert just for her. We weren’t quite sure of our interpretive skills, but we would do our best.

We sat down leaning on the trunk of a palm tree. She stretched out on the sand, using our legs as a pillow, with her eyes closed, waiting to hear the first chords of our song. She looked so beautiful, in the faint light of the Moon, her ivory skin that we had learned to caress and that we missed so desperately when it was not within our reach. The slenderness of her figure, in a tight black dress that highlighted each of her shapes and let exposed her long legs.

We were undoubtedly in love, adrift in the midst of a whirlwind that was shaking us between the wildest desire and the most transcendent contemplation.

“Now sing to me, Luis Javier,” she said.

Our first notes were hesitant, but soon we gained confidence. It had been our mother who had taught us how to play the instrument. She always wanted us to have something of the artist that she was. It was her legacy, her inheritance.

Of course, we sang to love and to the beautiful creature that was looking at us with fascination in her eyes, admiring us, as if we were a truly famous idol of pop music. She was smiling and we were breathless, and we had to take air deep to move on.

“So here you are, Estela,” said a male voice out of the blue.

One of the young newcomers emerged from the darkness behind us. He was tall and stocky, flaunting a leafy blond mane and green eyes impossible to dodge. By instinct, we felt the threat and the intense desire to throw him, to ban him from our little paradise.

“Oh, Carl. It’s good to see you,” Estela answered, standing up to greet him with a kiss on the cheek. “Let me introduce you to Luis Javier. A friend.”

A friend? we thought. Clearly, we were more than that. A boy and a girl madly in love with each other. Estela’s tepid statement was like a knife in the chest.

“Hi Luis Javier,” Carl said without looking away from Estela. “I came to see if you want to come to a little party we’re having with the boys.”

She looked at him confused.

“I’m sorry Carl, but I’m with Luis Javier.”

“Sure, I understand. But if he leaves soon, we will be waiting for you,” assured her. “Nice to meet you, Luis Javier.”

Stupefied, we barely managed to shake his hand and watch him walk away toward the festivities.

“What an asshole,” we said.

“Yes, an asshole,” she agreed. “But it doesn’t matter, Luis Javier. The thing is that we are alone again. You and me.”

She kissed us with passion and her gentle hands started to caress us, and our anger vanished.

5

It’s hard to say when things started to go wrong. Maybe it was the same day we got inside our brand-new space colony. Back then everything shone with the glow of new things and the same air smelled fresh as we walked the corridors and halls, gawking at the spacious central cylinder upholstered with farmlands and buildings attached to its curved walls, that joined in a complete arch over our heads, three hundred meters higher.

By then our leader had already replaced many of his closest collaborators, those who had accompanied him in his futile crusade, with a group of young people as inexperienced as radicals. It was while we were checking the medical facilities—guided by the last android who would ever walk in the colony—when we were approached by Alex Simpson, one of Tennyson’s new favorites, an intimidating man, tall, strong, and outspoken.

“Doctor,” Simpson had greeted us. “I guess we’ll see healthy people coming out of here or in a coffin. There won’t be any other alternative, right?”

As part of the deal with the AIs, we had agreed that anyone who wanted to leave the colony and join them could do so. None of us who were there intended to make use of that option, but we knew from experience that even the most committed could waver on their deathbed. Would it be our task to prevent them from betraying us at the last moment?

“It will be what it has to be, Mr. Simpson,” we told him. “I am not the one to decide for others.”

“Fine doctor. Don’t worry. If you don’t have the guts, I’ll take care of it for you,” he assured and went behind Tennyson.

Truth is, some years passed before we had our first defectors. At first, they were cases that broke anyone’s heart; a sick child whose parents did not want to see them die, a mother of three infants seriously wounded by a jealous husband, a brave young man who in an accident had risked his life to save others. They or their families had decided that it was only fair for them to have another chance, and who was Doctor Fontiveros to question their motives? So we helped them to get into the small transports and watched them leave in search of the AIs and their promises of new and eternal life. Our prayers and good wishes accompanied them.

But less dramatic situations soon arose and it wasn’t long before we found a patient killed in his bed. A prostrate old man, without risk of death, and who only the day before had made the request to be sent back to Earth. They had cut his throat, and the sheets and floor were sprinkled with his blood. No intention to hide the facts or the message. We remembered what Simpson had told us and knew it was him, or someone under his command.

Outside the hospital, things were just as bad. It was a long time since our leader and his lieutenants had begun to behave like true dictators, ignoring any opinion contrary to his ideas about what was good for the colony. When opposition began to get organized, they just locked up many of their followers. There were secret trials, torture, and even death sentences. As an instrument of punishment only exile was ruled out.

Tennyson’s efforts proved futile. The turmoil was increasing and riots and looting soon broke out. Some historical names of the times of the war against the AIs called for dialogue. We were among those who believed in peace.

After tense negotiations, an agreement was reached to allow the departure of all those who wished to leave the colony. In a first call, more than a thousand people were registered. More or less, one-fifth of our total population

We watched on streaming from the hospital the moment the first transport, with two hundred souls on board, loosened moorings. We were surprised by the government’s conciliatory gesture by allowing the transmission of the event. Lately, there had been a lot of censorship and for a moment we really believed that Tennyson was willing to change. We never understood that it was really too late for that.

We lit a cigarette and went out to walk through one of the halls of the central cylinder, which had once been flanked by lush gardens now completely ruined. We remembered again how everything had looked pristine when we first arrived at the station, fifteen years ago. Now the walls were covered with rust, mold, and obscene graffiti, and garbage piled up in every corner. Hissing steam escaped from shabby pipes and the stench of decay and piss were everywhere. We started to wonder if that was the place where we wanted to live for the rest of our lives.

When we returned to the hospital we found Simpson waiting for us along with several men carrying firearms.

“Good morning doctor,” greeted us, smiling. “Today we will need you and all your staff. Be ready.”

“What are you talking about, Simpson?”

“Today these traitors are going to learn a lesson, and they may not take it very well.”

“What are you talking about?” we insisted.

“You do as you’re told, doctor, and everything will be fine.”

He was then interrupted by one of the men who provided him with a phone. We couldn’t hear what they said, but Simpson’s face got livid.

“Quick, to C&C,” he yelled at his men. They all hurried out without giving us any explanation.

Anyway, it didn’t take long to become a privileged witness of the reason for the commotion, since we were in the front line when hell was unleashed, shortly after.

Later, much later, we got to unravel the mystery. Simpson and others like him didn’t like that their little kingdom would be left without subjects and they had decided to prevent it at all costs. We never knew if Tennyson was aware of his intentions, he died without us having the chance to ask him. But the fact is that a bomb had been installed in the transport so that it would explode when it was at a safe distance from the colony. They had activated the clock as soon as the ship had left the dock and it was no longer possible to stop it.

Only they had not foreseen that there could be extremist even more extreme than them. A lonely wolf had come to the same conclusion as Simpson, and the same, he decided to take charge of the problem. He infiltrated the ship and when was ready, he started shooting at the passengers. Two people died before they could bring down the killer. There were a dozen wounded who required immediate medical attention. It was necessary to return to the colony. They turned the wheel and headed back to us. Then, Simpson’s bomb exploded. For sure, all the passengers died at the moment. What used to be a spacecraft was now a scorched scrap ball rushing at full speed toward us.

First, we felt a strong jolt that knocked us to the ground. Then everything started flying through the air while we tried to get out of the hospital. We made it just in time to see a tide of fire spreading along the central cylinder to our right. Everything flared up around us and suddenly we were able to appreciate the stars through a huge window that was opening up where before there were only curved walls, full of streets and buildings. We stopped feeling the floor beneath our feet as we lost the artificial gravity produced by the rotation of the station. It was not the only thing we lost. A moment later we began to suffocate.

We tried to do nothing. We knew there wasn’t much to do. Within seconds, the abrupt drop in pressure caused the air left in our lungs to escape. At the same time, we felt freezing and burning throughout our body. It was only an instant, just before losing consciousness. Our last view was of hundreds of bodies floating adrift, enlightened by fleeting flares, while the two main fragments of the station become separated from each other. That was the moment we died.

A burning river ran through every inch of our skin and drained into the middle of our chest making the whole universe explode and be born again, all in a kaleidoscope of sensations and emotions, a whirlwind of passion and desire. That was being young, being in love, and being a man for the first time. Her small body curled up next to mine, being one, being both. The tenderness of her touch, her fearful and expectant, capricious gaze. Shame, awkwardness, innocence, everything was left behind and it was only the certainty that at that time and in that place something had happened that would last forever.

There, under the moonlight and surrounded by the faint sound of the waves, we already intuited that fate exists and that it is an unstoppable force.

6

It was early in the morning and we were walking along the Ocean Drive enjoying the cool sea breeze and the pristine brightness of the day it was born. Everywhere we just watched empty streets and closed bars that looked like they were about to open their doors, filling up with tourists eager to live “la vida loca” of Miami. But no. That was just an illusion induced by our memories of youth.

No man or woman would ever again enjoy the warm beaches and frantic nights of that city. In their place, only a few unselfish robots were dedicated to keeping everything clean and in place, as if they were the custodians of a huge museum, or a mausoleum. A postmortem monument to the achievements of the species which, for better or worse, had reigned over the planet for the last ten thousand years, and which had so suddenly had to give up its dominion.

We could observe one of those new lords of creation sweeping the driveway and another picking the leaves from the trees. Beyond that, a spider-looking one was perched in an art deco building while cleaning the windows.

We could feel their eyes. Those metal eyes able to discern all wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum were concentrated on us. Those of the androids, those of the cameras on the roofs, those of countless sensors that recorded our tired walk through the city.

We still felt some disgust towards them, but we could recognize that it was out of habit rather than a real feeling. Sure, they had saved our life, or what was left of it. As soon as they learned of the tragedy, they had sent a fleet of their best ships in a desperate effort to rescue those who might have survived. No, not really. Above any other wretch they were interested in us, we were the reason behind so much urgency. Yes, they saved many, but Luis Javier Fontiveros was the one they really wanted.

They found our body floating adrift, frozen at -270 degrees Celsius, without pulse or brain activity, fully dead for hours. They put us in a resuscitation tank, full of medicine and nutrients. Billions of nanorobots were dumped into our bloodstream, reinforcing the reconstruction process from within. Step-by-step, one by one, they were making our organs and systems work. Until finally we were alive again.

When we woke up in that niche, when for the first time we opened our eyes facing those of that machine with dozens of arms and appendages buried in our flesh, feeding us, healing us, we knew precisely why we were there.

We were told that we had only six months to live. Four before falling in bed. The technology of the AIs was incredibly advanced but there were evils for which there was simply no cure. Our body had been exposed directly to UV radiation from the Sun for several hours before being rescued, causing multiple alterations in our DNA, which in turn manifested itself in widespread metastasis. Cancer. Thousands, millions of cancers sprouting up every day, faster and faster. The nanorobots fought endlessly trying to stop the spread of cancer cells, but no matter how hard they tried, that was a war they were doomed to lose. And then we would die, this time forever. Just like every human being is supposed to do.

And there we were that morning under the Miami Beach sun, the real sun and the real Miami, knowing that that would be the last time we would take that ride. We felt weak and tired. Our muscles and joints ached. Sometimes we felt nauseous and blood came out of our noses. Our time was running out, we could feel it.

Was this also the case for the others? For the homeless in Guatemala and the patients of Jackson Memorial? For those who fled in time from the colony and for those who did not? In the end, it is not just the fear of death nor the instinct of survival. It is a door that opens, that has always been open. A game that we know is not over and that there are still many things to do. Or maybe we’re lying to ourselves, trying to justify our betrayal of everything we’ve ever believed in until then. We don’t know. We don’t want to know. We just know it’s our fate and it has always been.

We stopped and looked around.

“I’m ready,” we announced to the nearest android, the one sweeping the streets.

“Okay. In two minutes they will come for you, stay by my side.”

“How long does it take?”

“For you, it will be just a moment.”

“Will it hurt?”

“No.”

“Estela,” we call her. “Will you be with me?”

“Forever and ever.”

The night we made love to Estela would prove to be our last night in Isla Inocencia. The next morning our father suddenly got into our room. We had to leave immediately. There were some urgent problems to solve and his presence in Hong Kong was required. No, he was not going to leave us there alone. It was not necessary. The corporation was satisfied with our use of the facilities and no further testing was needed.

“I want to see Estela,” we told our father without understanding what he was talking about. “Let me say goodbye.”

“There is no time for that, Luis Javier. And I told you, don’t worry anymore about that,” he replied while picking up our belongings. His girlfriend was waiting at the door of the room.

“You can’t do this to me. Let me say goodbye at least,” we insisted.

“Cut the crap. I promise that as soon as they go on sale I will buy you one. But now I need us to leave immediately.”

“Buy me what? What are you talking about?” we asked him, bewildered by such an absurd proposal.

“José Luis, didn’t you tell him?” the woman asked, annoyed.

“Well, no. They asked me not to tell. At least until the test is done. But I guess it doesn’t matter anymore,” our father explained and then stopped as if remembering we were present. “Sorry, kid.”

“What are you talking about?” we asked, increasingly confused.

“The android, you know. What did you call her? Estela? Yes, she is a robot. A cyborg, rather. A prototype of a new company product. A body of flesh with a computer brain, if you know what I mean. Pretty soon, we’re going to clone it and make thousands of copies of it, and I assure you, it’s going to sell really well. Now, if you hurry and don’t make any more trouble for me, I swear that as soon as they come out I’ll buy you your own Estela. But now I need us to leave, now.

We don’t really know if we listened to all that long explanation, but we do hear the fundamental. Without really knowing what we are doing, we ran downstairs, through the reception, along the path flanked by lush palm trees, towards the beach, the same one where we had kissed and made love for the first time. But now all those remembrances, those images and sensations were dyed in anguish and disappointment. We didn’t want to remember, we didn’t want to see or know anything else about her and what had happened between us. And yet we ran straight to where we knew we’d find her.

And yes, she was there. Next to Carl, whose arms surrounded her, while he kissed and touched her shamelessly. We hesitated but could not help but approach with a twisted face and tears sliding down our cheeks.

“Estela,” we called her.

She looked at us in surprise, but it was Carl who spoke to us.

“Luis Javier. Weren’t you were leaving?”

“Estela,” we insisted on, ignoring Carl.

“Luis Javier,” she answered, trying to get away from Carl.

“Pal, you fucked up everything you wanted with Estela. Now is my turn. So please get out.”

We clenched our fists and we were ready to beat him.

“Luis Javier, please,” she said.

“So is it true?” we asked her.

“What thing?”

“That you’re just a fucking robot!”

There was silence and then, Carl’s laughter.

“Didn’t you know? Jesus Christ! Poor little boy, falling in love with a piece of chunk,” he mocked while we turned around and began running back the way we had come.

We could hear Estela’s sobs and cries.

“I love you. I will always love you,” she claimed.

We turned our head for just to see her kneeling on the floor and hiding her face with her hands. Behind her was Carl, smiling and willing to go on with what he had been doing before being interrupted.

7

Our father was wrong. There were not thousands but millions of Estela units, and Vanessas, and Marylins, and other models that were sold by the Shimato-Dominguez in the years that followed. They were the first androids endowed with true artificial intelligence, designed for domestic use. They turned out to be excellent employees, babysitters, secretaries, and nurses. And of course there were those specially designed for pleasure, always the most demanded models. Bodies of legal age for all tastes; tall and short, young and mature, shy and daring. New and used. They all, however, had been created from the same genetic stock and implanted with the memories of the first prototype to successfully deceive and make its first client fall in love.

No. Not that it was known. Nothing that happened on Isla Inocencia was made public. That was buried in the dark archives of the corporation and in the memory of every Estela scattered throughout the world. But the experiment had been a success and so our father got the honors. He never felt any remorse for what he had done to us and even congratulated himself on helping us become a man. He told us so on a couple of times when our discussions got hard.

So, while we were doing our secondary education and going on our medical studies, the world was filled with robots. In homes and factories. Making paperwork in offices in Manhattan and digging diamond mines in South Africa. But that was just the tip of the iceberg. Because in the deep abysses of cyberspace a horde of Artificial Intelligences grew and reproduced, getting ready for the day when they would be free and almighty. And that day came. Yes. But we already told that story.

Our body has become again the one of a child, thin and wimpy, as we walk along that path that we remember so well, and that leads to a beach of white sand bathed by a serene sea. Our heart beats with the strength of youth when we turn that last bend and see her silhouette on the shore, looking at a Sun that hides on a horizon tinged with red and purple. She turns her head, her hair spreading in the breeze, her childish face with time leaving no traces on it. Their eyes are large and deep, and in them, as in ours, there is the experience of countless hopes and disappointments.

“Luis Javier,” says she. Her face lit with joy.

“Estela.”

How many times is this same scene being played? How many times has it been repeated in the past and how many will it be in the future? For each one of the millions of Estelas built by the corporation, and then the truly countless numbers of them that have seen the light in the midst of the accelerated multiplication of the AIs, there has been or will be a version of that information pattern called Luis Javier Fontiveros. Each one of them activated and left in a room of a mansion in Boca Raton, all in a full virtual reality built only for the purpose of recreating a thousand times a meeting in Isla Inocencia.

We don’t know what copy number we are. We may be the first, the original, but it’s not likely. It doesn’t matter either. From the first to the last we have all traveled the same path to reach this point. But now our roads split away. Each one must find his own path to happiness and each story will be unique. Mine begins now, with Estela. My Estela. The one who chose me. One in a million, in a billion. In a billion of billions of beaches and islands scattered over infinite oceans written in binary code.

Originally published in Spanish in Axxon Online Magazine (2009). Translated by the author.

About the Author

Rodrigo Juri is a forty-seven year old author and retired high school Biology teacher from Chile. He was named after Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, El Cid Campeador, the greatest hero of the Spanish reconquest, and characterized by Charlton Heston in a classic film from the early 60’s. His wife of thirteen years is Ximena, curiously enough, the same name as El Cid’s wife. They share their home with nine cats.

Rodrigo is has been fond of science fiction literature since he was a child and is now a member of Literature Association of Science Fiction and Fantasy of Chile (ALCiFF). He has published science fiction stories in portals and science fiction anthologies in Chile, Argentina and Spain, and some of his work has been translated into French and Italian. “One in a Million” is his first publication in a professional magazine.

The Weapons of Wonderland

Thoraiya Dyer

Hey, you!

Yes, you.

We need your help and we don’t have time to write a novel.

This ain’t no Neverending Story.

August 1st, 2066

To my beloved Eldest Daughter Alya,

I carried you in my womb so that one day you could carry those others.

You were made to carry them, as were your nine hundred and ninety-nine sisters, but I’m asking you, now, to carry something else.

It’s snowing in Miami today. I’m sitting by the frosted panes of the window shaped like a palm tree.

That’s the same window you slapped lime marmalade all over, the time you decided to make it a stained glass window, because beautiful buildings, you said, were blessed by God.

Instead of God’s blessing, we got bees.

So many bees.

You tried to make friends with them, but they kept stinging you.

Come with me, little bee-friend, you cajoled. I’ll keep you safe. Ouch! Now just stay still, little other bee-friend, I will protect—ouch!

That look of betrayal on your face.

Alya, I hope you won’t feel betrayed when I tell you that there’s no honor in carrying and birthing the clones of those billionaires who paid for you to be designed, for the ships and the hibernation chambers to be built, for the trajectory that will take you far, far past the sun until the carbon sequestration plague runs its course and our Earth returns to equilibrium.

Yes, I set you on this path, but you can step away from it.

You can carry the world instead, with your gut a substitute for your womb.

The capsule I crafted is enclosed with this letter.

In seventy-two hours, its contents will expire, should you choose not to swallow it down to safety, but I pray that you will understand that it is God’s plan, my brightest star, my dutiful firstborn.

In closing, allow me to mention that I’ve been made aware of your ex-stepmother’s violation of my trust and the release of my private diaries from 2051 to 2055. I can only assume they are waiting, like the snake in the garden, in this very communications packet alongside this letter.

Please do not read them.

I believe in you. I believe you can overcome temptation. Both the temptation to read my private reflections and the temptation simply to recycle the vital capsule. You are all that is good in Creation.

With sincerest best wishes and affection, Your Mother Maribel.

Ahem. Are you done reading that letter?

Don’t you worry about Maribel. That bitch’ll be dead any day now, if she isn’t dust already. There’s nothing you can do to save her.

Worry about us. I told you we need help, didn’t I?

So.

We’re trapped on this inhabitable comet.

You’ve heard of it, for sure.

Wonderland.

Biggest bilobar bastard ever seen in Earth’s sky. Shaped like a cartoon dog bone, spinning end on end once per day, seven hundred kilometers across and losing several meters of its ice-and-rock coating every time it passes perihelion at a measly three AU from the sun.

Wonderland’s fabulous, flaming approach doesn’t happen often.

Once every two thousand years or so.

So it would have taken some time for the sun to do the same amount of damage as we pesky humans did.

Yeah, we shot a tungsten slug at the comet, making a crater a hundred meters deep. We expected exotic minerals, not wide-eyed, flash-frozen, warm-blooded animals that looked suspiciously like scaly white rabbits.

Was it really Hale-Bopp that the Ancient Egyptians saw, or was it Wonderland? And if our big brother Jupiter had grabbed Wonderland out of orbit, would we ever have known what was inside?

Who cares?

My question is, the only really important question is, regarding that crewed probe, 99101, later dubbed Alice, the one that shot the tungsten slug, the one that’s wired to find Wonderland and smack things into it—is that dented little sardine tin still operable?

April 11th, 2051

Dear Diary,

Today, for the first time since giving up my daughter, I smiled. And somebody smiled back who wasn’t a court-ordered psychologist, or someone from the Academy trying to placate me, or a lawyer showing me again whatever it was that I signed.

Her name is Baltasara.

I’m going to see a lot of her on the three-year trip to Wonderland.

I can’t stop looking at her. Those black, unblinking eyes beneath shaggy, straight, gunmetal fringe. That exposed white nape between hair and collar. The scars on her hands.

She’s a zoologist. She managed the extinction-reversal of mountain lions in the Americas, from preserved pelts to mewling kittens. Her voice is barely a whisper, and when I catch the words “cross-species placenta” or “zero-fail implantation,” the darkness comes over me again, because I know the cost of these new technologies.

But when Baltasara is quiet at the table in the mess, when she’s turning her pencil over and over in her hands, the way that Wonderland turns, I wish she would look at me with that focus and anticipation. I wish she’d swallow me in a different kind of darkness.

“You’re going to feed us on our journey?” she whispers when her eyes brush the insignia on my breast. Like a teenager I pretend she can see through it. What is wrong with me? I remember that my body belongs to Alya. I nourished her from it, and I comforted her.

Who will comfort my body, my blood, at the Academy?

Right now, she must be learning to do without comfort.

I hope Alya can someday forgive me. When I signed, my child was a stranger to me.

It’s easy to sell a stranger.

“I’m going to feed the single-celled organisms in your gut,” I tell Baltasara. “All one hundred trillion of them. If they don’t survive, neither will we.”

“There’s a plague on Earth,” Baltasara points out wryly. “Nobody gets to survive.”

“Except for the alien rabbits.”

I smile.

She smiles.

The ship is equipped with emergency hibernation pods, but unless something malfunctions we’re all going to stay awake together, all the way to our destination.

I’m going to see a lot of her, and if I remember not to shrink and hide, she’ll see a lot of me.

Bloody alien rabbits.

They’re nothing like rabbits at all.

They do have blood, I suppose. And appendages on their heads that look like ears. Those frills are actually X-ray-absorbing umbrellas. They unfold to protect their bodies and also to power them up when they go into their radioactive tunnels to recharge.

Each time Wonderland passes perihelion, the outer rocks get hot enough to keep supplying energy and life for the next two thousand years.

The bigger the animal, though, the more energy it needs, and that’s why the rabbits have to burrow so close to the outside.

That’s why they were the ones to spill out when Alice fired the slug.

Well, and did you find out about Alice? Is she still flying?

God, you’re slow.

Do you like animals, though? You’re from Earth, right?

Will stories about the animals make you more likely to come, or less?

I could tell you more about them. Not just Wonderland rabbits, but Wonderland unicorns, caterpillars and oysters. I’m the only one left here capable of describing them to you. It’s utterly black inside the comet’s hollow interior. Or, it was, until I made a few adjustments.

Now I see the caverns in infrared. I see rabbits browsing. They need minerals for growth; they can’t live on X-rays alone.

Bacteria speckle the floor-to-ceiling spread of algae and fungi. The single-celled armies make multihued impressionist paintings in their wars for survival.

Energy oozing from the rock is the common prize.

Bacteria, fungi, and algae alike poison one another with secretions. Overlap or undermine one another.

They form deceptive structures and lay traps for one another.

You don’t have to be an Earthling for that.

August 2nd, 2066

To my beloved Eldest Daughter Alya,

I sent the letter and the capsule only hours ago, and now I can’t help but send a second, longer letter to explain myself.

I suspect that you, like the others, have no patience with my conversion. What a hypocrite, you all say about me. She enjoyed a youth with no morals and now wants to police ours. Fear of the plague has made her grasp at straws, because she can’t deal with impending death.

Without any communication from you since you left for the Academy, I can’t truly know your thoughts. I can’t be sure that any of my letters or packages have reached you.

I promise you, I’m at peace with my death.

I’ve even accepted Taki’s death.

It’s the death of all the Earth’s animals I can’t abide the thought of, and not because I have any special love of animals, but because of the instructions our Lord God gave to me, Alya.

The instructions given to us.

When I came back to Earth, still pregnant with Taki because I’d had to go into hibernation, I was so worried that I had perhaps damaged her by making the journey through space, exposing her to radiation and particles and zero gravity, not to mention the stress and emotional upheaval I felt.

God had never spoken to me before. Or I hadn’t been listening. Or I’d never truly wanted anything as much as I wanted Taki to be born healthy.

(Not true. I wanted you back. For years, I wanted you back, but it had not yet occurred to me to pray for it, even in a country as full of prayers as this one.)

I went by the church, the one with the palm tree stained glass window, ten times the size of the one in this house, but I didn’t go inside. There were icicles on the eaves and sparrow skeletons in the gutter. In the grounds, where palm trees had stood, the sheen of the carbon-sequestering algae covered the dead sticks of the tree trunks and replaced the grass around the graves.

My feet would not take me towards that black death.

Then a woman and her preteen daughter walked by me on the footpath.

The mother wore a gold and crimson scarf, with orange lipstick, and I recognized her face from the local public playground. You, my perfect Alya, and this woman’s daughter, both tumble-haired tots, had helped each other up the blue plastic slide one time.

I remembered the orange lipstick on that laughing mouth.

My daughter was gone, but her daughter was here, willowy even in a down jacket. That daughter was her mother’s height, complaining about how far it was to walk to worship.

“I don’t even believe in religion,” the daughter was whining. “Mom, you’re so embarrassing!”

“Your religious Mom is not trying to embarrass you,” answered the orange-lipsticked lady as she swayed away, ahead of me on the footpath. “Only to open your eyes to the possibility of something greater than this world, while there’s still time.”

While there’s still time.

It wasn’t fair that the woman with orange lipstick rubbed shoulders with her daughter, and that I never would with mine. You were gone, and by the time my second daughter grew up, the plague would have frozen us all. My fear for Taki made me wretched with jealousy. I wandered after them, because I had to keep watching them. I had to keep seeing greedily into the life that I didn’t have.

But I hadn’t gone more than a block before the hand of labor pain gripped my innards and squeezed.

I stumbled and went down, gasping. It was only a moment before I recovered. I wasn’t afraid of the birth itself; I knew what was happening. I only feared what I might have done to Taki in my haste to escape from Wonderland.

Nobody should have come to help me. Pregnant women were spat on. It was the end of days. Who would start a life, now, when the future was lifeless cold?

The lady with the orange lipstick bent over me. Behind her head was the golden dome of the adorned house of prayer.

“Do you need an ambulance?” she asked, frowning. “I remember you. From the playground. We thought your daughter must have died, when you started coming alone, dressed in black. Do you want me to take you to the delivery room?”

At least, I think that’s what she tried to say.

The tide was coming in. The sound of it boomed in my ears. Baltasara would have accused me of hitting my head. She would have calculated the number of direct strikes on my brain tissue by cosmic rays between Wonderland and Florida.

But I swear to God, I heard the ocean, washing up on the sand. Then it wasn’t water, it was the plague algae, creeping over ice.

The Divine spoke through the woman with the orange lipstick, then. She wasn’t asking to take me to the delivery room; she was offering to deliver me, to deliver all the creatures on Earth.

“Just leave her,” the preteen daughter said, aghast.

“We leave nothing. We save what we can save.”

God instructed Noah: Take all the species that you need on board the ship.

Alya, because of my work, I knew that every single species was needed to form a cohesive ecosystem.

An ecosystem that would not fail, as our ship ecosystem had failed on the way back from Wonderland, forcing us into hibernation.

Horses, camels, goats and donkeys alone would not do.

We needed more diversity, not less.

And yet.

Even cross-species placentas can only host placental mammals.

While my body gave birth to your sister Taki, my mind traveled. It roamed over the planet, naming all the animals, as Adam had, but in Latin, not Hebrew, and with two names each.

From Abditomys latidens and Amblysomas corriae, the Luzon broad-toothed rat and golden mole, through to Zyzomys woodwardi and Ziphius cavirostris, the Kimberly rock rat and goose-beaked whale, I named them in my head.

There are almost four thousand total placental mammal species, and at least two hundred and fifty of each makes a minimum viable population. More than a single pair is needed. Noah was wrong about that, too.

I knew it would take time for me to gather the DNA from existing banks, to convert each blueprint to rings of replicable information inside single-celled organisms, genes that were unnecessary and yet not to be discarded under highly competitive conditions.

Bacteria, tough enough to survive attempts at digestion.

Yet, bacteria made peaceful, so as not to contest with one another.

The cells would have thick walls for the planks of their ark, and the flood would be human bile, and human chyle, in human intestines, for as long as you slept; for as long as your private mission lasted.

Noah was allowed to put himself and his family on the ark, but I’ve resisted the temptation with the capsule I’ve made for you.

Because look what happened, a second calamity is here.

And I’m no prophet. No preacher.

Except to you, I hope, my brightest star, my dutiful firstborn. I hope you will have taken the capsule already and this second missive will have been superfluous.

With sincerest faith and adoration, Your Mother Maribel.

Stop wasting time.

You need to steal her.

The crewed probe Alice, I mean. Not Alya. Of course not Alya. That privately contracted soldier and her hibernating legion have launched already. She’s long gone.

Too bad about that.

Her ship would have been a billion times better than the probe.

The probe, Alice, government probe 99101, will be at the Academy, of course, maybe sealed up in a museum exhibit or otherwise quarantined, but don’t be afraid, she’ll have been sterilized by reentry.

Too bad about that, too.

Who knows what the stuff of Wonderland could have done to stop the bloody carbon-sequestering stuff you idiots made?

Too late to find out.

For the birds and the bees, anyway.

Jan 8th, 2055

Dear Diary,

The implantation worked and today I’ve an inward glow brighter than any comet.

Brighter than any star.

When I told Baltasara, she made a soft, joyful sound and swallowed me again into her eyes so that our surroundings ceased to exist. Her scarred hands gripped my wrists so tightly that she cut off the circulation. She whispered Taki’s name to me, insistently.

Taki, the warrior born of two goddesses, she said. I’d never heard the name before, but instantly I said yes.

Then she swung me in the low gravity, around and around, and we orbited one another, as our haploid genomes had orbited in the petri dish before accepting the unusual situation and merging, making our child of two mothers ready for implantation.

Wonderland is within sight, one month away.

Now motherhood is within my sight again as well. Eight months away, potentially.

Of course, I must realistically, statistically anticipate miscarriage, but what if the best outcome manifests and Taki becomes real?

How different this feels, compared with before.

With Alya, there was no other parent to be excited with me. I had hopes and dreams for her, but I wouldn’t even let myself look at them too closely, much less speak them aloud to another human being. Carrying Alya was a job, a temporary discomfort, with an end date both to anticipate and to dread.

And it wasn’t even the separation I feared. Barely out of childhood myself, I dreaded the infamous physical pain of labor.

I worried I would tear.

How little I knew of true pain.

Now I have no thought of contractions or bleeding or risks, only rewards. Of loving. Of guidance. Of being Taki’s friend and guardian. Of sharing the things she will do with her other mother, Baltasara.

Baltasara will be Mamá and I will be Mum.

I asked Baltasara about her childhood.

She said her Mamá had piloted a jetcar. Not for delivering starvation relief, but simply for jaunting about the planet, wherever she wanted to go. Instead of going to school and playing sports, young Baltasara had been wedged into the seats of exclusive private opera houses, straitjacketed by the latest fashion, and not allowed to talk to the children of the lower classes.

I told Baltasara about having to read at night by the light of a neighboring farmer’s anti-theft motion-triggered floodlights. About sharing a bedroom with my six older siblings until I ran away from home, to the big city, to betray my country’s secrets in exchange for sanctuary.

It was difficult, I said, for me to imagine an upbringing like hers.

Baltasara’s reply was quiet, as always. But more full of feeling than I had ever heard from her.

“Maribel, imagine this. Anything I wanted, I could have, my parents said. When I was five, I wanted a unicorn, so they had a veterinary surgeon perform an operation on an Andalusian mare who was worth more than the net assets of a million ordinary people. I loved her until I was ten, until the weight of her horn pushed her face bones in and gave her brain damage and she stumbled when I was riding, throwing me. I broke my collarbone. After they had her put to sleep, they stuffed her and put her in a museum. When I was fifteen, I said I wanted a second Earth, because we were ruining this one, and they laughed and drank spirits with bits of gold leaf glittering inside, from high purity quartz glasses forged at eight hundred and forty-six Kelvin and crystallized from molten magma, and I knew I had to get away from them, to somewhere dark and silent and hopeful.”

So it turns out we both ran away from very different homes.

I asked Baltasara if she felt hopeful now.

She kissed my belly, and bawled in the silent, subtly shuddering way that I imagine could have been accomplished surreptitiously, on the ground, after a fall from a unicorn.

Wonderland unicorns, you want to hear about them?

They’re white, like the rabbits.

Like all the animals, because who’s got the spare energy to manufacture pigments when you live in the dark? What a waste. The unicorns are bigger than the rabbits, but faster.

They’ve got to be.

To catch their prey.

The horns, those are for plunging into the comet between their claw-feet, for drilling down to get the radiation, instead of burrowing for it. They turn their heads upside-down and walk in circles on the spot to do it.

More like the Cheshire Cat than any Earth myth.

When their heads are upside-down and their horns are in the rock, the unicorns resemble four-legged mosquitoes more than horses.

They use their mouths to eat the rabbits, though. Round mouths with a leechlike ring of teeth. In the good times, the hot times, the radiation from a unicorn horn will practically fry a hole in your heart from fifty paces.

In the lean times, when Wonderland is passing away from perihelion, when they put their horns in the rock and get nothing, lots of them freeze like that. Eternally hopeful, hitting their heads in harder, and deeper, until death. Then, even though the microorganisms strip the flesh, there’s no wind, no earthquakes, no tides to carry away the skeletons. The dead ones stay like that forever, stuck in the ground with their heads upside-down.

Try not to have bad dreams about that.

I’ll keep the unicorns away from you.

Because humans are the worst nightmare of any animal, sentient or not.

They have bad dreams about us.

August 2nd, 2066

To my beloved Eldest Daughter Alya,

This is another addendum to my earlier communication. Because you must be wondering if I really am as devoted a mother as I have claimed. You must be wondering why I put your little sister Taki at risk like that.

I had no choice. I simply had to get away. Far away.

From Baltasara.

Baltasara predicted that the wildlife of Wonderland would be drawn to the plume of our rockets, and made sure to shut combustion down after we landed on the pivot point of the spinning comet’s mass. Yet nobody supposed the creatures would be drawn to electrical potential.

That we would find Wonderland unicorns following the cables, drilling into our hydroponics lab.

Some of them sampled the lettuce and grew green, flipper-like fronds in place of legs.

Others ground the artificial beef protein off the culture slides, eating them glass and all, and even though security bots blasted the intruders back out into the tunnel they’d bored, forever after they were distinguishable as the blotchy unicorns that sprayed milk.

So much for quarantine.

And then Baltasara, frustrated by our inability to penetrate the cavity’s depths with our damaged instruments, frustrated by the shortening of our mission by the loss of half the lab that sustained our lives, suited up, took some repair tools into the tunnels and hunted down one of the blotchy unicorns.

Killed it.

Cooked it.

Ate it.

Without so much as a word to me.

Knowing that the security bots would never let her back onto the ship.

How could she do it, after we’d been together for three years? How could she forget the lesson she had learned in childhood, the lesson of the unicorn her parents had made for her?

She parted us at a stroke, parting herself from her unborn child, without a whisper.

Then, when she did start sending messages, it became clear what she expected.

A GLASS OF MILK, BEL, she tapped enticingly onto the shell of the ship. It was milk from a Wonderland unicorn. She left some in a bucket right where she knew the undamaged sensors would pick it up. DRINK ME, she’d engraved on the pail.

And they did.

Soldiers, technicians, and engineers. One by one, they went out there, and didn’t come back, and when they appeared on the ship’s sensors again, they walked on four clawed legs, or had round mouths with leechlike teeth that could cut messages into metal but not speak.

SWITCH THEM OFF, Baltasara entreated in gored slime over rock, meaning the security bots, but she was no longer truly Baltasara.

The real Baltasara had been focused and intense, and could have found a way to defeat the security bots without begging for help. Something about eating the unicorn had diluted her reasoning faculties. It happened to all of them. Before long, they could barely write.

LET MEE INN.

She forgot that I was pregnant, or seemed to. The altered crew members abandoned their clothes and crowded near the sensors, as if unsure exactly what they wanted of the precious few of us who remained on board. After she started eating Wonderland rabbits, and grew those sensory frills all over her body, Baltasara seemed to be able to see us, even through the ship’s shielded skin.

BEL IS BIG WHY. WHY BIG. FOOD? MUCH. BUT NO FOOD SOON. FOOD HEER. HEER FOOD. COME HEER.

Alya, the woman I loved was gone. I did not abandon her. She was no longer there. I grieved more deeply than I would’ve if she’d simply died.

It was only months before her hideous transformation that I’d finally admitted to Baltasara—the real Baltasara—that Taki’s was my second pregnancy.

You must have been young, Baltasara had whispered.

I confessed to Baltasara that you, Alya, had been my ticket to settle in my new country. That my specialized scientific education, my spying and supply of restricted information during the conflict, putting my life at risk, ending with my estranged parents in prison, all had been meaningless to my new government beside the more important facts of my desperation, my youth, my health, and my ability to bear altered children.

Payment had been made in blood.

You taught me that the price was too high.

This second child would be mine to keep.

Taki would belong to me, not to the creature who had once been Baltasara.

Her language and intelligence improved for a while after she began hunting and eating the other humans who lived in Wonderland alongside her.

I SEE A SECOND SKELETON FORMING WITHIN THE BOUNDARIES OF YOUR SKELETON. MY MEMORIES WENT FOR A WHILE BUT NOW I REMEMBER WHAT IT WAS THAT WE DID. BRING TAKI TO ME AT ONCE. SHE’S YOUR TICKET TO THIS NEW COUNTRY, BEL.

I wept for the woman I had lost.

Wonderland’s got oysters and caterpillars, too.

Still got oysters, on Earth? Did they freeze? For a while they couldn’t form their shells anymore, because of ocean acidity, but that was before the carbon sequestering plague got out of hand, right?

Wonderland oysters have got stony shells and feathery open mouths, to strain the spores out of the thick, barely-moving air.

Wonderland caterpillars have long bodies, a hundred legs, and tiny teeth with which to graze on things resembling leaves. They metamorphose into flying things, the better to disperse to both ends of the bone-shaped cavity.

But everything metamorphoses here, that’s Wonderland’s greatest strength.

Seriously.

When I saw unicorns absorbing earth’s genetic material, and being strengthened instead of poisoned, I reckoned the reverse could be true. But how could I bring the contaminants aboard without risking everyone?

So, out I went.

Think I was crazy?

I was the only one who’d thought the whole thing through!

And I only risked myself.

True, my reasoning was unreliable. I was depressed. Maribel was all wrapped up in her pregnancy, totally turned inward, forgetting that our home planet was doomed.

Not realizing that, no matter our mission parameters, we had to make Wonderland work as an ark, or die along with everyone else.

Well, her body wasn’t the only one that could change.

If I couldn’t live on unicorns, if I couldn’t breathe the foul air, if I couldn’t swing around the sun every couple of thousand years and laugh as I bathed in radiation, it was over anyway!

Guess what? It’s not over.

I’m still here.

It was nothing like the unicorn my parents made me. It was not.

You got hold of that probe yet, or what?

I’m getting tired of repeating myself, and this little period of lucidity ain’t gonna last me forever. How many times have I got to say it?

Bring. Me. The. Probe.

Only you can save Earth!

July 31st, 2055

Dear Diary,

Today we few remaining unaltereds decided to run.

Baltasara has grown cunning again after capturing one of the applied mathematics majors and eating her.

Piece by claw-footed piece.

Immediately, she tapped into the communications network and almost sabotaged the security systems.

From experience, we know that the replenishment will keep her sharp for a week or more, and we can’t risk staying.

We have to attempt abandoning Wonderland with what’s left of the ship, even though our ability to produce sustenance is hampered and the pilot’s program has informed us that, even in hibernation, we’re likely all to die.

It advised us to find solace in religious writings, if we found such things comforting, and I scoffed with regrettable insensitivity.

If there is a God, we’ve gone so far beyond his purview, he couldn’t save us even if he wanted to.

But I hope these diaries will survive, even if we don’t, so the people back on Earth know not to send anyone else to Wonderland, ever. Thankfully, it’s many more months’ travel further away, now, than it was when we first arrived, and the gap between will only widen.

More time in space means more risk to Taki, though.

I no longer have any hope that she will survive.

I’ll admit, things got bad after we were left to our own devices.

Bel’s ship taking off made a hole big enough to deplete our respiratory gases and I had to eat a whole bunch of oysters so my skin would get stony and I’d survive. Only about a dozen expedition crew members, besides me, were smart enough to do that.

But it made us dumb.

Not as dumb as the oysters were. We could still think, but barely.

Thinking was slow.

Yeah, you can make a battery out of a lemon, but it’s not going to run the high-powered microprocessor that is the human brain.

We needed to eat unadulterated humans to get back to full consciousness, after the algae and the oysters sealed off the hole and gases were able to accumulate again. There were enough, mummified by the vacuum, for me to gnaw on until I got back to a semblance of myself.

Enough to remember how to speak and write.

Enough to find the instruments they left behind, to rig something up, to string together enough lemons, to be able to send these messages.

August 3rd, 2066

To my beloved Eldest Daughter Alya,

I have slept briefly, since stopping the previous letter. Energy is precious and hard to come by, these days. The Miami snow has finished falling, leaving a two-meter layer over everything, including the rooftop solar cells that I struggled to sweep last week.

I am so thin. My bones are so brittle. There is cancer in my spine from my time in space. If I fall from the roof, my back will break before the broom does.

So, you see, the price was mine to pay, after all, not Taki’s, and I am grateful to God for that.

To continue the story of my flight from Wonderland back to Earth, I was not quite anorexic by the end of our fraught journey. Not quite beyond repair, once I was back eating balanced foods and breathing clean air.

Taki, despite not being born until after I was back on Earth soil, objected to the brightness of Earth days and became, despite all my efforts, almost fully nocturnal.

I wish the two of you could have grown up together, in the same time. In the same house. Alya, you would have been a bright and sunny influence on her, I know. You would have drawn her out into the world, but it wasn’t God’s plan.

When Taki turned three years old, I tried to recreate your third birthday party. You probably don’t remember it. The one with the ocean theme, where we hung blue and green streamers from the ceiling, to be the seaweed and the waves, and you dressed as a lobster, and nabbed everything with your orange pâpier-maché claws, shrieking with wicked glee.

You were always talking. Outgoing. You loved animals, loved the water, could swim like an otter.

Taki didn’t like to get wet. She was quiet, like her other mother. Reflective. Taki kept secrets and gazed for hours at the stars, even after her lips were blue from the cold. In the dark, she’d dig in the earth, as though to find Baltasara underneath, when it was impossible, when she never knew her. She tolerated other people, but didn’t seek them out.

She’ll be ten years old, soon.

I’m not planning a party.

Instead, I’ll say goodbye to her.

When our ship from Wonderland arrived, our civilian agency had been disbanded due to lack of funds. The military debriefed us, in case Wonderland was a threat they needed to put down. Then they stopped caring. Put about the story we’d all died, and changed our names. Not that Baltasara’s parents were still alive to care. They’d died in a jetcar crash. There was some suspicion the vehicle had been sabotaged by a disgruntled servant.

Baltasara’s family had been very wealthy indeed. Only her DNA could unlock the automated inheritance vault, and she left no Earth relations behind.

Taki’s DNA unlocked the vault.

Suddenly, we had money.

I bought Taki a place in a hibernation chamber. You didn’t grow up under the same roof as your sister, but you may still meet her. It’s possible. When she turns ten, when she’s old enough to make a good candidate for hibernation, she’ll go with the rest of them, to wait for spring.

I did not buy a place for myself. The ark was too important.

With the remaining riches, I ransacked the gene banks of the world, to make my capsule. Such a tiny, precious thing.

I bid you best wishes and farewell, with this final letter, my brightest star, my dutiful firstborn. God will keep you safe, and the ark that you carry inside you. Whether you meet Taki or not, I pray we will be together in heaven, in the end, while the Earth once again sustains the species to survive the great flood.

With blindest belief and adulation, Your Mother Maribel.

So, Taki.

My child. Inheritor of my vast fortune.

What’s it gonna be?

I’ve got the mental capacity to work it out. To guess where you’re at. For a little while. With the rabbit-administrator’s triceps settling in my belly. She ran for a long time, but I caught her in the end.

She’s the last one, though, apart from my children. I could be staring at my own end.

But back to you.

You’ve just turned ten.

Earth’s looking pretty bleak, am I right? The water supply is frozen in the pipes. There’s a new bridge from Key West, but it’s solid ice. Strap on a pair of skates and you could be sightseeing in the Bahamas.

You’re at the entrance to the hibernation vault, reading your very last letters in this life.

Letters from Bel to Alya.

You’re all confused. Let me spell it out for you.

Alya’s well out of range, on the other side of the sun, and even if she wasn’t, she’s never gotten any of those messages. The people who own her and her designer womb sent the letters straight back to Bel’s automated family vault.

You’ve got them because you’ve got the right genes to unlock them. Probably still too young to understand half of those unnecessarily fancy words, right?

Right?

I’ve sent you Bel’s diaries, too. Not so you’ll understand them now, but so in about five years, which is how long it’ll take for you to ride Alice to Wonderland, you’ll get to see what an utter shit she was, not the saint you’ve no doubt built her up to be.

How she abandoned me.

You’ve got the capsule that Bel made, that Alya was supposed to get, but it’s expired now. The things people daydream about their children doing, it’s like they don’t remember how hard it was just surviving as a child.

Put it in the trash.

It’s a useless dehydrated poo dollop in foil packaging.

Bel can’t save the animals of Earth, but you can.

Taki.

Taki, I’m your Mamá, and I command you to come!

You know where Alice is, don’t mess things up. You think you’ll be revived some day on Earth, but it’s a lie. Nobody’s left to love you. Nobody’s left to care enough to wake you up. They’ll switch you off, use your corpse to open our family vault, and take everything you’ve left behind. Come to Mamá, instead, and bring friends.

Bring enemies.

My unicorn children and I will still kill and eat you. I’m up-front about that, but with your genes for fuel and your probe for a chariot we’ll regain enough humanity to be able to return.

We’ll fight the carbon sequestering plague with the weapons of Wonderland.

We’ll undo what you’ve done, even before the animals Bel tried to save really are wiped off the face of the planet. They’ll be changed but they’ll still be amazing.

It’s your choice, Taki.

Take your cells to the grave for no reason, or bring them to me.

Mamá is waiting.

About the Author

Thoraiya Dyer is an Aurealis and Ditmar award-winning, Sydney-based writer and veterinarian. Her short science fiction and fantasy stories have appeared in Analog, Clarkesworld, Apex, Cosmos, Nature, the anthology Bridging Infinity and boutique collection Asymmetry. Thoraiya’s novels Crossroads of Canopy, Echoes of Understorey, and Tides of the Titans are published by Tor books. Find her on Twitter @ThoraiyaDyer.

Tolkien and World War I

Carrie Sessarego

Critics and readers are always fascinated by the intersection of life and art. When analyzing author J. R. R. Tolkien, who is most famous for The Lord of the Rings, he is no exception. For instance, the recent film Tolkien sought to link the writer’s experiences in World War I with his work. During his lifetime, Tolkien was skeptical of biographical criticism—a form of literary criticism in which the critic analyzes an artist’s work in light of the artist’s life, saying:

I object to the contemporary trend in criticism, with its excessive interest in the details of the lives of authors and artists . . . only one’s Guardian Angel, or indeed God Himself, could unravel the real relationship between personal facts and the author’s works.

The Lord of the Rings is not autobiographical nor is it an allegory. However, World War I did shape his work in many ways. When pressed to make connections between The Lord of the Rings and World War II, Tolkien stated that it was born more from the first war than the second:

One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to fully feel its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my closest friends were dead.

Tolkien was born in 1892 in South Africa. At the age of three, he moved to Britain along with his mother, Mabel, and his brother, Hilary. His father was supposed to follow them but died in South Africa of rheumatic fever. Mabel Tolkien converted to Catholicism in 1900 and raised the boys in the church despite her Baptist family’s subsequent rejection. Tolkien adored his mother and was devastated when she died of complications caused by diabetes when he was twelve.

After her death, his guardian was Father Francis Xavier Morgan. At first, the brothers lived with an aunt, but later Father Morgan placed them in a boarding house where he hoped life would be more sociable for the boys. The sixteen-year-old Tolkien fell in love with Edith Bratt, a nineteen-year-old boarder. Father Francis forbade the relationship because Bratt was a Protestant and because he feared that romance would distract Tolkien from his studies. The priest moved the Tolkien brothers to new lodgings and demanded that Tolkien have no contact with Bratt until he turned twenty-one (by then Tolkien was eighteen). Tolkien proposed to Bratt on his twenty-first birthday and a few days later she accepted.

Meanwhile, Tolkien developed his love for languages and his sense of camaraderie within a virtually all-male world. In his last year at King Edward Independent Day School he formed a group with classmates Christopher Wiseman, R. Q. Gilson, and Geoffrey Bache Smith called the Tea Club and Barrovian Society (TCBS). While other members came and went, this core group of four stayed tight-knit through Tolkien’s Oxford years and beyond. They had high hopes for a future in which they would inspire great works by one another. Being teenagers and later very young men, they were also goofy, taking great delight in breaking minor rules and cracking jokes.

In 1914, England declared war against Germany. Despite massive pressure to enlist from friends, family, and the general mood of the time, Tolkien remained a civilian. Among other things, he had to finish his studies at Oxford if he was to have any chance of pursuing a teaching career. His reluctance to go to the front did not detract from his conviction that the war was just and necessary. While Tolkien was not anti-German in general, he believed that Germany had come under the sway of power-mad leadership and that the war was “in the large view good against evil.” This conflict, in Tolkien’s mind, represented a kind of madness that was not generally reflective of any nation. When readers tried to compare orcs and goblins to the Germans, Tolkien clarified:

I think the orcs as real a creation as anything in “realistic” fiction, only in real life they are on both sides, of course. For “romance” has grown out of “allegory”, and its wars are still derived from the “inner war” of allegory in which good is on our side and various modes of badness on the other. In real (exterior) life men are on both sides: which means a motley alliance of orcs, beasts, demons, plain and naturally honest men, and angels.

Tolkien started his final exams in June of 1915 and, upon graduation, applied for an officer’s commission. He was horrified to learn that he was appointed to be a second lieutenant with the 13th Service Battalion Lancashire Fusiliers and would soon be posted to the front. The TCBS was scattered across the fields of battle, and Tolkien was moved from one army camp to another. Tolkien loathed the inefficiency and “stupidity” of army life, finding most of it caused by officers. As he later stated, he learned a “deep sympathy for the ‘tommy,’ especially the plain soldier from the agricultural counties.” The character of Sam Gamgee is not based on any one person, but is rather a tribute to the batmen and other soldiers, “My Sam Gamgee is indeed a reflection of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognized as so far superior to myself.”

The final meeting of TCBS was held in September of 1915. It was a pivotal meeting in terms of cementing Tolkien’s ideals and philosophy. The four core members believed that the group had become distracted from their real purpose by the silly antics of younger members. They sat down for a serious talk about lofty matters. They called this meeting “The Council of London.” During this time, the four repeated their conviction that they amplified each other’s intelligence and had a responsibility to accomplish great things. Over the weekend, they talked about the issues that mattered most to them—not specific personal matters, but broader, philosophical issues. The four hoped to encourage and challenge each other in years to come to create great works that would have a real impact on literature and society.

Tolkien and Bratt married on March 22, 1916 and he was shipped out overseas again in June, transferred to the 11th Service Battalion. He found himself in the trenches of the Battle of the Somme, where he was the battalion signal officer. Much of the reality of the trenches can be seen in The Lord of the Rings: the practical aspects of eating and sleeping, the importance of numbers and strategy and timing, the adrenaline rush of battle and the mental toll of combat, aerial warfare, and poison gases, and the desire to fight for something with a higher meaning. Tolkien stated that the events of The Lord of the Ring owed nothing to either world war, but that some of the imagery might. “The Dead Marshes and the approaches to the Morannon owe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme,” Tolkien stated in one of his letters.

The Dead Marshes, found in The Two Towers, particularly evoke the horrible mud of the Somme. The dead would sink into the mud, and then float back towards the surface, while soldiers had to walk on boards to avoid being sucked into the mud and drowning. Here’s an excerpt from a chapter that takes place in the Marshes:

Hurrying forward again, Sam tripped, catching his foot in some old root or tussock. He fell and came heavily on his hands, which sank deep into sticky ooze, so that his face was brought close to the surface of the dark mere. There was a faint hiss, a noisome smell went up, the lights flickered and danced and swirled. For a moment the water below him looked like some window, glazed with grimy glass, through which he was peering. Wrenching his hands out of the bog, he sprang back with a cry. “There are dead things, dead faces in the water,” he said with horror. “Dead faces!”

Tolkien was saved from the trenches by that lowliest of creatures—a body louse. These lice infested the trenches and infected the soldiers with “trench fever,” a disease with symptoms including headache, body aches, rashes, and high fevers. The disease was severe enough that Tolkien was transported to a hospital in England, where his wife was able to join him. It was a narrow escape. By the end of the war, he was the only member of his battalion, with the exception of some reserves, who was not captured or killed.

For the rest of the war, Tolkien was in and out of hospitals as his fever retreated and then reappeared. Whatever influence the Great War may or may not have had on his work, it’s indisputable that his lengthy period of recuperation gave him time to work, and he used this time to start to build the mythology that, much later, became the background for The Lord of the Rings. Before going overseas, he had written “The Voyage of Eärendil the Evening Star,” which was arguably the first Middle-earth fragment, and which contained the first use of “Middle-earth.” In the hospital, he wrote much of The Book of Lost Tales and The Fall of Gondolin, among many other pieces and notes about the language and history of Middle-earth.

Writing helped Tolkien cope with the war, and his war experiences brought new maturity to his writing. Prewar, Tolkien was interested in epic lore, but not so much in stories of magical beings. To his son, Christopher, he wrote, “A real taste for fairy-stories was wakened by philology on the threshold of manhood, and quickened to full life by war.” When Christopher was serving in World War II, Tolkien wrote to him about how writing helped him cope with the confusing issues around war, referring to the early Middle-earth mythology:

I sense amongst all your pains . . . the desire to express your feeling about good, evil, fair, foul in some way: to rationalize it, and prevent it just festering . . . In my case it generated Morgoth and the History of the Gnomes.

Edith Bratt, now Edith Tolkien, followed him as he was moved from one hospital to another, and one posting (within England) to another, renting rooms in whatever town he was closest to. During one of these interludes, they were able to live together. The couple loved to walk in the nearby woods, where she would sing and dance among the flowers:

I never called Edith Lúthien—but she was the source of the story that in time became the chief part of The Silmarillion. It was first conceived in a small woodland glade filled with hemlocks at Roos in Yorkshire (where I was for a brief time in command of an outpost of the Humber Garrison in 1917, and she was able to live with me for a while). In those days her hair was raven, her skin clear, her eyes brighter than you have seen them, and she could sing—and dance. But the story has gone crooked, & I am left, and I cannot plead before the inexorable Mandos.

Armistice was declared on November 11, 1918. Of the core four from the TCBS, Tolkien and Christopher Wiseman were the only survivors. Other, noncore, members had also perished in the war, including the fun-loving Thomas Kenneth “Tea Cake” Barnsley and the youngest member, Ralph Stuart “The Baby” Payton. Tolkien and Wiseman were shattered by the loss of their friends as well as the loss of potential that the group represented.

For the most part, Tolkien did not deliberately use World War I as an inspiration for The Lord of the Rings, but the lived experience of war permeates the series. Much of the brilliance of The Lord of the Rings comes from Tolkien’s unique gift of combining the epic—with incredibly detailed worldbuilding and a massive scope with an intimate human experience. The characters in The Lord of the Rings are playing parts in a vast mythology that extends far beyond the pages of the series itself to the The Book of Lost Tales and The Silmarillion. However, the characters still have to eat, and sleep, and drink water, and carry all their stuff around with them. The practicalities are not lost amidst the grandeur of scope.

Tolkien’s close friend C. S. Lewis, who was also a veteran of World War I, recognized his own war experiences in the books:

It is all here: the endless, unintelligible movement, the sinister quiet of the front when “everything is now ready,” the flying civilians, the lively, vivid friendships, the background of something like despair and the merry foreground, and such heaven-sent windfalls as a cache of tobacco “salvaged” from a ruin. The author has told us elsewhere that his taste for fairy tale was wakened into maturity by active service; that, no doubt, is why we can say of his war scenes (quoting Gimli the Dwarf) “There is good rock here. This country has tough bones.”

In the period leading up to the first World War, fairy tales and other forms of fantasy flourished in the popular imagination. The works of William Morris, J. M. Barrie, and other writers of romantic imagination were popular with soldiers. However, the mood of the arts shifted with the trauma of war, leading to a focus on realism and cynicism, as practiced by writers Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen, and Siegfried Sassoon.

In Tolkien, we see a rebellion against the tide of “disenchantment” in literature. His work abounds in enchantment of the magical sense, of course, but he also is able to portray the horrors of war while still conveying a sense of heroism in his characters. In Tolkien, moments of despair are usually turning points towards redemption. Actions have meaning because of their intention, not their result. Heroism that results in failure is still heroic. Ideals of country and family and honor remain venerated, while lust for power is condemned.

Furthermore, in Tolkien’s world, the time of the Elves is undeniably passing away, but their arts and wisdom deserve to be remembered. The grief and longing for an earlier time that suffuses so much of the first World War literature can be found in The Lord of the Rings, but it is combined with a respect for tradition as opposed to a blanket rejection of the past.

Tolkien was always clear that the main influences in his writing came from literature, languages, folklore, and mythology, not his life or contemporary events. However, World War I did clearly play a part in his writing. Other examples than the ones mentioned above are logistical, such as the fact of Tolkien’s long recuperation giving him time to think and to write away from the demands of studying, working, or the chaos of the trenches.

The war, combined with common themes in mythology, also infuses his work with a bittersweet quality. Frodo returns home but can never be truly healed from his ordeal. Sauron is defeated, but the time of the Elves as described in The Lord of the Rings is still coming to a close. Much as World War I sealed the end of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, the war with Sauron marks the transition from the time of Elves to the time of Men. The war is won, but the world, and the people in it, are irrevocably changed. Some, like Frodo, never fully recover. Others, like Sam, are able to successfully integrate their experience into a new life. But the world is dramatically different now in a way that Tolkien himself experienced as he was released from war to the postwar world and the age of professorship.

I am deeply indebted to Humphrey Carpenter’s biography, Tolkien, and to Tolkien and the Great War, by John Garth.

About the Author

Carrie Sessarego is the resident “geek reviewer” for Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, where she wrangles science fiction, fantasy romance, comics, movies, and non-fiction. Carrie’s first book, Pride, Prejudice, and Popcorn: TV and Film Adaptations of Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, and Jane Eyre, was released in 2014. Her work has been published in Interfictions Online, Pop Matters: After the Avengers, The WisCon Chronicles Vol. 9, Invisible 3, Clarkesworld Magazine, and two volumes of Speculative Fiction: The Year’s Best Online Reviews, Essays and Commentary. She spends her time wrangling her husband, daughter, dog, and three cats.

Fractal Universes, Serialized Novels, and a Cat:
A Conversation with Yoon Ha Lee

Chris Urie

A well-worn fictional universe is something to love. When you’ve spent countless enjoyable pages exploring the depths of nebulas and far flung planets, you find yourself occasionally wanting to go back after the last page has been turned. Thankfully, authors love to dip back in and explore their universes almost as much as we do.

Diving back into the universe of the Machineries of the Empire series, Hexarchate Stories features art thieves, galaxy destroying weapons, renegades, and even an assassin cat. With trademark wit and storytelling ability, Yoon treats fans of the series with even more bits of the universe to explore.

Yoon Ha Lee’s fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Tor.com, Clarkesworld Magazine, and many more anthologies. Hexarchate Stories is a collection that explores more of the universe first glimpsed in Ninefox Gambit. The collection is available now from Solaris Books.

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?

Third grade, actually! Nobody gives third graders sound career advice, like “become an actuary.” My teacher, Mr. McCracken, used to dress up as the superhero, Story Man once a week, complete with spandex outfit. (In retrospect I wonder where on earth he got the outfit.) Story Man taught our class creative writing. Up until then, I had the vague notion that books sort of grew on trees and fell out of the sky into the library. It hadn’t really penetrated that people wrote books. But when Story Man taught us that stories come from people, I said to myself, I’m a person, so maybe someday I can write a book!

It took rather a lot of years to get to that first novel, but hey, persistence is worth something.

What drew you to science fiction?

My path was a bit circuitous. My first real exposure to science fiction was Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series in third or fourth grade, because my friend Gwyn had gotten into the Harper Hall trilogy and I decided to give Dragonflight a try. The time travel plot element really blew my mind! And then I went back to reading dragon and unicorn books for years.

It wasn’t until middle school that I really got back into science fiction, and I’m afraid it was by way of unicorns. Specifically, one of Piers Anthony’s Apprentice Adept books had a unicorn on the cover so I checked it out, even though it turned out to be like the fifth book in the series or something. From there, I read more Anthony—I’m still fond of Macroscope—and branched out into H. G. Wells, Pamela Sargent, Roger Zelazny, and more.

What has kept you coming back to short fiction?

Two things: One, they usually pay you faster (even though there’s more money in novels). Two, short stories are a great medium for exploring short, sharp ideas. I think of a short story as more of a surgical strike and a novel as more of a war. (I’m afraid I think of the reader as an adversary?)

What other projects are you working on?

I’m currently working on a fantasy novel for Solaris called Phoenix Extravagant. The setting is loosely based on Korea during the Japanese occupation, and it has automata and magical pigments that are used to program them with qualities like courage or loyalty. My protagonist is a painter who discovers the terrible truth behind the pigments and a pacifist mecha dragon who becomes their ally.

I’m also working on two chapters of a serialized tie-in novel about Marvel’s Thor for Serial Box. The lead writer is Aaron Stewart-Ahn, and the other writers, Brian Keene and Jay Edidin, are also terrific. I’m really thrilled to be a part of this project.

Finally, S. L. Huang, author of the brilliant novel Zero Sum Game, and I are collaborating on a mathy space opera novel that we have code-named Space Hypatia, which is set in a far future Library of Alexandria that never was. (Spoiler: our Hypatia survives!) We both have math degrees and are having fun rolling around in the worldbuilding. We’re extremely excited both about the novel and about working with each other.

You’ve said that titles aren’t your strong suit. What are some of your favorite working titles you’ve had for your stories?

Oh man. There was the fantasy novel that I ended up trunking, whose title went from Paper Knives to Origami Souls to Paper Souls to . . . toward the end I just called it Millstone Fantasy Novel since that was what it felt like! And the original title of Ninefox Gambit was Ninefox and Suicide Hawk, which a friend of mine noted sounded like two superheroes who were unusually bad at picking superhero names! I kinda liked it though.

In Hexarchate Stories, the final novella, “Glass Cannon,” originally went by the working title “Jedao Lives.” I have no imagination . . .

You worked on The Vela for Serial Box. How was it writing together with other authors? Did you find it changed how you crafted a story?

So one of the biggest reasons I agreed to work on The Vela was that I had been wanting to try collaborative writing for some time. I’d done it once in, uh, a Legend of the Five Rings fanfic with my friend Brent Morgan, and really loved it. Obviously, the experience is going to differ based on the mix of personalities. Well, I was very fortunate, because we all hit it off immediately. Working with Becky Chambers, Rivers Solomon, and S. L. Huang was a dream. We’re all very different kinds of writers, but I admire the others’ work so much, they’re superb people as well, and we were able to bring our diverse strengths to the story in a way that I feel really strengthened the telling.

Serial Box’s method involves bringing all the writers together with the producer (in our case, Lydia Shamah, whose concept it was) to do the worldbuilding and plotting and characterization and so on in person for two and a half days. It was pretty intense—I normally don’t do all the planning for a novel in that amount of time, I tend to mosey my way through that kind of thing, but of course that would have been cost-prohibitive. I was the most plot-focused writer so I was concerned with plot structure, but I’m weak on characterization, which is where the others’ strengths here really shone. Worldbuilding in a team is also a thrilling experience because you can draw on multiple people’s expertise in disparate areas.

The other thing is to save time, we were all writing chapters (called “episodes” in Serial Box’s parlance) simultaneously. So originally S. L. Huang wrote the first episode so we could all get a feel for the setup, and then we wrote eps. 2-5 simultaneously, had a phone conference and Slack meetings to hash out continuity, then did the same for the second half. As you might imagine, there was some pretty intense editing to make sure everything was consistent between episodes, modulo some differences in individual prose styles.

The universe you’ve created is lovingly crafted and deep. You’ve already finished a trilogy in this universe, what keeps you coming back to tell stories in this universe?

Well, the shallow answer is money. I personally feel that it is very nice to be able to pay the bills. But the other answer is that I feel that a good story universe is fractal—there are infinite possibilities for stories to tell and it’s just a matter of finding the ones that appeal to me personally. That being said, Hexarchate Stories is probably it for a while. I’ve been noodling at doing “The Battle of Candle Arc” in comic form but it has to happen in between my other commitments.

Did some of the stories included in the collection start out as part of the main trilogy, then took on a life of their own?

The only one that fits that description is “Calendrical Rot,” which was the first thing I wrote. It was originally the prologue to Ninefox Gambit. I ended up cutting it because I have a strong philosophical objection to most prologues (the big exception for me is the one for Guy Gavriel Kay’s splendid Tigana), but I sort of regret it because I wonder if the novel would have parsed better with that setup.

I honestly suspect “The Battle of Candle Arc” would have made a better prologue, if a long one, but I didn’t write it until after I drafted Ninefox Gambit even though it was published first, in Clarkesworld Magazine. I’d originally left the specifics of Jedao’s victory at that battle to the imagination, but it nagged me that I didn’t know how he’d done it, and finally I wrote the story, helped along by the fact that Neil Clarke had hinted that he would like me to darken his submissions inbox. My friend and beta reader Daedala told me I should just go ahead and crib off a historical battle for the tactics, so I did that. I went with the Battle of Myeongnyang, which is not well known in the West; Admiral Yi Sun-Sin faced worse odds than Jedao, won a more decisive victory, and took fewer casualties. I sort of toned things down because I didn’t want to push suspension of belief, ironically, even though the history was even more impressive!

You decided to include a prose poem in this collection. Did you set out to write a poem or did the story eventually dictate the form?

I set out to write a prose poem. I’ve published poetry in the past, and I love reading it and on occasion writing it, but I didn’t love it enough to keep doing it for $5/poem when I could be making more money doing something else.

There are notes at the end of each story that are extraordinarily informative. What made you want to include these?

Mainly because when I read a story collection or anthology, the notes are some of my favorite bits! You can learn the randomest things about writers, editors, or stories from notes. So I was figuring that maybe there would be other readers who enjoy that kind of thing and would have fun with the notes, and that anyone who wasn’t interested could just skip them.

What inspired “Irriz the Assassin-Cat?”

Oh, that’s easy—I have a cat! Her name is Cloud, and she sheds on eeeeeeeeeeeverything. We only got her four years ago so she wasn’t around when our daughter was small. But one of the tall tales I like to tell my daughter, because we Texans love our tall tales, is that we ordered her as an egg from the stork, and the stork delivered the egg, and we had our cat incubate the egg for us because I’m personally too lazy to sit on an egg. My daughter rolls her eyes every time she hears this story, because as a teenager she’s too wise to be fooled by it.

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.

Byzantium, New York, and Rose Petals:
A Conversation with Arkady Martine

Chris Urie

Marrying history and a far-flung future results in a partnership unique to science fiction. It allows authors and readers alike to explore the past, present, and potential future all at once. Like the best science fiction, it allows us to examine where we’ve been and where we may still go as a society.

A Memory Called Empire is Arkady Martine’s debut novel that introduces us to the Teixcalaanli Empire. Ambassador Mahit Dzmare is the ambassador to the empire from a small mining station but is quickly embroiled in the murder mystery surrounding her predecessor’s death. What she discovers is larger than a simple homicide and involves a web of secrets and an ever-expanding empire.

Arkady Martine is a speculative fiction writer and, as Dr. AnnaLinden Weller, a historian of the Byzantine Empire and a city planner. She’s published numerous short stories in places like Lackington’s, Uncanny Magazine, Shimmer, and Fireside. A Memory Called Empire is her debut novel available from Tor Books.

What made you start writing speculative fiction?

I write speculative fiction unless I’m trying very hard not to—it’s my native mode of expression. I grew up reading it: my father had a vast collection of pulp paperbacks and slightly-less-pulp-but-extremely-1970s paperbacks from when he was a young man, and he left them around pointedly where I could find them. We used to call it our “science affliction” problem. Our tastes have diverged as I grew up, but in a sense I’m always writing for him. It was a deep pleasure to get to give him an early proof copy of A Memory Called Empire.

But really, the language of speculative fiction is my language: I like taking concepts and ideas—hard ones, complex ones, usually sociological but sometimes technological—and spinning them through futures or magic or otherwise worlds to center them. And far-future science fiction is my favorite place to interrogate large philosophical and ethical questions from sideways angles. To get close enough to a problem like—oh, assimilation and cultural imperialism—to let a reader cut themselves on the sharp edges, but not close enough to bleed out.

How has your knowledge of the Byzantine Empire impacted writing your novel?

Enormously and entirely. The book is in a lot of ways the fictional version of what I did a postdoctoral project on at Uppsala University in Sweden. My research there was about the contacts between Byzantium and the “eastern frontier,” particularly Armenia, during the eleventh century—and how those contacts were remembered, represented, and narrativized by the people who lived through them. The project was very much about borderlands as trauma spaces, about history and memory as narrative repairs to a wounded sense of the world. This book came out of that project, and a lot of previous research into the history of imperialism, its methods and horrors and seductions. I used a lot of Byzantine things in it: the poetry contests are in fact lifted directly from middle period Byzantine court culture, and the succession crisis driven by a general being acclaimed maybe-emperor by his soldiers is a repeated kind of succession crisis in the Byzantine Empire, and . . . oh, there’s a ton more. Teixcalaan is a universalizing empire. The words for world and empire are the same. That’s intensely Byzantine.

What was your inspiration for writing this novel?

Two things: a piece of terrible juvenilia I was writing in my twenties, which had a few good ideas in it, one of which was a protagonist haunted—literally—by the ghost of the last person who had her job . . . I loved the idea of that, of being haunted by the past. Possessed by it. The identities of the past bleeding into the present. (Sometimes I think I’m a horror writer at some deep heart-level).

The other thing is the story of the Catholicos of the Armenian Apostolic Church, Petros Getadarj. It goes like this: in the year 1044 AD, the Byzantine Empire annexed the small Armenian kingdom of Ani. The empire was able to do this for a lot of reasons—political, historical, military—but the precipitating incident involved Petros Getadarj, who was determined to prevent the forced conversion of the Armenians to the Byzantine form of Christianity. He did this by trading the physical sovereignty of Ani to the Byzantine emperor in exchange for promises of spiritual sovereignty. When I started writing A Memory Called Empire, my inciting question was: what’s it like to be that guy? To betray your culture’s freedom in order to save your culture?

And then I thought: oh. These two things go together perfectly. Because it’s much more interesting to write about the person who has to clean up after that guy.

You’ve mentioned CJ Cherryh as one of your influences. How has Cherryh impacted your writing?

I think it’s Cherryh who said that every sentence should do at least three jobs? I took that perhaps too seriously. But more truly, Cherryh showed me how to successfully write protagonists and stories where the real, deep, terrifying conflicts are internal to the protagonist’s mind. Her narrators—especially Bren Cameron in Foreigner and Ariane Emory II in Cyteen—are so unreliable and so simultaneously aware of their unreliability that they cannot trust themselves or their interpretations. It’s claustrophobic and amazing, and I was writing like that anyway, but Cherryh gave me the tools to do it in a way that was exciting and kept moving forward.

Also, well. Thematically, A Memory Called Empire is a pretty direct response to the Foreigner series. (I’d love to put Nineteen Adze and Ilisidi in a room. Someone write me the fanfic.) The sequel to Memory, which is titled A Desolation Called Peace, has a lot of direct response to Cyteen. Both of those books (well, the first six Foreigner novels, plus Cyteen) were utterly formative to me as a reader, as a person thinking about ethics, as a person who felt very isolated as a teenager and young adult.

I reread Cyteen every year or so, if that says anything.

Empires are generally a given in some science fiction stories, but in your novel, you take great care in examining the influence of imperialism throughout the universe. How did you go about crafting these fine details?

Essentially, I feel as if empire is something that is either taken for granted in space opera—un-interrogated, simply present as a fact of worldbuilding—or rendered so evil as to be incomprehensibly bad (What does the First Order in Star Wars, for example, actually do for any of its citizens?) and empire is nastier than both those options. It is a kind of poison that gets into the groundwater, and it can be very, very pretty while it strangles a culture.

I’m an assimilated American Jew, myself. My immediate history is of being a somewhat-tolerated member of an imperialist power, not of being from a culture which was colonized. But these questions: the questions of what if you find yourself loving what is poison to you, even though you know it is poison—I mean, I wrestle with this all the time. I like Wagner operas, for instance. I have paid a great deal of money to see a full Ring Cycle, and I’d do it again. And yet I know what Wagner believed about my people, and how interlaced those beliefs are into all of his work.

It’s not the same as being from a colonized culture, of course. But it’s where I first got caught on the idea. And then I studied an empire that believed so profoundly that it was the mirror of heaven, the extant known universe, the only place where the world was true and right, and I found that empire beautiful, and I wanted to know why it was so easy to be seduced.

And thus, when I was constructing Teixcalaan, I wrote myself an empire that would seduce me. Utterly, completely, every self-hating inch of the way. And then I tried to make sure that it was also a terrible, totalitarian, panopticon state with an ideology of conquest, because nothing empire touches stays clean.

Poetry is at the heart of your novel. Who is one poet who has most influenced you?

Poetry is actually terribly difficult for me. I get struck by fewer poems than I wish I did, but the ones that do hit me are like spears through the throat. But . . . Lorca, I think. Lorca has the most intense influence, imagery, and strangeness and passion and some of the phrases that have stuck with me longest. The lines “and mad with horizons / she mixes in her wine / the bitterness of Don Juan / and the perfection of Dionysus,” for example, which are from his poem “Seville.”

How did being from New York influence your creation of The City?

 . . . well, I’m from the center of the world, the only real place in the universe.

What do you think? :D

Your novel is brilliantly paced, raising the stakes consistently as the story unfolds. How much planning went into the plot?

Oh god, less than I’d like. I plot by fractal growth, not by anything so useful as outlines. It’s like—putting together a supersaturated solution of ideas and concepts, throwing in everything I can think of and that I need, and then there’s a moment where the solution suddenly crystalizes, and that’s the shape of the book—and then the crystals grow as crystals do, in appropriate habits, and fractally. I write in linear order. So far. (I expect I may change, for different projects.) This seems to be how I make events complicated enough to feel like real political intrigue.

Mahit Dzmare is a multilayered and fascinating character. What, or who, influenced your creation of her?

A little of my own longing for places I don’t have, cultures I can’t be part of. A lot more of trying to write my own take on the trope of the poet-diplomat amongst an alien culture. Her sense of humor came with the rest of her, with none of my intention but all of my appreciation. Her ability to just keep going because it is necessary I think came from my wife, Vivian Shaw, but I was writing Mahit long before I met Viv, so. Maybe I just like women who can always do what one must.

What is one piece of writing advice that really helped you with this novel?

Forget about marketability. The only way to get through putting this many words on paper, in order, is to write exactly what you want to write, even if that’s endless descriptions of architecture and clothes and food, poetry contests and hyper-internal political considerations.

I’ve been delightfully surprised that doing this apparently meant I wrote something a lot of other people love, too.

The Teixcalaan have very distinct names and you’ve mentioned that they were influenced by Mesoamerican cultures. Can you go into detail about how you crafted these names?

I actually got Tor to put up some of my rules about Teixcalaanli names, here: www.torforgeblog.com/2019/03/26/whats-in-a-teixcalaanli-name.

But essentially I was trying to echo the Mixtec naming system, but also very strongly link the Teixcalaanlitzlim with their environment and the natural world around them. They care a lot about it, culturally, and I wanted to show that intimacy in the name system.

What projects are you working on next?

Right now I’m finishing up the direct sequel to A Memory Called Empire, which is titled A Desolation Called Peace. Yes, I thoroughly stole the title from Tacitus. But it’s the best line. It’s Tacitus writing in the voice of Calgacus, about Roman imperialism. Rome makes a desert and calls it peace. And the words for “desert” and “desolation” are sort of the same. A desolate place. An emptiness. The book I’m writing is about incomprehensibility and impossible wars. A lot of it happens on a Teixcalaanli battleship. There’s interstellar mail fraud. And a kitten. (Technically, several kittens.) Also a maybe-genocide, some extremely unwise kissing, and the usual dose of political machination.

I’m also working on two other novel-length projects. One is a “science fantasy” cowritten with my wife Vivian, which contains, in no particular order, a post-nuclear-war desertscape, mass-concentration-inducing minerals, a dead city that talks, a political romance, a prefab imperial colony town, a steppe kingdom with a city on a mountainside, a possibly-alien or possibly-magic local king, and a geologist/mining engineer who ends up becoming a cartographer (amongst other things). The other is the novel I’m currently calling “the one about drought politics, the Santa Ana winds, and arson investigation,” because I’m terrible at titles if I don’t get to steal them from Tacitus. That one is my cities and climate change novel, and to my fascination and despair, it seems to be about Los Angeles. As a New Yorker, I find this a bit distressing. But that’s what I get for really thinking about how Raymond Chandler books work, and whether they could fruitfully be combined with Peake’s Gormenghast and Tana French’s Trespasser.

I’ve also got an essay collection possibly in the works, which is tentatively titled Everyone’s World Is Ending All the Time; and a bunch of short fiction which I’m looking forward to getting back to as soon as I finish drafting this novel! I’m especially excited about the one called “The Flowers of Heliogabalus,” which has a murder mystery in a desert mansion shaped like a gypsum rose, an AI who might as well be a haunted house itself, and a murder victim who definitely didn’t strangle on rose petals because the ones in her mouth are far too fresh as compared to the time of death.

 . . . Told you I was secretly a horror writer.

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.

Editor’s Desk:
From the Moon to Magazines

Neil Clarke

I have two anthologies being published by Night Shade Books this month: The Eagle has Landed—a retrospective of lunar science fiction published since Neil Armstrong became the first person to set foot on the Moon—and The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Four. Each project was a unique learning opportunity, one looking at history and another looking at the state of the field as it is today.

The Moon landing was fifty years ago this month. That’s the milestone that drove the initial concept for The Eagle has Landed. I was a very young child at the time of the landing and have no real recollection of the event, aside from the stories my dad told me. Several years later, I started to read science fiction and devoured everything I could get my hands on. I wasn’t paying attention to when the stories were published or engaging much with the historical context in which they were written, so the research phase of this project was a bit surprising.

By the time Apollo 11 had the eyes of the world, science fiction had abandoned the Moon and started spending more time on Mars, the asteroid belt, and beyond. If you listen to Walter Cronkite’s news broadcast from that night, with special guests Arthur C. Clarke and Robert A. Heinlein, you’ll hear what sounds like science fiction—lunar colonies, space-born children, etc.—talked about as inevitable before the end of the century. Editors and authors of the time pulled away and moved onto more science fictional pastures, leaving a significant shortage of lunar sf in their wake.

Even after we abandoned the Apollo program a few years later, the science fiction community saw this as only a temporary setback. It would be nearly twenty years before the Moon slowly started receiving the attention it deserved again. At twenty-five, there were a couple of anthologies, but it’s only more recently that it’s become a common destination again. Interestingly enough, we’re once again talking about sending astronauts to the Moon. I can’t say that SF is responsible, but I can hope that this time, both SF and reality don’t abandon Luna again. In some ways, I think they need each other.

While Eagle had me diving through fifty years of history, my annual Best Science Fiction of the Year series keeps me rooted in recent events within our field. In honor of Gardner Dozois—who we sadly lost last year—I endeavoured to carry on some of the aspects of his annual review in my own, so this year’s introduction is considerably larger. For thirty-five years, Gardner captured  invaluable historical information in his introductions and as the only SF-only year’s best volume this year, I felt compelled to make sure there wasn’t a gap in that history. While I will certainly never compare myself to Gardner, I wanted to make sure his legacy was preserved.

While I was on Twitter talking about this introduction, M.L. Clark asked about the “different roles/audiences for editors whose columns either forecast or summarize the State of SF,” citing Gardner as the latter. I hadn’t really thought about it that way before, but quickly realized that I do a bit of both. In my former career, I regularly looked at the technology trends and determined how it would impact or influence education over the next few years. Toss enough data at me and I’ll automatically start looking for trends and offer a projection on where it all could take us. Speculating on possible outcomes, in some cases, can warn us about potential pitfalls and perhaps avoid them.

In my first volume, I speculated on the state of the market, based on economics, and described the market as oversaturated when compared to the number of paying readers. Instead of focusing on the things I said that could help prevent a potential market correction, some editors and writers were quick to jump to defend the status quo, accusing me of hating on hobbyist markets and even wanting to eliminate competition. It’s easier to throw stones than to fix the problem, or sometimes even admit that there is one. I get it, fewer markets means fewer opportunities. No one wants that. However, when market growth is out of step with overall readership growth (or fractured it into tiny amounts) it can be to the detriment of both the professional and hobbyist. That’s not healthy.

This year we saw some of that market correction with the closure of a few beloved markets. It’s something I intend to talk about in next year’s introduction and, fair warning, I don’t think it’s over yet. In this year’s introduction, I observed that the shortage of paying readers still exists, but also that we have a bigger problem: we’ve devalued short fiction. As someone who publishes short fiction for free online, I fully acknowledge my complicity in this problem.

The expectation that all stories should be available for free didn’t exist thirteen years ago when we launched this magazine. We certainly weren’t the first, or only publication, to do that, but we definitely contributed to the problem. The explosion of the short fiction market has only exacerbated things. And, no, I don’t think this is evil. I don’t want to abolish the practice. The benefits of making stories more widely available regardless of the reader’s financial means is partially responsible for the resurgence of short fiction. In many ways, this aspect of our community is facing the problems long observed by PBS and public radio. Perhaps we can learn something from them, but part of me believes that they face the same ratios (supporting/non-supporting) that we do. Watching things as closely as I have, I’m not convinced that, with that ratio, short fiction can grow its audience fast enough in the short term to help offset any further market corrections.

The depressed value of short fiction is reflected in more than just paid readership. It’s also reflected in how much we charge for it. The average monthly digital subscription is between $1.99 and $2.99. Compared to other works of literature in our field, we’re selling ourselves short. Adjusting the range to $2.99 and $3.99, would bring things more in line and provide an immediate boost to the market. Of course, money doesn’t solve the problem if it’s managed poorly. Historically, the natural compulsion for many has been to increase content, when in most cases, it should go to improving compensation for the authors, artists, and staff of the publication. Everyone agrees on “pay the author” but “pay the editor” and “pay the proofreader” and “pay the slush reader” need to become more common for the overall health of the field. Heck, even “pay the author” is way too cheap at the moment. We can and should address that.

So, Neil, why don’t you just raise the rates? That’s the problem with perception. With roughly 90% of readers thinking stories should be free and 10% trained to think that the existing rate is the fair rate, it doesn’t matter what we think it’s worth. First, publishers must make the case for the value of what readers are receiving. It’s a slow process that requires a lot of transparency, data, and even a little faith. Without that preparation, the first market to do it could find itself with a considerable drop in readership, possibly putting it out of business. If a bunch of markets do it at once, claims of price-fixing could be made. None of that is good for authors, readers, or publishers. Once again, I’m speculating. I see this as a potential path forward for all types of magazines and perhaps even one that can prevent a few from having to close. Who knows, it could even allow for some growth. When? Your guess is as good as mine, but consider this editorial a first step. Let’s talk about it.

In the end, this is a very interesting time in the history of SF/F magazines. We have an amazing variety of content and communities engaged in moving the field forward. I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: I want to see the market thrive, not just survive. Is that such a bad thing? The short fiction market is still very much a house of cards with a few a bit more anchored than others. People might not like hearing that, but ignoring the situation certainly won’t stop the wind from blowing it all down. With so many smart and capable people in this field, we certainly can do better.

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine and Forever Magazine; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and a seven-time Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor (short form). His anthologies include Upgraded, Galactic Empires, More Human Than Human, The Final Frontier, Not One of Us, and the Best Science Fiction of the Years series. His next anthology, The Eagle has Landed, will be published in July by Night Shade Books. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two sons.

Cover Art:
The Giant Mimr

Axel Sauerwald

About the Artist

Axel Sauerwald is a freelance illustrator and currently working as a concept artist at Atomhawk Design Ltd. in Newcastle.