Such Thoughts Are Unproductive

Rebecca Campbell

The woman whom I sometimes believed to be my mother flickered. Once. Twice. Her face—smiling—froze in a cloud of pixels, while her arm—the wide, emphatic gestures that were as much a marker of her identity as the color of her eyes or her fingerprints—swept the screen, leaving blue eddies, whirlpools of information. Then silence, but her mouth moved, leaving a flesh-colored smudge across the top half of her head.

“You’ve cut out again,” I said.

The picture reset. She was saying something that made her laugh.

“Your hair looks really good,” I said.

“Wha—”

I waited. Repeated myself.

“Yes,” she said, suddenly clear, “I cut it myself because the guy they get in is terrible. He let me use his scissors, at least. So chic and DIY. If it was 2015 I’d pin it—”

Slideshow, for which I was paying five dollars a minute. Figures in black pacing against the yellow cinder block wall of the common room. I tried not to look at them because it was always better not to look at them. It was better when I could see the windows and get a look at where she was.

“We’re running out of time,” I said. “I only paid for fifteen minutes, cause last time you had the drill and I thought maybe—”

The hand, now trailing pixels. It was definitely her face, but I searched her jawline for the suture where her appearance had been attached, virtually, to this body, a scrim of pixels over the person that was—as far as anything was these days—my mother. Her smile. Her expressive hands. No matter how empty the content of our words, there was comfort in seeing her speak.

I could not, though, let go of the suspicion that this face I was searching—hanging again, lag deforming the number on her gray uniformed shoulder—was not my mother, so much as the collected fragments of her from a hundred thousand hours of CCTV footage and intercepted video conferences and Google hangouts and whatever other material had streamed through the state’s huge filter-feeding machines, snuffling all traffic—dark and light, private or public—for the information it required on problematic—

—Such thoughts are unproductive.

This woman I speak to, who is my mother, and may not be by mother, but who fills the space in my life called mother. I will continue to chat with her when I can because the illusion—if it is an illusion—is so close to reality that sometimes I am taken in and relax into daughterly affection.

The black silhouettes in the background of the common room do nothing to interfere with our conversation because no part of our conversation can be hidden from the eye that watches us all, which is not an eye, but the hundred thousand eyes of a filter-feeding behemoth made entirely of information. She sends me messages at night, long discourses on the problem of making the food palatable, or the solitaire she plays, or the scrabble tournaments she organizes. I can hear the powerful gears of her mind grinding against the cinder block walls of the place, finding things to put in order, to make, to fix. Her resources are limited: games and other companions, the discussions and lectures and regular chastisement that she undergoes, but which she does not mention, but which is always implied. I can imagine her turning that mind toward the problem of 2 + 2 being 5, producing the right answer for the individuals who ask her—daily, hourly, by the minute—to repeat this new truth. A problem of philosophy? Perhaps of language, she would say, from the perspective of neo-radical-orthodoxy, or post-Platonism. One needs only to adjust the definitions in that portion of one’s brain that is cordoned off from reality in order to comply with the ideologies of the state. That’s how she could give the “right” answer without dying of it.

She never says these things. The mother who exists in my mind—which might or might not align with the mother on the screen, or in my messages—would do such things. It would be necessary for her survival, once the small collection of paper books had been arranged by the Library of Congress system, with gaps on the shelf for “critical theory” and “resistance” and “escape plans.”

But what kind of escape could she possibly need? The enclosures are beautiful, despite the yellow cinder block walls. I’ve seen them when her back is to the window, trees and mountains framed in bulletproof glass. When I was a kid, we often drove through the Rockies and stopped at Banff. Once we stayed in a massive château on Lake Louise. There were men and women in lederhosen outside, playing alphorns. The air, when we left the sticky lowland fug of our car, was so fresh and lovely I wanted to laugh. The glaciers had receded, but you could still see the blue-white glow of them up high, far beyond us.

I think—I’m not sure—but I think I have seen similar mountains in the brief moments she directs the camera over her shoulder and out the window. The time zone can’t be far too different, but the summer nights are bright there, so it must be farther north. Toad River, I think. One of the big provincial parks. I have looked at maps—antique ones on paper, tearing at the folds—and seen the gaps in the satellite images, and I have wondered, is she there? Close to 60?

This winter I’ll watch the angles of sunlight and track the darkness behind her. I’ll hope she picks up on my questions: I’ve had trouble with my nasturtiums again. Are you growing anything? And hope she turns her camera toward the window, talks about what she’s planted in the gardens that are supposed to be so therapeutic.

We live in an age of infinitely preserved information, so it’s not actually odd that I saved every video call on an external hard drive. At night I turned off the Wi-Fi and studied my mother’s face for evidence of fakery. I didn’t search for “ten ways to spot deepfakes” because that left fingerprints, and I’m already a problematic citizen, confirmed as such by my associations, rather than any action I have taken. To be visible meant you have done something to deserve visibility, after all. And if our exploration of the human genome means anything, it’s that my genes matter. I am treacherous.

You could inherit treachery, or be infected with it, by the people who waited in government offices, slouching from hard blue chair to hard blue chair, sharing between them the rumors and possibilities regarding what happened to the missing. Camps. Education centers. Wilderness highways that stopped dead on the other side of the great divide. The blank spots that are slowly overtaking our digital maps, even archived versions I thought I had kept safe. No more news from Fort Mac, not for a couple of years now. The pipelines never leak. Silence accompanied any disruption of gasoline, or the regular oil slicks up and down the Salish Sea, where all the fish are dead. There’s another dam on the Peace River to celebrate, but the blackouts got worse.

When I had thoroughly and silently examined the information available (is that a tamarack? A black spruce? Is that a mountain?) It occurred to me that as the woman I talk to might be scrimmed with my mother’s face, so might be the room in which she sat. The darkness and light I have so painstakingly tracked, the faint, blue line of a mountain, and a pink winter sunset at three in the afternoon? That may well mean nothing. Worse than nothing: deception.

At work I was also a watcher. I was part of a team that sanity-checked the AI that surveils traffic errors in the western provinces. I looked for anomalies and found ways to integrate them into the AI’s understanding, slowly eliminating my own job, as the anomalies grew rarer and the world more perfectly known. I thought, sometimes, following on my father’s philosophical leanings, that this was the goal of our state: perfect knowledge of landscapes and people and relationships. So perfect that the simulacrum we saw on the screen was more perfect than the territory we possessed. The woman on the screen was my mother, as was the woman in my messages, so perfectly had she been synthesized by the state that also slit—

—Unproductive.

“Have you heard from da—”

“—He’s okay. Did you get that? You’re a slideshow.”

“Weak—”

I was a slideshow, too. Maybe she didn’t even think it was me. Maybe there was another woman she spoke to midweek, and she believed that was the real daughter, and she only spoke to me because the system required her to maintain the fiction. Maybe she had a million daughters asking her leading questions. Maybe.

Still smiling, in case we connected, I wrote on my tablet and held it up to my phone: HE’S STILL WORKING ON THE SOLAR PANELS. Dad withdrew from the city to our old cabin in the interior (is she near there? Farther north and east. The forests I have seen out that window are deep and green), when Mom left, or disappeared, or was taken, whichever mode you choose to use for description. Dad and I just say “when Mom left” like it’s the only date that matters. He hasn’t come back to the city since. I took two weeks off work to help him chuck their things, and carry what was important—photographs, old books, her clothes, her jewelry—to the cabin. We couldn’t afford to take much, with the cost of gas. The house was requisitioned later, for a nominal fee that didn’t cover the time or gas it would have taken him to get the papers signed. I don’t go by there anymore. I don’t like to see it.

“Do you remember when we camped at Banff?”

“When you graduated from high school? Or are you talking about before Sophie’s wedding?”

“Sophie? Piano teacher? At Banff?”

“Aunt Sophie, not piano Sophie. We were roommates all through grad school. If you were going to have a godmother, she would have been your godmother. You were pretty little that trip, though.”

I remember Banff, because we went right up to the glacier and Dad showed me where it had been each year, walking backward through time, saying this is when you were born and this is when I was born.

“I was like five? Four? I thought that was Emily’s wedding.”

“No, Sophie. And I was maid of honor so I had to be there three days early, and you and Daddy just ate junk food and went on the swings until you threw up. You hated Fudgsicles for a year after that summer. I should have done that with more junk food. You’d be vegan now.

I actually am vegan. I do not remember having an aunt named Sophie. I’m pretty sure it was Emily’s wedding. Dad and I played on the merry-go-round until we were so dizzy, we stumbled across the soccer field toward the edge of the forest, collapsing on the grass until the world stopped spinning and we’d expelled all the Doritos and gummy worms we’d eaten. That afternoon, Mom—woozy and white-faced after a late night—got ready in a blue dress I had never seen before, her hair up high and her makeup all pretty. She carried me into this old lodge halfway up the mountain and shouted over my shoulder to friends I had seen in pictures, but never met, making jokes about things I didn’t understand. Dad and I left during the dancing, but she came in long after that, laughing. She slept in late, grouchy, cuddling a water bottle to her pillow, while we went driving in search of coffee and hot chocolate. “And what do you say to more Doritos, Mar?” Dad asked, and I pretended to throw up.

She said other things that left me watchful and adrenalized. I didn’t draw attention to the discrepancies because her memory might be flawed, but so was mine. So was everyone’s, except the filter-feeding behemoth that follows us all, and while we didn’t seem to possess the same past, it possessed us equally. We found an equilibrium. For more than a year I didn’t even hear from her, not even to confirm she still existed. I waited patiently in offices, both virtual queues and in person, and I went to Victoria to line up with all the others at the Ministry of Information Management and Retrieval. The answers were always the same: here’s a chit with a number. We’ll be in touch. Said with a synthetic smile by an AI phone tree, or a tired clerk behind glass. They will always get back to you.

I am patient and consistent, also better connected than a lot of people, so I have pushed further than most. I also know the system better, and know when to leave things be, keep my head down, be grateful that I know my mother is alive. I am the model supplicant, waiting in dovelike patience outside the walls for the emergence of her mother, whose radical spirit has been (will be) corrected by the benevolent ministrations of the state.

You got to know other people because you saw them at the offices and in the spillover corridors. Which wasn’t to say you know them, just that you were familiar with their faces and concerns. Julie’s looking for her brother and nephews. Chris wants to find his wife. Chris thinks she’s in the foothills somewhere. Alberta has a few sites. You avoided the ones with loud voices who talked too loud about what was happening, even the explanations you really shouldn’t say out loud: they have been replaced by bots of some description; their minds are being damaged beyond coherence by electroshock or DBS. Uncommon, but appealing: discrepancies are coded messages that only family will recognize, and thus communicate important information about location, and security movements, and the details of what’s happening inside, in preparation for a massive action. We should all pool the discrepancies, and see what picture they show us, if we stand far enough back. We should talk. We should organize.

I have never contributed to these efforts. In lineups—the sorts of lineups that involve standing up every fifteen minutes to move one spot down in the long row of hard blue chairs—I listened, but said nothing, only thought, you don’t know how loud your voice is why don’t you care that the walls are full of cameras and your face is so well known to the machine no one you love can ever be sure it’s you talking to them.

I didn’t need specifics regarding what happened inside, because what happened inside is what’s happened inside such education centers since they were first invented. Repetition and regulation. Rote recitation of truths regarding the nature of the society to which we belong. The principle being—I knew this, because Mom told me—that the surface recitation has a transformative effect on the mind, even if the mind resists the meaning of the words it says.

And then the culturally-specific humiliation, and the strategic application of pain—

“—Recite platitudes that deny climate change,” she said, “or the refugee crisis or ethnic cleansing or forced sterilization or eugenics. The perfectibility of the human animal in an ideal society. Repeat it and eventually you believe it. Or act like you believe it, which is just as good as far as they’re concerned.”

That was near the end, when she said those sorts of things out loud, and in text, and every last fragment collected and shared them across whatever the network is now. Five Eyes. Nine Eyes. Ten Billion Eyes. In collaboration, those systems extracted meaning and implication from the marks she made on the screens and the sounds from her mouth—rarely out of range of a microphone—cross-referencing those patterns with other patterns. They flagged her profile. They saw the outcomes, and identified my mother as a point of vulnerability. In her terms: an imperfect citizen.

Me too, probably, and Dad, though we’re less threatening. We don’t talk often anymore. It was difficult to have a conversation when most of what matters is dangerous to say out loud. Dad mentions that he’s repainting the garage. I talk about how I want to do a bike trip through Oregon. Dad says he thinks he’s got a rat in the basement. I say I had some decent wontons at a new place that opened around the corner. Hanging over our conversation, a list of things we don’t mention: droughts (unless historical); disappearing island chains; climate refugees; the rage associated with rising temperatures and food prices; the—

—But this isn’t productive. We both know. We talk about whether he can catch the rat with a humane trap. We talk about how smart rats are, and how deftly they have adapted to human landscapes. I say I’ll make a trip to help. He says no no, no need. I’m fine. I say, you should come visit me, do city stuff, and he says no no no, no need. I’m fine. We’re both fine. As you can see, I am now good at lying.

I ran into an aunt at some event, and she said, “I haven’t heard from your mom in ages, how is she?”

“Oh. She’s doing better.”

“Better? What happened?”

“She contracted one of the antibiotic-resistant strains of TB, and she’s taking some time to recover.”

“I’m so sorry to hear it. Where is she?”

“One of the new sanatoriums. She’ll be in for a while.”

“Oh, Mar. She’ll be in my thoughts. Pass that on, would you? Or maybe I’ll email her.”

This was the safe response. An innocuous message passed on. No further inquiry. No possibility of betrayal.

I set my keys on the little shelf by the door and sighed, the way you do when you take off high heels or get somewhere quiet where you can cry. Then I heard someone shifting on my couch.

She squealed. “Mar! Mar! Look at you! The last time I saw you was at your mom’s fiftieth. When was that? Oh god don’t tell me. That means we’re old.”

I have an Aunt Sophie. She was a thin, athletic woman, honey-brown hair, not Mom’s pixie cut, but of the same vintage, choppy, with playful silver highlights. She was dressed in elegant athleisure. And you know, at that moment she could have been an aunt, one of the women from Mom’s PhD program, or a second cousin, or someone from the Elder college where she talked political philosophy.

“Where did you—?”

“—I’m just going to be in town for a couple of weeks, and I’m going to be nearby while I deal with a contract. I saw your mom, you know.”

“What?”

“Last week. That’s why I’m here. I knew you were in the city, but I didn’t know where, obviously, and—okay, I was a little embarrassed that I’ve been so out of touch with everyone. It’s these short contracts. They’re disorienting. I travel. So. Much.”

“You heard from Mom?”

“Yes. And I realized how much I’ve missed of your life these last years. Remember when I lived on Elm Street and you guys used to come over and we’d go to that one park with the splash pad, and then we’d get ice cream on the drive?”

I found myself nodding. It’s what you do. Lie.

“Anyway.” My new aunt said. “I thought I’d come over and I had your mom’s key so. I brought you dinner, too. Are you still vegan?”

“Yes,” I said. “For five years now.”

“Good. You know, while I was waiting I remembered how much you hated cooking when you were a teenager—remember how your mom tried to teach you to make, I don’t know, spaghetti sauce, and the fights. Oh God. I heard about the fights.”

I had not remembered those fights in years. “The Bolognese,” I said. “I still can’t make it. On principle.”

“I brought pakoras. They’re off the fucking hook—I ate like two of them waiting for you. Let’s go eat the rest.”

The pakoras were excellent. The rice she also brought was fragrant and nutty underneath the curry. The beer delicious, bubbling out of our glasses and over the rough table on my back deck, which just had room for four people. Sophie talked about grad school and Mom, about parties they threw together, about staying up late crying over deadlines and supervisors, about graduation, and how Mom had blown hers off for the government job, but been there the next year for Sophie’s, already pregnant with me.

“So you were at my graduation. Good luck charm.”

I slid into this the way we slid into so many things: the loss of cities to the encroaching waters and deserts, the swamps and the Zika virus creeping north along the Mississippi, as the days grew hotter and the mosquitoes adapted. A kind of compliant quiet—pleasant, safe—overtook me as I thought yes, of course I had an aunt named Sophie. Of course.

She slept that night on the couch. It was the obvious thing to do. Curfew.

That night I lay in bed and recited the facts of my life: I do not have an aunt named Sophie; my mother did not have antibiotic-resistant TB and was not in a sanatorium on one of the quarantine islands. My mother is in an internment camp with yellow cinder block walls, somewhere in the mountains, far enough north that she’s surrounded by tamarack, maybe by black spruce. At the end of the road with no exit. Britney is gone. The dam on the Peace River was bombed last year. Gasoline shortages are worse.

In the dark I texted Mom, or the Mom-function of some bot, or the person assigned to be my mom that shift, while my real mom—the internal enemy—underwent her daily reeducation, which wasn’t happening but was happening all the time. Maybe, I thought, as I typed, these words are shuttling right out to the living room, where my aunt Sophie was not sleeping, but surveilling the various fictions of my family relationships. I wondered how many nieces and nephews she had.

Sophie is here.

Who? The answer came too quickly. Maybe she wasn’t sleeping. She had trouble sleeping, she said, despite all the fresh air and exercise. Maybe she wasn’t Mom, maybe she was—

Sophie. My aunt.

Awesome. How is she? I haven’t seen her for ages. She asked about you, though. Not surprised she turned up. She just finished that contract in Halifax.

She’s great. She brought pakoras from the place on Main.

Oh man. I miss those.

They’re really good. We have leftovers. I wish we could send them.

I want pot stickers from Hon’s. And honeymoon rice. Then we should go for gelato.

Triple scoop. Then back for another three.

You should ask your dad if he’ll come into town and have gelato with you.

He’s so busy.

I didn’t write he hates the city now or he hates people now or neither of us can afford the gas if we want to eat. I wrote, he’s so busy and somewhere, the mom-function, or the behemoth, took note.

Have you heard from Britney?

And then I had to stop, because the question hurt so much it didn’t matter whether the woman on the other side was my mother, or a fiction, or some synthesis of true and false too complicated to understand.

You ask yourself as you read my record: why is she so compliant? Why doesn’t she tell the woman who keeps visiting daily, bringing food and asking questions about work and dating and Mom and Dad, why doesn’t she just say, you aren’t my aunt, I don’t have an aunt.

I answer: because this is what we all do. Because I don’t want to end up removed to a complex somewhere in the northern mountains, where if I escaped the hundreds of km between me and a highway would kill me before any of the guards had to. Because things can always get worse for everyone involved. Because they need someone on the outside.

But also. Also. Because she knows that I love honeymoon rice, and that I would like nothing better than to gorge on pakoras and gelato with Mom and Dad, and talk about inconsequential things, without reference to—or—or—but rather what we watched on TV and whether it was a Mac’s convenience or a 7-11 that we used to stop at on our way out of town for holiday road trips (it was definitely a 7-11). Whether the aphids are back on the nasturtiums. I talk this way with the entity who is/isn’t my mother, who may be my mother, who may be human. The entity behaves so exactly like my mother, and I like that, because then I don’t think about how she’s dead, or in solitary, somewhere, with the volume on prog rock or economic propaganda at 79 decibels for weeks on—

—But this is not productive.

My face betrays itself to the camera that is watching me, that also hears the catch in my voice when I thank the barista for my coffee. I use the drive-through because it offers marginally more privacy, since it can’t read your whole body, and because if you order with the app the drink is there and you don’t have to say anything and you have the pleasure of silence, though your face—the breathing, roughened by repressed tears—is still visible to it.

The girl who gives me her drink is impassive, but I think—a flicker of sympathy in her eyes? She can’t tell that I’m contaminated by my association with my mother, that I have an Aunt Sophie. But maybe she’s contaminated, too, and has an Aunt Sophie. Who knows? You don’t wait long enough to find out.

Sophie and I watch movies and go for walks, and sometimes I think how much I would like it if Sophie was my aunt. She clucks over me when I cough and asks whether I’ve tried turmeric and makes me tea of mint and ginger. It would be very easy to accept the gentleness of this state-sponsored intervention, ignoring the deviations I hear in conversation, and the fact that she is also someone else’s aunt. I like Sophie. That’s what I keep thinking. I like her. It’s such a relief to have someone like a mom around that I cry, sometimes, when she checks in to see if I ate lunch.

We walk past my neighbors who say, who’s that, Mar? And I say, this is my Aunt Sophie, and they all smile, and I don’t know—not really—if they believe me, or if Aunt has become code for them as it has for me, for something you can’t talk about, a person who is close to you like a missing lover, like family, but who is—

Dad called. Unusual, therefore treacherous. “It’s confirmed,” he said.

Sophie was on the porch. She’d waved yes yes when I got the call, take it, and she kept eating. I’d made us cold noodles with mint and basil from the pot I kept in the corner of the little deck.

“When?”

“This morning. I’m going to head out tomorrow morning.”

“I could be there—”

“—No, you can’t. It’s contagious. You’ll have to get checked out. They’ll be in touch. Probably soon.”

“What do you need?”

“Nothing. Just to hear your voice.”

In the silence my throat shut and on the other side of the line, his throat shut too. I tried to think of safe things I could say, but what would that even be? All conversations are recorded. All expression is evidence.

“What is it?”

“TB.” He paused. “You know the one.”

We all knew what that meant. There’s nothing for us to say, because probably all the feelings, all the fear and anger, were exhausted that first year when we didn’t hear from Mom, and he went with me to the offices with the hard blue chairs. Now, though, it was just the familiar and inexorable creep of the end, as all us imperfect citizens were taken up, one by one.

Sophie started as soon as I hung up the phone, “What happened?”

I said nothing.

“Talk to me, honey.”

Mom used to call me honey. She still did sometimes, in text. Sometimes she didn’t.

“It’s your dad, isn’t it? I know how hard this is.”

I threw things into my pack. T-Shirts. Socks. Solar charger. Filter bottle. Fleece.

“You can’t go silent on me. Mar. Mar. Do you think this is what your mother wants? Seriously? You have to talk.”

Documents, hidden from her view by the closed door, on which she banged her fists, tucked into my waistband.

“It’s not good to bottle everything up inside. You need to learn to trust people.”

My backpack—the giant frame one that Dad got me for my first real solo expedition the summer I was twenty. It cost twice what I wanted, but he insisted, and he’d been right because here it still was. I checked my balance with Humanitas, the telecom provider for all the camps. Sanatoriums. Whatever. Ten minutes banked against next week’s call, and enough for a handful of texts, so I hit dial.

She didn’t answer. I rang again, just swallowing the five dollars. Then the woman appeared, her back to the windows.

“Hey, I didn’t expect—”

The image of my mother-not-mother hung, and reflexively I studied the margins of her face for the suture between reality and fiction, the faint betraying lines of an AI’s interference.

“You cut out.”

“I didn’t expect to hear from you. I heard from your dad yesterday, though, so both of you are off schedule. What’s up?”

“Dad’s sick.”

The image hung. I picked up the jiffy I had ready in case, and began writing on the white wall of my bedroom. DAD IS SICK IM GOING TO VISIT HIM.

Her face—hanging in the moment when she understood what I wrote—was animated only by the shimmer of pixels across my screen. She might have dropped, but I kept my phone fixed on the wall so she had a chance to see it again. One way or another, they already knew, and if it was Mom. If it was. If. Then she had to know.

“Are you talking to her? Is that her?” Sophie shouted. “You can’t disturb her recovery, Mar. That’s just fucking selfish.”

She said other things in quick succession, about my being a bad daughter, about how I was a bitch, about how I shouldn’t be so hard on myself, careening from insult to affection in a split second in order to stop me from doing—something. I wondered if she’d try to hit me.

I locked up the apartment with Sophie still following me, talking about opening up, saying are you a fucking rock? Tell me what’s wrong with Bastien, he’s my friend too, you can’t shut me out. A thousand other platitudes about sharing the burden of pain.

I got into the car. She stood in front of it.

“Why don’t you just put a tracker on me,” I said, “and let me go. It’ll all be over soon anyway.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I inched forward. She leaned onto the hood and I thought, this may be the single stupidest moment of my entire life.

“We’re family, Mar.”

Maybe she told the truth, though not in the way she thought. We were family in the sense that we were bound to the same omnivorous machine.

“Please,” she said. “Please.”

I could hear her saying those words to someone else, someone standing behind me, someone looking out of my eyes, and I wanted to ask, who is it? Who are you talking to?

I unlocked the door. She got in, face full of rage-tears.

“You can’t rescue him,” she said. “You need to just trust that things happen for a reason.”

I thought about killing her. I thought about killing myself. I thought about driving into the roadblock at the exit for Needle Park, which was now manned by American uniforms, hazmat suits, trucks with Chinese plates. But while I often have those thoughts, I have never pursued them. It’s how I have survived as long as I have, why I haven’t been scooped with my parents, with Brit—

—But thinking of Britney would make things even worse than they were. So instead I thought about the roadblocks, and how the exits for Kingsvale and Brookmere and Coldwater were bulldozed, so you couldn’t leave the car to feel the air change as you climb into the mountains. I thought about what might now be on the other side of the torn up concrete and rock.

She talked. She laughed. She told the same stories about my mother in grad school, what a mess she was during her comps, cleaning the bathroom at midnight, smoking until dawn on their tiny, rotten front porch. Ha ha ha.

I thought of all the times we started our summer road trips on the Coquihalla, headed to the cabin, or farther north and east. Other years due south along the American coast, watching the beaches change from shingle to sand, to Manzanita and Tillamook, then farther south until we found our way to California. I thought of camping, and the dogs with me in the back seat.

Her throat raw with talk, she kept going, “Your parents love you so much,” she said, “they want what’s best for you, and what’s best is to let them get better.”

“We’re going to need gas,” I said. “Stop at Merritt.”

“Are you even listening? I’m here because I love you, Mar, and because I’m trying to convince you to move on with your life, and let them go. You can’t change this.”

Once, a year ago, when I still hadn’t heard from Mom, and Dad had just moved to the interior but was off the grid because of the fires, and the Coquihalla was still roadblocked because of the attack on the dam, and I had no idea about anything anymore, and Britney was—

—I had the opportunity to find an aunt, or a niece, or a cousin. This happened when you appeared to be as compliant as I did. Ashley—my direct manager—called me into a meeting with someone I’d never seen before, a woman in a sleek gray suit who talked about how I could help Britney and my mother and anyone else I cared to help, by telling them about my extended family, about those cousins I met sometimes on the hard blue chairs. I told them I didn’t have any cousins like that, but that I’d think about it. I wondered, later, if my hesitation was enough. Maybe we were all damned because I thought instead of saying, yes yes whatever you like I’ll find a cousin and tell you anything you need to know.

The lineup at the gas station was better than Vancouver. Thirty minutes. I thought of killing her again, my Aunt Sophie, who had grown so familiar to me, messenger from a childhood I had not had, a life I did not lead in a country that no longer existed, full of loving familiar bonds, and gentle teasing, and a father not slowly dying of TB, a mother not being tortured by—

—I said, “There has to be someone you’re protecting, right?”

“You, Mar. You’re my goddaughter,” she said it mechanically, and I could imagine the dialogue somewhere in the dossier that archived me, identified my vulnerabilities, cataloged my failures. I have no godmother, no aunt, no mother, no wife. “I swore at your christening that I would uphold the ethical and social bond of our relationship. That I would love you. I promised—”

—We moved a car length forward. You could smell the wildfires, and see last year’s burnout, overgrown with fireweed.

“Daughter?” I asked. “Your sister? Granddaughter?”

It was like a moonscape out there, Dad said when he drove through after the fires. On the other side of the mountain, the cabin was safe, but probably not for many more seasons. I had always thought that I could escape there, if I needed to, get the camping gear and walk out to some place no one will ever set foot. A mountain. A valley where I could wait until this was over.

“You should probably go see them,” I said. “Whoever they are. They’d rather see you than get whatever help you think they’ll get. Because you’re not helping. Not really.”

When we got to the pump I filled up, then we went in to pay and get some water, and whatever candy was available because that’s what you do in Merritt, you get snacks for the last two hours on the road, even if they were sparse and overpriced gummy worms.

She said, “You know I don’t have a choice.”

I nodded.

“She’s not your mother, probably, the one you talk to. You know where your mother is. You know what they do.”

I nodded.

“I did actually know your parents in grad school. I did. You were in utero at my graduation. That’s why they thought—and I was already doing. It. This. For her. I was doing it because if I don’t—”

—And I will grant her a little privacy here. It only takes a few words when it’s people like us, the imperfect citizens of this perfectly known world. She told me things I do not wish to know, because they hurt to know, then we both looked instinctively for cameras and drones and microphones.

She said, “I have to. I’ll just be. I have—” and she walked away.

I went back to the car and drank from the water bottle, then started the engine. A full tank of gas, the sunlight brilliant, and I pulled out of the lot. I had, I figured, a couple of hours before they got to me, and by then, I would be at Dad’s, and maybe we could talk for a few minutes before they came. I saw the signs for Peachland and Kelowna, and the sun was going down, and eating the gummy worms I could almost be on one of those other road trips, out from the city to the cabin for a week, or maybe past the mountains and somewhere else, north maybe. This time I’d make Britney come with us, even if I had to beg her to take time away from work. And—the image came to me, though I did not want it—Sophie with us, sitting up late to talk with Mom. I could imagine another lifetime in which she was my aunt, when she and her daughter might have joined us for a week on the lake, drinking beer by the water, and swatting at the mosquitoes together.

About the Author

Rebecca Campbell is a Canadian writer and teacher. Her work has appeared in The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, Tor.com. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Interzone. NeWest Press published her first novel, The Paradise Engine, in 2013. She mostly uses her PhD in Canadian literature to make up sad futures and weird fictions.

Witch of the Weave

Henry Szabranski

Skink changed direction toward a knot of weave that loomed ahead. She sailed easily between the withies dangling from the tunnel ceiling, moving with a speed and agility I could never hope to match.

“Go around,” I protested as I stumbled along the fern-choked floor after her. “It’s easier!”

As usual, she ignored me.

It had been days since we abandoned the Motherman. Days since his vast body had collapsed into the sea of flesh-eating mist surrounding the plateau. Days spent getting used to the wide-open spaces around us and the strangely solid ground beneath our feet. Fortunately there was still weave scattered upon this new landscape; giant tubes that served both as shelter and passages through which Skink could swing.

She paused before the huge knot, a dense tangle of withies easily twice my height that hung suspended in the middle of the tunnel. It reminded me of the Motherman’s heart, though it was tiny in comparison to that great organ, and motionless. As Skink delved through its outer folds, I called up to her, “What you looking for?”

She didn’t answer, face crinkled in concentration, but it wasn’t long before she gave a cry of triumph and her hand reappeared out of the tangled weave, clutching what looked like a huge black spider. It was a weaver. Similar to the ones in the Motherman, and just the same as those, it appeared dead, or so deeply comatose it might as well have been. I frowned up at her. “You know we can’t eat those, right?”

“Not eating, Percher. Testing.”

“Testing what?”

“Idea.”

“What idea?”

But she was done communicating with me. She slid down a ropelike withy to the floor and leaned over her prize, pushing and pulling and squeezing until there was a loud crack. A circular plate split from the weaver’s knobbly carapace to reveal a shiny compartment within. I edged closer to get a better view.

“What is it? What’s inside?”

But Skink was not looking at the opened weaver, but at her hand. She hissed. The weaver tumbled from her grasp like some hairy-legged, poisoned fruit. I saw a bright splash of blood. A sharp edge on the weaver’s body had caught her palm and forefinger.

“Are you all right?”

Despite the blood, the cut seemed slight to me, but Skink cradled her hand, all earlier cheer erased. “Can’t swing. Not until this heals. It’ll keep splitting open, get infected.”

I eyed her skeptically, but the more I thought about it the more I realized she was right. She needed her hands to be able travel, as well as for everyday tasks. Her weak and twisted feet were useless over any distance.

“I’ll carry you.”

Skink’s face hardened. “No more carrying, Percher.”

I glanced through the tube’s woven wall. It was late. Outside, night was gathering. It wouldn’t be long before it was dark, sooner within the weave than without. “Time to stop and rest, then. Hand will be better in the morning.”

“Not enough.”

I ignored her injured tone. I knew she was more upset with herself than anything else, and not usually one to dwell on hardships. I concentrated on collecting fronds of weave and fern suitable for tonight’s bedding.

When I came back with the last armful, Skink was already crouched in a makeshift nest. She nodded toward the tunnel snaking beyond the knot. “There is something out there. Waiting. I can sense it in the weave.”

“More dead weavers. More dead everything.” I could no longer hold back my own growing sense of despair. I had been trying to ignore it for days, for Skink’s sake, but the deepening gloom, her injury, the constant hunger and discomfort we endured—it was taking its toll. Yes, we had survived the Motherman’s collapse. Yes, this strange new land allowed us a meager existence. But what were we heading toward, and why? As far as I knew, Skink and I were the only living people left in the world. How long could we expect to survive? Sometimes it felt like we were traveling for no other purpose than to distract ourselves from the grim reality of our situation.

“No. Something out there. The weave . . . it has a direction.”

“Direction?”

“There is . . . intention. Grown stronger the more we have come this way.”

I frowned at her serious expression, no clue what she what was talking about.

She picked up the dropped weaver with her uninjured hand and began to inspect it again.

“Why break it?” I asked. “There’s no good meat in those things.”

She didn’t answer, but carefully placed the tips of her fingers inside the weaver’s exposed, iridescent cavity. She closed her eyes and stayed like that, silent and still, for many moments.

“Well?”

“No good, Percher.” She cast aside the broken weaver, her expression unreadable in the growing dark. “Test failed.”

I woke, bewildered, to screams. I had been dreaming of long hair dangling over my face, lithe arms around the back of my neck. But reality was quite different.

Skink was clutching her head, her fingers frantically combing her mop of hair.

“Get it out! Get it away!”

By the faint glow of the predawn gray light penetrating the weave around us, I could tell it was past the darkest part of the night, but I could still barely see in the gloom. “What? What is it?”

The discarded weaver, miraculously reanimated, was scuttling over Skink’s head. Its exposed interior cast an odd, silvery light on her distraught face. Before I could reach her, Skink managed to scoop the creature away. It flopped and jerked where it landed, trying to right itself in a bed of weave.

I snatched it up, ignoring the prickle of revulsion as its spiky limbs clenched tight around my fist. Too late to worry about whether it could sting or bite. For something the size of a child’s plaything, the little weaver was surprisingly strong. It twisted and bucked in my grip, struggling to pull itself away. I searched for something to smash it with; a rock, or a stick—but there was nothing. Only my hands. I lifted it up, ready to throw it as far into the tunnel as I could, but Skink grabbed my arm. “Percher, wait!”

She thrust out her hand, the one with the cut, palm upright. “Look! Look what it did.”

It was a moment before my eyes could refocus in the gloom, and at first I didn’t understand what I was meant to see. The wound on her hand was still there, a dark gash extending from the base of her thumb to her forefinger . . . but something about it was different.

I peered closer, the weaver still struggling in my own hand.

Skink’s wound was neater.

Sewn up.

A caterpillar trail of stitches left in the flesh.

We slept fitfully for the remainder of the night. When the light from the sky became too bright to ignore, Skink rolled her back to it and declared she had a headache. She held the weaver protectively in her hand—it had crawled back to her earlier and she had let it—where it lay motionless apart from an occasional spasm of its long legs.

I resigned myself to a day or three anchored around Skink’s curled up body. She had always had headaches, even back in the Motherman; it’s just that I could ignore them whilst she holed up with Ma or Da. They had always protected her from the worst criticisms of our tribe. If Skink had one of her debilitating headaches, Da would order out foraging parties or give some other excuse to hold up climbing for a day or two. We hardly noticed, glad enough to stay in one place for a time. But now it was just Skink and me, and her condition was impossible to ignore.

The first time I had woken, ready to go, and Skink had instead rolled over and covered her eyes, groaning, I had thought she was just tired. I had felt momentary triumph, that at last I wasn’t the one lagging behind for a change, the one complaining about sore feet after hours of stumbling over rolling hurdles of weave, Skink gaily sailing above me. But my feeling of superiority quickly turned to guilt and worry. She tried to speak but instead only vomited. It was obvious she wasn’t feigning or being lazy; she was truly ill. I worried she might have eaten something she shouldn’t, something that had infected her with dark rot, poisoned her, but she was hoarsely dismissive of my concern. “It’s the same as always, Percher, all my life. Just leave me be. In darkness. Silence.”

So on those days she was ill I would forage for mushrooms and snails and water amongst the tunnel’s dank floor, groping through its undulating landscape of weave and mud and broad-leafed undergrowth. Sometimes I would find a gap in the tunnel wall and look out into the unobstructed sky and open spaces beyond, feel the wind and sunlight on my skin. Until it became too much and I would feel sick myself. Retreating, shuddering, back into the welcome confines of the weave. I couldn’t understand my fear. I used to sit on the Motherman’s skin, it seemed miles above the mist and within the sky itself, the hazy horizon arching before me. How could it be that openness filled me with such terror now? It made no sense, but knowing that didn’t help my queasy stomach settle or my thumping heart race any less.

It was on those days, absent of Skink’s company, with the weave feeling at once like a cage as much as a protection, that I especially missed the others in the tribe: Ma, Da; Wren, Feather, and Dart, all of them. Even, sometimes, my brutish eldest brother Broc, who had almost killed us when we tried to escape the burning Motherman. Sometimes, even more than the people, I missed the silent, hard-edged company of the library; Da’s book collection that I used to carry in a great sack upon my back, and in whose moldering pages I used to immerse myself, transported to a world long lost to the mist and the weave. But the books were all gone now, as were all the people of the tribe. Victims of the fire, of the swarming razorbugs, of the rot and the mist. I told myself I would have to get used to it. Adapt. Survive.

Such days were bad.

Today was worse. Every natural rustle and crunch around me sounded suspicious, jarred my nerves. What had Skink meant, that something was out there? Were we unintentionally trespassing on some other tribe’s territory, like we had with the clevers in the head of the Motherman? Was some strange, hostile face about to break out from the bracken and scream at me? Eventually I shook off the feeling, and after spending most of that morning foraging in the tunnel bottom around the knot, I returned with a handful of mushrooms, slugs, and fleshy tubers rooted out from the dark wet soil. It was tough trying to find enough to eat, especially as we had no means of starting a fire or any way to store what little we managed to find. We had fled the Motherman with no time to grab any equipment—only the clothes we wore, and even those were ragged now, and torn.

Skink had stirred by the time I returned. I hoped it was a good sign; perhaps we’d only lose that day instead of the next couple too. She was sitting up, inspecting her cracked-open weaver. It lay on its back on her injured palm, and its legs were, one by one, gently curving in to touch her other hand, as if in obeisance. I shook my head, unable to fathom her interest in the thing.

“Stop playing with it,” I said. “Get rid of little creeper.”

She glanced across at me with a glint in her eyes. “Pet.” She upturned the weaver and placed it on top of her head. Creeper used its legs to hold itself in place atop her hair. She laughed. “Hat!”

“You mad.” I turned away, shuddering.

Something landed on my back. Sharp-tipped legs scuttled toward my skull. I seized the thrown weaver and hurled it away.

Skink’s laughter followed me as I marched away in disgust. “What you afraid of?”

She was still laughing when I stopped, heart leaping in my chest, at the sight of a line of people standing on the tunnel floor only yards away. The sharpened sticks in their hands pointed toward us.

“You.” An old man at the front jabbed his spear at Skink. “Like Meghra. Patternmaker. Witch!” His words were heavily accented, but unmistakable.

The others murmured in agreement and shuffled back warily. I made a quick count: three men, two woman, three I could not tell. Was it the whole tribe, or were others hiding in the weave? They looked strong and well fed, dressed in tanned and stitched fur. Elaborately painted marks swirled over their faces and shoulders, skillfully executed bright patterns of blue and green and yellow.

Skink slowly stood, unsteady on her legs. Creeper had clambered back onto her body and now balanced on her shoulder. “Who’s Meghra?”

“Witch! Witch!” The old man waved his hands, fingers spread like claws. His rheumy gaze could not decide between settling on Skink, or me, or scanning the undergrowth around us.

He seemed terrified.

I made a step forward, my hands raised and open. “We don’t mean to trespass on your land. We are lost. Hungry.”

The man raised his spear and I took a step back again. He was too far away for me to rush and grapple, but too close for him to miss if he had any strength or skill at throwing.

“Where you from?” He jabbed—but did not hurl—the spear toward me.

“From the Motherman. Of the heart tribe.”

Skink elaborated when the old man showed nothing but further confusion, “From the mist. We used to live out . . . ” she waved vaguely in the direction we had come from, the edge of the plateau, so many days ago “ . . . there. Beyond the land. In a giant made of weave.”

“No one survives the mist. No one. Only the patternmakers.”

I backed further away. I did not know how to ease the man’s bewilderment and fear. “We will leave.”

“No.” A hurried, whispered discussion between the man and the others. He advanced. “Are there others? Like you?”

I shook my head. Images of Ma and others falling into the mist. “Only us.”

“Then you stay. You and witch. Food for news.”

I hesitated, exchanged a glance with Skink. “Food?”

The man nodded, lowered his spear. “Yes, come. Tell us about mist, how you survived. Please, you stay. Food for news.”

The old man replied to me, his hand outstretched. But his eyes kept shifting—with barely hidden fear or desire, I could not tell which—always back toward Skink.

The man said his name was Idran, and his village was not far outside the tunnel. Skink managed to stagger the short distance, though she leaned heavily on me for support. I knew it pained her, knew that she was still suffering from her headache, but her face was set in its familiar determined way. I doubted if Idran or the others realized how difficult it was for her.

The village was nestled in a small valley between the weave tunnel sprawled across its western border and a saddleback ridge dividing a line of high hills to the east. It bustled with more people than I had ever seen before, more than the most populous tribe in the Motherman; possibly over a hundred villagers or more. They had stripped weave from the tunnel and braided the torn withies into globular, nest-like dwellings with circular entrances and windows. These pods clustered in circles and rows and stacks around a communal space into which we were led. We were quickly surrounded by children and yipping little fur-covered creatures I was unfamiliar with. At the center of the space, a pond and a series of firepits, at least one of which was in use.

I was immediately attracted by the warmth of the flames and the smell of meat roasting. The skinned and gutted carcass of some large, four-legged animal was being roasted on a spit near the piled embers.

“For us?” I asked, meaning it to be a joke, as it was obvious the meat had been cooking for hours. But Idran nodded and motioned with his painted hands. “Yes, yes. Come. Eat.”

A slice was cut from the creature’s haunch with a sharp stone knife and the steaming hot meat was passed to me by a wary looking boy. I tore the hunk easily in half and shared it with Skink. Rich yet lean meat, of a kind I had never tasted—not as tasteful and as textured as heart meat, but delicious all the same after so many days of only raw river meat, bugs, and tooth-achingly tough roots.

“Please.” Idran squatted on a richly-patterned woolen blanket on the ground near the firepit, indicating we should do the same. The other villagers kept their distance, fearful or disdainful, I could not be sure. “Tell us about yourselves.”

Skink did most of the talking as I greedily ate. It was odd, hearing her like that, the villagers and their children gathering around. She had a clear, beguiling voice, I hadn’t really noticed before. Perhaps the children in the audience brought it out in her, their greasy faces rapt. She spoke of the Motherman, how the lightning had set him on fire, how we had nowhere to escape but to keep climbing toward his clever-haunted head, how there she had made the giant walk, and how we had found this land rising from the all-encompassing ocean of mist. Her hands were in constant motion, adding emphasis or effects or occasionally becoming transformed wholesale into characters. I was as fascinated as the children.

Eventually she came to us escaping the Motherman, and the current point in our journey. “I tell you about us,” she said, leaning back and straightening her arms, cracking her knuckles. “Now you tell us about you. About Meghra the witch.”

The villagers glanced amongst themselves and shifted uncomfortably. The children were ushered away. Idran stood. “Is late. You rest. Tomorrow we will talk again.”

Skink bristled. “Not fair!”

The old man hesitated, then sat again. The other villagers, however, quickly drifted away, with many a wary backward glance.

“Meghra used to be like us.” Idran jabbed a grease-slicked thumb at his chest. “But different. Even when young.” He pointed at Creeper, still mounted on Skink’s shoulder. “She was always interested in weave and stories of the patternmakers. For days she would be lost in the tunnel there, exploring and playing with the withies, bending, shaping, making shapes. Then one day she was gone and did not come back. Perhaps she had gone to the old city.” He waved beyond the pass that loomed above the village to the east. “We thought her lost, and that was that.”

“But then she came back. And she was changed.”

An old woman who had still been listening nearby leaned forward. “Meghra takes.” She made a circular gesture above the top of her head and nodded. “She feeds. Feeds on us, now.”

A man beside the woman pulled her back, obviously unhappy she had spoken. He glared at me with such an intense mixture of fear and loathing I had to look away. When I glanced back up, he and the woman were gone.

I asked, “Where she now, this Meghra?”

Idran pointed back toward the pass again. “Stays in her cave, weaves her strange patterns. Until she hungers.” He stood. “No need to worry. She does not come to the village anymore.” He nodded at a weave pod nearby. “This yours tonight. You safe. Tomorrow we talk more.” He joined a huddle of villagers that looked like they were determined to strip the last remnants of meat from the roasted carcass.

We squeezed through the round opening of the pod Idran had indicated. A straw mattress lay on the floor, surrounded by stacked empty baskets that stank of river meat. But it reminded me of the nests we sometimes built in the Motherman, cozy and private. Skink collapsed on the bed.

“World is bigger than we thought.” Her voice was soft.

“Too big.” I eyed the wide-open horizon from the doorway. Night had long fallen, and the stars and a sliver of moon glittered in the clear sky. I shivered. Despite the firepits and the shelter of the pod, the air here was cooler than in the tunnel. I bent down to investigate a pile of blankets in one of the baskets.

“I have to meet her,” Skink said.

“Who?” But I knew who.

“This witch. Meghra.”

“Why?” But I knew why.

“She’s what I’ve been sensing in the weave, I’m sure of it. Or if not, she knows what it is. Perhaps she found the patternmakers.”

“They’re just a story.”

She arched her eyebrow. “Like the clevers? Like this land we stand on?”

I knew from the determined set of her mouth there was nothing I could say to change her mind. And . . . probably she was right. So far we had been crossing the weave without aim; only to move away from the cliffs and the mist and to find enough to eat, surviving day to day. But now we had new purpose. Or at least Skink had, and I knew better than to argue. At the very least it seemed that this new tribe—with its intricately woven pods and penned livestock and plentiful food and water—were ready to tolerate us. Yet it seemed odd, the strange mixture of celebration and revulsion I had seen. Hushed whispers, furtive looks, children pointing. They seemed glad of our arrival, or at least curious, but many also seemed to turn away from us. Too soon, I guessed, to understand the internal politics of this tribe . . . and perhaps we would have treated strangers much the same, back in the Motherman . . . another pair of mouths to feed, a burden until we proved ourselves otherwise.

I stared at Creeper, huddled obediently beside Skink. It munched on spare weave shards. Was it my imagination or had it grown? The creature’s knobbly thorax was bigger than my fist now.

“You are a witch,” I said, as I threw Skink a blanket from the pile.

She glanced at me sharply. “Been called worse.”

Spurned by most of our own tribe, and abandoned as a child by her original one. She must have heard plenty of insults in her lifetime. I immediately regretted my words.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean it that way . . . ”

“What way?”

“I meant, I wasn’t serious. I . . . I’m sorry.”

She glared at me and snapped the blanket in the air before letting it settle over the mattress. Creeper bunched its legs as if it were about to launch itself at me.

There was no room in the hut other than to sit or lie down beside Skink. I considered leaving but she patted the straw next to her. “Come on.”

I watched the light of the fires dying outside through the weave of the blanket covering the entrance. Enjoying the warmth of Skink’s stiff body beside mine. Slowly, sensing her and myself relax.

I tried not to think about how much a fool I was. Tried not to worry about Idran, and Meghra, and being at the mercy of total strangers. To think about the unyielding ground beneath me and the wide-open sky and blazing stars pinwheeling directly above. I would have to get used to leaving the weave behind, I knew that. Just . . . not quite yet, surely.

Just as I was finally drifting off to sleep, Skink nudged me.

“Hmm?”

“They’re right, you know,” she whispered.

Confused, half asleep, “’Bout what?”

“I am a witch.”

We slept in, both of us, strangely comforted by the sounds of the village awakening around us: children playing, shouting, crying; animals barking and braying, chickens screeching, adults chiding. The sounds of family. The sounds of life, and of belonging.

I didn’t know how I felt about becoming a member of another tribe. It’s not something I had ever thought of before. Would these villagers, with their painted skin and dour manners, even want us to join them? Or would they only usher us on? It seemed they had plenty to eat, and plenty room. Perhaps we would be welcome, once we got to know each other.

Drowsing beside Skink, her hand inadvertently on mine, not wanting to move and wake her even though painful tingles spread through my arm from it being in one position too long, I felt a confusing mixture of contentment and melancholy. The world and the people we had known had been brutally stripped away, and yet here we still were, alive and together, survivors of it all. If only Ma and Da had been able to see us now.

There was the sound of running footsteps and rapping on the side of the hut. A young boy’s sweaty face peered around the entrance blanket. “Breakfast?” He offered a pair of stacked bowls and made pouring motions with an earthenware jug trembling in his other hand. I took the bowls and held them as he poured a pale liquid from the jug. “Drink, drink,” he urged. “Is sweet.”

I took a suspicious sip. Sweet and sour, fermented milk mixed with honey, perhaps. “Is good,” I said to the boy, who smiled in what seemed like relief. He ducked his head and quickly ran from the hut. I handed the other bowl to Skink, who stood and gulped its contents down.

“Today we find out more about this Meghra,” she said.

I sighed and finished off the last of the milk. Despite the initial sweetness, there was a bitter, chalky aftertaste and the inside of my mouth and my lips tingled. “Thought you might say that.” I stumbled suddenly, and looking down I saw I had almost trodden upon Creeper.

“Skink, you need to stop feeding him,” I said. The weaver had grown bigger overnight. Its body was almost the size of my head, its legs as long as my forearm.

“There’s something they’re not telling us,” Skink said, frowning. She swayed, unsteady on her feet. “I think,” she passed a hand over her eyes. “I think . . . ”

“What?” I blinked. “What d’you think?” She seemed to blur before me.

“Think they lied.”

Her legs crumpled beneath her. I tried to catch her, but my arms seemed heavier and larger than the Motherman’s. I could not move, could not turn, even as the hut’s straw-covered floor tilted upward and slammed me in the face.

I watched, an observer trapped in the cave of my own skull, as Creeper jumped upon Skink’s fallen body. She twitched but otherwise did not move, as its legs and feelers danced over her flesh.

The hut’s entrance blanket was pulled aside. Light and then shadow spilled over us. A sandaled foot kicked Creeper into the corner, where it fell into one of the baskets, curled up as if dead.

Unable to move, every moment sinking deeper into a sickly darkness, I was helpless as we were seized and dragged out of the hut.

“Why.”

My lips and mouth, still numb, slowly returned to life.

“Why.”

Idran’s swirl-covered face hovered into view. Fat black flies circled his head. He avoided looking into my eyes as he checked my bonds were tight. (They were.)

“Rather you than us, my unlucky friend.”

The journey had been a blur of rough jolts and hard, ever-changing grips upon my body; chattering voices, half-snatched conversations—“Such a blessing”—“Andar will be relieved”—“Still think we should save one ’til later.” Bright sky and dark ground lurched before my eyes and only served to sicken me more. Eventually the movement and sound reached a crescendo and then retreated, and only then, when I could only hear a single set of crunching footsteps and the soughing of the rotten-smelling wind, did I manage to turn my head and look around me. Then I wished I hadn’t.

I was tied upright to a thick pole or stave of some kind. Skink similarly bound a little ahead of me. We were outside the village, up the cinder slope toward the pass. Sharp-ridged, bare hills rose to either side.

Around us, bodies piled carelessly in the dirt. Crows and worms rooted amongst the sticklike bones and leathery bags of skin. Teeth-lined gaping mouths, slitted nostrils and eyes. The tops of heads missing, sliced open, empty as old eggshells, lined by blowflies.

The stench.

“Meghra will come soon,” Idran said.

I struggled to find words to express my rage and fear. Only a mewling, groaning sort of noise emerged.

“Do not think too badly of us, stranger.” Idran remained impassive. “If we do not offer tribute, then twice as many are taken. If we run, we are hunted. We have no choice, as you see.”

Skink squirmed in her ropes to look over her shoulder. “No worry, Percher.” Her words still slurred. “Not afraid. Me witch, too.”

Idran gave a sad nod. “Maybe so. Who knows? If we could stop Meghra we would. But we cannot.”

With a final vicious tightening of the knots around my wrist, he walked out of my field of vision and was gone.

I shouted after him. Cursed him and his tribe. It was as futile as insulting the brainless dead at our feet.

It did not stop me.

Skink hung limp upon her post. Silent. Waiting.

Only wisps of cloud scarred the brightening sky, but the earth was dark here, the rock-strewn soil densely packed, with little vegetation. I still found the sight and sensation of the flat, nonwoven surface fascinating and disturbing. Such binary distinction between ground and sky, with hardly any degree of ambiguity or complexity; you were either on the ground, or, with vastly greater difficulty, above or below it, nothing in between. No opportunity to burrow down, shimmy into crevices, find shelter. It made me queasy, thinking about how exposed I was, how far I would have to run to hide from any threat . . .

The burn from my bound hands reminded me even that was no longer an option.

Skink’s next words only deepened the sick feeling in my stomach.

“She comes.”

As one, the crows and flies swarming over the abandoned flesh of the dead rose into the sky and circled away.

A dark sun rose over the crest of the ridge. At first I could not properly resolve its shape or understand its scale, as it writhed and lurched upon its many-jointed limbs toward us. Then I realized it was a face, a head, carried upon giant, insect-like legs that splayed from a trunk-like neck. As it crawled closer its size became clear: easily four times my height, more if you counted the huge mane of snakelike, writhing weave atop it. I frantically pulled and twisted my hands and feet, but Idran’s cursed bonds only cut deeper into my flesh.

“What have we here? New treats?”

To my surprise, the giantess’ voice was that of a frail old woman’s, and no louder. The strange dissonance between the scale of the body and the sound she made only terrified me more. A woven forelimb, like a giant crab’s claw, easily shoved aside the piled corpses. Meghra reared over Skink’s bound form. A huge mesh face peered down at her, all swiveling eyes and cavernous horror of a mouth, cackling, “Different, different, that’s what you are.”

“Leave her alone!” I shouted.

Meghra immediately shifted her attention to me. It was then, as she became my entire darkened world, that I realized her great mass was nothing more than a ghoulish mask, a giant intricate contraption within which the real Meghra lay buried, a hunched old woman deep in the chest of the giant puppet she wore like a costume around her.

She cackled again, a gleeful, evil sound. “No, not you.”

I woke with such a pain throbbing in my shoulders and neck; the oblivion of death was preferable. There was no sign of Meghra, and no sign of Skink. The rope that had tied her to her stave had fallen to the ground, torn and bloodstained. Only the brain-scourged dead surrounded me.

With growing despair I realized my own bonds remained intact, that I was still tied firmly to my pole. I must have passed out, or been hit by one of Meghra’s tentacles. Was she behind me? Was I about to be snatched—or worse, my head peeled open? I twisted and turned, ignoring the pain of moving my neck, but there was only the open sky above me. Eventually I dared to cry out—barely more than a croak, really—but there was no answer.

I had been abandoned, rejected by Meghra. Skink hadn’t been so lucky.

I dangled there for what seemed like an age, alternating between rage and despair. There was no answer to my increasingly desperate cries; only the mocking calls of the returning crows and the soughing of the wind. There was no sign of Idran or the villagers. The cowards.

I spotted dark movement from the corner of my eye and for a moment I feared that Meghra had returned, or perhaps the crows had summoned enough courage to approach me . . . but it was a familiar mixture of jerky and smooth motion.

“Hey, Creeper.”

The weaver crawled over the piled bodies toward me, one limb not working quite right, but still capable of climbing. I was surprised by how glad I was to see this creature. A friendly, familiar presence despite its completely alien nature. The weaver reached my bound feet, and began to climb my legs. I had a sudden moment of doubt. How big and heavy it had grown. What was it doing?

Strong, sharp legs gripped my knees, my thighs, pincers closed round my back—snick, snick. My numbed fingers immediately began to tingle as my hands came free. Snick, snick, my legs, too.

I immediately stumbled down the mound of bodies, my feet catching bony ridges and squelching in unspeakable cavities. When I reached the bare ground I fell to my knees and retched up the remnants of that morning’s treacherous breakfast. The wide-open sky reeled above me, pressed me down into the hard, unrelenting wall of dirt beneath me. I felt crushed between the two. Insignificant, as helpless as an insect.

Swallowing hard, I forced myself to my traitorous feet. Was that how Skink felt, all the time, feeling like the ground would rush up and punch her at any moment?

How long was I out for—surely not long? But there was no sign of anyone on the saddleback ridge apart from Creeper and me. The cowardly villagers had at least the decency not to witness our fate.

Where was Skink? Where had Meghra taken her?

Was she even still alive?

The panic and confusion that threatened to overwhelm me quickly faded. Right before my feet—clear tracks and furrows left in the dirt.

Creeper was already leading the way.

There was a canyon-like depression just over the pass. Not really that far, though it felt it as I staggered beneath the glaring sky. Was it the residual effects of the poison the villagers had fed us that made my head swim so?

Creeper skittered before me, surprisingly fast even with its damaged leg, eager to find its lost mistress.

As we approached the canyon I slowed. My heart pounded. I thought I would be sick again as I crept toward the edge and leaned over, fearing I would peer down and find Skink with her skull already torn open. Expecting to see her, desperately hoping to see her, I was still shocked by what I saw.

At the bottom of the long dried out, half-collapsed gorge, she was there. Upright, swaying, her arms outstretched before Meghra’s giant, hollow face. At first I thought Skink’s hair had grown hugely and billowed out from her head. But it was tendrils from the giantess that were swarming around her skull. Pushing deep into it. Skink’s eyes were shut, but I could see their lids trembling. As if she were dreaming.

Floating up, Meghra’s manic cackle. “What’s in there? What pattern do you hide? Now let me in, child.”

I didn’t stop to think. I ran shouting down the scree-littered slope toward her, no idea what I would do. Would it damage her if I simply tried to tear her free? I didn’t care. Anything to stop her brain being lifted out of her head.

Meghra’s tentacles reared up before me. Before I knew what was happening they had curled around my arms and waist and tightened. My feet were lifted from the ground as if I were no more than a doll. From deep within Meghra’s complex, animated construct of weave, came the old woman’s voice, “There is nothing you can do! She’s mine now.”

“No!” I shouted, even as the grip on me tightened and the breath was crushed out of me. Skink’s eyes flickered open, closed again. Maybe she could still hear me. “Fight her! I know you can!”

Laughter from the old woman and a wordless groan from Skink. Her head lolled beneath the dark crown of tendrils and a suffocating wave of fear and despair swept over me. I was losing her, and my own life was in equal danger.

“You’re stronger than her!” It had to be true. Everything we had been through together, Skink always smarter, always tougher than anyone I knew. “Remember! You moved the Motherman. You made the mountain walk! This—” I waved a temporarily free hand at the grinning giantess. “This is nothing!”

Another moan. But this time Skink’s eyes fluttered open.

“That’s it! Show her!”

A skittering movement across the canyon floor. Creeper, limbs flailing at Meghra’s weave. I didn’t know what it could achieve, but it was at least trying to distract the witch.

The giantess lurched. The ground shook, and the tentacles holding Skink swung wildly. A mewling sound of frustration and fury emerged from Meghra’s mouth, as it twisted in new effort.

Skink’s eyes gleamed with sudden triumph. I knew the look, same as the one when she had made the Motherman walk. The tendrils stretching from Meghra whipped and swayed, as if they were trying to retract but were unable to.

The sound of whip-snapping tentacles and weave tearing filled the air. Meghra was trying desperately now to reverse away from Skink, to release her, but it didn’t seem she was totally in control of her extended body. Withies curled and swung and trembled. The old woman was crying out.

“Stop it! Stop it!”

Waves and ripples, the air cracked with sudden motion. Skink still hung suspended in midair, held by the surging weave, no longer captured so much as borne aloft. A mass of dark withies descended upon Meghra’s head, easily puncturing the fragile outer skin, crashing through to the frail human core.

I could not look as the weave bunched and curled and squeezed . . . until the screaming stopped and the only sound that remained was Skink’s breathing.

All around us Meghra’s mass of weave sagged to ground, as if in relief.

I couldn’t wait to escape the desolate canyon. But Skink kept rummaging amongst the listless weave, ignoring my questions about how she was, whether she was hurt. Briefly I approached Meghra’s crushed body, to check if she were alive or dead, but I quickly retreated when I glimpsed the mess of jutting bones. I kept looking at Skink. Was she damaged? Had Meghra changed her? Physically, apart from bruising that could just as well have been caused by the villagers, she appeared uninjured.

But she kept avoiding my gaze.

Creeper bounded amongst the collapsed withies like a crazed thing, spinning and biting off sections, curling and splaying its limbs as if in excitement. Eventually I lost it as it disappeared beneath the densest mass, its presence only visible as a disturbance on the surface layers.

Confused by Skink’s behavior, fearing that the villagers could return at any moment and become vengeful that their feared witch had been defeated, I climbed back up to the pass.

At the top of the ridge, a glimpse into the large, bowl-shaped valley beyond to the east. Just visible, I thought I spied distant spires and domes clustered on the far side. The view was fascinating, apart from the growing dizziness and sickness as the sky crowded down upon me again. I shielded my eyes, and tried to calm my breathing.

I jumped as I heard Skink’s dragging footsteps behind me. She had finally emerged from Meghra’s wreckage. She squeezed my shoulder as she leaned for balance against me. I tensed and my stomach seemed to flip-flop as she touched me.

“Thank you,” she said. “She had me. I would have been lost.”

I hung my head and shrugged, not knowing what to say. Shoulder tingling. What had I done, really?

“We have to go,” she said, pointing. “To the city. Find the patternmakers.”

“Believe that story?”

“Saw it in her mind, Percher. In her memories. She went there. Learned how to control the weave.”

I frowned. Had a sudden memory of Skink in the brain of the Motherman, exultant as she first made the colossus move. Saw her lifted on Meghra’s weave tentacles, eyes turned back into her head as she probed a way to crush the opponent before her. Truth was, Skink frightened me sometimes. Actually, quite a lot.

“Is that what you want? Control? Like Meghra had?”

“She too hungry. Too . . . damaged.”

I sighed. I didn’t understand her. Couldn’t. “Maybe we should go back to the village. Poison their wells.” My bitter words surprised even me.

“Really?”

“They betrayed us.”

“Wouldn’t we have done the same?”

“No.”

But I remembered my brother Broc. How often he had called for Skink to be thrown into the mist as an offering to the gods. She was the slowest of us, the weakest, he said. Abandoned by her own tribe and not even a proper part of the family. Ma and Da had always resisted his call, but there had been more than a few of us who had looked at Skink with hard eyes.

Perhaps she was right.

She was still staring at the eastern horizon. “I saw books there, Percher. Many books. A . . . ” She struggled to find the word. “Library. That’s where Meghra went.”

I eyed her twisted leg, her obvious state of exhaustion. As far as I could see, the land between us and the distant city was a flattened, grassy plain. There were only occasional odd struts or stalks of weave; no big hollowed-out tubes or interwoven corridors through which Skink could use her arms to hoist herself.

“It’s a long walk.”

She released her hold on my shoulder and stood alone, wobbly at first. I moved to support her but she pushed me away. “Don’t need to walk.”

A shadow fell over my back, and I turned.

Emerging out of the canyon, a giant, spiderlike creature. I fell back, immediately fearing a reassembled Meghra. Skink’s laughter barely reassured me.

It was Creeper, grown giant, bigger than Skink and I put together.

Skink quickly hoisted herself onto a saddlelike protrusion on the creature’s ridged back. When I hesitated, she stretched down her hand to me.

“Space for two,” she said.

About the Author

Henry Szabranski was born in Birmingham, UK, and studied Astronomy & Astrophysics at Newcastle upon Tyne University, graduating with a degree in Theoretical Physics. His fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Diabolical Plots, Kaleidotrope, and Fantasy For Good: A Charitable Anthology, amongst other places. He lives in Buckinghamshire with his wife and two young sons.

Annotated Setlist of the Mikaela Cole Jazz Quintet

Catherine George

Tight Squeeze

That solo! Art blowing so hard and so hot, jumping out like a solar flare. Art, the only one of us with a real instrument, a beat-up old brass thing with the spit of two hundred years of play in it—and, well, sometimes we thought you could hear the difference. Oh, people said the 3-D printers could make horns that sounded just as good, blew just as pure, and Mikaela said it was worth it to have anti-grav, so she could tow the piano behind her wheelchair—but still, there was something about knowing the horn had been on Earth, that there might be red clay or Terran bacteria gummed up under the keys. Every note heavy with the weight of time.

We never asked Art where he’d gotten a real Earth tenor sax, but there must have been a doozy of a story there.

Zymosis

This one we came up with the first time the five of us ever played together, on a Tenthday night down at that bar Lee Jae-jin ran on the lower deck of the ship’s outer ring.

The bar was squashed between a bot maintenance stall and a gray-water recycler, and across the ring was a shop that specialized in VR experiences of life planetside, even though those were thirty-odd years out of fashion. The whole quadrant smelled like seaweed from the algae synthesizers down-deck. It was a terrible spot for a bar, anybody could see that! Jae-jin didn’t care, though. He just wanted a place where he could take rice or barley or potatoes and make drinks like they had back on Earth, drinks with names like uisghe and makgeolli and ouzo, drinks that didn’t taste much like synthanol and didn’t sell like it either. He liked to say they were acquired tastes, but of course nobody on board had ever acquired them.

And, well, maybe it was the drinks list or maybe it was the neighborhood, but after 1900 hours the bar was always empty. When Mikaela fixed on starting a band she figured she’d ask her old pod-mate Jae-jin about practicing down there, because it seemed like the perfect place for a newborn jazz quartet.

Jae-jin said yes, just so long as he could come and play his trumpet.

“You play the trumpet?” Mikaela said, surprised. She’d never heard him play in the three years they’d shared a pod.

Jae-jin said, looking away: “Sure, sure! I’ve been playing a long time, friend.”

He’d played trumpet on music nights in crèche, alright. Sometimes, after the group got rolling, we’d go down to the bar and spy him hiding out back, long black hair spilling loose, warm blush of exertion rising under tawny skin as he chased the solos on old recordings, trying to wrest control of the melody back from the horn. He worked hard at it, he did, but jazz wasn’t a passion for him like it was for some of us. We figured he must really need the culture credits.

So there we were, that first night: Mikaela at the baby grand, the rest of us revolving around her like moons in synchronous orbit. We’d already played some classics, Monk and Coltrane, Akiyoshi and Washington, Glasper and Onwuachimba—not too shabby, we thought, for our first time together—when Mikaela suggested we jam, see what came of it.

“Alright, what about this, something real simple,” she said, long brown fingers spooling out chords into a loose, sparkly melody: something with a little swing, not too show-offy. After she’d played it a few times, everybody else—drums, bass, sax, trumpet—eased in, shy and tentative, like new pod-mates. We slipped behind while the piano raced ahead, laughing, urging us on. Then Mikaela nodded to Art, the saxophone leaped out into a solo, and finally things began to simmer, the music mixing on the air with the old-sock smell of Jae-jin’s bubbling brews.

From there it was easy; we fell into the melody like meteors, the piano and the sax trading lines until we wound the tune up tight.

Fifth Wheel

As a name, sure, it was a bit old-fashioned, smelling of Earth like it did. But then we figured a jazz quintet could hardly be anything else, so we didn’t mind too much. And there was a story to the name—

It was early in the band’s history; we’d just finished the song, a dizzy, exuberant little thing, and there was backslapping, a loud call for drinks. Gigs, festivals, five-ring tours: all that was pinwheeling through our heads. We lined up at the low glossy slab of plasti-crete that served as a bar, below the shelf filled with bottles of Jae-jin’s strange brews. In the backlight, they glowed like so many red suns.

Jae-jin, seeing we were curious, pulled one down and began to pour.

“Try it, try it,” he said, eager. (On work rotation he was in chemistry, trying to improve the texture and flavor of synth food; he was always foisting his creations on us. Sometimes we liked them, and sometimes . . . well, sometimes not.) “I aged it in a barrel. A real wood barrel, if you can believe it—oak, real Earth oak”—and we figured then we knew why he needed extra credits.

Whatever-it-was tasted like burned toast and scorched our throats like the afterburn from a rocket. Some of us wondered, silently, whether he’d gotten the process quite right, if the recipe in the databanks had left out some steps. Art, too old to keep quiet, put down his glass, and said, confused: “Is this how it’s supposed to taste?”

Jae-jin laughed, but when he said, quiet, “I don’t know,” we hurried to push our glasses across the bar for refills.

After that we turned to business: the song needed a name.

“Old Drones,” Fe suggested. We thought that was pretty much the worst name we’d ever heard, and said so.

“But it’s got that clanking bit! Like gears, right?” Fe said, and when we shook our heads they sighed and pouted into their drink, melodramatic as any episode of Farthest Star.

“The Experimental Blues?” That was Jae-jin.

“It’s not exactly experimental,” Mikaela pointed out, rolling a little sphere of green-and-blue glass—a marble, she said it was called, something she’d pocketed from the archives—into the shadowed valleys between her knuckles and back up onto the cool brown flat of her hand. She was always moving her hands, Mikaela was, playing with something, a credit chip or a chew sphere or a child’s toy.

“No?”

“It’s pretty standard bebop. Nineteen-fifties stuff.”

“Ah. I suppose not, then,” Jae-jin muttered.

If we hadn’t gotten it already, that Jae-jin didn’t know much about jazz, we got it then. Mikaela was our expert, our bandleader. There was no jazz in the databanks she hadn’t heard, nothing about the history of jazz she didn’t know. She’d played solo for a long time, and tried to tour around, but the fashion then was for bands—nobody wanted to hear a musician play by themselves, it was anti-communal.

Romy, just out of crèche, had been taking lessons on the bass since she was a child. She knew her vamp from her walk, her broken time from her break. Fe, well, they always said they had bossa nova in their blood; and we knew they had rhythm.

And Art? We didn’t know much about him, except his age, and we could read that on his face: the papery white skin lined in gray, like the bark of the aspens circling the Commons. But we knew he could blow; we figured he must have been playing for years, long before any of us were born. He’d never said a damn thing about his experience with jazz, but we figured he probably knew everything we did, and more.

There was a pause for drinks. It grew on you a bit, Jae-jin’s stuff did.

Romy had pushed her glass across the bar for a refill a couple times, and after a bit she began to look a little queasy, beads of sweat prickling all over the ochre of her upper lip, normally spiky purple hair wilting under one restless hand.

“Okay, I am thinking: Planetfall,” she said, after the fourth glass.

We remembered, then, that she really was that young—just out of childhood. There was a moment of silence while we all looked away, into the bottom of our drinks, or out the port at the back of the bar, to the distant view of bots harvesting rice from the verdant emerald curve of the ship’s inner hull.

“Nobody wants to hear a song called Planetfall,” Art said, gently, in his growl of a voice.

“Let’s play it again,” Mikaela suggested, a distraction before we all got too close to the abyss, to thinking about things it was better not to think about.

It sounded strange the second go—and not just in the way a song does when you’re improvising, playing into the solos—but we kept bashing our way through: Art, face serious under the swoop of his remaining silver hair; Fe, gloriously fat, bobbing with the rhythm, light gleaming off the dark gold of their head like the reflection off Art’s sax; Jae-jin, lurking at the back, glasses slipping down his nose, trumpet barely keeping up; and Mikaela, the mound of her box braids swaying side to side as she carried us through, professional as always. It wasn’t until the end that we noticed Romy: she was leaning on her instrument like a crutch, sweat streaming down her face and dripping into the belly of the bass, rolling around in there like the saltiest of seas.

“You okay?” Fe asked, poking her with a drumstick. Romy blinked, tried to straighten up.

“Oui, oui, c’est tiguidou,” she murmured, blinking. We mostly stuck to Common Shipboard, but get a few rounds in Romy and she lapsed into her crèche-mother’s lullaby tongue.

“You weren’t playing, friend,” Mikaela said.

“Non?”

“Nope.”

There was a pause as she visibly pulled herself back together.

“We’re playing which one?” she said, thick-tongued.

We were lucky to get her to the head before she bellowed like a moose. When she came back out, wiping the awful residue off her face, she said she had it: “Fifth Wheel.”

“Why?” Mikaela said, cautious, not hating it.

“Well,” she said, “Nobody minded that I was not playing. The song, it’s complete without the bass. Like a fifth wheel, yes?”

Corner Pocket

A bouncy, looping rhythm, horns blaring like the crowd at a shipball game, the piano holding it all together until, crashing, it fell apart again . . . a souvenir, this one. A souvenir of those long afternoons in Jae-jin’s bar, of the jazz-brain fever we got after a couple hours chewing coca and sucking back synth brew, feeling like forever was a Ninthday afternoon.

In those days, we’d started coming down three, four times each Tenthday, sometimes practicing, and sometimes doing shows that felt more like jumped-up rehearsals than anything else, with an audience that mostly couldn’t say no to an invite—oh, there were a smattering of friends and acquaintances, some fans of Mikaela’s from her time playing solo, but the mainstays were Jae-jin’s bond-circle, Romy’s crèche-sibs, Mikaela’s triad, and Fe’s wife, Geneviève. (Art never invited anybody, not that we saw.)

The bar was a good place to play, though, even when attendance was sparse. Jae-jin had it done up like something from Earth, and we thought it looked good considering the space used to be an Office of Colony Establishment, back when we thought there would be a colony to establish. There were incandescent filters on the lights, to give it an old-time look, so that every time we came in we had to adjust to being steeped in gold, marinated in amber. There was even something called a “pool table.” Jae-jin’d had the equipment printed and a few times, when we were relaxing after practice, Mikaela tried to teach us to play. She’d seen a video in the databanks, she said.

Well! None of us could figure it out, though Art came the closest, sinking a few balls every time we played.

“You should toss it,” Fe said to Jae-jin after another of their balls hit the edge and bounced out, suspending midair for a moment before slamming to the floor. The gravity wobbles that close to the bottom of the ship didn’t make it any easier. “It’s broken, yeah?”

But the pool table stayed. He liked to the get the details right, our Jae-jin did.

Everybody Else (Can Do, Can Do)

The closest we ever got to avant-jazz. The name was a joke, from one night spent listening to random cuts Mikaela had pulled from databanks; and Jae-jin, after hearing something atonal, all sprawling dissonance, complained that “Everybody else can do whatever they want, but I switch to the key of D and Mikaela says it’s not jazz.”

Angels’ Share

Ah, this song! This was where Jae-jin had his first real successful solo.

One night he’d gotten us tangled up in a real train wreck, the trumpet going off the rails and taking the rest of us with it, and afterward he was sitting morosely behind the bar, sipping a glass of the drink called whiskey.

“These things take time,” Mikaela said. “You’ve got a good ear, thank Ship. But you know it won’t happen at the speed of light.”

“Like your barrels, eh?” Romy said, gesturing to the backroom that housed Jae-jin’s experiments. “The drinks spend a long time in there, or they are no good, yes?”

Jae-jin swirled the liquid in his glass. “You know, the whole time it’s in there, it’s evaporating? The longer it’s in the barrels, the more that’s lost.” He took a small sip. “On Earth they called the part that was lost the angels’ share.”

And the next night, when Mikaela put down a pensive melody, the piano asking some question we couldn’t quite name, Jae-jin picked it up and blew a slow, foggy response, and in it we heard the story of how long we’d been in here, and how long we would be still, and what things had been lost and might still be lost before we set foot on some distant planet.

1957 Overture (Pata Pata)

A riff on a song that was popular on the livestreams back then, a thing made of mashed-up old Earth tunes, a woman’s joyful voice soaring above the blare of cannons and strings. Ours had the horns coming in hard, like asteroids exploding on the hull shield, but when we put our version on the livestreams it didn’t get so many ears.

Why not, though? Gen, Fe’s wife, signed, one night after we’d played a show in a Sichuan restaurant. That was the sort of place we got gigs: out-ring bars and down-level diners, places where they were trying things the way Jae-jin was trying things, not synth food at all. And once we’d played a VR party set in old-time New Orleans, but only once—we had to draw the line somewhere.

I like your music. It feels right, like it belongs here on the ship.

We all looked to Mikaela, and Romy got hurriedly up and went to watch a low-grav dance troupe on the vidscreen in the corner, and Jae-jin took off for the kitchen to talk to the chef—

“We’re out of fashion,” Mikaela said, smashing her drink down on the table. We’d all heard this rant before.

Fe interpreted, hands flashing ahead of familiar words.

“There’s only two things people want to hear these days, and we’re not playing either of them. I mean, thank Ship we’re not playing that horrible star stuff”—the big thing in music then was people turning the vibrational frequencies of the stars, the bellowing of gas giants, into strange atonal symphonies—“because I’ve heard more melody from a malfunctioning synth bot.”

Mikaela was on work rotation in the archives, helping decide when new music should go into the databanks, to act as an official representation of who we’d been in our shipboard years. She couldn’t vote against the star music—too popular—“but I wish people would stop listening to it, so I could stop, too.”

That was the way of things, we always told her. There were those on the ship that wanted to look forward, not back, even if they weren’t sure what there was to look forward to. We could forgive them the impulse, mostly, even if it meant hearing a three-hour dirge composed using the sound of water sloshing beneath the surface of an icy moon.

Yes, Gen signed, having sat patiently through Mikaela’s tirade about the transmission of culture, the devaluation of traditional forms and the solo instrumentalist. But I’ve seen string quartets and pop bands and rappers playing the Commons. Right?

Mikaela sighed and nodded, signed Yes, right. There were always those that performed the old ways, and some of those things made it into the great ship concerts on the Commons, and then into the databanks, if they were good enough, popular enough. That was what Mikaela wanted, we knew—to be in the databanks. Sometimes we’d see her fingers going, going, going on the edge of the table, playing through more imaginary riffs than you could ever need in one career. She was looking for something, a song that could write her name into memory: Mikaela Cole, jazz pianist. Part, however small, of the story we told ourselves.

How do they get there?

“Luck. Playing in front of the right people. You know the Council picks acts for the Commons?”

Gen nodded.

“Well, they’re not coming down here for mapo doufu. At least not on the nights we’re playing.”

So Blue

There was a recording, in the databanks, of the last broadcast from the drones on Gliese-786. We didn’t know what it sounded like, but we knew it was in there. It was part of our story, however much we might have wanted to forget. Nobody ever made music from that, though.

Trying

Fe had started to show up later and later for practice.

“Fire,” we heard Fe say, when Mikaela took them out into the ring to talk about it. “I didn’t know.”

“You’re an hour late,” Mikaela said.

“I didn’t realize.”

Mikaela gave up on it, and we got busy coming up with a new song. Mikaela had written out a lead sheet, like she sometimes did, but that night it was Fe that led us out, with an advancing wall of rhythm that rattled us all around in an old tin can. Everyone else just had to pick their moments, if they wanted to be heard.

“Ship, Fe,” Mikaela said, when it was done. “Where did that come from?”

“You like it?” Fe said.

Now normally they were the bright light in our group, in their neon silkex jumpsuits, bare head painted with great galactic blasts of color, always with the big laugh and gap-toothed smile. (To see them you’d hardly believe the stories of their troubled youth—oh, nothing terrible, no anti-ship behaviors—just the games lost kids play, hacking VRs and burning credits, and they’d clawed their way out of it, settled down to married life and a work rotation in credit reg, structuring our communal systems to keep us all on course, from falling into our own unmapped spaces.) But that night they were different: far away, quiet.

Mikaela wavered a hand above the keys, striking a few sharps. “Maybe. It’s got energy.”

With that we were down around the table, throwing around song names, except Fe, who sat with eyes closed, one hand slipping down the sweating surface of their glass.

“Fe?” Jae-jin touched their wrist, softly, and the drummer’s eyes snapped open. “You alright?”

We razzed them a bit, called them old for falling asleep in the bar, and finally, maybe just to shut us all up, they came out with it.

“Gen and I, we’re trying to have a baby.”

Well, that sure did shut us up. That was something we didn’t talk about much, the question of whether it was right to tie new generations to this journey of ours; once, late, Mikaela had started to talk about it, asking why—“why? We have it good, don’t we? No hunger, no real violence, a roof over our heads . . . isn’t this a good life?” And she was right, especially when we thought about what we knew of the years before Launch—but there it was; it scared us, and she’d stopped when no one responded. Privately, Mikaela had chosen to contribute to the genetic pool, and so maybe in a crèche somewhere there were children out of artificial wombs who looked like her; but she didn’t want to know. Jae-jin had decided against it, flat out; and Romy was glad, in theory, that the medics could keep a trans woman fertile through transition, so she could make that choice someday, but beyond that she felt she was too young to think any more about it.

Art, well, a lot more people had raised their own children when he’d been young, but we’d never asked him, and he didn’t say anything to Fe’s revelation. In fact, when we thought back on it, some of us remembered that he got up and went over to the bar and poured himself a shot of soju.

“The thing is,” Fe said, “it’s constant, you know? Like, if we miss one chance, it might have been the right time.”

“That doesn’t sound too bad,” Mikaela said, with a nervous laugh.

Fe shrugged. “Yeah. Maybe. But it’s all the time. I’m tired. I’m late because she says, ‘How about now?’ And sometimes it’s like, I don’t think I can do it . . . ”

We murmured what we thought was consolation, and a moon later they’d get their reward, when Gen announced she was pregnant and Fe began their habit of drumming their fingers on their wife’s belly, to ensure the kid would come out a drummer. That night, though, it was an easy decision: we called the song Trying.

Unmade Constellations (For Mary Lou)

The longest solo Mikaela ever had; she kept coming back, searching, to a moment of silence, then breaking it.

One night she’d brought something to show us, a thin black disk apparently imprinted with music in some way—a record, it was called—that she’d taken from the archives. It was Mary Lou Williams, Zodiac Suite, and the songs weren’t in the databanks. But there was no record player in the archives, and so the music was trapped there forever, unheard.

She sat looking at it for a long time, tracing one finger over the thin rings on the disc, and then she took it away with her, after. Sometimes we wondered if she’d broken it, too.

A Handful of Dust

A slight, misty thing, all the notes shivering and breaking apart, seeming to trickle away from the listener, but still warm, somehow; like the feeling we got, when we were playing together. When Romy laid something down on the bass, a rumbling, slapping run of notes, and Mikaela picked it up, carried it, tossed it in the air with a rattle of her hand on the high end of the piano—well, that was a great feeling. It was like someone reading your mind. It left a warm feeling in our stomachs that couldn’t be matched by any damn synthanol.

“But what is the point, if nobody is listening?” Romy said, one night, wandering over to the viewport and staring down into the dark expanse of the inner hull. Out the window the growth lights had dimmed for the dark hours, and only the twinkling lights on the bot control panels, like tiny roving stars, were visible.

She had started to say things like that, a lot. And she had started to talk about other things, too, about Earth things—oh, she’d always talked, dreamily, about Earth, and earth, the soil, the dirt, the dust, the sand, “the weight of it, you understand? The feeling of it under your fingers?” and what clay might feel like in water, what the stars might look like if you weren’t on a ship moving five psol—but we just thought it was nostalgia, and who were we to judge?

But one night she missed practice, and the next time she said, casual enough, that she’d gotten in with a group that was practicing survival skills, taking sessions in VR and getting on the list for shifts in the biome cylinders at the core of the ship, so they could try living off the land, learn to build a world from scratch. Fire from flint, fishing with a spear, shelter hacked from a jungle. That wasn’t any nostalgia. That was the dream of life on rock, steady and stable, not shooting through space toward unknown destinations.

“We’ll never need to do things like that,” Mikaela said, sharp, when she heard. If she wasn’t going to make a splash with us, she’d probably never make it, and she knew it; there weren’t too many jazz bassists on board, not good ones—so it mattered. For that, and for other reasons. “You know that, right? We won’t need to start from scratch, we’ve got all the tech we need, we’ve got the manual for starting society again, whenever we—”

“Leave it alone, Mikaela,” Fe said, watching Romy, who was plucking a little low melody, sad and spare.

But Mikaela wasn’t done. “And anyway even if we didn’t have all that, it wouldn’t be you doing it, would it? It wouldn’t even be your children’s children.”

“So what?” Romy said, smacking an open hand against the strings, so the bass seemed to thrum with anger. “So what, and so instead I should do jazz? You think this matters? That we will need this jazz, wherever it is we are going?”

“Yes!” Mikaela said, nearly shouting now. “Of course we’ll need jazz. We’ll always need jazz—”

“But it will not be you doing it, it will not be your children,” Romy said. “You all know we are going nowhere, but no one wants to say it, so you all just pretend. This jazz business? This is just marking time.”

“Enough,” Art said, heavy. “That’s enough.”

All the Things We’ve Never Seen

Never seen sunrise, never seen sunset, never seen summertime. Never been caught in a rainstorm, or slipped into the springtime sea. Never been alone, truly alone, with miles to go ’til the next human: even near the end you could do that, on Earth. Never set out to walk with no destination, or stayed up late to watch a meteor shower. Never seen a flock of starlings startled from rest, to swirl and dive against a blue-gray sky. Sky—what was that? We had the ceiling above our heads, and then, out there—space. A vacuum. Never seen our loved ones in the light of the moon. Never gotten lost.

We thought about how we should have put down roots by now, gone beyond steel horizons to find feet on soil and wide-open spaces. How the ship hadn’t been designed to go so long, and neither had we. We all dreamed of things we’d never truly seen, never truly heard. Like the wind: in our dreams, we heard the wind, and the sound of birds, and we’d wake up with tears, our bodies remembering an impossible world.

Giant Leap

“She’s too young for that,” Mikaela said, speaking of the thing nobody wanted to name. Romy had left early, that night, again. “The kids who were born after—”

“She’s not,” Fe said, who had a closer eye on these things than the rest of us. “It still happens. She needs a distraction—if this, if we could just . . . ” They sighed, and shrugged, and we knew what they meant. If we could just make something of ourselves . . .

Art, nursing his one glass of synth brew, put it down hard on the table. “Think I’ll be heading out now,” he said, and went; and off we went, too, quiet and bitter, to our pods to rest—

But warming up for our next show we found Mikaela grinning, riffing on C Jam Blues in one hand, pointing with the other to three people sitting at a back table, sipping uncertainly from glasses of Jae-jin’s latest: the Council, in the flesh.

We left it all on the table that night, playing like we could condense our whole lives into song: the babble of the Commons, the Babel of a dining hall, the wailing of a wake, voices raised in harmony and cacophony, drums like a lover’s heartbeat under your ear at night in the sleep-tubes. It was everything we’d wanted to say: the shipboard life, its loves and its losses, in music.

“Thank you,” Jae-jin said, to Fe, as we packed things up that night, a bit giddy. The Council had liked us, we thought—and we were right: not a Tenthday went by before we got the embossed invite to play on the Commons, the first time some of us had ever seen real paper.

“For what?” Fe said.

Jae-jin shrugged toward the three councilors, chatting in one corner with Mikaela.

Fe shook their head. “You think I’ve got this type of pull? That’s not how credit reg works.”

“Who, then?”

And that was how we realized that Art had gotten us in front of the Council. Art! What a mystery he was. We looked at the old saxophonist, and wondered.

Amy

Sometimes, at the end of a session, when the rest of us were pulling up to the bar, Art would linger behind and play a little tune. If it hadn’t been on a sax, we might have said it sounded folksy; and once Fe said it sounded like a lullaby, but Art didn’t say anything back.

Late on the night before our gig on the Commons, just before we packed it in for the night, Mikaela picked out a version of the tune, simple, just in the right hand, and Jae-jin took it up, real quiet, and suddenly everyone was in except Art. We thought maybe he wouldn’t join—he could be stubborn like that—but suddenly, out of the warm ring of the repeated tune, he broke into this golden, chaotic riff, ripping through the tune too fast, and then too slow, and then just right, repeating it like we were playing a round. We couldn’t believe what we were hearing. He was pulling us up there, into some sort of hallowed, golden space, like the dream of sunlight, and for once, we all went there.

When we came back down, nobody said anything. We just nodded, once. It was too late to talk names; but that night on the Commons, when Mikaela said, “Let’s play that song,” we all knew which one she meant. When we played it that night, we were great: not just good, but great. We could hear it, the audience could hear it. At the end they stood up for us.

Memoria

Our quietest song, and our slowest. It opened with a bass solo, played arco, a shadowy melody exhaling beneath Romy’s bow. We can still picture her, all these years later, leaning into that airy hum as if pressing into an imaginary wind. Out beyond her, under the gleaming lights, the ship transformed by the act of listening, into a temple, a hallowed place . . .

Well. The things you remember.

Two hours after that show on the Commons we found ourselves deep in the archives, jubilant, swirling in Mikaela’s determined wake.

“You’ll see,” she said, when we asked what she was looking for.

The archives were perpetually dim, like the time of day on Earth known as dusk, and hushed, as if someone had wrapped the rooms in a quilt. (A quilt was one of those things we had in the archives, back then. Maybe we don’t anymore, we don’t know; as the years pass there will be less and less space for what we were, all of that pushed out by whatever we become. They were only built for a hundred and fifty years of remembering, and so things will be jettisoned out into space, leaving a trail of human footprints across the galaxy.)

“Here,” Mikaela said, finally, pulling something out of a drawer. It was a bottle of gleaming spirits. “It’s whiskey,” she said to Jae-jin, and opened it, casual. From somewhere on her chair she pulled out five little glasses, and began to pour.

“Are we . . . are we allowed to drink it?” Jae-jin asked, awed.

Mikaela shrugged. “No one’s going to come looking for it for, what, five hundred years? And by then, well . . . I figure we drink some of it now, while we know someone might appreciate it.”

The first sip was sweet liquid starlight; Jae-jin’s efforts had more in common with synthanol than they did with this. He looked crestfallen for a moment, but then, buoyed: “I probably need to barrel mine for longer,” he said.

Then Mikaela said, “We need a name for that song,” knowing that it would go into the databanks, join the music we carried with us. “I’ve got a few ideas—”

We cut her off. The honors for this one belonged to Art.

“Alright,” Art murmured. “We’ll call it Amy, then.”

Sure, we said. That sounded fine. Then someone—memory serves, it was Jae-jin—went and said it. “Why that? Why Amy?”

“Amy’s my daughter,” he said. “Amy was my daughter.”

After that we got real quiet.

“When she was little she slept real badly,” he said. “And I had this song I’d hum to her, and sometimes it would help. Then, when she was older, she wouldn’t have any other lullaby. She’d say, ‘No, Daddy. I want your song.’ And then she grew up, and, you know, she could get to sleep by herself. But I never forgot that song.” He paused and took a slow, cautious sip of his drink. It was the longest speech we’d ever heard him make.

“It was the guitar, with her,” he said, gesturing to his saxophone case on the floor beside him. “She said she was going to play jazz with her feet in the dirt, hear the sound of jazz in atmosphere.

“The night the news came about Gliese, she was performing on the Commons with a trio she’d started. She had this solo that night . . . I’ve never heard better. She came home and said, ‘I’m a hit, Daddy.’” He paused, and looked thoughtful. “It might be in the databanks. I don’t know. Probably not. There were other things to listen to, that day.”

Romy and Fe were too young to remember that night when the news came. Mikaela had been seven, and Jae-jin four; they could remember the vidcasts, the sad robotic voice repeating over and over: Error in calculations. Catastrophic change in orbital mechanics in target system . . . Orbital mechanics: what an innocuous sounding phrase.

“What does it mean?” Jae-jin had whispered, to his father, because his mother was in a fugue state, unspeaking. His mother, who he remembered as a musical presence, a song just out of sight, humming while she worked; now she was silent.

“It means we don’t have a home anymore,” his father had said.

“She was fifteen, when we got the news,” Art said. “And eighteen, when she died.”

All of us knew people who’d died of it, died of the Gliese flu—the flu! What a thing to call it, when it wasn’t a flu at all; the doctors, watching people carry in their loved ones, those first waves of hundreds, listless and immobile, they said it was called psychogenic death. Dying because we’d lost the idea of home, and the next habitable planet was six hundred years out. Jae-jin’s mother had died of it when he was still a child; and Mikaela had lost an older sister, and Fe her grandfather, and Romy two friends in one of the later waves, striking after we’d already been decimated.

“Maybe it was our fault,” Art said, low. “There was a recording, back then, of the sound of the wind on Gliese. Made by one of the advance drones. We played it for Amy, my wife and I, right from the day she was born. And every time we’d say, ‘This is it, this is the sound the wind makes in your new home.’” In his raw old voice we heard, briefly, a sobbing song, and then he swallowed it, and seemed calm again.

“A couple years later I realized I couldn’t really remember what Amy looked like anymore. Oh, she had black hair, brown eyes, I knew that . . . but I couldn’t picture her in my head. It was like I had forgotten Amy. But somehow, even though it’s been years and years, I haven’t forgotten that song.”

He didn’t say anything else, and finished his whiskey in a burning gulp. The evening broke off soon after. A few of us would look into it, later, and find out that Art and his wife had split, after Amy died; she’d thrown herself into community organizing, into establishing the crèches and the credit regs, and we had some sense then who he’d appealed to in order to get the Council to our show.

Art had lived in the temporary pods ever since, and playing jazz was pretty much the only thing he did. It had been half a century since he’d first hummed his lullaby, we realized. But he still remembered that song.

Angel’s Share (Reprise)

That was our last show, that night on the Commons.

Oh, we came back with good intentions; we were gonna be big, we thought. But somehow, over the next few Tenthdays, some of us found that the reasons for being in a jazz band didn’t seem so compelling anymore. Fe, with a newborn, was the first to go; the late nights were too much. And before we could find another drummer, Romy got busy with other things. She stopped talking about dirt after that night, and started making historical VRs about our shipboard history. They were good, too—they still show them in all the crèches. It was nice, we agreed, to see ourselves as making history, and not just—what had she said? Not just marking time.

After that it didn’t seem like there was much point, and so when Jae-jin told Mikaela that he was giving up the bar, it wasn’t a real blow. He wanted to try something new, he said, apologetic. He went on to wine making, with synth grapes, and made a drink that was very popular for a while. Ever had wine labeled with a picture of a trumpet spilling out roses? That’s Jae-jin.

And Art—well, none of us ever saw him again, after the band’s last practice. And a few years later, when we looked up Artur Wisniewski in the ship directory, we found it said not listed.

Most of the songs died with the band. You lose them, after a while, we all agreed on that; when you don’t play, they seep out of you, in puddles of sweat, in tears while you sleep. Even Mikaela, back playing solo and touring the deep-ship dives, said she couldn’t recall the songs we’d once played. There was no record anywhere with those tunes inscribed in its grooves; they’d just disappeared, like they’d never been. All that was left was the names.

That last song is the databanks, though, if you want to hear it. Mikaela was right about that. Afterward, when the band was done, she went in and labeled it Amy, but she couldn’t listen to it. None of us could.

It didn’t matter, though; that was the one song each of us would always know. Sometimes, before a show, Mikaela would catch herself warming up with that particular refrain, and flinch; and Jae-jin would find his fingers pressing down a certain run of imaginary keys in moments when he was feeling a little unnerved. Romy found herself humming it as she scrolled the databanks, looking for bits of history to unearth. Fe, late at night, when they were feeling weary, would tap a certain rhythm on the pod roof.

There was one song that wouldn’t grow out of us. We never did forget how to play that song, that song for forgotten Amy.

About the Author

Catherine George is a lawyer who lives in Vancouver, BC, with her partner and two toddlers. In 2018 she returned to writing after 10 years away and now writes short speculative fiction of all types. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Flash Fiction Online and Augur Magazine.

Eclipse our Sins

Tlotlo Tsamaase

I pray to You, Mother Earth, Mama Earth, Mmê Earth:

Sun, hide your eye, eclipse your birth from our sins.

When Climate Change came,

It tore into Your womb, Mama Earth, sodomized it

—and we watched.

We stood and watched You, Mama, crying.

Still we didn’t listen:

We were the wildfires

The sky’s mouth was wrapped around smokestacks and tailpipes,

muzzled, Your lip hog-tied around that foul,

folding the poison into Your lung,

burying it into Your oceans, making fire of soft bodies, perfumed in oil.

We slit Your womb to throw out the children who lay in Your bellies across nations,

across oceans,

across skies,

distances they sacrificed,

as if Mama Earth is not their own,

Claiming the crime as many names like xenoph—I don’t want to say it.

Reality evolved to punish us for it was us who solicited climate change as Your murderer:

We have sin-fever

Your oceans swallowed continents.

What was once a relic, is our savior.

We can’t rely on technology when it relies

on electricity wi-fi fossil fuels that are no more.

A relic relies on nothing but itself.

Our souls were the only things we could rely on; from solar energy to soular power.

We had no other hope but to use them to light the streets and

our homes to give warmth in the long, rainy heat wave-winters.

Soon our actions, our thoughts became our enemies.

Mama Earth, we heed Your warnings, forgive us, forgive us for our sins.

The morning prayers ended, and we dispersed from the heat wave of the mosques the churches and tents in our respirators and cooling suits and the skyscrapers that raised their fingers to God’s eyes. Maybe one day Mama Earth will hear our prayers, maybe one day She will forgive us, and maybe She’ll set Her hound dogs—reality and the new culture—off from our bloodline.

a-burning-soul

It starts like always, a burning soul, a still sky, a quiet universe. A white rooster croaks, a death has been foretold. A quinquennial affair. The earth moans under our breath.

It is dusk. The sun is menstruating, smearing a rosy tinge across the bleak industrial skyline. It has teeth. Teeth to catch. Teeth of metal and jagged glass. Nothing homelike about this city. The smoggy vapor of every citizen’s breath obscures the soular-powered streetlights. I gaze out our cinderblock apartment windows at the masked commuters below in the streetways unable to tell who’s human, who’s not. Every machine’s gait is seamless, the joints oiled with the occult of the upper-city citizen’s desire and our rigged poverty. In the misty-sandstorm-laden morning, I watch some of the commuter’s smog-voices and smog-words rise into the air, like round shiny balloons, turning the skies rowdy and gray, tearing open the ozone layer. Even the poorest don’t have access to at least one basic human right: a respirator.

I lean against the window. Huff my breath until the glass fogs, and with my index finger, I draw the words “freedom is extinct.” My breath is smog. The window clears. I replace my mask, listen to the intermittent buzz-buzz sound of the breath purifier, the air purifier in our household, a secondary precaution in case the former fails. Every apartment window is a widow, staring back with lack of want and light, carved too deep into the façade to protect tenants from the penetrating hot eye of the sun, its fingers always hot and abrasive. We know it too well, for it probes our thighs, molests the unknown parts of ourselves.

It is morning, burning with too much sun. But in the other room, a darkness segues into a deeper dark, the air humid with a breath laden with too much evil that our masks rust by the second. Mama is in death throes with an immense force we can’t see, but we can see the slashes it leaves on her arms, back, and legs. It wants to silence her. But her voice has been to God and back, nothing can stand in its way. Even the shaman takes his shit and leaves, his shame tucked in between his legs.

“Fuck,” I yell, grabbing him. “You can’t do this! You can’t just leave. We paid you. We paid you.”

He lifts his palms. “Sorry, sisi. You paid me for the work, not its success rate.”

“What kind of bastard are you?” I shout. “Save her. You can’t just leave her like this.” My glare turns to Mama, her skin wet with sweat, exhaustion an axe in her mouth.

“I’m not God.” The shaman struggles with me by the doorway. “You can’t force me to be God.” My grip is viselike, so he snarls at me. “Aren’t you the hypocrite? How can you force a stranger to be her savior when you couldn’t live up to the task, yet she got you, birthed you for that reason? So you save her. You can’t just leave her like this.”

“Don’t talk about my birthright.” But my voice is weak, not as poisonous as my anger.

“Fong-kong human,” he spits, and the words wash over me like acid.

“I swear this is going to come back and haunt you, like all these diseases,” I say, my voice wet with pain. He pauses at this; for, an unfair treatment begets the owner a fatal disease. “Isn’t that how your wife died? She was racist, wasn’t she? She maltreated someone because of their skin-shade. The disease got her. It’ll get you, you fucking swindler.”

He falls to his knees, misery torn across his face. “I can’t be God. I can’t save everyone.”

My sister’s tiny arms wrap around my waist; her lisp weepy. “Tsholofelo, no, please, we’re burning up the minutes we have with Mama. Just let him go. Let him go.”

My grip slackens. The shaman shuffles and disappears out the front door.

Mama’s giving birth to death; 13 hours so far of labor. Our uncle, he stands in the bedroom threshold, the daylight from the other room sharp against his back, promising to bring a hopeful help. That bastard man. From the nook, where each of our melanin hangs, my uncle yanks his skin-color coat, throws it over his shoulders, it ties to his bone, taut as ours, black as ours. He wears our skin color, but he’s not like us.

“I’ll be back,” he says gruffly.

My sister, Botshelo, nods politely. My head refuses to move, but my palms fold into rage. The coat belonged to my brother who lost the war to this family. My uncle wears it proudly as if he faced the war. Bastard. He has a slew of habits, terrible habits. My uncle, his terrible habits have become the sewage of our city.

Mama screams again. So I have to pin her down from breaking more bones. And I remember how it started. When she returned from work two weeks ago. I’d visit her at work, bringing her lunch I’d cooked. I’d watch her as she sat in her factory chair with knotted fingers, her illness weaving the time-holes, the laptops, the eye-held for the rich, the bones in her back screaming out of her skin. Her skin was too tight to hold anything. I stare out her bedroom window at the shock of sun’s glare, refusing to enter. I stare at the miles of the city, sprawled out. The city rests on tribal land in a metallic voice devoid of adobe sultry notes. Architecture is a refugee of this torn world, unable to run, its feet frozen to the ground. The city has teeth, and it devours the land with its politics and materialistic gluttony. Its devoured its way through nearby villages, upheaving homes for “better” franchised architecture. It’s not urban sprawl, its rural devouring; sharp glamorized buildings glooming above shacks and poverty. We, the city, stand in the tribal land of Kang.

The country is the city, and it’s devouring its way into my mother’s body.

Mama’s back cranes as she screams. Her teeth gnash, a few topple to the ground. I collect them quickly, shake them like dice for a miracle, and put them in the jar, place it on the shelf next to my great-great-grandmother’s. Mama refuses to die. Not yet. “Please, Mama,” I cry. “Please.”

Her skin sizzles with boils, her scream penetrates everything, like steel boring into my bones. Something beyond us harbors in the air. Botshelo foolishly tries to plead with this thing.

“Please, we’ll give you anything,” she cries, spinning around, unseeing. She’s naïve. She doesn’t know that to give is to sacrifice soul-blood. I cup my hand around her mouth.

“To live is evil,” something in the air says; maybe the air is not an accomplice, maybe it’s the victim to the voice-holder that hides itself in its folds, camouflaging itself to taunt and haunt us. But that voice came when we hurt the earth; now Mmê Earth hurts us in turn. In our tribal land, the human soul is tied to the land; what hurts the land hurts the soul. I listen to the burrowing screams, seismic, of mama’s cries as she gives birth to death, fighting it too. Trauma punches a hole into our family’s time—time-hole—because he left, my father.

“To save someone, it is better to kill them,” the voice in the air says.

But why, why why why?

This urban sprawl continues to eat into Mama’s blood, bones, her mind, destroying the culture that once disseminated in her bloodline. The still night is mixed with the sound of rattle-shakers, like cicadas imprisoned in beads, singing into a heated crescendo. The mourning voices of the choirs, a funeral song, as they beat their palms and thrust their illegal unfiltered breaths into the balmy air. The treetops inhale the wind, tossing it back and forth, collecting sin-dust and disposing it into our mask-less faces.

Mama bleeds and screams, breaking bones that recalibrate themselves. “Someone is killing our land. Someone is our enemy. Someone in our midst hides in our color. Catch them! Catch them; if your land dies, you die.”

Those were the last words as Mama fought death, a death that tried to silence her, but her voice rose higher than any flesh, a bigger purpose than us. Her voice, her words are immortal, lived longer than the people who thought killing her would stop her entirely. But she lives in those words and many more:

“Only non-sinners cast stones,” Mama used to say, “which is why I cast my voice to you.”

“But how do I cast my voice when it was stolen from me?” I’d ask her.

My world ended on my mother’s tongue. She was the only one whose voice wasn’t a murderer. Mama wasn’t a believer, but she survived on her beliefs for a while. “Nana, I will only believe what I see,” Mama used to whisper as she kneaded bread, “therefore all these superstitions are just make-belief hallucinogenic kak that people like to eat.” Kak; crap, shit. We covered her corpse to prepare for her burial, but hours later we found it twisted; the apartment yanked the voice box from her throat, and days on end, the apartment whistled a hazy dark into the folds in between our legs. I hate this apartment. I hate this architecture. 

I don’t know why she had to test reality like that. Now she’s dead. She’s left us alone. And I wonder if she became a believer when she saw what was happening to her. Sometimes faith keeps you alive, but sometimes it kills you. So I hardly hold on to things or people. There are those before us who have sinned more than we have sinned, but they enjoyed the mercy of Mmê Earth, unlike us today.

Our sinful habits are the cause of everything that’s happening in our city—every action must birth a more powerful insidious reaction. Our sins are here to reap our sorrows into our corpses.

Mama’s gone and we are without her protection. We are demons; we can’t be exorcised.

Each week, on a Sunday, we rose early, went to church, sang hymns, waited for the priest to slap our heads desperately trying to extract the demons in our bodies. We’d return in our Sunday church-anointed bodies, and in dark rooms and secret-encased closets, we’d remove our skull-covering, clean the sticky residue of toxic thoughts. Sometimes we’d lick them, gluey and chewy, push them down our throat, wondering how something sweet and delectable was a danger to the environment.

Sun, Hide

I pray to You, Mother Earth, Mama Earth, Mmê Earth:

Sun, hide your eye, eclipse your birth from our sins.

Earth’s hands taste like smoke and suicide.

We held our unborn,

lay open beneath the cirrus veils of sky,

catching sunlit stars without knowing the death we salt their throat with—

our babies, their eager lungs slurping, thinking all is oxygen, all is milk.

In the mornings, we pray.

Because of infertility from this global war,

men have taken children from the streets, to have their children.

It’s sick; Sun, hide your eye, eclipse your birth.

living-as-an-orphan

My bed is a comforting grave at times. The night is still, sleep is a villain, taunting me to lull in its quietude waters. Death is a silent walker. I am drowning in a room full of oxygen. Oh, dear God, no, has the sickness come to get me? Has Mama Earth’s hounds come for me?

I don’t want to die like my brother, Itumeleng. Mmê Earth was angry. Her tides were high, her labors strong. She was purging a group of them one by one by their sins. By their lack of consideration for the other. The natives who looted the foreigner’s businesses, burning them down, beating them up—they were found walking about like ghosts, in incomprehensible chatter. My brother, Itumeleng, was one of them. We pulled him home. Several days later, he died. His xenophobic predilection killed him. Sin-fever is fatal.

But no, I am not sick. Something else must be the problem. A loud siren flares in the darkness, my bedroom, supported by intermittent flashes of a warning red light. My respirator screeches into the midnight hour, wailing. I sit up, pinwheeling; my lungs burn with pain as I gulp for the excruciating unfiltered air that scrapes its way through my nostrils, frying my alveoli. The respirator continues to cry, clamped to my nose and mouth, a gaudy beast, unlike the sleek expensive models that my friends have. It has a chute leading into my esophagus as thick as a python that swells and assesses the safety of food that enters my body. Tonight, it gags me.

Warning! Replace your respirator immediately. I need to change it. Warning! Pollutants rife in the air, in the city: carbon emission, racism, oil spills, sexism, deforestation, misogynism, xenophobia, murder . . . I’m not the only one screaming in our neighborhood tonight. Someone is dying because of a simple skull-escaped thought, and as they exhale their smog-breath into the air it contaminates us all. We hurt the earth, and so shall we hurt each other.

I fall onto the floor, banging my fists, trying to reach for mercy, gulping for air, but choking from its excruciating asphyxiation. I yank open my side table drawers desperately looking for another respirator as I would a sanitary pad when I leaked onto the bed. Dear God, I don’t want to die, not today, please, I’m only eighteen years old. Please, God. I’m hiccupping and sobbing, desperately pleading to God that I hope I didn’t forget to at least leave one spare respirator. Several rustic ones sit aside for return-and-exchange purposes.

As I rummage, the glinting eye of a respirator calls my attention as my bedroom’s soul-light licks its reflective surface. I yank the current respirator off my face, and it swivels to the ground, the chute covered in mucus as I choke out stomach-sac produce. Sin-dust quickly steals entry into my nostrils, making me sneeze and cough. I slowly dangle the new respirator’s chute like a spaghetti string into my mouth, and slowly slide it down my esophagus, and to avoid a gag reflex I attempt to do this with ease as I’m dying; it is a skilled art I learned the hard way.

Eventually, the mouthpiece fits snugly into my mouth and nose. A green glow fills my face, the new respirator hums gladly, filtering the air that enters smoothly and cleanly into my body. Fresh air is as rare as a non-manufactured human being. Respirator installed into the body successfully! I made it in 2 minutes 39 seconds, but the poisonous, unfiltered oxygen slimes the surfaces of my lung sacs, deteriorating them further.

I fold into the floor, tears dampening my face, panic gripping me. The soul-lights in our home flicker. As renewable as they are, the bandwidth of our souls is bone-thin, in need of being replenished. Darkness will fall soon. Life, for the generations before us, used to be easier, air floating around their bodies, easy to inhale, easy to exhale. Mmê Earth, You used to be so healthy for us . . . until we destroyed You. I understand now why You want to purge us from Your womb. But it is unfair. How come we are the ones to suffer for the before-generation’s desires that smoked our future? I hate them. I hate them all. And now this is who I have become; I sinned by breathing more pollution into Mother Earth’s belly. Nonetheless, I must show gratitude to Mother Earth, God, and the Universe. I prostrate, take a deep breath, glad and desperate for clean air.

My respirators last only a month each. This is my last one. I need to buy a new one, tampons, period-pain medication, anti-depressant medication, food, water—these are all necessary things that I can’t do without. Maybe I can do without food for a bit, but with my anemia, I need some iron at least. All my uncle has to worry about is food, Chibuku, and porn. Normally, Mama was the only one who’d remind us to change our respirator the day before they expired, or when we needed to buy more food supplies. These are the holes in our families, the holes we must survive with. Even now, I can’t maintain the tasks she managed. How did she even manage our water harvest, for when we open our taps, the droplets grip to the metal mouth, refusing to release; how did she ration and stretch our food storage for months long?

When Mama died, I had to become a mother to people and grown-ass men I didn’t even give birth to. I only care for my sister. But my bones are tired, they want a rest I’m too afraid to give.

the-time-hole

Every girl-child is given one of three roles: warriorship, housewifery, birther of death. My sister is neither, so she is considered useless. It’s only been years since my mother died, but it feels just like yesterday. The time-hole initiates the memory every month. We can’t run away from it. My cousin is rattling through the house, carrying away dust and sin, which coagulates to the upper-roof of the soul-blood, slick and sticky. She came when the time-hole reported my mother’s funeral to every family member. Everyone is here. She keeps bustling about every room. I want silence and shadows.

A low frequency forces itself into our ears, a burning signal, Morse code. The disparate breathing of the earth, its belly. By rote, I rise. Unfold my skin-coat; it ages slowly. I pick my thought-dial, it refuses to connect. Our soul’s bandwidth isn’t strong enough to carry our message, it needs funds, and maybe in many lightyears, someone will hear our story light the sky. Communication and commerce have merged with our bodies, tore its way into our minds with no need of access codes and passwords. It needs our bodies more than we need it. When we were young, Mama used to chide my sister, Botshelo. Botshelo thought of every unforeseeable bad thing. The divorces in our family. Men who weren’t supposed to touch girl-child nieces a certain way. Affairs that clung to the dark in the closets. And every time Botshelo woke up, she wondered if the city had shat her out yet, had purged her yet. She’d see me and hope ceased to light her eyes, so she’d lie back hoping one day that she’d actually die.

As I enter my sister’s room, her soul-light flickers as my shadow stomps on it. Her sickness is a gauzy yellow veil in the bedroom. Soon I swallow its acrid taste, bitterer than bile. On the other side of the house, I hear her thought-dial ringing, endless, the hour hanging fruitlessly on the limb of the only technology that connects us. She hardly opens her mouth. But her thoughts always crowd me in the kitchen as I knead bread, hoping to deep-fry magwinya for us. And now, whoever is calling us is impinging on our thought-dial’s bandwidth—we bought two to share five winters ago; we may as well share the same skull. I feel Mama Earth’s force clench around my body, and I do a quick prayer, I will police my own thoughts before they’re skull-born, before You feel their whisper bend Your bones. It’s a hard thing. Our bodies are no longer the refuge of our souls. The flesh soul-holders are grief-stricken.

Botshelo sits in the dim light, her feet dusty with not-belonging as she ropes sectioned parts of her Afro in wool. For days she looks like this, a medusa with maphondo-styled hair. Her time-hole is rusted and old and hangs next to the rain-wet umbrella by the door. That’s how I remembered that tornado day. The mud footsteps that led to her bedroom. The miasma of her sickness and sweat that hung humid-thick in the air first notified us she was sick, but she wouldn’t tell us why. That’s how I remember my sister. Her time-hole, a metal thing that stored everything about us: biometric data, digital life, AI assistant, bank accounts, medical aid info—everything, yet it wouldn’t tell us what she did.

I pull aside Botshelo’s tattered curtains, and a bird, something rare in our city, sits on the windowsill pecking at our window.

Botshelo sits up from her bed, joy brightening her eyes. “Death’s coming,” she says, staring at the bird. “It’s knocking on our window. My window.”

“That’s not a good sign,” I say, sighing. I knock my fist against the window. The bird throws itself into the air, flapping its wings.

My sister crosses her arms, a sour twist to her lips. “Why won’t the doctors just kill me if they won’t save me?”

“You know why they can’t kill you,” I say, crying. “The city still needs your body connected to the grid. How else can they connect to your soul?”

Our souls light up the riches’ avenues and streets we can’t even call home.

“Now, here, it’s time to go for your meds,” I say, dragging out her wheelchair from the closet.

She pushes herself into her pillows, sulking. “Please, tomorrow. I hate that place.” She raises her pinkie. “I promise I’ll be more agreeable tomorrow.”

“It’s the only way they’ll let us live here,” I say, folding the wheelchair back.

“But this was our grandmother’s home. It’s our home,” she cries.

I walk toward the bed, wrap my arm around her. “Things will work out, let’s just be a bit more patient.”

“People used to live longer than this,” she whispers. “Sisi, we expire so fast, but why us? Why not those who had the chance to enjoy Mmê Earth? Why are we living in their shit?”

I hold my head in fear of it snapping off my neck. So, like always, my sister counts my fingers hoping that they stay even.

“I shouldn’t have sold my eggs,” she whispers, “to the manufactures. Look at all those abnormal manufactured humans. Yes, they live longer, they’re resilient, but still, we’re still humans, we matter as well. I shouldn’t have signed up for the experiments to save this family—look at me now, they destroyed my body. When it wasn’t satisfactory for them, they fired me, took me off their payroll. They don’t even give a fuck about me.”

“You were gone for years,” I whisper, “what exactly happened?”

She realizes now the acerbic rise of the past, existing in this little room of ours, burning her tongue. Realizes how she never spoke of her experience. Realizes how her discomfort triggers the trauma. I watch her, silently calculating, sifting through her thoughts, editing them then throwing them away because neither one sounds good.

She pulls her knees to her chest, peers at me through her thick eyelashes. “Why am I the one who’s ashamed when it should be them who’s ashamed?” It surprises me, this response of hers, the light sharpening her pupils to a dark pinpoint in her brown eyes.

“What did they do to you?” I ask.

“There are many of them out there.” She rests her chin on her knees. “I don’t know how many. I’m going to die without knowing how many . . . ” She hiccups. A sob. A tear streams down her cheek.

“How many what?” I ask.

Her grip tightens around her knees, her shoulders clench forward, as if gripping onto her secret. Maybe she realizes that she doesn’t have long to live, maybe that’s why she’s slowly opening up to me every day.

I catch her teardrops and massage her shoulder. “How many what?” I ask softly.

“Children.”

“Children?”

“My . . . ” She sighs, digs her head into her knees, then in a muffled voice, whispers. “My children. The manufactured ones.”

No one in our family likes her mouth except me. They’d gagged her with soap once. She woke up to find him with his arm down her throat, soapy and acrid. She couldn’t even scream. His thought-dial, unlike ours, was portable. He was authorized by the family to do that. Their reputation was more important. Perhaps, at a microclimate level that’s how it started—accumulated from every family, from every district, from every nation to the whole continent until it overwhelmed Her, Mmê Earth. So when my sister tells me she has children, I think it’s just her typical mouth speaking silly stuff.

“The plan behind the experiments was to migrate the upper-class citizens into a more resilient body that can withstand our climate,” she whispers. “They’ve already paid body rentals and purchases of the manufactured bodies.”

My respirator makes a hoarse noise, then I realize it’s me gasping, choking. I clasp my hand to the respirator, as if it’s in the way of my breathing. It’s the shock, filling my bloodstream with adrenaline. Is this what Mama meant? Someone is killing our land. Someone is our enemy. Someone in our midst hides in our color. Catch them! Catch them; if your land dies, you die.

Our land is our bodies.

I’m supposed to love my sister, to care for her, but each time I look at her, I feel this grudge, its furnace burning in my body. I stare at her as if she’s holding a knife to my back. I could be next. I could be Mama. I grip her shoulders, my sudden movement stunning her. “Why is She doing this to you?” I ask. “What did you do to Her?”

“To who?” she shrieks.

“Mama Earth!” I yell. “What did you do to turn Her against our family. Are you telling the truth? I ask. “Is this why you’re re-sick? You only become sick when you’ve sinned against Mama Earth.”

“I became part of their experiments, part of their sins, and yes, I may have sinned.”

“What did you to Her?”

She clasps her ears with hands.

“Please don’t be ashamed,” I say. “Just tell me.”

“Everyone sins against each other thinking they’re going to live forever, thinking they can trick Her. You can’t. Sin leads to death.”

“You’re the only one sick in our family,” I say.

“Even malome is sick,” she yells. Malome; uncle. “He thinks I don’t hear him at night, creeping through our passage into the toilet, vomiting every night, his diarrhea filling the toilet bowl, him wearing heavy garments in this heat wave. He’s trying to hide the rash from the sin-fever.” Her eyes turn deadly on me. “Soon you’ll fall sick.”

There are secrets in our family. Terrible secrets that lie on our skin like rash. The rage in me burns. I stare at the blatant, gaudy sickness clinging like a batshit lover to her skin. The rash. The boils. The scathing lies. What did you do to become like this? Are you still my sister? Why do you cling to your secret like this disease clings to your bones? What pollution did you impose into the environment that it turned on you? Did you burn down someone’s house? Did you talk down to someone because of their religion? Did you kill someone? Mother Earth no longer stands for such pollutants anymore. I ask these questions only to myself because she won’t say. Who are you? I hate that there’s a part of her that I don’t know. Mama Earth knows all our secrets, Her and God and the Universe, and They will not let us live freely with them.

“Haven’t you learned anything from Itumeleng?” I ask her, reminding her of the family fable, the death of our brother.

A family fable:

The only reason someone becomes sick is because they sinned, did something terrible. Last summer when the sun was boiling the air, my brother was one of many behind the xenophobic attacks on foreigners’ businesses—looting, burning, killing. The next morning as I made breakfast for the family, he sat in the middle seat as usual. He tried to eat the bread. He tried to drink the coffee. But his mouth was skew, and everything slipped out. The next morning, his mouth was slack, teeth unhinged. He had a knife. Scratched at his skin.

He was allergic to his skin.

He scraped it down to white flesh that was just as quickly flooded with bright-red blood. He became allergic to himself. The only cure was death. Mama Earth was trying to purge him as he tried to purge the outsiders; but not as quickly as he snuffed them. She did it slowly and painstakingly so that perhaps remorse diluted his rage. Only good and God and Allah or whoever holy you believe in will exist. All evil will be extracted out like a bad molar from Mama Earth’s mouth. The rest, She will purge unto death. The racism and exclusion too, hit back like a bad wave of locusts, harbingers, a pandemic of encephalitis. The population was low. They tried to manufacture new people who’d be more resilient to this new climate.

Tomorrow is looking for Future

We still continue to sin. I have been out, looking for a second piece-job; it’s been a failure. I am brilliant, I am smart, I am talented—I know that, but I lack the privilege and wealth to get into “somewhere, somewhere.” Every department’s response: “We are looking for someone with mass appeal,” they say, every snow-white strand pulled tautly from their scalps. “Your work, your body is not a fit for our list . . . unless you are interested in signing up for our experiments.”

I was desperate, but not that desperate. Look at what they did to my sister’s body, and I still have to take her to them for meds. But I didn’t want to be blacklisted for my attitude, so I bowed my head, smiled, and thanked them for their consideration. When I stepped outside, I couldn’t breathe. I was filled with a burning panic at the truth: there are walls built around me. I can’t see them, but I can feel how they suck at the air around me leaving me unable to breathe. All the things they want me to censor about myself will eventually censor my existence in their eyes; from this, as Mother Earth has dictated, they will die. But they don’t believe in this “superstition” like Mama didn’t. And now she sleeps in a grave.

On the way home, I tried contacting my sister, but she was not responding to my thought-dial, so I had to storm up the dirt-stirred concrete stairs. She’s probably with her boyfriend. Lung-borne pollutants proliferate the air, obscuring the hallway’s path. I bang on an apartment door—her boyfriend’s. I bang it again. He, the boyfriend, yanks it open. Climate change has made a home in the marrow of their bones. His studio apartment contains doctored air hyped with amphetamines, secondary meth-smoke.

The lady downstairs selling gene-hacked vegetables told me that she heard from a neighbor that my sister and her boyfriend stoned a young couple a few days ago.

I refused to believe her. “They’re not violent people,” I tried to tell her. “No, not my sister.”

“They called the couple terrible words, said they’re sick, yet your sister and her boyfriend are the sick ones. What fucker does that to another human being? Bashes their head in because of their love?” she’d asked. “They’re sick, I tell you. Demented.”

Then the old woman hobbled to her workstation to pick up her thought-dial and sent me the image that was circulating through many thought-dials. The couple, two young girls in love, lying huddled in the street. My sister and her boyfriend, their hands bloody, their eyes rabid and fierce.

I staggered backward. “This is not my sister, no, she’s—she’s not capable of this.”

“You’re so foolish with your faith in your sister,” she’d said.

I want to rid our city of this pollutant that continues to destroy our world. This pollutant that infests my sister’s body. If my sister dies from sin-fever—no, I can’t watch her die so that the world continues to live. She is my world more than this Earth is. It’s not her fault—but this is her, hurting another human being, for what reason?

“My sister, she’s only fourteen,” I whispered. “She’s just a kid. He’s twenty-three.”

“Dating a kid. Perhaps that’s why he’s doubly sick.” The old woman grabbed her thought-dial back. “The police don’t need to lift a finger,” she said, “Mama Earth will sort these criminals out. They deserve what’s coming to them.”

Actions and thoughts lead to real sickness. Stoning someone can give you a disease worse than cancer. And I see it now, what Mama Earth is doing to them, the encephalitis sickness of their consequences, gripping to their sharp cheekbones, as they limp around the small apartment, looking puny and pitiful. A cackle of thunder as if Mama Earth laughs over this. My sister’s boyfriend is shaky, at first, bones brittle, cytosine rife with anxiety and depression like every other citizen, and saturated with commercial ads that probably sprayed every tester at them from every façade with cleaning agents to protect society from their sickness, charging them an automatic “small” fee that they couldn’t pay.

“Why?” I ask. They both stare at me stupidly.

“I’m sorry, I was puking,” Botshelo says. “I didn’t have my thought-dial. Just saw your message. I’m ready, we can go.”

“Is it true?” I ask. “Did you hurt those women?”

Her lips tighten into themselves. “Don’t believe every rumor you hear.”

I raise my rusty thought-dial. “I have evidence of you and him—” I point at her boyfriend without staring at him—“hurting them.”

“It was a misunderstanding.” She picks up her luggage and drags her body to a stand. “We’re going to be late.”

I stand in her way. “Why did you hurt those women? They’re barely holding on to life at the hospital.”

“Speaking of the hospital, if we don’t leave now, we’ll be very late.”

I shake my head. “Take your damn self.”

As I turn my back on her, her voice reaches out to my neck. “You think you’re so innocent. Don’t neglect your family or Mama Earth will punish you like She’s punishing our uncle. You’ll be next soon.”

I turn to her. This is my sister. When did she change? Become this way? Is it the sickness now changing all that remains of her? In the days to come what will she turn into before she dies? Does she still love me? No, not if she will stoop so low to threaten me so as to do what she needs.

Chemical weapons fondled Earth too much. I guess the environment became sick and fed into her, then she became sick and fed into the environment—this cycle, no quarantine. I remember we’d drive for miles, the fields barren, the quarry a white-torn wound in the earth. The earth tried to swallow back its ocean, but it came back in tsunamis, washed aside our homes in toxic acid. My eye-feed blurs, another village has gone down. Everyone is living in temporary housing, but the rich stay in the sky, smoking it up, because they can afford it.

I slam the door leaving them alone, wiping tears from my face with my fist. My family is falling apart, Mama Earth. I’m sorry, please forgive them, I yell at the sky.

I step outside, the heat boiling the air. Fuck.

We have become foreigners to Earth, and it has turned xenophobic.

hidden-by-night

Darkness falls. The moon clicks into place, like a bullet into the chamber. I must hide. I catch sight of the moon, half-slain, a stranger. Why is Mama Earth punishing my uncle? What has he done?

Nightly. Moonlight sways through the air abnormally, and once in contact with skin, a rash quickly develops. Severe asphyxiation initiates. Soon death befalls the body. The moon is a toxic beauty. We must remain indoors; the tectonics of architecture are built to restrain outside toxins from us, and our toxins from the natural environment. It’ll be only an hour before the city shuts the moonlight out.

Night; the world dissolves into black. All I hear is humming rain, panting breaths. Every noise slows down to a heartbeat. Soul-lights flare. Only the broken moon’s shadow tells us the time. I can leave my residence now. I will follow him, the honorable uncle, to see what he does under the cloak of night.

Maybe once I witness his ugly actions, then I will understand the sickness that pervades my sister, that is killing my family one by one. As I follow him in the dark—through the backstreets, the gravel road, the barren fields, to a lowly place between two hills, a tavern overlooking a bonfire—my thoughts burn a feverish gloom, evaporating from my skull, almost exposing my hiding place. It’s not just us, there’s a tavern of them. Oh, dear, God, Mama Earth—it disgusts me what they do. I crouch lower behind a cactus. Moon, hide your eye, eclipse your birth from our sins. A tavern of them stand, dancing and drinking around the bonfire. Laughing. Little children. There are little kids here. How can these people laugh at this evil they create?

Who can I cry to in this very second that can stop this cruelty? Even if I ran back to the city to report them, they’ll be gone by the time I get back. My thought-dial has no network. Mama Earth, there are people made of devil-skins unburned by God hands. These are the people I see in our newsfeed in our government in our schools who act as our guardians—these are the people that make a noose out of bible pages, wrap it around our ears and eyes, and hang You dry. They wrap it around the night, saying, “This is the lung of Earth.” I know these men with starving throats so full of fire to evade the teeth of ethics; they’re carving hunger into the belly of our children, saying our food security is compromised, saying there is drought, yet they’re taking these children’s hunger to dress their dinner tables. They light the torch of hunger in our bellies and parade streets and slums saying, “Here is light, here is star.”

I press my fist against my mouth to stop me from screaming at the horror. Behind closed skins, and even in the sockets of eyes, they bury themselves in wombs of little children to carve their names inside them, until their bellies balloon to sky, their hearts nowhere found. Is this what happened to my sister in her experiments? I can’t watch this anymore. Sun, moon-stain your bloodied ribs. We’re a spatter of sky, there are sinless stars broken from the voice in our throats. These men, there are deserts in their heartlands. They’ve learned how to open children-thighs, their mouths are spraying evil into the crooks of their knees, breaking the language from them in villages where the tongue is tender, the brain soft.

The village, a mecca for men

who still fondle the night with their wife hung around their necks.

They make a shebeen of children’s limbs,

turning their hearts into sorghum and dust,

teeth nicking their magic from children’s milk,

children who don’t know what it means to be the hourglass of birth

as death lilts at the cages in their chests.

It snows in parts of them that didn’t know the sun.

“Child, do you understand my anger now?” the voice in the fold of the air enters my ears, quietly. I jump, turning around. There’s no one near me. No one has seen me.

Mama Earth is intimate with my thoughts: Mama Earth is that you? Has it been you all along?

“Child, do you understand my anger now?” She asks.

All along it’s been Your voice in the air, Mama Earth?

“Child, do you understand my anger now?” the air-voice repeats into my ear.

I understand Your fury, Mama Earth.

“What must I do now?” You ask. “Must I let such people live?”

Stop them, stop them, the kids—the poor kids!

“To live is evil,” Mama Earth’s air-voice says. “Do you see that now? Now tell me, what must I do?”

Stop them please.

“How must I stop them?” She asks. “Don’t you remember this? Remember we have been here before?”

There are so many memories in my head. We became man, the machine that decimated the planet, hastened its way toward its end. The phantom of our thoughts rose from our limbic systems as we slept and night’s tentacles fed into our nervous system. Anxiety and depression grew like the urban sprawl of our cities into the marrow of our bones.

“What else do you remember?” Mama Earth asks.

Our home villages were gone, replaced by cold foreign skyscrapers, its mother tongue guillotined. With toxic lungs, our thoughts carried weapons through the night, tore the trees down, sullied the waters. I remember seeing an angry moon that night, leaking death into our time-holes. Time-holes, the only thing close we had to sanity, to humanity. That night, we silenced our thought-dials, watched our time-holes glow in the dark. My sister was bone-tired. “Climate change has crept from the built environment into the marrow of my bones,” she’d whispered in that raspy voice of hers. “That’s what’s wrong with me. Climate change lives in me. The old are lucky to have died and lived in a safer Earth. This one wants to purge me—Earth doesn’t want me born.”

I remember she’d stared at her time-hole hoping for a better reincarnation, but time was a ceaseless, indifferent creature. Her time-hole sat on the mantelpiece, anachronistic, beeping at the endless updates it starved for. During the night, we listened to the hoarse grumble of taps that were thirsty for water. She checked her time-hole where every part of her life resided. There were no funds. There were no jobs. There were no opportunities, except the hole in between her thighs to hold men who didn’t want children.

“You can start afresh,” Mama Earth’s air-voice says. “But to live again you have to die. It’s the only way I can stop or save them. Tell me, how must I stop them?” Her air-voice fills me. And I know what she wants me to say. “Why do you keep choosing to relive your family’s past and trauma. Let’s stop it now. Do not be afraid, child.”

I stand on the edge of a rock, whisper to the wind, “I know what I’m going to do will be considered evil, illegal. I do not care.” Summertime languishes on winter’s skin. Sky tears are saltier than ever. Forests and grasslands are scraped back like alopecia of the land. We’re buried in this tombstone of tar; a desert gives birth to anorexic trees.

How can they not feel that? How can they not taste that? Our evilutions are running through Mother’s bloodstreams.

Sun, Earth: your truth needs pain.

I’m sick of it.

I.

Am.

Sick.

I do not care;

so Sun, hide your eye, eclipse your birth.

Tonight, the city goes.

Sea-rise will be our baptism, brushing Her breath of our toxin.

That’s when the fissure tore through Your layers, it’s Your anger Mama Earth, and rocks from the hill eclipsed some lives. That’s why You drowned some continents, Your bile swallowing whole civilizations. Many times this has occurred based on such morbid actions. You’re sick of it. So sick it hurts. You, Mother Earth, taste like suicide, smoke, smog.

a-sleeping-earth

I don’t know where I am currently. I am a being freed of flesh. I am sight without bone, without structure. Hope is a sun that never rises. A moon that never “woke.” All it knows is a night full of stars it pulls from people’s hearts.

There’s no existence in the constellation. There is only smoke and no God in the horizon. Look at Her, Mother Earth, Her womb protruding into a constellation of space and dark matter—we matter. The heat warms Her globe, She is lit, She is lava. Atmosphere is our gas mask, forests are an underbrush of sky, and ocean waves emulate amniotic fluid. Gravitational pulls, the labor pains. The ozone layer unfolds, the gases choke. The sky is screaming. The sun broke, and he’s bleeding past our horizon.

I am gone, I am going, but I am here too.

Everything hurts. Everything—it hurts. The Earth, She hurts—we degrade Her skin, discriminating it with war, bombs, shootings, and pollution . . . there are parts of Her body desecrated, forcing people to flee, leaving Her naked. Don’t you see? She’s human too. We live in Her—Her womb. Earth can’t commit suicide; we commit it for Her. I am gone, I am going, but I am here too. Everything hurts. Everything—it hurts. Don’t you see? But the pain. Tell me you can’t smell that? The summer sky smells smoke. I smell smoke. Her soul, a pyre for our desire, burns. The summer sky . . . my starry eyes are smoked. This is what we became; Her ozone layer is torn, the sun leaks through. She is bleeding moon. Everything hurts . . . the oceans, the ecosystem—Her heart, it beats outside Her.

Our heartbeats were cataclysmic, a big bang, giving birth to pandora-things. Every creation gives birth to chaos as well—we know this now and we will be reborn.

And that Woman, soft rivers run in her throat, volcanoes thunder in her voice

She is lady,

She is monster,

She is Sun,

Hide your eye,

Eclipse your birth,

Sea-rise will be our baptism

We will be reborn.

About the Author

Tlotlo Tsamaase is a Motswana writer of fiction, poetry, and architectural articles. Her work has appeared in Terraform, Apex Magazine, Strange Horizons, Wasafiri, and other publications. Her poem “I Will Be Your Grave” was a 2017 Rhysling Award nominee. Her short story, “Virtual Snapshots” was longlisted for the 2017 Nommo Awards. Her novella The Silence of the Wilting Skin is forthcoming from Pink Narcisuss Press in 2020. You can find her on Twitter at @tlotlotsamaase and on Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/tlotlotsamaase.

Appointment in Vienna

Gabriel Murray

I want the two images from Kraków to be first. May, love, poppet, if you outlive me and give a tinker’s damn—and I won’t hesitate to resurrect Ned Frye to harangue you if you don’t—you should remember.

You do not have my permission to colorize. You do have my permission to rearrange. They were taken in order, but it interests me to imagine them either way; the brothers looking up, and then back down. The brothers engrossed, then unpleasantly aware. Nothing else in the scene signifies which came first: the shot is mostly rubble, without a great deal of living subject to speak of, no flag flapping nor dragonfly on its circuit. My beautiful composition of an ex-museum—I’m sure I already had the theme in mind—became two awkward shots of unfriendly children. It’s good to make the most of things.

They dominate the frame—which is troublesome, because I hadn’t actually been intending to photograph them. But I was twenty-seven, wasn’t I? Seven-and-twenty and so chilly and weary; so ready to declare that I had arrived. That’s always been true of me. It is probably what allows me to stand it, any of it. Just ever supposing it must be over.

Those should be at the beginning. Sandwich the title page. A little honor guard.

I know there’s no input for me on the cover. I don’t care about the cover. If I were Ansel Adams you wouldn’t be slapping Glacier National Park on the cover and telling me to shut up. As I am not, you and that child you’ve got in place of Ned now are going to do that with something else anyway. I understand about Glacier National Park; no one with a coffee table purchases an Adams retrospective to stare contently at something he doesn’t recognize. Doubtless you will find something just as striking for your celebration of the journalistic life of Leslie Kincaid. Whatever it is that you manage to make of his work.

I think what really unites us in the service is a desire to confess. To scream our secrets into the reeds. What’s irritating is that I cannot think of a better way to put that. You’d think the Bible would have something to offer. I’m not religious, however. Even if you, or more searching parties, could get the truth out of me, none of you would be terribly surprised to find that I am agnostic. I fit the profile. Even if you scratch me, I fit the profile. I’m far too homosexual for God and too fucking sentimental for atheism.

I’m sure I’ve heard some homilies. The word has a compulsory ring to it. Unfortunately, what I’ve heard far more of is classical references. You wouldn’t understand, May—the chief purpose of public school in the United Kingdom is to perfume the rotting corpse of antiquity. I could describe damned near anything in misattributed Latin.

So with that in mind: I hear thieves want to be caught. This sounds like something a copper would say. But I do think spies all want to confess things. It’s why it’s so easy to get us to do it. The less attention-starved ones take their L-pills right off. If you get one of us, you have to know he is looking to tell you everything. I don’t know a man who got into the trade who harbors not even the faintest hope of spinning it into his memoirs. We’re the weakest possible solution of T. E. Lawrence hereabout.

Including me. Certainly me.

But that isn’t going to happen. No Kincaid retrospective is going to happen, and you won’t work on it. You won’t even get to be snide. I’ve got too many things to do now.

The collection would be called Appointment in Vienna: The Images of Leslie Kincaid, 1938-1965. To think, 1938—God in Heaven, I’d been a professional for all of a year? That was when our lot approached me, starting with our boys in French SOE. Is that what adulthood is: realizing that people lied to you? Admitting that you decided to believe them?

Assets will do anything to feel special. So did I. Those were always my favorite bits of life: scholarships, positions, recruitment. Everyone likes to be chosen.

The appointment is in Vienna instead of Samarra, of course. I like to imagine people wondering if I’d died in Vienna. I certainly would not mind dying in Vienna, or some other place nice, but I doubt I’ll have much selection. Still, I could drive my readers—I suppose perhaps I shouldn’t joke, but what does it matter?—I could drive my readers to wonder about my appointment with Death in Vienna. Especially when they page past the two boys in Kraków, staring at them, looking down, and discover that after my brief biography the first image is from Vienna in 1948. (My readers do basic math in their heads. Obviously I did not die in 1948.)

It’s the ceiling of the Vienna Opera House, dazzling and cramped in concentric light. It is a heady thing to look at, or even just be under, and an excellent use for color film. Even standing underneath it feels a bit like champagne. Then they also furnish you with champagne. Mozart must’ve put them into a raving fever. You can think of what a fun place it would be to meet Death, if you liked.

But Death is not about, just hundreds of ball-goers for the Viennese Opera Ball. You can’t see them, but you needn’t—you know as well as I that ballrooms are not lit just so, light and dark, for anything but a grand event. A ballroom in Vienna is for a ball; a photograph of an empty one is not “a photograph of a room” but “a photograph with a room empty of people.” It’s different.

This one is full of life. I am wearing a dinner jacket but too distracted to care; I have turned my camera up to snap the ceiling, which dizzies me. I think I can feel the thickness of music. In fact I know little about music, and am starstruck. This is not an undercover task of any sort. I am just here to photograph wonderful excess. I’m having fun, in a lost way. I’ve lost the threads of fun, truly, by this point in my life, but I’m not immune to glamour. A gentleman is about to speak to me. I know he’s there—I can always feel the shape and presence of men, for reasons both human and pragmatic. I’m ignoring him to perfect my shot.

You’ve never seen this photograph, May: I know, because no one has. I developed it and destroyed the negative, and then when I was packing up my room at the Grand Hotel Wien four days later I destroyed the print too. I destroy about nine-tenths of my work, do you know? It’s the dull stuff that I give you.

I suppose it’s been a decade now since I’ve finished a painting. I’m always behind the camera. No one who came up where I came up aspired to be a photojournalist, though—I drew, like anyone else.

Children do not draw environments. I was no exception. Houses are where they contextualize people and animals. Any boy who likes to draw houses more than people or animals is disturbed. I was uninterested in animals—well, I was interested, I was interested in everything. Just not in drawing everything.

I wanted to draw beautiful people. Lovely like Degas. Striking like Friedrich. When I had my first proper instruction the master told us that Degas and Friedrich, in fact, drew places, into which wanderers and ballerinas fit like every cloud. I didn’t believe him. I believe I didn’t understand how anyone could be inspired by the pure fact of a scene.

It’s difficult to be so romantic as a photographer. Painters are always lying. We make our subjects brighter than they are, and when we take up photography we are amazed at how, in reality, people fade so disappointingly. Human extraordinariness does not tend to emphasize itself: it fits into the composition.

Oh, May—May, you haven’t any idea how often I think of you. It’s very challenging not to think often of one’s editors. It’s a very embarrassing relationship that all of us in the newspaper business won’t admit to. I hope your years are well, in between my intermittent calls. I did always think you married a good fellow; your son is growing up so handsome now, too, but I’m afraid no woman can hear that from a homosexual without squinting, not even you. It’s all right. I don’t mind, not really; May, darling, we’ve known or not-known each other for so long—tell me, do you ever suspect?

I think of Vivian. You wouldn’t know her: we’re both in the trade. She runs the numbers, yes, but she has to lie about it. That’s the trade. Does she ever wonder?

She doesn’t. I know she doesn’t. We’re all too busy scrutinizing all our boys for Bolshevism, understandably. If it’s all just volleys between ourselves and Moscow, there’s no need to look for other ways to turn. But everyone turns, May—statistics bear it out, we both know. Nothing is ever the way you left it. Not your room. Not your mother. Not Liberty Leading the People (despite the Louvre’s most valiant, expensive efforts). Not me, yes, but that’s not the point—you cannot just leave everything in this world and expect it, however uneasily, to remain.

I suppose that sounds like a moral apologia. It is. It’s not something I dwell on anymore—the morality of all things is depressingly simple. It’s the logistics that occupy me. I have so much to do now. I don’t even sketch anymore, in my bedroom.

Two pages on Vienna, explaining. Then we turn the page and we’re in the brown downtown of Hagerstown, Maryland—

—home to the Dorsey-Palmer House and the Maryland Theatre; all English-language high culture is similar, even in how the word is spelled—

—where once I met a boy and flirted with him, push-pull, as he shied laughing away: playacting seducing him/resisting me, as though anyone anywhere cared a whit for his purity or mine, or thought it even existed; as though brothers and nuns were possessive of the likes of us—

I was in Hagerstown for other reasons: certainly not to flirt. Flirting plays a substantially smaller role than you’d imagine in any of my careers. I went to a soda fountain and had a malt and listened to the boys and girls talk; you can hear the American South, but it grows ever quieter. I can’t say I’m sad. They can find someone else for that elegy.

I remember the soda and the conversation because after I had them, I went outside and snapped that photograph. Otherwise I wouldn’t.

This was a boy, actually: seventeen or eighteen, high school, letterman jacket. And I suppose I did flirt. His friends had moved further away down the bar and he was smiling at me and sneaking a few glances—well, I’m worth glancing at. I smiled back at him and decided to be American. “You don’t have the time, do you?”

He grinned: “You don’t trust the wall clock?”

“I’m out here from California—I had to go through the Rockies. Trust me, once you deal with that time zone situation,” I leaned on my elbow, “you learn to get a second opinion.”

We chatted. His name was . . . God . . . he told it to me. Sam or Stephen. Within ten minutes he was telling me about the town and what I should look at while I was here for my aviation business; he pointed out that pretty old Dorsey-Palmer House and even the Masonic Hall down the street, which he spoke of in a mocking hush (“They say it’s a compass, the math kind, but it’s probably a pyramid. You know how it is with weirdos and pyramids.”) and speculated on which of his friends’ dads were involved.

“Everyone likes three,” I said, affable. “And Egypt and stuff that makes sense, and that probably accounts for the Freemasons altogether. Alchemists, medieval fake magicians, you know they used to believe in somebody or something called Hermes Trismegistus—thrice-great Hermes. Like the Greek god, but no actual relation. I think that’s where you get hermetic from. Don’t quote me.” (He could quote me all he liked. It is.) “But at the end of the day, no one could tell you what that meant or what in God’s name alchemy was supposed to be doing. So if it makes you feel any better, people’s friends’ dads have been pretending to do important things probably since we invented the wheel.”

His eyes shone. “Yeah. You’re right.” Then dulled: “Well, my dad’s a fucking plumber,” he said to his malt.

Ah, to be seventeen and queer and bubbling with hate you push down to talk bored Americana, impress a stylish man. I understood and understand; my dad was an electrician.

The truth is Americans don’t need Masonic structures to summon the devil, and neither do we. I photographed the brown, squatting, friendly-and-dying downtown of Hagerstown, Maryland because it reminded me of an old Irish setter: but, really, because it was a growing hub for a certain sort of tourism. It is a nexus of Confederate losses. From there you can drive to Antietam, Gettysburg. Harpers Ferry, though they don’t speak John Brown’s name there. It’s not heroes that they honor there, nor the sad and desperate and called to God—just resentful memory, the dinner jacket they put on living hate.

In Vienna I suppose they bother to lie. I photographed Hagerstown because I liked the colors and I fancied myself a spiritualist making daguerreotypes—I’d develop it and the dead would be vindicated. But they aren’t, they’re nowhere; streets are empty, empty, empty. I do not know where the dead go, but the killers are always here.

We live in a laundered world, May: now more than ever. All you remember is the Blitz, studying basement ceilings and wondering if you were going to die; I, however, have met people in Vienna whose dossiers we’d pore over in rooms in Châteauroux, before we burned the papers and ran once more. People we almost killed. People we would have. I suppose they missed their appointments, didn’t they? I can’t remember my grandmother’s face, but I know who’s lying about what they did in the war. In Austria—most everyone. In Britain, maybe seventy percent of that. I know. I know.

Soon I won’t have to know anymore. I understand in this world that no one really lays down their arms; all they can hope for is not to pick them up in the first place. That’s too late for me—but I will be the first. I will lay them down at the end of my fight. There is a kingdom I have been to; I have seen the other face of tomorrow, which has only ever revealed itself at day’s end.

All the old expatriates say that dead old Berlin was something I would have liked, something that will never be seen again. In Britain we make a cottage industry out of the maudlin. But I think the old Germans are telling the truth. That is, I think they believe themselves. Christopher Isherwood is such a hit with that crowd—I feel like I know more German escapees who can quote Goodbye to Berlin in English than can describe their own long gone childhood homes. I don’t think that’s such a bad thing. It’s probably the best thing Isherwood ever did for anyone—giving them something to miss.

Me, I never saw that Berlin. I’m—was—too young; I only spent six months there, posting negatives back to London, and they pulled me out after the Pogromnacht and sent me to Paris instead. If there was an old Paris to miss, I never saw it either. Salons and cabarets, yes, and all filled with people talking about war.

You should pay attention to this period when you’re compiling, May. My published work then, when I was twenty to twenty-one, contains all stuff that was purely for its own sake, which one cannot say for anything since. Or, well, for journalism’s sake—for truth’s! For justice’s! (God. To think.)—I suppose that’s also true of my student work, but don’t anthologize my student work, for pity’s sake, it’s pathetic and I think I modeled a St Paul after a lecturer I fancied. But 1938-1939, a year and a half of shining simpleton adult professional photojournalism for you. A relic of Old Leslie. Goodbye to Me.

Since then I’m afraid it’s all been a cover. That’s what we call a lie, love, in the service: like the stuff of our lives is a bedsheet, or sturdy paper.

It was in France where the door opened. I sometimes wonder how long they’d been considering me—but what a flattering notion. Of course it couldn’t have been long. To SOE and the Secret Service I was an opportunity in the right place. I understand. I select for the same things now: opportunity.

She talked to me at a party, and then by the Seine: “Mr. Kincaid,” she turned the handle of her umbrella, bundled tight, in her hands: “You said you want to help.”

By then, I knew what she meant.

“The things that are happening in our lifetime have never seen an equal before,” said Geraldine Rinn, as I suppose I must have called her. “If we do not stop them here, they will become inexorable. You’ve no idea what the fascists are doing. You’ve no idea what they’re going to do.”

Our names have a tendency to flake and slough. Since this is all between you and me, dear, I shall say that her name is Elaine Paxton, or it’s certainly on her passport and half of it on her birth certificate. She’s married to that Paxton, yes, you can have that scandal if you like.

She’s supposed to know everything about me too.

“I have an idea,” said I, twenty-one: defensive, like it or I mattered.

“You do not.” She sniffed—correct, of course, but how did she know the reprimand wouldn’t drive me off? Because this was her job, too. Because someone had talked to her as well, a long time ago. “Mr. Kincaid, I mean no disrespect to your profession. I know you feel called to it. You place a high value on the truth and you hope that its revelation can undo the worst of hypocrisies.”

Glib, but not wrong. “More or less,” I hedged.

“Your documentations will not convince anyone who is not already convinced,” said Elaine, Geraldine. “The British and American peoples are accustomed to hardening their hearts and covering their ears. There is no atrocity you can show them. But there is another difference you can make.”

We should have an image of Birmingham in here. I don’t need to backtrack for that one, because the truth is I didn’t photograph Birmingham until I was an adult returning. The last thing I’d, personally, got into art for was to capture my brown, clamoring little hell-world. I should have. The Blitz tore a lot down—the house where I lived, the school I attended, the hospital where I was born. I’ve never felt much for them, though: just the strangeness in knowing that there was once an interior space, a closet under the staircase, where I’d sit in the dark and listen to Stephen’s voice bellowing as he pounded around looking for me so he could regale me with something, or Mum cursing my lateness to supper—just me, the crashing of people on the stairs, and that treacherous sliver of light, back when I thought the most luscious reward I could want was to be really and truly alone.

Now sometimes business takes me back. Rarely, also, holidays: yes, I get holidays from Elaine. I spend them in London and Bristol and Birmingham; I meet contacts, sometimes boys and men. Which is to say that casual sex is a useful pretext to establish as a spy—but also, it’s casual sex. Sometimes it’s a fling for a week or so. I don’t mind. If I want to sleep with someone at all I probably want to sleep with him for a week.

Thus with someone we’ll call Denys: I had a holiday, so this was my own mask I had on, the one called Leslie Kincaid, and I told him how I worked for the BBC and sometimes contracted with the Times. “What great fun,” he said, sly; he was one of those pretty blue-bloods, the ones to whom absolutely nothing’s sexier than some notion of class mobility. Talk contemptuous posh to me, they always seem to be hinting, and put your electrician’s hands all over me. Denys had an earl somewhere on his mother’s side—good God, can I ever resist these? I’ve never fixed a damned radiator. “Why not the Daily Mail? They’ve got a market for pictures. Think of what you’d get to photograph.”

“Darling,” I flicked ash off my cigarette, all affectations, “I did not embed myself in France during the war to go on to work for the Daily Mail. I would like my biography to show an upward trend.”

We sat on the steps of a university library, too grown-up and dissolute to be taken for students. Sometimes it’s refreshing to be stared at here and there. He smoked with louche confidence, with sort of an insolent Francophilic attitude. “Well, that’s only if you do something interesting here too, isn’t it?”

“Goodness, am I still in the audition phase with you?”

Denys smiled like an imp. His eyes took a merry crease—remembering my roughness with a thrill, I supposed, the urgency I summoned or manufactured for him. You have to understand, I do feel urgency. I feel desire. It’s not the same to me with all people, and it’s certainly not the same to me between men and women. It’s just that almost no one sees it uncovered anymore; with people like Denys I find myself obliging, with the roaring engine banging on the inside of me to get out.

“Snap one of me,” he said.

I leaned back, sort of a dignified topple onto the steps. “What, are you commissioning me?”

“Don’t give me that. Take a picture. I want to see what your work can do for me as a subject.”

“This is architecturally dull.” I indicated the library. “There’s nothing good in you that university design would bring out.”

He prodded me with his shoe. “Then pick a place. I didn’t manage to be a barrister—I’d like to be your muse, at least.”

I don’t know how much I cared for him or didn’t. I only knew him for one holiday. It was my hotel I took him to downtown, and first I set him up in the half-empty lounge in the lobby; “Why don’t you take me to Coombe Abbey or something?” he said, laughing.

“I’m not photographing Coombe Abbey,” I said. “I’m photographing you.”

That startled him—I don’t know what was in me, or how I looked. I can only look out. He looked startled, looking up from the lobby sofa, and that I captured.

There’s my Birmingham shot for you, May. You always said that I should do a portrait series; I maintain it’s a conflict of interest, getting to know subjects and depicting them—so have the one. His name was—not—Denys, and his uncle had an earldom; you can see here the fineness of his carpals and his ulna as he reaches up in that awkward manner to deflect his surprise, next to his face—those beetle brows, so indelicate, his luminous dark eyes. The sofa cushions must have had a bright gold color you can’t see here, but it’s no matter; it was so washed out, and look how insubstantial behind him. His shirt really was that white.

Of course I photographed him again later, lying on his stomach on the bed with his feet kicked up. You could see the laughter stirring—I nearly sent it to him, actually, two weeks later after I developed it; but those were two cool weeks, I’m no fool. I did destroy that one. Some traces are bloodier, brighter red.

We conversed on that topic, actually. Here I’ll depart from my posture—

I was examining my own shoulder, where he’d left a very red mark. He made fun of my squeamishness at first; then he glimpsed the mark, and how red it actually was, and became very shamefaced—“Don’t,” I waved him off (though I was considering how to get rid of it). “I always like to be marked up at the end of things. Think of it as rubedo.”

“Leslie, let’s dispense with the fiction that I know remotely as many things as you do,” he said. “What in the name of God is ‘rubedo?’”

I—don’t know why I do these things.

“Part of the old fancy superstitions,” I said to him, or the ceiling; “I mean before Aleister Crowley and the Golden Dawn, even. The medieval-Renaissance things: transmuting lead to gold, but it was more than that to them. They called it the Great Work—nigredo to albedo. Albedo to citrinitas. Citrinitas—to rubedo. Black to white to yellow to red. What this really meant was darkness to light, light to dawn.”

The way he looked at me was wider than in the photograph, maybe because of the dark. No light yet to ruin things. No dawn. I could tell that what he was going to say was, maybe, are you all right?

He was a city person, that one, fonder of the smog and the choke and the side street where people like he and I thrive; I am too. So are you. So is Elaine. So are all those Kincaids I don’t ring at Christmas—my brother who’s remodeled the shop (good for him!), my mother. From the air you would all be little lights in Birmingham and London and Bristol, pinpointed together in that bustling yellow glow. There’s citrinitas if you’re looking for it; you only see it at nighttime, up in an airplane or higher.

I’m sorry.

That was stupid, and I was thirty-six. It’s been ten years, however; I seem to have weathered a fair bit of my own stupidity.

I don’t take so many lovers in these years. I just don’t have the time. I’m busy—fewer of everything, outside of work, outside of you, outside of Elaine, outside of my magnum opus. Fewer things, so theoretically I should be getting less attached. I kid. You know me, I drain the blood out of every little thing.

Well, no, you don’t. You don’t.

The best friend I had in school was Sufian—you know him, or knew. We gallery-goers are a small world. He’s gone now: bled dry by madness and misery and the places we live, in and out of hospital. It was always in him; I would have taken it out if I had only known where it lived. No, May, we didn’t fuck, you vulture; it was a beautiful boy with a heart from greener country that he wanted, and I’m hardly that. I hear your imprint is doing another run of his work. The best of us never make it out, do we? Soldiers, spies, civilians. All luminous things are recorded by their hangers-on.

I’m afraid no one is hanging on to me, though. Not even you—you’re just a woman weary of her job and circles and always getting up and falling back in—no, I’m really hanging on to you. I know I think of you about a hundred times as often as you think of me. That is really the quality for which the Secret Intelligence Service selects.

Whiten, therefore, the red, and redden the white.

I’m going to talk about a woman whose name you might, or mightn’t, remember. Please say that you do. I know that it’s a fragile illusion—the notion that while we forget strangers’ sorrow every minute, the things that happen to us make a mark—but humor me, if you will, and connect the name Sylvia Leigh Nancarrow to a headline in 1949.

I am going to include an image here from the holiday I took to Campania with Sylvia Leigh Nancarrow. The image is not of her. I never took a picture of Sylvia Leigh. Not much of anyone did. The surviving photographs of Sylvia Leigh are juvenile, up to a point, and then they’re blurry: a face in group posters, with a hat, with sunglasses, smiling, moving at the wrong moment, frustratingly imprecise. She’s difficult to pin down, like me.

1948, Vienna. 1949, Campania—I’m just putting things in order, I’m just putting things together.

You probably remember Sylvia Leigh Nancarrow for a headline that crossed your desk at one point, or a series of. I remember Sylvia Leigh because she had the most wonderful fake bad Italian of anyone I’ve known.

She modeled it for me on the deck of our boat from Greece. “Mi dispiace, ma non parlo bene l’italiano,” rolled off her tongue with the sly false humility of a fluent speaker—then, with a wink and a reversal, “Mee disspiacchi—” like an American trying to order at a posh restaurant.

I leaped like she’d trod on my tail. “Fuck! I mean, cor blimey, that’s awful,” I said in the insincerest acknowledgement of the family sitting nearish. (The mum glared.) “My absolute stars and garters. How do you do it?”

“It’s an important trick,” said Sylvia Leigh with that cigarette holder of hers. “Certainly more so than sarcastic surprise.”

“My word, you couldn’t be implying that I am anything less than charming at all times.”

“You ought to make your Italian a little less than perfect,” she said, unflapped; “in that way people always think they’re getting one over on you. Surely you were always doing that in France.”

Being partnered with Sylvia Leigh was like studying with a star classmate; she had the most obnoxious standards, and the worst part was that she absolutely met all of them. “Naturally,” I said. “Well, bully for me, then—as a matter of fact, my Italian is imperfect.”

“No, that’s just not being very good with Italian.” Sylvia Leigh had the right of it, of course. “You need to drop it a notch by design. Let’s try this.”

She could do this with any language she spoke, which amounted to English, Italian, French, and German. Neither of us spoke Russian; we had a joke between us that we had been demoted to the non-Russian-speaking division, which was not all joke, considering the business of our trade. Our real shining stars, whoever they were, were off infiltrating the USSR and passing themselves off as comrades to comrades.

In communiqué, I was Bullfinch; she was Jocasta. (I always thought these would have been more secure if they’d given us misleading sexes—not that a bullfinch is a specific sex, I suppose. But to think. I could have been Jocasta! I could have been Medea.)

We were playing casual lovers; we were playing ourselves, our journalistic selves, on sort of a busman’s holiday to Naples where she was going to write about a local fertility festival, one of those pagan holdouts, and I was theoretically going to photograph it, but really we were going to eat and drink and cavort in the Italian spring like God and Stravinsky intended. But really, we were supposed to intercept and hold a crooked American arms dealer long enough for some friends in the carabinieri to transport him. Simple and crude—no miracle tranquilizer darts, we were just going to get him drunk.

By crooked I mean in bed with the Russians, here. Otherwise no one would have any quarrel with what he was doing.

He wasn’t due for a day or two, though, and we did eat and cavort, sort of. We ate, anyway, and drank a little: we established our cover, dancing, kissing, me boorishly fumbling at her skirt in the hotel bar until she raced away to see the bazaar with a gay spirit.

She was impressed with Naples. The chemistry with me was all that she had to feign. I don’t think she understood me very well there. Sylvia Leigh was one of those who thought restrictions in lovers were sort of a petit bourgeois affectation: she took men and women for recreation, if they were any fun, and was a little annoyed that she had to pretend to stick with me here.

We put on an Ellington record, danced and laughed, rolled around in the sheets and took off our clothes in case housekeeping came in; it was like that, with her putting her bare legs up on the headboard like she was sitting, dimensionally, on the wall, that she said: “Is it a problem for you? Being with women? Because you have to do it, too, don’t you? I mean, really, not just this.”

It was a brazen question. I didn’t really mind; “Not exactly. This would be an unwise use of my time if I couldn’t abide sex with people I don’t like.”

“How is it different?”

Sex is more or less the same with all people if it goes decently, I was about to formulate, but if you’re not interested in women, then it just doesn’t make you happy, there isn’t a connection. But I couldn’t go further—I would hang myself with my own standard, if put that way.

I’d leaned on my remembered self, of course. I still do. But he never says anything back to me.

“It’s more difficult to choke on a woman.”

“Leslie!” She laughed, the first full-throated snort I got out of her. “I thought you were meant to be dashing.”

The next day we went to see the festival, as Mr. Piers Wegmann of San Diego, California presumably motored into town on a boat a few miles away. It was all evil-eye charms and maypoles and shadows of Priapus, which was very thematic, really—I had to squire Sylvia Leigh about to fend off the ruder young men with my tan forearms, or possibly wallet. There was a point at which she unlinked arms with me, though, to go and converse with a group of maypole girls with ribbons in their hair and all over their arms; I’ve a suspicion she wanted a ribbon for herself. I would’ve. Anyway, I supposed she knew whether she could take care of herself, and when she was out of sight I fiddled with my camera and I took a shot: a different maypole, in the first stages of being taken down, ribbons torn away. Girls chatting amongst themselves, with their friends and boyfriends. No Sylvia Leigh in sight, no Sylvia Leigh anywhere. Gone, and no one looking at her in-frame either—like a pond when the ripples ceased.

She came back. We got some ice cream and went down again. We split up and I, independently, confirmed Mr. Wegmann’s check-in at our hotel with a few duplicitous conversations—then we reconvened, in our room, as she shook down her hair and put on her evening dress: purple, almost Tyrian purple, with a plunging back. I told her half of what I’d learned and said I would confirm his identity; that she should come to the hotel bar in one hour and I would let her know what I knew.

And then I went out and met Piers Wegmann, passing myself off as a Russian contact. No, I don’t speak the language. But neither did Mr. Wegmann, and I’d learned from Sylvia Leigh about bad accents.

I had to kill him very quietly, in the Neapolitan dry-docks. Quiet killing is very brutal, more so if it’s bare-handed: Mr. Wegmann was not small, but I was much stronger and I crushed his windpipe before I snapped his neck, and put his body in with Asia-bound freight. Then I went home and met Sylvia Leigh in her Tyrian purple dress and told her I’d identified him—and the following morning, I left her at a restaurant and went, American, to meet his Russian contacts as Mr. Piers Wegmann, whom they’d never met.

We formed a cordial relationship. I had an additional piece for barter—a British agent, Sylvia Leigh Nancarrow, working with the Americans. “I’m sure she would have a great deal to say,” I said, twisting the corner of a napkin between my fingers; “given the opportunity to defect.”

I think she did “defect,” Sylvia Leigh—that is, I think they let her resettle in Moscow. I do not really know. My government does not look kindly upon her. But the headline I suggested, WRITER SYLVIA LEIGH NANCARROW MISSING AFTER NEAPOLITAN HOLIDAY, is more gentle.

It wasn’t the Tyrian purple she was wearing the last time I saw her, it was something else. After it was done I went on down to the waterfront—not the docks where I murdered Wegmann, but a seawall where I could see the shore. Do you know that I’d expected an angel to swoop down with a ram, at any moment?

It doesn’t matter. I laid my soul bare and open in Naples, May, in 1949. First I was called, and I answered; then I was tested, and I endured. That I don’t regret. I’m not sorry to Sylvia Leigh—the business I am in was always called sacrifice.

Now I feel the warmth of a promise and I understand what I could not understand before. I have seen what I never thought I’d see; I have seen certainty.

But I would like you to include the shot of the festival. The revels are coming to a close. To this day I don’t know what Sylvia Leigh was doing then, in those minutes to herself. I’ve no way of finding out. I like to imagine the girls have forgotten: they’d be women now, and perhaps one of them has finally thrown out her ribbons.

I said earlier that what unites us in the service is the desire to confess. I still stand by that. I’ll add, though, that what we have even more vastly in common—man-to-man and woman-to-woman—is the compulsion to lie.

It makes sense. You can’t really have the first without the second.

I was making it sound like the SIS and the CIA and the KGB are all three-letter factories for memoirs, which I really do think they would have ended up being someday—embellished memoirs, first, and then eventually embarrassing exposés once no one cares for their honor anymore. I think that’s how national legends die. First in glory, then in tell-all bloody truth, then in far more banal and stupid truth. It’s certainly happening to our imperial project. Maybe someday if we’d let history run some version of its course, all the cabinets would open and all the idiotic, incompetent secrets of our leaders would come tumbling out into the light—Nelson with his pants down next to Churchill and Pitt the Younger, and all the rest of us bloody well free.

You may see, though, that in fact I am the only person committed to time’s course.

In any case—do you know what the Secret Intelligence Service is, however? It’s a goddamned double agent factory. You’ve probably surmised that I am one, so you would think I’m in no position to criticize; but May, darling, you know I am always in a position to criticize, so let me say that the agents of Her Majesty the Queen are always defecting for the stupidest and pettiest reasons. Sometimes it is because they have become Communists, which is stupid, but not petty; sometimes it is because they believe they have a better offer from the KGB, which is both stupid and petty and requires believing the KGB has anything to offer in the way of quality of life, or that there is even a better life on offer which doesn’t require asking the Almighty to amend history so that you never got involved with spying in the first place. There are no good lives here, May, no up-trading whatsoever, which is why I believe most of these nincompoops do it because they’re bored.

Elaine said as much, actually—in fact, she said as much when I was twenty-three, in the third year of the war. I try to think back on Elaine Paxton at that time (I believe it had just occurred to me, bright lad, that her name was probably not Geraldine) because I want to remember how she looked, how she was different; the truth is, it’s difficult. It is just too continuous. I’ve seen her too many times.

I wonder if her hair was silver. It can’t have been silver all this time, but I can’t remember it any other color.

“The paradox of intelligence work, Leslie,” she said to me once in a car when we were reviewing a potential target—a Belgian office for munitions research—“is that everyone predisposed to be duplicitous, be creatively dramatic, have a rapid change of heart and come drastically over to your side, is that they are also predisposed to do all those things when you don’t want them to. There’s nothing worse than well-suited spies. I wish we could affix them in place with glue.”

I must’ve been in no mood for wit: “Are you concerned I’ll go over to the other side, ma’am?”

“You? No, you aren’t a Nazi. You’re no monster. That’s why we approached you.”

It was hard for me to conceive of the point of this abstract discussion. I remember what was going by outside the window: a dirt road alongside our paved one, where rural women worked and endeavored not to look up. “Isn’t this a bit immaterial, then?”

Elaine always sits with composure in cars, like she doesn’t notice that they are moving. I used to think that this was a skill, but lately I believe it’s just that she’s short. “I mean after all of this. These are fairly dire circumstances, and we’ve recruited rather than hired or been approached—that’s selected for people of some integrity. But it will be very different after.”

I must have looked at her, though I don’t recall what I saw. I either said or thought, with bitter disbelief: you’re assuming there’s going to be an after?

But honestly, I do believe she affixed me quite thoroughly for some time, or at least rid me of any double agent tendencies. Maybe it was that she’d approached me, rather than been approached: they tell that to children in case they become lost, you know—talk to the adults you choose, not who try to help you. In fact, I never became a Communist, received a better offer, fell in love with a beautiful Russian, became resentful, or grew bored. By that score, Elaine Paxton, Morrigan, did Queen and country right by recruiting Leslie Kincaid, Bullfinch. He served them gladly and well.

I said before also that we all like to be chosen. I’ve had the fortune of being chosen twice, and it’s the second that I imagine you are finding more relevant and more concerning—but let’s assign credit where it’s due. The first person to select me, inexorably, to save the world was Elaine Paxton nee Goddard. The last dreadnought in commission. They should give her a knighthood. They should have called her Gawain or Lancelot—or Bedivere. Loyal, incorruptible, changeless. I do not know how many years of service she’s had to witness these betrayals in, but I know, unshakably, that none of them were hers. I think a part of me hoped that one would be—I know I hoped her mask would be one to lift, on the other side of things, on my way back to my appointment in Vienna. But she—in relief, in sorrow—is exactly what she appears to be: I want to imagine that she’d have been by the young Queen’s deathbed someday, advising some last heartless course of jingoism. I can’t really imagine an England without her.

And really, I think that’s her undoing—imagination. Elaine’s no fool. But whatever she’s suspected of me, I don’t think she has ever been able to imagine the truth, or that her heart is big enough to contain everything I’ve been given to carry. I think she lacks a certain capacity for belief.

One more Elaine anecdote—the year after that, I hadn’t seen her in a while, wondered if I ever would again. She seemed too important to concern herself with me. (I am her steadiest agent, her protegé. Her most constant star.) I was under-supported and had to leave someone behind; then I tried to liaison and found my Resistance cell had melted like candle wax, off to Dachau and Ravensbrück. I was sick with fear and waited for them to come for me too. I had nowhere to go, and knew running would incriminate me. Mostly I sketched my landlord’s dog—I tried watercolors but something was off with me, I was unsteady and my washes too dark.

Every day I had alive was a day that the dead and dying had not betrayed me. I think about that sometimes, when I like to repeat fatuous truisms about spies and liars. I think of Luc and Noemie Boissel and five other people I’d barely known.

“I want an L-pill,” I said to Elaine when she finally came for me.

She’d come with a driver and a “husband”—lumpy men in overcoats. It was, at least, reassuring. “Those are less useful than you would think,” she said, in the middle of her last check of my lodgings.

“The Boissels never turned on me. I don’t want to turn on anyone either.”

“Very well,” she said, and in the car she gave me a tin: I didn’t think to be startled that she had one on her. “But no one is going to put it inside of your tooth. Pretend it’s a mint. Not too well.”

I dedicate this book, Appointment in Vienna, to Elaine Goddard Paxton, upon whom the sun never sets.

I dedicate my Great Work, the Magnum Opus, to Luc and Noemie Boissel. It will make no difference to them, decades too late. They’re beyond the reach of the dawn; I do not think I could even sketch them from memory. I didn’t commit their faces to it at the time. I’d thought I would have more opportunities.

Maugham’s unfortunate fellow sees Death in Baghdad and hastens to Samarra to meet him. Death is no less nonplussed—I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, he says, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.

Death clears his throat. Death touches him on the shoulder. Death checks his calendar, conscious of ever-hurrying onward himself; Death’s time is boundless, yet pressed somehow into an infinite number of urgent shapes. Where is Death going? Only to meet destiny in every place himself. Can he call it his own destiny, too? In Samarra he makes it just in time to see the startled face of the man running from him; in the marketplace he passes his hand through his shoulder. The man understands, suddenly. He turns back to the road. He must go back to traveling, or he too will be late.

Grytviken is a whaling station in the Sandwich Islands near the Antarctic. It’s one of the southernmost places a person can visit, and in 1950 I pitched it to National Geographic magazine in Washington DC as the substance of a profile. So I traveled there as cargo on a queasy whaler to explore the research station and photograph the Aurora Australis, and make a rendezvous.

I am including these pictures because I believe they are my most arresting work that I did not destroy. Like many beautiful photographs, they were somewhat a matter of being in the correct place, and largely of choosing the correct film and exposure.

Look at the green tracks of the valkyries, May. Imagine the darkroom I made of the lavatory where I was staying, where I labored and the Norwegians looked at me with pitying eyes.

In Vienna fourteen months before, I’d snapped a much more impulsive photograph. The lights at the opera were no less dizzy. I could’ve believed them the work of the gods too. That was the work of a different man: one without direction. Here’s the trouble with photography—it’s still. You don’t see what goes into setting it up, it’s true, but you’re also tricked into believing that it’s unobtrusive, that nothing happens after you capture the image and disturb the universe.

A gentleman was about to speak to me at the opera. I knew he was there, but I was paying him no mind until he touched my elbow. So forward!—I thought, amused, silly and vain—and I addressed him.

We spoke outside on the tiled veranda. “Do you have an interest in the future, Leslie?” he said.

“Does it matter?” He’d brought me to candor—I was studying his face. “It’ll be realized whether or not I take an interest, does it not? One way or another.”

“Not precisely. Time passes, whether or not you take an interest.” He took my hand like an earnest suitor, mulling over his own words; I didn’t think to prevent him. “But a future has to have witnesses in order to experience it. It doesn’t meaningfully exist without human eyes. This time will pass away, that’s true, with or without intervention. But there’s no guarantee that another will come.”

I must not have been fully serious. Fully comprehending—“Are we talking about the Age of the Atom? If so, between you and me and whoever’s listening, I will say that I don’t think the bomb will put an end to future time. To America and the Soviets and you and me, possibly, and quality of life as we know it. But there are so damned many of us running around.” Was I holding a glass? Champagne or rosé? How did I gesture, in my throes? “Mankind, I mean. Humans. There will always be somebody around to have a miserable time of it. Well, maybe not always. But it’ll be a while.”

I suppose here I was expecting some doomsday notions, or whatever the Russians—it had to be the Russians—had dreamed up and sent me—

He leaned in, fearless as a partner in a waltz. He wasn’t wrong: no one was looking at us.

“I’m not talking about bombs,” he said. “I mean better lives. I mean a better world for people to live. Aren’t you weary, Leslie, of spending your time trying to fight the horror? Has it ever worked?”

Ah, I wish I could record a startled and reverent silence here. Unfortunately, I always had something then. “You are getting damned seductive over in the KGB,” is what I said.

“The Communist experiment has always been reliant on educating virtue into human character,” said he, pushing his fingers through the spaces in mine: it felt idle, somehow, a courteous afterthought. Just partnering me for one dance. “The American one, too. Leslie, you can’t possibly imagine I would try to evangelize you on the premise that people, at large, will change? For the better, no less?”

After I finished my nighttime photography in Grytviken, I packed up my tripod and went to develop the film. I like my time in the darkroom. I put on a record, this time, to drown out the Vera Lynn from the downstairs—I can’t abide Vera Lynn, can’t hear her promises without being wrung out like a rag. Two kinds of veterans, I suppose. I put on The Andrews Sisters. Then after that, I went out after midnight to sit on the hill—it’s mostly hill, in Grytviken. The southern lights are better with your own two eyes; some things are.

He sat next to me. The cap he wore reminded me that he had to wear a costume, like the rest of us: I had fanciful thoughts, then, imagining him impersonating a whaler. Working one of those iron ships. (Nothing so daring. He was a scientist and had attained a research post, I learned: his name was public record. And I mean he was a scientist—that was his post. He’s not like us. If anything he has to come up to the surface to be seen.)

“I went to Kraków,” I said. “I murdered Sylvia Leigh. Or as good as.”

“I saw what you published. It’s a beautiful shot, the children. What did you find there?”

“Rubble.” It must have been cold. “And swarming greed. And revision—already. It isn’t going to get better, just after knocking everything down.”

“Not without intervention,” he agreed, quietly.

We sat. The green tinged the water, and the hair on my arms between jumper and glove.

“I hope you aren’t delusional,” I said.

He smiled; I could hear the remnant in his voice after he waited to reply. “If you were me, Leslie, what would you want before I granted you the revelation? Or think of it this way: what have you left to ask from me?”

The rocks were rough underneath us. After all this time I don’t think I’ve gotten any thicker-skinned.

“An L-pill.” I think I pushed the question out of my voice—not an L-Pill?, hopeful, to the schoolmaster.

He patted me between the shoulders. This time it was avuncular.

“I don’t need you to die,” he said.

“I don’t care if I do.”

“I know.” He put his hand over my hand. “When we sacrifice, we make no offering to ourselves. And we make no offering to God, either. Everything we do, we do for the living. I know you.”

Everyone likes to be chosen, or should. In truth I felt silly—all my pretenses gone. The end of a play-chase, and no idea why I’d been running. “You must remain alive to do everything you need to do,” he said. “What I need from you is your loyalty. More than an oath. You will never betray me in word or deed. It is not a command—it is a description.” His voice was close, his tone remote. “I will not force you to take it. But know that I can settle for nothing less in you.”

I don’t know if it was a kindness, that he brought me to a beautiful and strange place to do this to me—the exact sort of place an artist would like to be transformed. Or perhaps I flatter myself. Or perhaps I do the hand of fate a disservice, bringing Death and the traveler together on their obverse errands. He took my arm and led me to the water, where the world of lights was reflected. I know it was no choice. I know he did not force me. I know, May, that we were each on our course, and he was gifted to know where I would walk.

So there you have it, May. I lead a matryoshka life: an artist and journalist on the shell, within him a spy, and within him, something else entirely. But to be honest—to—be—honest—there are some times when I think the shell must have been the real one. Not something painted on, but something hollowed out. If nothing else, he takes the least thought. When I spent time with you and Ned (is he really gone? How is it always something like pneumonia, or flu?) and our smart set, our boys and girls and nellies and sympathizers and manic-depressives of the galleries and the papers, I never had to think of how. I felt so heavy with habit. I was comfortable.

I think in another time, I would have reviewed film—set myself to thinking about what Ingmar Bergman was doing, always with the vague dissatisfaction that I had a work within me too that, next year, I would realize.

Well, it turns out that I do, don’t I?

I . . . I was always late to the “salons” you hosted. Fashionably. You know, those glorified parties—I hear Astrid’s were glorified orgies, but not of the sort I’d like. Your salons, there were always thirteen or fourteen of you arrayed on chairs or cushions, depending which venue you’d acquired, and you sat smoking with drinks in your hands, all facing one another. There was always a cloud of smoke and some light through it, which flattered everyone’s hair and jewelry. Together you toasted your health as you depleted it, and damned the bastards and the philistines: to next year, next year in Jerusalem where there’d be funding for more than just propaganda and BBC hagiography, next year where they produced the films of brilliant women, next year, next year, next year where we made it, every single one. I would linger to listen to your toasts and Sarah’s and Art’s and Erich’s when he mimicked you.

You’d see me shortly—Leslie! Are you ever punctual?—but there’s some added-up time of me in doorways, waiting for you to notice. I wonder if there’s anything you’ve ever waited for me to notice. Did I?

Next year, May. I can promise you next year. Maybe not for us. But I come bearing next year: where we make it, every single one.

I’ve wondered often—is the oath I took real? Is it binding? I have seen stranger wonders since—and we have stranger ones yet in store, when we take what we must from this world and burn it in that offering to the living. On the first Armistice Day they had the ludicrous idea of a War to End All Wars. Call this the sacrifice to end all sacrifices. I’ve seen the spheres that move above us and below; I know we exist on a fragile plane of a shape of catastrophic complexity. Believe me, May, I have learned not to be arrogant and skeptical. Skepticism is an easy refuge. It is more often true than not, which almost seems like “true.” You will see things you cannot imagine—there is no avoiding that, really. That’s just the advance of time.

But the oath is the thing I doubt. The reason I doubt it is that I’ve never had reason to test it. I have never tried to betray the Great Work. I have never opened my mouth with the aim of telling anyone the truth of what I do. Perhaps that’s evidence of the oath, or evidence that it never needed to exist. That is why I am interested in our book, May, in Appointment in Vienna—because whatever I say or don’t say here, I have no control over it. It would not exist, and if it did, I’d have no hand in its making.

I believe that is the only course left to me, in the way of confession.

In closing, I have no editorial advisement on the contents of the text, for the most part. One thing I would like for you to include at some point—I’m not choosy about where—is a reproduction of one of my sketches. This is a retrospective of my photography, yes, I do know, but I think you would be remiss not to acknowledge that I was a representational visual artist as well, don’t you think? I’ve chosen a self-portrait in charcoal from my time at university when I was terribly young, before any design had me in it apart from my own.

You can see it is my work because I have rendered myself a little unattractive. I’ll have you know I was a handsome boy, but somehow false humility had already got under my skin and I’d thought I should be a little ironic. Well, there you have it—turned three-quarters, crosshatched, with the slightest devilish smile on my crudely formed lips. The joke is all on me: there’s no one left to see the irony, no applause for the deprecation. My voice, eighteen, is gone. You can attach it to the biographical material.

About the Author

Gabriel Murray is a writer, teacher, and interactive fiction hobbyist originally from Portland, Oregon who has lived in just six U.S. states but under about twenty-one different roofs, give or take a shingle. His stories and articles have appeared in Strange Horizons, GlitterShip, Daily Science Fiction, and elsewhere. His favorite forms are the novel and the Inform parser text game, due to his affection for maddening and drawn-out labor.

Symbiosis Theory

Choyeop Kim, translated by Joungmin Lee Comfort

Ludmila Markov had memories of a place she’d never been.

It was unclear when those memories established themselves inside her. The memoir of one of her teachers at the orphanage where she’d spent her early years contained the following recollection: “Somewhere around five years of age, she began saying that she’d come from ‘that place.’ We didn’t think much of it, since pretend play and talking about imaginary things are common behaviors among normally-developing children. However, Ludmila seemed somewhat obsessed with her make-believe world. Whenever any of us playfully challenged its existence, she became very upset. As a result, an unspoken rule developed regarding Ludmila, that one ought to just go ahead and play along with her. As long as we did that, there was never any problem. We just all figured that she’d outgrow her fantasy soon enough.”

Defying their expectations, however, Ludmila never did. Her notion of the place persisted into adulthood, and remained with her throughout the rest of her life.

From an early age, Ludmila’s remarkable artistic gifts set her apart. According to the teachers at the orphanage, she began producing intricate drawings of her dream-drenched world as soon as she was able to hold a crayon. Lamentably, these early pieces ended up getting tossed out when she left the orphanage later on, having been considered little more than the elaborate doodles of a talented child.

Still, in that orphanage—where the need for bread and crackers far outweighed the need for crayons—little Ludmila spent more time daydreaming than drawing. It wasn’t until the age of ten that she was discovered through a youth talent project sponsored by a multinational corporation, which swiftly whisked her out of the orphanage to a renowned academy in London. From that day on, she would never again go hungry or sleep in a roach-infested room.

Shortly after her move to the academy, Ludmila began exhibiting paintings of “the place.” Her first solo exhibition, which was held at a small gallery rented for the purpose of showcasing work by the academy’s students, was something of an introduction to the general landscape of this “place.” From the opening day, the collection made waves, with many of the gallery’s unsuspecting visitors finding themselves moved to tears while peering at the canvases. Inquiries about the creative spirit behind these works poured in.

Her proud instructors at the academy all wanted to know as well: “How did you conceive such a world?” Granted, there was still plenty of room for improvement when it came to their young protégé’s technique; but her landscapes never failed to enthrall, and the strokes of her brush upon the canvas showed nary a hint of faltering or hesitation.

Ludmila’s vision of “the place” seemed to have been etched deep into her consciousness as it continued to exert a supreme influence on her life. It was a place that appeared at once utterly real and completely imaginary, and she devoted her life to painting it. Each painting formed a discrete fragment of its landscape; yet taken as a whole, her oeuvre constructed an impossibly detailed and vivid sense of the spellbinding place that so clearly inhabited her mind.

Journalists never stopped asking her, “What do you call this place, Ludmila?” But her response, as well as the flustered and somewhat apologetic look on her face, were always the same: “There is a name for it, in my head, but it’s as if I can’t say it out loud.”

She did try, at one point. With each valiant attempt, she produced a string of unintelligible sounds so alien that they seemed to have come from another dimension. Efforts to break it down into perceptible units proved futile in the end, and so “the place” simply came to be called “the planet.”

A fictitious planet with a name that couldn’t be articulated. That its name didn’t render itself to spoken language only added to the planet’s phantasmic allure. Over time, people began to call it Ludmila’s Planet, conferring upon it the dignity of distinction through its eponym. It ultimately seemed to matter little whether or not such a place existed in the real world: the force of the beloved artist’s eternal yearning for it was all that mattered.

In many of her early pieces, Ludmila’s Planet is rendered in a more or less abstract style. Themes of swirling blue and purple present it as a home to multitudes of creatures, some with stable forms, and others with fluidly shifting ones. Much of the planet’s surface is covered by an ocean teeming with drifting bioluminescent amoebas, to which the planet owes its peculiar blue glow. More complex organisms form their own distinct ecosystems that fill the planet’s land, sea, and air. The days are short and the nights, long. The sun, with its daily rise and fall, fills the sky with breathtaking hues.

Her depictions of the planet grew more detailed as Ludmila entered adulthood. It was also at this point that she began converting her paintings into digital data. Before long, she had digitized the planet’s major attributes and characteristics in scrupulous detail. The drive and focus with which she constructed its flora and fauna seemed akin to that of a scientist working engaged in fieldwork.

It was only a matter of time before Ludmila plunged headlong into what was then the still-fledgling world of simulation art. Her revolutionary new endeavor mesmerized the public and critics alike, with the latter proclaiming that she’d brought much needed substance into a field oversaturated with technology and shallow technique.

Her response to these accolades was as consistent as ever: “The planet is. I’m just a skilled technician recreating what I see.”

People had fallen in love with Ludmila’s Planet. Through her art, which by then could be experienced in every corner of the globe, the planet had come to take on the status of a real thing. Their adoration for the subject of her art went beyond passive admiration: it inspired films and plays based on reinterpretations of Ludmila’s original works, and even as art of all lineages continued to be treated like mere consumer goods by the masses, her work enjoyed the rare exception of boring itself into people’s hearts and influencing their minds.

One of the most notable characteristics of her work was the complete lack of any traceable national or ethnic aesthetic. This might have been attributable to her nomadic life: her early childhood in Moscow, her adolescence in London, and the many different neighborhoods around the world she called home in the years that followed. Whatever the case, her depictions of the planet never evoked a single location that could have existed on Earth, but in fact, a place that seemed to exist all on its own, in a completely different universe.

And yet, her planet series stirred in viewers a curious sense of nostalgia. Gazing at Ludmila’s paintings, people would find themselves suddenly besieged by an inexplicable longing—a kind of grief for the utter goneness of something they might have once known a long time ago. Then, moved by this ineffable emotion, they would often become teary-eyed. Regarding this phenomenon, critics liked to say that, because the planet series depicted a world that didn’t exist in real life; paradoxically, it spoke to a world that uniquely occupied each of us inside.

There is a lesser known, nonetheless extraordinary series by Ludmila published only after her death. Entitled Never Leave Me, this series departs from the vivid and highly detailed imagery that characterized her signature style. In fact, each of the highly abstract pieces in the series broods with the potent emotionality of infinite sorrow that seems determined to devastate the viewers, in what could only be described as a plea of desperation.

For whatever reason, Ludmila had chosen not to promote the series: it was only after her death that dozens of pieces bearing this title were discovered in her attic. Scholars have argued that the series was a surrogate to the artist’s yearning for a lover, but Ludmila’s private life remains so poorly documented as to render any speculation or theory impotent in the absence of conclusive evidence.

By the time of her death, Ludmila had placed all her work in the public domain, in order to allow its use by anyone. Soon, simulation games based on her planet series began surging onto the market. For many people seeking refuge from the chaos of everyday life, wandering through simulations of Ludmila’s planet became a widely popular form of leisure. An unreachable world though it may otherwise have been, people had come to consider Ludmila’s Planet their own utopia, a legacy of the beloved artist which would forever live in their imagination.

Then the planet was discovered.

A space probe exploring deep space transmitted data back to Earth one day. It included images of a small planet with an unusual orbit, located in a distant multi-stellar system. Analysis of the data suggested the possibility of life on the unknown planet. Regrettably, its astronomical distance from Earth and the limits of technology at the time prohibited verification of this possibility within a reasonable time frame. Nevertheless, the discovery caused one typically sleepy observatory to erupt like a batted hive.

For days on end, the observatory buzzed with talk of the planet. Barring the potential of faulty transmission, the implications of the data were too exciting. Indeed, the most that Earth’s deep space exploration program had produced thus far had been nothing more than the same old vague possibility of life on alien planets, but never any data as clear and forthright as this.

Further analysis revealed that the planet’s atmosphere was an exquisite mix of ammonia and methane, two gases that were easily broken down by the UV light of one of the nearby stars. Upon this insight took shape the dominant hypothesis, which was that the planet’s atmospheric composition necessitated the presence of carbon-based life on its surface. When scientists converted the probe-measured electromagnetic spectrum into visible rays, the whole planet was suddenly lit in an anodyne blue glow, making it look very much like . . . another Earth. Or perhaps a fantastical twin that might have existed in a parallel universe somewhere.

“Doesn’t it remind you of Ludmila’s Planet?” said one technician, looking up from his boxed lunch.

“What? No way . . . ” another balked, incredulous.

“I mean, think about it. Precise and detailed measurements of her planet are preserved in simulations, which scientists have already used to verify the probability of its existence in real life. The data we received the other day . . . it’s consistent with the data we have for Ludmila’s Planet. Are you really trying to tell me that’s a complete coincidence?”

At this, others at the table set down their forks.

The staff at the observatory lay sleepless that night. It was true: the newly discovered planet’s observable data lent a new reality to Ludmila’s Planet, as the simulations she’d left behind predicted with perfect accuracy the world’s volume, mass, orbital period, diameter, and average surface temperature.

Could it indeed be Ludmila’s Planet? If so, how on earth could she have known about it?

With astonishing swiftness, another stunning fact was discovered the following day: the planet, it turned out, had long ago gone up in flames when its parent star had flared up. The data they’d received had been collected mere moments before its explosion.

The technician who had initially confirmed the content of the transmission stood before the assembly of reporters and journalists, triggering a blitz of questions and camera flashes.

“We’re looking at a planet that has been gone for a time now,” he said. “That is, Ludmila’s Planet, which once existed in a distant galaxy.”

But how could it be? Had Ludmila possessed some magical power that had allowed her to see into the distant past, if not the future? Was that even a viable theory in this day and age? Could everything instead just be an enormous coincidence? But then, what were the chances that an imaginary planet, flawlessly conceived though it had been by a massively gifted artist, was virtually identical to one later discovered in real life far off across the universe?

Everyone hungered for the truth, but the one person who held the key had already departed from the Earth.

As news of the staggering discovery zipped around the globe, the midnight oil was burning bright near the lakeshore in Seoul’s Gwangjin District, at the Brainwave Research Institute.

It was two in the morning, but the building was bustling with weary employees making a last-ditch effort to meet the deadline, their collective anxiety spilling out into every hallway. In the staff lounge where the TV was on to fill the silence, breaking news of Ludmila’s Planet was airing to the rapt attention of no one.

Seated at a corner table was Senior Researcher Soobin Yoon, still glaring at the same piece of document that she’d been clutching for a good hour. Her eyes felt ready to tumble out from their sockets. The progress review meeting was fast approaching, and she needed a modicum of cooperation from a machine that wouldn’t stop spewing wacky results. She shuddered at the thought of the subtle eye rolls and other signs of annoyance that she’d have to weather in the conference room. Was there anyone who wouldn’t be annoyed to hear that, “Life is overwhelming,” or “I miss my colleagues,” were the sort of thoughts that had been detected occurring inside the heads of two-month-old infants?

“It was working fine just a month ago,” she sighed, addressing Hannah at the next table.

“But the subjects were kittens then,” Hannah said, taking a break from her stack of documents. “These human infants are inscrutable.”

“Kittens, infants . . . They cry when they’re hungry, sleepy, or scared. It’s all the same,” Soobin retorted.

Giggling at this, Hannah said, “Who knows? Kittens may be more philosophical than human infants.”

Maybe so. But the pressing issue for them now was decoding the cries of the infants. Accurately.

The Brain-Machine Interface Team was studying thought-to-speech interface technology, which captured neural activation patterns using monomolecular imaging technology and then converted them into speech. Conversely, speech could be reverse engineered to the original neural patterns—or thoughts—that had generated it, though the latter was still very much a work in progress.

Humanity’s attempt to understand the brain had a long history, as did their desire to read another’s thoughts. Thus each breakthrough in neuroscience that had failed to deliver mind-reading technology nonetheless stoked embers of this longing in people’s minds. It was to this longing that the Brainwave Research Institute owed its continued, robust funding since its establishment at the dawn of the 21st century. Much had been gained in the cutting edge of neural decoding over the years, but it was the emergence of advanced imaging technology that hurried the research forward by finally allowing high-resolution recording of the smallest changes in a subject’s neural activity. Prior to this advancement, the interface technology had stalled out at a rudimentary level, success being correctly inferring whether a subject had been shown a picture of a scenic landscape or a food item based on their brain MRI readouts.

The paradigm-shifting breakthrough had come two years prior in the form of a monomolecular neural scanning technology, which made it possible to analyze brain activities at the level of the neuron. Promptly adopting this new imaging technology, the research team had achieved significant success over the intervening years. The new challenge now was to reverse-match speech to thoughts—or inner speech—yet to be processed into perceptible output. It was a task requiring a massive scanner, and mere minutes of speech took multiple days of tedious processing and analysis, but the technology’s unlimited potential kept everyone going.

In the preliminary study, which had involved the analysis of pet dogs’ and cats’ assorted vocalizations, the interface proved extremely effective, matching the animal subjects’ vocal expressions to corresponding desires with an accuracy rate of ninety-five percent. The canine subjects in the study wagged their tails with contentment when petted or given chew-toys according to their bark analysis. Before long, the technology’s commercial applications targeting mammals were green-lighted. Wealthy pet owners flooded the institute with phone calls pleading for an opportunity to have one final “conversation” with their dying pets. Unfortunately, such technology was still a long way off. If the research continued to make steady progress, however, a universal translator would be well within the realm of the feasible.

The research team then swiftly embarked on a new project involving human subjects. If the interface proved as effective for humans as it already had for other mammals, the obvious implications for those who lacked speech or motor function—not to mention language researchers mystified by some linguistic puzzle in an obscure language—were nothing short of incredible.

There was a great deal of hope and optimism during the initial data collection stage. It was true that the complexity of human thoughts and speech was expected to pose a challenge far greater than that posed by the previous animal study. As it were, the interface was still only capable of simple text output inferred from neural readouts, as opposed to, say, real-time transcription of a full-fledged conversation. But even so, there was the fact that its remarkable accuracy rate consistently measured at over eighty percent. Thus, it was implicitly understood by everyone that improving the system’s capacity for linguistic complexity was the next hurdle, though it seemed unlikely in the extreme that this challenge could threaten to derail the research itself.

Indeed, another success followed when a pattern model was completed based on neural data collected from the adult subjects. The team then swiftly moved on to human infants. The trill of hope and excitement was undeniable in the voice of everyone who discussed it. Deciphering infant cries, even just approximately, would be a game changer for new parents and those currently toiling in the field of robot-assisted childcare research. The interface was bound to become an indispensable infant-care tool the world over—except that this time, the research ran into a brick wall right out of the gate.

Hannah, who had been in charge of the first round of analysis, entered the conference room with a data chip in hand. The mood in the room was buoyant with the hopeful anticipation of her colleagues.

“The results are . . . very strange. They’re not the kind of thoughts we’d think infants are capable of thinking,” she said. Then, heaving a big sigh, she projected the results onto the screen.

The entire room fell silent. According to the interface, the infants had cooed and cried about the following:

“How can we imbue a greater sense of morality in them?”

“How are you all doing in there?”

“No. This is our home now.”

Everyone gaped at the screen, dumbstruck. The analysis was a complete mess.

“It looks like data corruption,” Soobin said flatly.

It only made sense to question the purity of data, considering how the imaging system worked. At the current stage of innovation, decoding accuracy was still highly subject to the noise level in the input data, after all. Noise, environmental or otherwise, had a way of making its way into data no matter how vigilant the monitoring, which frequently resulted in a frustrating amount of time spent on filtering it out. In fact, the team had already run into a similar problem during the adult trials. It wasn’t a stretch to imagine that the data collected from infants would be more muddled, since their brains were still learning how to formulate a thought, let alone vocalize it.

Around 14 months of age, the average human baby begins to absorb basic vocabulary with a striking efficiency, and is able to follow simple commands. From infancy to adolescence, a person’s cognitive development and linguistic development follow the same general trajectory, which is to say, one’s thought development is critically dependent on one’s language comprehension and vice versa. Hence, logic dictates that an infant’s thoughts cannot greatly surpass the level of his current language comprehension.

“So it has to be noise,” Soobin repeated, “If the data were clean, we’d be seeing I’m hungry, I’m uncomfortable . . . that type of output. And not even in fully formed sentences. Simple registration of pain and other sensations is what we should be seeing here.”

“That’s what I thought, too.” Hannah nodded in agreement. And then she ventured, “But noisy data alone can’t explain everything. Look at this analysis of older children just beginning to speak. Their speech and neural patterns are all over the place, too. ‘Mama, I want that’ was matched to ‘I long to feel connected to the world’ . . . ? How do we explain it?”

“Hmm . . . Could it be because children’s neural activation patterns are so completely distinct from those of adults?” Soobin wondered.

“Possibly,” Hannah said, her face darkening as she added, “And if that’s the case, then we’ll have to start it all over again.”

At that, the air in the conference room hung heavy with a sense of foreboding.

Thankfully, a problem identified was, usually, a problem half-solved. Soobin and Hannah set about sorting the collected thought-speech data by age group. Next, they separated the data of subjects whose language had yet to emerge. The effort drastically reduced the amount of available data, so a full day had to be spent on the phone while begging every cooperative agency for additional material. It was a chore they could do without, but surely it was more agreeable than accepting the results at hand and announcing to the world that babies babbled madly to themselves.

They’d placed a great deal of hope on the effort, but the results that came back were nonetheless demoralizing. It turned out that the infants’ brainwave patterns were far more intricate than they’d had imagined, suddenly making it seem trivial by comparison to scrutinize the adults’. In fact, the other team, which had continued with the adult study, was enjoying smooth sailing. Having already mapped onto the interface the large database of neural patterns collected from adults with no speech or language difficulties, they were currently working on teasing out speech from the brainwaves of adult subjects who’d lost the ability to speak for various reasons. In sad contrast, Soobin’s team was still troubleshooting for the initial findings that indicated infants engaged in philosophical musings. No matter how many times they duplicated the entire process, though, the results remained consistently baffling.

“These babies . . . ”

Clutching at her head in frustration, Soobin plopped down on the sofa.

“ . . . complicated, deep little philosophers, they are,” Hannah said.

Had they underestimated the challenge? Could it be that the mysteries of the human brain were simply too complex for them to unravel? Soobin was at a loss, completely.

Sensing that she was left with no other recourse, Soobin began talking with Hannah about the fate of the project, and whether a course correction was necessary to save it. Despite everyone’s efforts, the problem of the philosophical babies seemed insoluble. In the end, it was determined that the project should be redesigned at the next progress meeting. Enthusiasm dwindled, and the project began petering out when an unexpected development diverted it from its course once again.

“Soobin, could you take a look at this?” Hannah said, presenting her with a stack of analysis results she’d printed out. Her lips pressed together, she looked oddly intent. Taking the stack from Hannah, Soobin began scanning the pages, before clapping it shut within a minute. This couldn’t be right. She couldn’t take seriously what her eyes had just told her. It felt like she was reading a tabloid.

“What’s this? What is it supposed to mean?” she accused.

“It’s supposed to mean what it means. These are the results of the infant babble analysis,” Hannah said, “Do you remember that day? Ludmila’s Planet had just been discovered. The data captured on that day are all like this.”

Soobin remembered, of course. It was on that day the two had first begun to debate the viability of the infant project. While she’d continued fussing over the puzzling results, Hannah had begun a new analysis with the remaining data, the staggering results of which were contained in the printout that Soobin now clutched in her hands.

“What on earth . . . ” Soobin stared at the strings of letters.

“This is where we’d all begun.”

“I miss our planet.”

“Ludmila!”

“Ludmila!”

“Ludmila!”

“Ludmila painted the place exactly as it was.”

“I miss it!”

As Soobin stood there with her mouth open, Hannah emphasized how many times she’d already verified the results.

“I couldn’t believe it myself, which is why it took me a little while to share it with you. Every infant was occupied by these thoughts that day.”

With that, she produced an additional report containing the analysis results of reams of data she’d personally pored over, which had been initially rejected by the team for being corrupt and unusable. Working on the assumption that the data was, in truth, free of noise, Hannah had isolated the units of meaning that emerged repeatedly. The resulting chart at hand incorporated the infant thought-speech model that had been scrapped for being an utter failure. Once again, the analysis had found that some bizarre conversations were taking place inside the heads of these infants. These conversations, not to be outdone by the notion itself in their oddity, appeared to be thoughtful and, at times, lively exchanges between multiple voices in the brain.

“You OK? I just heard a racket.”

“No worries. Mr. clumsy just knocked over a chair, that’s all.”

“I bet his eyes were glued to the screen.” 

“Are you already dreaming of the sea?”

“Oh, I’d love to end up in the sea someday.”

“This data right here? It’s from one infant, from the same time frame—as you can see,” Hannah pointed out. “It’s as if multiple beings coexist inside the infant’s brain. Please, stop looking at me like that and hear me out,” she urged, turning the page for Soobin. “I extracted the interpretations that showed up repeatedly and then sorted them out. And I took care of the post-analysis, in case you’re wondering. Look.”

It was true. There were multiple participants in these conversations, all of whom were speaking with the tenderness and devotion of a caregiver. They talked about morality. They talked about life. They talked as though they were co-parents, every one of them nurturing and looking out for the infant. These results all but pointed to a conclusion that Soobin herself would be hard-pressed to accept. Stunned speechless, she listened to what Hannah still had to say.

“Something’s present inside their brains,” Hannah concluded. “Something not human. These occurrences can’t be explained without introducing an external entity.”

“It must have been noise in the data,” replied Soobin in a tight voice.

“Noise can’t account for it. The conversations are persistently and deeply coherent. How likely is it that noise interruptions turned into discussions of morality, ethics, altruism, and all that? Isn’t that more absurd to imagine?” Hannah persisted.

“But . . . How? The data had come from thousands of infants, each one an individual. And you’re saying that, inside each of those little heads resides some force that acts like a parent?”

“If not, then how do you explain what you see?”

Given her radical-leaning perspective on many subjects, it wouldn’t be the first time Hannah had offended others’ sensibilities. Still, when it came to that, this current argument was her best effort so far.

“All I’m saying is . . . ” Soobin began, only to realize she had nothing to follow it up with. Composing herself for a few moments, she said, “A foreign presence inside the infants’ brains? Some intelligent entities that aren’t human?”

“It’s the only plausible explanation,” Hannah replied.

Soobin decided to spare the team Hannah’s lunacy for now. Speculations of some force occupying the infant brain . . . Of course, such an idea didn’t stand a chance. And yet, when she finally decided to give her colleague’s argument due consideration in all its absurdity, intriguing patterns began to leap out at her in a way that they hadn’t just a few hours earlier. For one, she could now see that, among babies and toddlers on the verge of speech, there was a complete lack of congruence between the measured neural patterns and their outward expressions—specifically, the infants’ cries, babblings, and simple utterances. When fed through the interface, the neural patterns of these very young subjects consistently produced highly sophisticated and intellectual speech output, which could only be understood as exchanges between multiple mature voices inside the brain. It was just as Hannah had said.

Soobin and Hannah began referring to the voices as “them.” They discussed feelings and thoughts, love, and empathy. They clearly seemed to want to teach the infants something.

Moving on to young children, the two scientists reorganized the large amount of speech data they’d collected, sorting them by age. Were there distinct conversations taking place beneath all the “mommy,” “daddy,” “I want that,” and so on? Their analysis showed a mix of the children’s surface communications and the conversations among them. Curiously, these two-tiered conversations seemed to vanish at around age seven, following years of gradual retreat that began at approximately three years of age, with some variation between individuals. It was as though the internal voices gradually withdrew until the child became fully communicative, at which point they seemed to bow out completely.

These notions kept Soobin up at night. Even now, she and Hannah had kept the theory to themselves. Day in and day out, she labored through additional data in search of a clue that might help reveal their identity. Colleagues who’d noticed the pair beginning to look increasingly sapped and haggard expressed concern by gently reminding them that “it was what it was”, or that it was the nature of science to progress through trial and error, and so forth.

Yet even as she persevered, Soobin didn’t completely rule out the possibility that everything might still turn out to be a massive decoding error. Still, the more data she analyzed, the clearer it became that there was only one possibly true conclusion: the analyses were accurate, and inside the infant brain, they existed.

But where did they come from? How did they settle in the brain? And why do they leave when they leave? What was the tangible proof of their presence? And then, one day while reclining on the sofa in the back of the staff lounge, it struck her.

“The box children!” she blurted out loud. This jolted Hannah, who had been nodding off nearby, into wakefulness.

“ . . . What?”

“A few years ago, there was an experiment conducted to see if human touch was absolutely necessary for normal infants development. Do you remember?”

Hannah’s eyes began to widen as if slowly registering something.

“Of course . . . yeah, the experiment with infant-care robots . . . ”

“Their data may be useful to us.”

“How?”

The so-called “box children experiment” had been conceived to test the efficacy of infant-care robots. In the experiment, infant subjects had been kept isolated from the outside world for the duration of the study, to be raised in the lab solely by caregiver robots. All other variables had been kept constant. Some researchers had speculated that the babies’ experience shouldn’t be too different from an extended tenure inside a giant incubator. After all, the ethics committee had given the research project its stamp of approval, which was supposed to have reassured everyone that no infant’s well-being was going to be compromised in any way. Still, this approval did little to mute the concerns surrounding its design. When the findings were finally published, the project once more attracted harsh international criticism.

“It was such a huge mess,” Soobin sighed.

“I remember.” Hannah nodded gravely. “By the end of the experiment, the subjects were found to act purely on instinct, their growth in the affective domain having been completely stunted over the course of the experiment. It was a big relief to hear that many were successfully rehabilitated and socialized later on, after the experiment finished.”

“The experiment should never have gotten approved,” Soobin said, her gaze fixed on the empty air before her. “On the other hand, I still have some unanswered questions about it,” she continued, turning to Hannah. “Caregiver robots are designed to deliver optimal stimulation. Why does a simple lack of flesh and blood affect the infants’ socioemotional development so profoundly? I have to wonder if there’s more to what the finding seems to suggest. If anything, we, humans, are imperfect caregivers given to personal moods and circumstances. So . . . maybe there’s some connection with whatever caused the robot-reared infants to fail to thrive . . . ”

What if they gained entry into the infant brain at some point after birth, in the way of parasites and microbes—as opposed to in utero? Like viruses, they could be lurking in the air, or otherwise widespread throughout the environment. Even so, there had to be a specific point of access for them. What if the box children had never gotten the chance to be exposed to them because they’d been locked up inside the lab? Hannah shot up from her chair.

“There must be recordings. We need to analyze their cries,” she said.

It took no effort at all to find relevant video files online, each trailing an endless comment section crammed with condemnations and disapproval of what the viewers considered a cruel and morally detestable experiment.

“How dare you leave these babies alone with robots, you monsters!”

“Babies NEED a warm and caring HUMAN touch! You’re raising androids devoid of humanity!” 

However, the question of whether or not the caregivers had been human might ultimately have been of little consequence. That is, if one could allow the possibility that they were the ones outfitting human infants with their humanity, and that, perhaps, what we’d considered our innermost human qualities ultimately originated from outside of us.

Soobin felt ready to turn her gaze outward for proof. She began to enter the audio data extracted from the videos into the interface. To the naked ears, the infants’ cries were indistinguishable from the cries of other babies. But their presence or absence amongst the box infants would soon be verified by the output of the interface, which would, in turn, disprove or validate the hypothesis that the crucial factor determining humans’ socioemotional development was them. Had they been absent among the box infants, as the two suspected, the interface would display only the infants’ requests, minus the veiled conversations attributed to them.

The software commenced its analysis. There was nothing for Soobin and Hannah to do but wait for the results to load up. The first round of analysis produced units of meaning that remained too abstract and incoherent to make sense of. With a trembling hand, Hannah initiated the final decoding process, whereupon the algorithm began arranging the discrete units into sentences. Soon after, the final results appeared on the screen. The cries and coos of the box babies in the videos had apparently been concerned with the following thoughts:

“I’m hungry.”

“I’m sleepy.”

“I’m scared.”

Soobin and Hannah turned to each other, unsure of how to feel about this. Should they rejoice in their victory? Or should they be aghast at the overwhelming implications?

Indeed, what had been fired by the synapses inside the heads of the box babies couldn’t properly be called thoughts. They were intense needs driven by pure instinct, which in fact was what anyone would have expected of such young babies. Mere days old, and having been kept in the laboratory since birth, these babies had yet to be exposed to them. Thus, their brains had generated only the neural patterns associated with typical infantile desires tailored for survival—the kind of neural patterns Soobin and Hannah had also previously expected to find in all babies who had yet to acquire speech, and thus, had yet to begin contemplating life and the world.

But Soobin knew now what the absence of those neural patterns must have meant for these newborns isolated in the lab. It meant that they would miss the milestones their peers out in the world would soon begin to meet, one after the next.

Let us indulge in a truly bizarre supposition: imagine that, unbeknownst to us, an extraterrestrial species has existed in symbiosis with humanity for millennia. After all, parasitic bacterium had to enter cells before beginning their permanent symbiosis with the host cells, all the while evolving into mitochondria containing its own DNA. In truth, this sort of arrangement is commonplace in nature, where organisms from two different species often live in a close, dependent relationship. Humans, for one, share a symbiotic relationship with a myriad of microbes living inside of us. We don’t consider them invaders. They are already an inalienable part of us.

But what if one of our partners in symbiosis was not native to the planet Earth? What if it had hailed from another planet, tens of thousands of years ago? What if it had settled into our brains to rule over our childhoods and infect us with its ethics? What if the unique qualities we’ve forever believed separated our species from all other beasts of the world were, in fact, not quite so intrinsically human?

“So . . . the traits we’ve prided ourselves for possessing all along are actually alien traits?” the team leader observed as Soobin finished presenting the theory. Among the rest of the team’s members, responses varied. Some gaped at the results, while others rejected the theory point-blank.

“It’s too unorthodox! Nobody would take it seriously,” someone remarked.

“I’m still having a hard time believing it myself,” Hannah conceded, “But how can we deny the data?”

Meanwhile, Soobin was itching with the desire to probe further into the infant brain. If it was true that they had taken up residence in there, shouldn’t we be able to observe them somehow? What might they be composed of? Shouldn’t there be something—anything—that we could measure? Of course, it was unlikely that she would get the chance to satisfy these queries any time soon. Probing the brain of a live subject raised significant ethical issues. Plus, blindly poking around in brain tissue in search of a speculative life-form whose material properties they knew nothing of wasn’t likely to result in any groundbreaking discovery. Most saliently, if they so readily rendered themselves to human inspection in the manner of parasitic organisms, then wouldn’t medicine have already discovered them long ago?

“I’d be shocked if we could observe them. If they had a physical basis we could detect, they would have been discovered ages ago, sometime during the long history of anatomical science,” said the team leader, voiding any half-hope that might have lingered. He was right, Soobin knew, and she nodded in resignation. Still, she would have stared at a sample all day long, if one had been made available for her inspection.

There was no shortage of other queries to mull over yet. Symbiotic coexistence didn’t always involve a mutually beneficial relationship. In some cases, one party benefited while the other was unaffected, and in others, one party actively harmed its partner for a unilateral gain. What was the nature of our symbiosis with them? What did this enigmatic species gain from operating inside a developing human brain? Might they be a carbon-based life-form, like humans were? What could they reap from presumably inculcating ethics and altruism in humans? And why had they chosen us, among all the species of the world?

“I happen to think that they’re space refugees who found a new home in our planet,” Hannah said. Despite the raised eyebrows of her colleagues, she continued, “They repeatedly refer to Ludmila’s Planet as ‘home,’ and we know for a fact it went up in flames a long time ago . . . ”

Ludmila’s Planet. A planet conceived and described in impossible detail by the eponymous artist. The idea that it could have been their home in some ancient eon might just be the clue leading to the truth of their being.

If these beings were so advanced as to manipulate the human species, it stood to reason they ought to have been able to predict their planet’s demise and evacuate in time. After that, while wandering about in space in search of a new home, they had arrived on planet Earth one day . . . and the rest was history.

“Their conversations clearly suggest exquisite intelligence,” said Soobin. “So much so that I have to wonder if a great deal of intricacy isn’t getting lost in translation due to the limitations of our own language. They’re likely a far superior species to humans, or that’s what I think. But then again, they seem entirely reliant on human neural networks. Could it be that they are a species that requires a host in order to actualize their intellect? That might explain why they chose the human species. For all its mystery, the human brain is known to be the most efficient on the planet, and if they’d discovered us tens of thousands of years ago, it is conceivable that the symbiosis triggered the birth of civilizations and the whole cascade of human evolution. Even if it hadn’t been their original intention to enlighten us, their intelligence could have been transferred to us over the long course of symbiosis.”

The room had fallen silent. If the symbiosis was truly as old as human history, there must be ample evidence outside the walls of the lab. In fact, there might be evidence everywhere, hiding in plain sight across human civilization, Soobin supposed.

“What if we ask them directly?” someone suggested.

The same thought had crossed Soobin’s mind, and probably the minds of a few others in the room as well. However, the prospect of actually doing so was dismal. The current research involved children. It was one thing to analyze the raw data collected from children going about their business in their natural environment, but a whole different proposition to attempt to connect with an enigmatic presence supposedly inhabiting their brains. It was anyone’s guess what sort of reward or punishment an attempt like that might provoke, and there was no guarantee that the gesture wouldn’t be perceived as hostile. In fact, how likely was it that they would welcome our sudden interrogation following millennia of unauthorized inhabitation inside of us? Any rash attempt risked inviting irrevocable harm.

“Following that line of thought . . . are we sure that they’ve actually left our brains?” someone asked, apparently bothered by a similar concern.

In the end, this risky proposal was rejected, and Soobin devised a new plan. If they had hailed from Ludmila’s Planet, then exposing them to paintings and simulations of their long-lost home should elicit some very particular responses. The danger it posed to the hosts was zero, as evidenced by the fact that no infants exposed to the breaking news on that day had been harmed by it. If anything, the data to be generated in this experiment ought to help illuminate the mysteries of these beings.

“It’s as we’ve predicted. The level of neural activity it triggered is . . . off the charts. We can barely keep up with the data stream.”

It was just as Hannah had suggested: when exposed to footage of Ludmila’s Planet, the infants ceased all fidgeting and fussing, their eyes silently tracking the moving landscape in rapt attention. Inside their brains, however, they seemed to be erupting with excitement, in a storm of discussion so lively, complex, and dense with information that its analysis became an unprecedented challenge. There was no doubt they were intimately connected to the Planet.

The question was whether or not to publish these findings yet.

“If we don’t, someone else will. We’re not the only ones pursuing a universal decoder. It’s extremely unlikely that other researchers won’t test it on infants, if they haven’t already,” Hannah said, “Even if people are appalled by the idea that extraterrestrials take up residence in infant brains, I don’t see how the knowledge would change anything anyway. Would it even be possible for us to suddenly evict them?”

“It wouldn’t do us any good,” Soobin said. Looking around the room, she continued, “I’m not alone in thinking that we’re the ones who should be begging them to stay, am I? Without them, we’d lose everything that we’ve forever believed made humanity unique!”

“Hmm . . . but how strong is our ego, as a species?”

Someone raised an important point, then. “Perhaps it’s hard for us to stomach the idea because we view ourselves as completely distinct from them? Would it make a difference if we found, in adult brains, some remaining vestige of their presence carried forward from childhood?”

If they’d left their fingerprints all over a child’s development while living inside her developing brain, her mature brain might still possess some evidence of the fact. Still, no neural patterns suggestive of them had been observed in an adult brain so far.

“This is just a hunch,” the team leader chimed in, “But they seem quite reluctant to leave the host at childhood’s end. Phrases like, ‘It’s difficult, but the time has come for us to leave,’ have come up more than a few times.”

“Yes, I know,” Soobin concurred. Then, pointing to the chart she’d been looking at, she continued, “Plus, I can’t stop thinking about the timing of their departure. Clearly, seven years of age bears some significance, given that’s when they seem to leave us for good. The data’s consistent. Only children seven years or younger exhibit neural patterns indicating their presence. After that, there’s nothing.”

For it was at the age of seven that, according to the chart, intercranial conversations disappeared completely. It was at this point that children’s neural signals and speech came to mirror each other perfectly, just as with adults. This suggested that they stayed inside human brains from infancy to early childhood before packing up shortly after the seventh birthday.

“I’m wondering if we could connect this to childhood amnesia. Very few of us are able to recall much of what happened during our formative years,” said Hannah. “The established theory holds that rapid development of the hippocampus around this age is responsible for the phenomenon—that a high rate of neurogenesis in the hippocampus somehow destabilizes the existing long-term memory.”

This much was true: by the time a child reaches the age of seven, most of his or her memories of earlier years, autobiographical memories in particular, have faded. Few adults, if any, remember events occurring between infancy and early childhood. Those who claim to are, in fact, most likely to be relying on false memories formed on the basis of what they heard about the event from others.

“But a little while ago, I read an interesting report in a neuroscience journal that disputed this theory,” Hannah continued. “Apparently, some researchers used the newest imaging technology to peer into the brains of kids around the time when childhood amnesia kicks in. What they discovered was that the rate of their neurological development and the degree of amnesia experienced didn’t track at all. There was zero statistical significance.”

Someone looked up the paper online and shared it to the room’s screen.

“The authors vaguely argued for an external cause, though they sounded pretty puzzled themselves. It’s surely a controversial finding that triggered a stream of papers disputing it. But if it’s true that childhood amnesia isn’t caused by rapid neurodevelopment, and that it can actually be attributed to an external factor . . . then what’s the external factor? What is it that’s taking away our memories? I have to wonder . . . ”

“It’s them,” Soobin chipped in. “They take it away with them when they leave us.”

In terms of their theory, what was most unexpected of all was Ludmila’s role.

She was the only human being who had retained any memory of them beyond early childhood. After all, she had only begun working on her planet series in earnest as an adolescent. This fact seems to suggest they might have remained within her and continued influencing her personality. That the planet had never ceased to be the subject of her art, and that she had been able to furnish exact and scientific detail regarding the planet (including its mass, volume, and so forth) seem to indicate two distinct possibilities: that she had been permitted to continue listening in on their conversations, or that their collective memory had been transferred to her in its entirety when, or if, they left her.

“Perhaps they stayed with each and every human being on Earth, but only Ludmila was let in on the truth of their origin?”

Investigation into Ludmila’s life unearthed nothing but the well-established fact that it had been a lonely one; in stark contrast to her colossal fame as an artist, precious little was known about her as a person.

“She had been an exceptionally creative child. And as creative children often are, she, too, must have been a sensitive soul inclined to introspection—which may have caused her to become aware of their presence early on. They might have taken special care of her, seeing that she really was alone in the world.”

Thus, in the end, it turned out that Ludmila had never once lied about her work after all. From the very beginning of her career as an artist, she had simply transferred to canvas the landscape they’d held up before her, inside her brain. Her mind eventually came to contain the entire planet as they remembered it, far beyond just the fragments of its landscape. In every practical sense, she had visited the planet—through them, with whom she’d shared a brain all her life.

“Ludmila’s memories of the planet may have been enhanced through the act of painting it,” Soobin said. “Motor memory may have boosted her episodic memory of the planet and vice versa, as the two types of memory are distinct, but not entirely separate.”

“Given how they abscond with childhood memories when they take their leave of the host, they seem extremely cautious about revealing themselves to humanity. But then, why risk exposure by encouraging her to recreate the planet through her work?”

“Well, their conversations make it clear that their planet is incredibly dear to them,” Soobin said. “I mean, whose home isn’t?”

To that explanation, nobody offered any objection.

Alien refugees, still mourning the loss of a homeworld that had been pulverized into cosmic dust eons ago . . . perhaps they just wanted for someone in their adoptive planet to carry its memory, even if all the rest lived in blissful ignorance. And they had found that person in Ludmila, who, with her capable hands, was able to resurrect it back to life in all its beauty.

A planet that had existed tens of thousands of years ago.

The team arrived at the ultimate question. What was it that caused people to obsess over Ludmila’s world, a place about which they themselves knew nothing? What was it about her world that moved everyone to tears—why such unexpected melancholy and longing for a place they had never even seen before? Of all the countless simulated worlds created during human history, why was it that Ludmila’s Planet alone had managed to leave such a powerful impression in the minds of people worldwide?

“Because each of us has served as a host to them before,” Hannah said.

And there lies the proof of this proposed symbiosis, Soobin thought to herself. A wholly amorphous memory, flickering at the edge of our consciousness, without ever vanishing completely. It was our vague yearning for those who had shaped us into who we are.

What people yearned for through Ludmila’s mesmerizing work was not the planet itself, but its former inhabitants who had once cared for them.

“That other series. Do you all remember? There’s another series by her,” Soobin said.

“Never Leave Me. It’s not as widely known, but just as beautiful, if you ask me.”

“Yes. That’s the one.”

It occurred to Soobin that the series, which remained largely indecipherable, might hold the key to Ludmila’s veiled interior.

“Perhaps it was Ludmila’s plea?”

“Plea?”

“Ludmila had become aware of their presence, and . . . ”

Without warning, a wave of emotion crashed over Soobin in that moment.

“It was her plea to them. Its title, and the infinite tenderness, sorrow, and loneliness that it stirs in people . . . Ludmila had lived her life in perpetual solitude. Their companionship must’ve meant everything to her: they were her only friends, family, and colleagues.”

She had been begging them not to leave her. Not to take away from her their world and its splendor. Please, oh, please, to stay with her forever.

“So they stayed,” Hannah mumbled to herself. Her voice was the only sound in the room, where every occupant was presently picturing the same place in their minds: that planet, awash in its mystical blue glow. Ludmila’s Planet. The ancient home of the unknowable beings, our partners in symbiosis for all these tens of thousands of years. In that moment, Soobin found herself seized by a wholly unexpected sense of grace. It felt somehow like a longing . . . for someone she’d never met before.

Originally published in Korean in Crossroads, January 2019.

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

About the Author

Choyeop Kim is an award-winning Korean science fiction author with a background in biochemistry. She enjoys converting intangible ideas, such as memory, emotion, minds, and relations into tangible items. She wants to write about the abstract components of life in a specifically scientific language while discovering new questions in the process.

But Is It Art? Science Fiction that Isn’t Really Science Fiction

Mark Cole

It sounds familiar.

A tough, intergalactic private eye goes to a city enslaved by a giant supercomputer, to arrest or kill its creator and shut down the computer. But somehow it isn’t familiar—or perhaps too familiar, as Alphaville is just bits of the real Paris.

Then, there are the truly strange parts: the bizarre swimming pool execution by girls with knives, the retractable theater seats used for mass slaughter, the moody black-and-white cinematography, some eccentric editing—and the computer is defeated by poetry.

Yes, poetry.

The only thing that could make this stranger is to learn that its director, Jean-Luc Godard, wanted to call it Tarzan vs. IBM.

It might be tempting to dismiss this as a unique and unlikely fusion of science fiction tropes with the Art House radicalism of a notoriously eccentric and iconoclastic director. Yet this is not the only film with this curious combination, nor was it the first. Science fiction has a long connection with Art House and Avant-Garde films.

But that doesn’t mean that science fiction fans would approve.

Perhaps it goes back to the Surrealists, for whom popular culture had a strange fascination—particularly that newest of art forms: cinema. But their tastes were rather odd and deliberately arty. While they praised highly regarded artists like Charlie Chaplin, they also had a strange affection for more sensational works, like Feuillade’s Fantômas serials.

So, it should come as no surprise that the French Avant-Garde gave us a silent 1924 science fiction film. Among those involved in Marcel L’Herbier’s L’Inhumaine, one finds noted Surrealist Fernand Leger, Art Deco designer, René Lalique, and Bauhaus architect, Robert Mallet-Stevens. It’s even rumored that the extras include many notable artists and Surrealists.

A famous beauty who is almost inhumanly aloof from love suddenly falls for a young engineer. However, the main attraction is the often-bizarre sets and editing, and a remarkable climactic scene where the engineer raises her from the dead with an incredible—if not particularly believable—machine he just happens to have in his lab. There is a dining room complete with swans swimming in a moat, creepy smiling masks for the servants, and a plywood jungle.

Those hoping to find a standard 1920s science fiction film will be disappointed: L’Herbier is far more interested in artistic effect than science fiction—or, for that matter, telling a story.

But it was the French Nouvelle Vague, a movement as self-consciously arty as the Surrealists, that truly embraced science fiction.

Perhaps it was a cultural shift: science fiction now filled the comics, pulp magazines, movies, and TV. Or, as with the Surrealists, it may have been a desire to embrace what the mainstream deemed intellectually inferior. Whatever the case, it appeared in a number of seminal New Wave works, starting with the 1960 horror film, Les yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face).

Its director, Georges Franju, was more precursor than full-fledged member of the group, but the film had a huge influence on them. It is beautifully filmed, artistic and yet deeply disturbing. A doctor’s daughter is badly maimed in a car crash and he kidnaps other girls and strips them of their faces to restore her. Franju mixed moody black-and-white cinematography, a dreamy atmosphere and some of the most shockingly accurate portrayals of surgery ever shown.

He followed it with the equally arty Judex (1963), a film full of bold monochrome compositions that seem to strive for a perfect balance of black and white. It mixed steampunk inventions and surreal images in a remake of one of Feuillade’s most sensational serials.

1962 brought the movement’s most famous science fiction film, Chris Marker’s La Jetée. Widely recognized as a classic, it offers one of the most remarkable formal experiments ever filmed. In only twenty-three minutes, it tells a tragic time travel story using a montage of stills (with a single blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moving image).

In keeping with the New Wave’s theory-heavy approach, it revolves around a single image frozen in the hero’s memory, while a narrator calmly tells a story whose strong emotions come from the images.

While it influenced a number of other Minimalist films, La Jetée was also the main inspiration for Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys. It tells virtually the same story—but takes much longer.

Three years later, Jean-Luc Godard made an even more ambitious science fiction film. However, Alphaville lacks any of the usual trappings of science fiction, and Private Detective Lemmy Caution arrives in his trusty Ford Galaxy (which is actually a Mustang).

Nor is the film as straightforward as a simple description would suggest: Godard liberally mixes poetry, politics, literature, a lot of ironic humor, and often obscure references to other films. Akim Tamiroff repeats his character from an Orson Welles film, a scene borrows from Cocteau’s surreal fantasy, Orpheus, and his star, Eddie Constantine, had previously played Lemmy in a series of thrillers (unfortunately, the company which made them didn’t appreciate the joke and he never played Lemmy again).

As in many other New Wave films, a main theme is the nature of film as a medium, its artificiality and conventions. One fight composed entirely of still images uses such rapid cutting that it goes almost unnoticed. While he wants to show how unreal such editing is, it probably also references La Jetée.

Godard’s Week-end (1967) is often called science fiction as well, although with far less justification. A young couple goes on a trip just as civilization breaks down and encounter increasingly bizarre and disturbing incidents along the way. While Alphaville stayed more or less within the bounds of the genre, Week-end’s trip is far more surreal than postapocalyptic, featuring encounters with Emily Brontë and the French Revolution leader Antoine de Saint-Just. It is also far more political and ironic, and one of the characters is eaten by a cannibalistic Liberation Front.

Time travel showed up in at least two other New Wave films—or perhaps three.

There are a few critics—like Philip Strick in his book Science Fiction Movies—who filed Alain Resnais enigmatic and mysterious Last Year at Marienbad (1961) under the heading of science fiction: it is a strange, nonlinear film, where things happen, then didn’t happen, then happen in some other way without ever offering even the slightest hint of what is real. The notion that it involves some form of meddling with time makes about as much sense as anything else.

Which isn’t much.

Although most Doctor Who fans probably don’t know that the classic Tom Baker episode, Warriors’ Gate, with its time lines and meeting point between two universes, borrowed heavily—at least visually—from Resnais.

In 1968, however, Resnais followed it with what was clearly a time travel movie—even if it was merely as an excuse for making an even more nonlinear film.

Je T’aime, Je T’aime tells of a young man recruited to take part in a time travel experiment after he attempts suicide. It sends him randomly back and forth throughout his life. As in La Jetée, it involves some form of mental projection, although here he is placed in a strange, organic, womb-like device.

The film lacks the temporal paradox twist of Chris Marker’s film and instead focuses on the young man’s story. Curiously, while it resembles Billy Pilgrim unstuck in time, it came out a year before Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five—and as protests shut down the 1968 Cannes film, the film remained almost unseen for over forty years.

An even stranger approach to time travel appears in André Farwagi’s Le temps de mourir: a mysterious woman appears at a rich man’s estate but can only remember things that have not yet happened. The film’s status as science fiction is less clear: a marvelous supercomputer whose interface is a large, creepy face, tries to solve the mystery. It has just arrived at a rational scientific explanation when it is destroyed before it can explain.

Last Year at Marienbad was undoubtedly a major influence on another film that came out that same year, Agnès Varda’s Les Créatures. It chronicles an epic battle between a mad scientist using mind control to wreck other people’s lives and a writer. Only the writer is working on a novel about mind control, using the locals as characters. Reality and fiction are so thoroughly mixed it is hard to say what, if anything, is real.

Swiss director Jean-Louis Roy’s 1967 L’inconnu de Shandigor also involves a mad scientist, although it is more of an Art House James Bond parody, with Serge Gainsbourg as the leader of one of the gangs of inept spies killing each other for a secret invention.

Another leading New Wave director, François Truffaut, released his poetic take on Ray Bradbury’s classic novel, Fahrenheit 451 in 1966. Like most of his work, it is far more straightforward than most New Wave films, and focuses on Bradbury’s themes and the question of memory.

On the other side of the Atlantic, science fiction also found its way into the world of Andy Warhol and Pop Art.

In a way, it seems strange that SF played such a small part in an art movement focused on glorifying popular culture, particularly anything lowbrow or trashy. Though, one does find Roy Lichtenstein borrowing from Wally Wood’s space comics for a 1964 World’s Fair themed magazine cover, and Warhol declaring that his favorite film was the obscure and inept robot movie, Creation of the Humanoids.

Warhol himself made what might be described as a science fiction film in 1965. Vinyl was one of the odd and very amateurish (and mostly unseen) films Andy made to entertain his friends. It is more or less a version of Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, but shot in a single, tiny warehouse space with little camera movement. However, he seems more interested in the torture scenes than anything else.

While Flesh for Frankenstein has often been called “Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein,” it was, in fact, far more cinematic, and directed by one of Warhol’s associates, Paul Morrissey. Like most of Warhol’s art, its main intent is to shock. It has generous amounts of incest, necrophilia, and depravity, an excess of blood and a deliberately campy script.

More successful was Sins of the Fleshapoids by Mike Kuchar, a very minimal short film with brightly lit painted backgrounds and, instead of synchronized sound, cartoon speech bubbles literally scratched onto the film. It tells of robot slaves rebelling against their masters with lots of PG-rated sexuality and intense color. It is (as unlikely as it may sound) fun to watch. Mike would later end his black-and-white short, The Craven Sluck—a tale of a bored housewife—with an out of left field non sequitur surprise science fiction ending: flying saucers invade and kill her. It’s a surprisingly effective sequence despite the fact that the saucers and their death rays also seem to have been scratched onto the film!

The term “New Wave” has been used to describe cinematic movements in other countries, although none were much like the French model.

In Czechoslovakia, the New Wave came during the Prague Spring and offered daring criticisms of communism—until the Soviet tanks arrived. Science fiction mostly appeared in a series of lighthearted comedies that were satirical and almost surreal, based on absurd gimmicks like drugs that made dreams come to life (Who Wants to Kill Jesse?) or nuclear war causing bearded women (I Killed Einstein, Gentlemen).

The exception is Case for a Rookie Hangman, a bizarre Surrealist take on Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, with bits of Alice in Wonderland worked in—although that hardly begins to describe the film. A young man has an accident and ends up in Balnibarbi, which is ruled by the ultra-scientific people on the floating island of Laputa. However, the Laputans’ actions are totally senseless and the hero finds himself in one inexplicable circumstance after another.

In Japan, the New Wave was a reaction against the way the studios made movies, but you did find a few directors creating more artistic works, like Hiroshi Teshigahara’s surreal films. His The Face of Another, however, about a disfigured man getting a new “face”—a mask made of artificial flesh—was more poetic than surreal, and clearly inspired by Eyes Without a Face.

In England, several of radical director Peter Watkin’s films were at least marginally science fiction, starting with a documentary-style TV movie about a nuclear attack, The War Game. In his feature debut, Privilege, a successful rock star has been packaged and sold by the British establishment as a way to control teenagers. He followed this with three documentary-style features that used science fiction settings and backgrounds as a way to express his radical political views: the world powers settle their disputes with teams of soldiers fighting each other in an arena in The Gladiators; Punishment Park offers protestors a chance to avoid prison by participating in a manhunt straight out of The Most Dangerous Game; and a family celebrates the new millennium in an underground bunker in the 1975 TV movie, The Trap.

Perhaps the German New Wave was closest in spirit to the original, as a group of young directors created highly politicized and often experimental films.

Alexander Kluge’s 1971 film, Der große Verhau (The Big Mess) is probably the most minimal space opera ever made, with primitive effects and tiny, unimpressive sets stuffed full of all sorts of unnecessary junk, highlighting a story about a greedy small-time crook of an astronaut in an exploitative capitalist future. A year later he made a similar lo-fi space opera, Willi Tobler and the Decline of the 6th Fleet for television: it is far more successful as science fiction and actually quite entertaining.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder was the enfant terrible of the group, an incredibly prolific director who completed 44 projects before his sybaritic lifestyle caught up with him at 37. Curiously, his two-part TV movie, Welt am Draht (World on a Wire, 1973) is one of the first filmed treatments of virtual reality and an impressive SF work in its own right. Perhaps the only signs of its Art House pedigree are the themes and the rather decadent society it portrays.

However, the group’s most notable member, Werner Herzog, was too busy hauling ships over mountains or shooting films with the entire cast under hypnosis to bother with SF. Not, that is, until 2005 where he created a strange formal experiment—a sort of hybrid found film/documentary/science fiction film, The Wild Blue Yonder, which starred horror icon Brad Dourif as an alien.

Thanks to the birth of film schools in the mid-sixties and the rise of independent film, small, “arty” films from a lot of very different movements proliferated. Many of these were at least marginally science fiction, from wild and stylish punk films (Liquid Sky or the German-made Decoder); to so-called “No Wave” eighties films like John Lurie’s Men in Orbit, which were made for next to nothing with the most minimal sets and props; to the work of performance artists like Valie Export (Invisible Adversaries); or Cory McAbee‘s, deliberately unreal Western/musical/science fiction hybrids, The American Astronaut and Stingray Sam.

In fact, a lot of directors—including George Lucas (THX-1138)—made such films.

Not to mention a few surprises like Luigi Cozzi, who made the Star Wars rip-off, Starcrash, but started his career with an experimental version of Frederick Pohl’s The Tunnel Under the World.

The art film is alive and well today, and a few of them do still show up at SF film festivals—although the best, like Zoltan Sostai’s Cycle (2012) work both as a piece of art and as science fiction.

But that’s rare.

In 2004, Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-wai released 2046, a story of a lonely writer’s failed attempts at love. Part of the film takes place in 2046, a special-effects laden world from the stories he is writing, which might or might not be the future.

Science fiction critics were quick to say that Wong Kar-wai did not understand science fiction, but they missed the point: he wasn’t making a science fiction story, nor even a metafictional reference to one. 2046 was merely a way of exploring his protagonist’s thoughts and feelings.

This is true of most of these films: the science fictional elements are there for the artist’s purposes and were never intended to be anything else—or merely serve as a background, as in Wim Wenders’ meandering Until the End of the World. Even those that seem closer to “real” science fiction—like Alyce Wittenstein’s No Such Thing As Gravity—are more likely to resemble fifties sci fi films and lack any sort of genuine scientific underpinnings.

In the end, Art House science fiction isn’t science fiction—or at least, not necessarily so. Nor does it make sense to insist that it fit the demands of a genre it was never intended to meet. It needs to be seen on its own terms.

Even if they aren’t the ones we’d like.

(For more information on these films, see https://rivetsontheposter.wordpress.com/art-house-science-fiction/.)

About the Author

Mark Cole hates writing bios. Despite many efforts he has never written one he likes, perhaps because there are many other things he’d rather be writing. He writes from Warren, Pennsylvania, where he has managed to avoid writing about himself for both newspaper and magazine articles. His musings on Science Fiction have appeared in Clarkesworld and at IROSF.com, while his most recent story, “Let’s Start from the Top…” appeared in Daily Science Fiction.

Starfish and Sunflowers:
A Conversation with Peter Watts

Arley Sorg

Peter Watts has been selling fiction for twenty years. He has won a number of awards for fiction including an Aurora Award for short story “A Niche,” a Hugo Award for novelette “The Island,” and a Shirley Jackson Award for short story “The Things.” He has been a finalist or been nominated for a host of other awards, including the Sunburst, the Theodore Sturgeon, the Campbell, BSFA Awards, and Locus Awards. His work has been translated into over twenty languages and translations of his fiction have received a Seiun Award, a Grand prix de l’Imaginaire, and many other nominations.

Watts is a biologist who spent years “paid by the animal welfare movement to defend marine mammals; by the US fishing industry to sell them out; and by the Canadian government to ignore them.” In 2010, he was found guilty of resisting a US Customs and Border Protection officer and since then has been unable to reenter the US. Nonetheless, he continues to sell work, with short stories “Kindred” and “Cyclopterus” appearing in anthologies Infinity’s End and Mission Critical respectively, and The Freeze-Frame Revolution published by Tachyon. Known for his brash wit, Watts’ collection of nonfiction writing, Peter Watts is an Angry Sentient Tumor: Revenge Fantasies and Essays, came out from Tachyon in November 2019.

In 1990, your award-winning story “A Niche” came out in anthology Tesseracts 3. Years later, following Blindsight’s publication by Tor in 2006, you had the Locus Magazine interview in March 2008, where you said you’d “lost all motivation to write,” and talked about being disheartened by the publishing process. With even more publications to your credit since then, including 2018’s The Freeze-Frame Revolution and more recently Peter Watts is an Angry Sentient Tumor (both published by Tachyon), how have your feelings about publishing changed or evolved?

Tor was really my only significant interface with the publishing community back during the Disheartened Era. In the years since, though, I’ve interacted with a whole wide range of publishers across the world (I’m available in 21 languages now, I think), a whole wide range of new audiences, and a wider range of writing gigs ranging from video games to (I kid you not) Norwegian black metal science opera. Most of those other publishers, most of those other audiences, have been great.

In 2008, I was limited to a single habitat; in the decade since I’ve emerged into an entire ecosystem, and it’s done me a world of good. In fact, I can’t stop thinking about the irony; while the planet itself is turning to shit at an ever-accelerating rate, my own life—personally, selfishly—is better than it’s ever been. (At some point, of course, those two trajectories are bound to collide. It will not be pretty.)

Perhaps Tor has changed in the years since; or perhaps, if I got back into bed with them, I’d end up in a gray funk all over again. But I doubt it, because I’ve got eggs in different baskets now. The trophic network is more complex and more resilient.

The Freeze-Frame Revolution is the fourth installment in Sunflowers, starting with award-winning story “The Island.” When you wrote that first story, had you already planned the series to this point? What else do you have in store for Sunflowers?

I had planned something—just not a series of conventional stories. “The Island,” as a stand-alone, functioned as an interrogation of the whole stargate trope—all those ready-made superhighways left behind by ancient races that have conveniently gone extinct and left us all their toys to play with. It’s a great device (if overused), but what about the poor bastards who had to build those gates in the first place? So, there was that.

At its heart, though, I always thought that the premise of a repurposed asteroid, inching its way around the galaxy and building a stargate every millennium or so, would make a kick-ass basis for a video game. Each build would be a mission level; each would be preceded by centuries that would act as a reset button. You’ve got the standard running-into-someone else’s territory scenarios, but you’ve also got the what-has-humanity-turned-into-in-the-past-thousand-years scenarios, where you have no idea what might come out the gate behind you once you’ve built it. And the ongoing conflict between the Chimp and the Human crew provides another source of ongoing conflict that ties the epic together. So, I started writing Sunflowers as a kind of testing ground for a video game, and I haven’t entirely given up hope that that might happen.

I gotta say, though—after ten years and a half dozen unrelated video game gigs—that hope is dimming.

Some have cited dialogue as one of the strongest elements of your recent fiction. Has this changed since your earlier pieces? Do you have specific strategies or techniques for developing great dialogue?

Not really. In fact, I’m kinda surprised to learn that “some”—anyone, really—have singled out my dialogue for praise. I’ve been told by someone I trust implicitly that all my characters sound essentially the same, that they’re all just different facets of me. I’ve always regarded that as a weakness in my own craft.

Just out of curiosity, who are these wonderful people who like my dialogue? Are they influential? Are they rich?

You have also been lauded recently for your ability to weave information into the story, which is a provocative contradiction to your Locus interview statement: “Let’s face it: the climax is a three-page infodump (albeit an infodump replete with torture and mutilation).” Have you changed the way you approach putting information into a story, or is this more about length—shorter fiction vs. novel?

If I’ve changed, it’s just because experience might have improved my technical craft: a change of degree, not of kind. I’ve always tried to avoid infodumps; when I can’t see any way to avoid them, I try to make them less boring by inserting them into a more dramatic context. So a first draft conversation around a conference table ends up taking place during an invasive and painful decontamination procedure in the final version. Someone who starts off pondering the biochemistry of a certain microbe while sitting in a chair might, by the time the book makes it into print, find herself being forced to work through the same questions under torture. Anything to avoid endless pages of talking heads spouting facts at each other.

The main downside is that casual readers are more likely to decide I’m just some kind of closet sadist. In fairness, though, you could say that about pretty much anyone who writes fiction.

As a scientist, do you adjust scientific language and concepts for a broader readability, or are you more of a “if they can’t keep up they aren’t my audience” kind of writer?

First off, you have to remember that my scientific background is in marine biology; when I’m writing beyond that limited sphere, I have no more science expertise than any doofus off the street. At best, I have a better appreciation of how science, in general, works.

But believe it or not, it’s closer to that first thing. Sure, the actual dialogue may be opaque—my characters may just whistle incredulously and exchange significant looks at a “5 Tesla” reading, without As-you-know-Bobbing about it—but I like to think anyone who’s paying attention won’t have any trouble figuring it out. Context makes it clear they’re talking about some kind of magnetic field—the whistles make it obvious that 5 Tesla is really fucking high.

If the concept doesn’t fit into those kind of cracks then I’m more likely to wax poetic, try and jam in some metaphorical imagery to convey the essentials—the problem with that being, I’m told, sometimes my metaphors and imagery get so elliptical that no one can figure out whether I’m describing something literally or whether I’m just on drugs.

A good rule of thumb is: if one of my characters tosses off a fifty-dollar word and it just hangs there unilluminated, chances are it’s pure background color, unimportant to the plot. In Jaws, Quint challenged Hooper to tie a sheepshank; no one complained when the movie ended without explaining how you’d actually do that.

In your previous Clarkesworld interview (Issue 95, August 2014) you talked a bit about plot and structure. Is your overall approach to writing novels different than shorter fiction?

Definitely. Short stories have to be way more efficient. Ninety percent of the stories I’m asked to write come with an upper word limit; I generally spend half my time writing the damn thing, and the other half trying to cut it down so it fits.

Are there projects you had to give up on, things that were permanently trunked, or have you found ways to make all of your stories viable?

Well, there are projects that seem to be stuck in Development Hell, to steal a term from the movie industry. I’ve had one book simmering on the back burner since 2011 and I’ve still made barely any headway. But I haven’t given up on it yet.

Overall, though, the question doesn’t really apply. Pretty much every short story I’ve written in the past decade has been in response to someone asking for it, so there’s always been a built-in market; I don’t have to do the unsolicited-submission thing any more. (Which is just as well; my success rate was pretty pathetic when I did.) For the most part, the folks who’ve done the soliciting have found my work acceptable (and honestly I’m not always sure I would have, if I’d been in their Blundstones). The only story of mine that wasn’t published by the person who solicited for it was “The Things,” and that was only because I was unwilling to sign a contract allowing the publisher to walk away if Universal ever came after me for copyright infringement. And I don’t have to tell you that even that story ended up finding a good home, and doing pretty well for all concerned.

You’ve made a lot of your previously published fiction available for free online at your website: https://rifters.com/real/shorts.htm including the aforementioned “A Niche” and “The Island.” But on the other hand, does that affect potential income through reprint rights sales and so on? What is the thinking behind this?

It’s an old story by now, but if I hadn’t gone Creative Commons, I don’t think we’d even be doing this interview. As far as I can tell Blindsight had been written off as DOA before it was even released—teensy print run, no real promotion, cover design that departed radically from my earlier titles (not, I think, in a good way). Unsurprisingly, it tanked on release: a prophecy, self-fulfilled. But then Blindsight started generating buzz on its own merits, to the point where demand exceeded supply. (Granted this was not an especially high bar to clear, given the print run.) There were genre outlets that listed Blindsight as their top seller several weeks running, based on zero physical sales because they had no actual copies in stock; the rank resulted entirely from back orders.

For some reason, Tor seemed reluctant to go to a second printing. (To this day I’m not sure why; the answers I got kept changing.) Eventually I concluded that if I wanted people to read the damn book, I’d have to provide that option directly. So I followed Cory Doctorow’s lead and put Blindsight out on my website under a CC license. And I figured, what the hell: might as well put the rest of my backlist out while I was at it. It wasn’t so much a principled stand as a Hail Mary.

To circle back to your question about potential income, I’d already written that off by then. I saw only two realistic scenarios: one in which sales tanked, my career was over, and nobody could read Blindsight vs. one in which sales tanked, my career was over, and anyone with an Internet connection could read it. I did not foresee any scenario in which sales tripled the week after I set the book free, followed by continuous reprintings, multiple translations, and multiple awards. (All for overseas editions, curiously; none for the original English, although it got nominated across the board. This leads me to suspect that my translators are better writers than I am.)

As it happened, that third scenario is the one that transpired. I came along at this sweet spot in time when going the Creative Commons route was still newsworthy. Cory boosted it on Boing Boing; Scalzi boosted it on Whatever; Kathryn Cramer not only gave me free ad space on her website, she built the bloody ad. All these folks and others amped the signal to the point where Blindsight hit some kind of critical mass and became self-sustaining—and the rest is history. Obscure, trivia-bonus-question history, but history nonetheless.

Tor still isn’t especially happy about it, though. Every now and then they try to get me to take down the backlist—at one point they even made a (slightly) sweeter e-royalties deal contingent on that—but you’ll notice the backlist is still live. Next year they’re releasing Blindsight in a new “Tor Essentials” edition (part of a new line they’re running to compete with Gollancz’s “Masterworks”), so I guess it’s still earning for them. We don’t talk much, though. Patrick Nielsen-Hayden dropped me an email last year informing me of the new edition, and I wrote back saying Cool, can we maybe get some new cover art?, but he never got back to me.

The table of contents for Peter Watts is an Angry Sentient Tumor offers everything from “Why I Suck” to “Pearls Before Cows: Thoughts on Blade Runner 2049.” Is there an organizational principle at work behind what pieces were in the collection? Are there new pieces only available in the book?

You’ll have to ask Jacob (my editor at Tachyon) about any grand organizational architecture; I handed him a bunch of pieces and he made the selection. I did serve them up according to theme—Reviews, Writing, Science, and so on—but they all ended up getting mooshed into a single unpartitioned volume.

Tumor is a reprint collection; the only piece that hasn’t previously appeared anywhere on the planet is my Introduction. That said, you’d have to be one hard-core fan to have seen it all before. If you’ve only followed my blog you won’t have seen the Nowa Fantastyka columns that appeared only in Poland; if you’ve devoured those columns in their original Polish you might not have seen essays that appeared in places like Aeon and The Daily. It doesn’t break physics to posit a fan so devoted they’ve stalked me across the Internet and into every dead-tree venue I’ve ever written for, but it is vanishingly unlikely.

Who is the audience for Angry Sentient Tumor?

That’s a really good question. Perhaps a better one would be: Is there an audience for Angry Sentient Tumor? Is there a Sentient Tumor demographic? I guess we’ll see.

I just discovered last night that—unless someone hacked the Amazon website as part of some cruel hoax—it got a starred review from Booklist, which is hopeful. They described it as a fusion of Hunter S. Thompson and John Scalzi, which sounds like an especially gruesome sort of transporter accident. They also described me as “self-depreciating.” I’m still trying to figure out whether that was deliberate.

For folks who haven’t read your fiction, what is the best place to start?

I’m not certain. Blindsight is certainly the novel that put me on the map, but a lot of folks regard it as hard-core and not for the novice. Starfish is more accessible (and was a NYT Notable to boot, so you don’t even have to feel genre-shame while reading it), but it was my first novel so maybe the prose isn’t as smooth as it might be. Freeze-Frame Revolution is, well, short.

Maybe start off with a couple of short stories, get a taste of me before committing to anything really substantive. As you’ve already mentioned, a lot of them are available for free on my website.

Oh, now that I think of it: a very recent story of mine, of which I am quite proud, is also quite obscure; it was published earlier this year in the Slovenian Magazine ŠUM, released in conjunction with the Venice Biennale exhibition by Marko Peljhan. It’s called “The Wisdom of Crowds,” it’s about the use of crowdsourcing to determine the target of a hypersonic glide vehicle with an explosive payload of 300 kilotons, and it’s not quite like anything I’ve written before. Does Clarkesworld still do reprints?

Also, possibly but not necessarily related, which is the work you are most proud of, and why?

You’re expecting the usual suspects. And sure: I’m proud of the “The Things” because it started out as Lamarckian fanfic and grew into something with more layers than I would have expected. I’m proud of Blindsight because it managed to say something reasonably new, and back it up with footnotes. (Interestingly, I recently read it for the first time since it came out in 2006—I had to go over a fresh set of galleys for that “Tor Essentials” edition I mentioned—and I gotta say, I didn’t think it was all that special. I mean, it was well written and decently plotted and all, but I’ve spent 13 years now hearing from folks who found it a mind-blowing and life-changing experience. Rereading it from start to finish, my mind wasn’t blown once. Of course, I could obviously see all the plot twists coming, and having written the damn thing I couldn’t really be expected to find the neuro-gazing especially surprising either. Still. I probably shouldn’t pay so much attention to my own PR.)

But I think what I’m going to settle on is my video game adaptation: Crysis: Legion. Because let’s face it, the basic conventions of the alien-invasion FPS are pretty dumb; any civilization capable of hopping across the galaxy is going to be capable of squashing us like bugs. Positing that a few Navy SEALs in a Chinook helicopter could take down an alien spaceship is roughly analogous to suggesting that a bunch of lemurs could take down an F-16—and yet these kind of conceits are pretty much essential to a lot of games (at least, I’ve never seen a successful video game that embraced the “Bambi vs. Godzilla” vibe. Maybe Alien: Isolation comes closest.)

The challenge in writing the Crysis adaptation was being faithful to the game’s story—absurdities and all—while retconning it all to make some kind of sense. To interrogate the game from within the game, to posit scenarios that would make it plausible, add stuff around the edges to give it some kind of substance. One advantage to adapting an FPS is that the protagonist tends to be pretty blank; they’re a vessel designed to contain the player’s persona, after all—so I was free to insert backstory and character development to my furry little heart’s content. It also helped that this particular FPS was scripted by Richard Morgan, so I had a lot more substance to work with.

Still, it was a challenge simultaneously being faithful to, and retconning, and even metacommentating up, the source material. It’s not my best work. It may not even be good work (although I personally think it has a certain tawdry charm). But it forced me to flex creative muscles I’d never used before, albeit in a confined space—you might almost call it a kind of literary bansai—and I’m proud of what I managed to pull off within those constraints.

Of course, it absolutely tanked commercially. Sold about 4 copies.

What are you working on now that fans can look forward to?

Those are actually two separate questions. I’m working on stuff, but I don’t know if fans will be looking forward to it.

My agent would like me to be writing All Sunflowers All the Time; apparently it sold well (I have to admit the first-year royalties were pretty nice). But while I do have an overall epic arc plotted out for the whole series—extending from the 22nd century to at least halfway to the heat death of the universe—we’re really talking multiple volumes, and I have no desire to embark on such a big project on spec. At the same time, I gravely doubt that any publisher would be willing to commit to such a project from a mere midlister such as myself. (They certainly wouldn’t be eager to embark on a deal in which a bundled video game was part of the deal, which it would be if I had my druthers.) I’ve promised Howard that I’ll work up a proposal for such a project—and I will—but my hopes are not high.

Then of course there’s Intelligent Design, which has been the Next Big Project for so long now that Julie Novakova asked me about it the last time I did a Clarkesworld interview back in 2014. I’ve made no further progress since then because other stuff keeps coming up with larger and/or more immediate payoffs.

A bit of background. Starfish is the only novel of mine that was, when I sent it off, truly as good as I knew how to make it at the time. I sent off all my others feeling that I could have made them better, but I needed to make deadline. So with ID I vowed to go back to basics: to write without a contract—and hence, without a deadline—so I wouldn’t have to send it out until it was damn well ready. The unintended consequence is that without a deadline, I still haven’t got around to writing the fucking thing. But I still fully intend to. I was planning on diving into it this very fall, in fact, until . . .

I ended up working on a VR cyberpunk game with a feisty little start-up out of Tel Aviv. I have no idea whether it’ll go anywhere—I’ve done gaming gigs on and off for the past twenty years, and not one of them has yet made it to market—but in the short term it’s a new medium, it’s an exciting concept (there’s greater thematic depth than you usually find in games of this sort, although I can’t share details), and the people themselves are a joy to work with. I imagine that will keep me busy for the next few months, anyway.

If not, I can always blog.

About the Author

Arley Sorg is a 2014 graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop. He writes SF/F/H, reviews for Cascadia Subduction Zone Magazine, and is associate editor at both Locus and Lightspeed magazines.

Caste in Blood:
A Conversation with Juliette Wade

Arley Sorg

Juliette Wade started writing fiction while studying for her PhD—a combination of linguistics and anthropology: “a ridiculously close look at cultural clashes inside classrooms where American students were learning Japanese, investigating how those impacted the way the students learned politeness grammar.” After finishing her degree, she continued to write in spare moments while working at home, raising her two sons. Wade has traveled the world as well as lived in France and Japan. Her fiction draws heavily on her academic background, her experiences in other countries, and her love of languages.

Wade’s first fiction sale was in 2008 to Analog Science Fiction and Fact. She was a judge for the 2015 Canopus Awards and her stories have appeared on the shortlist for Analog’s Analytical Laboratory Award five times. She has over a dozen stories out and her debut novel, Mazes of Power—first in The Broken Trust series—is due out from Penguin Random House/DAW in February of 2020. She has a blog, Dive Into Worldbuilding, where she discusses craft and holds interviews with authors such as Aliette de Bodard, Fonda Lee, Rebecca Roanhorse, and Nisi Shawl.

What books did you read growing up and how did reading transition into being a writer?

I was a voracious reader as a child, especially of fairy tales and folktales from different cultures across the world. I still have many of my folktale collections, including for example the gorgeously illustrated Folktales of the Amur by Dmitri Nagishkin, illustrated by Gennady Pavlishin, and I also consumed a ton of fantasy—I had a period where I would go to the library and check out any book with the word “magic” in the title. The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien was a favorite; Red Moon and Black Mountain by Joy Chant also snared my imagination.

I started reading science fiction in junior high school; I recall finding Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man fascinating but terrifying. At that time, I loved to invent different species of fantastical creatures, but never felt I had any good book ideas. Then when I was twelve I went to visit the Gouffre de Padirac, a cavern in France, where I rode on a boat on an underground river. The following summer I had A Big Idea for a story set in an underground city. I tried to write it in ninth grade, but stopped when I realized I couldn’t write it the way it needed to be written. That idea, that world, never left me, even though I wrote very little fiction in high school or college. What did happen during that time was that my studies in anthropology and linguistics gave me a new perspective on the idea, and turned it from fantasy into sociological science fiction. I started writing the Varin world seriously in 1999, and discovered that I couldn’t stop. Fiction writing had captured me.

Looking at your website and ISFDB, your first sale was “Let The Word Take Me” to Analog Science Fiction and Fact in 2008. Did you go to workshops, receive rejections, and struggle towards selling fiction? Or did you start selling to pro markets right out of the gate?

By the time I got serious about trying to get published, I had written well over 350 thousand words, but I also had a three-month-old baby, so going to workshops wasn’t really an option for me. I had started writing short fiction at the recommendation of friends, to hone my craft, and I sent stories to a lot of markets but was universally rejected. “Let the Word Take Me” was my first ever piece of linguistics-based science fiction, my own take on the linguistic concept behind the famous Star Trek episode “Darmok.” I sent that to a number of markets and got long, incredibly helpful rejections (one, notably, from Strange Horizons), and revised it extensively. Then at a convention I told Sheila Finch (The Guild of Xenolinguists) about the story and she asked if I had considered sending it to Stanley Schmidt. I had never considered myself a writer of hard science fiction, so it had never occurred to me to send to Analog. When I sent the story to Stan, he replied “I like this.” I was shocked down to my toes! I changed a few details at his request, and that’s how I made my first sale.

Have you been able to sell everything you write? Are there stories you sold but which took a bit longer to find a home? Are there projects you felt like you had to trunk?

I write slowly, and I don’t write a lot of stories. Instead, I tend to take an idea and work it and redo it and rework it and refine it until it gains the right kind of internal resonances and turns into something good. I have sold every piece of linguistic science fiction I ever wrote—it’s something that really inspires me. Other stories took years to find a home. I’ve trunked a handful of stories. Around 2012, I decided I didn’t want to be exclusively “that woman who writes linguistic science fiction for Analog” and I put a lot of work into creating fantasy stories, some using my background in Japanese language and culture, and some in my Varin world. The first one of those I sold was “Suteta Mono de wa Nai (Not Easily Thrown Away),” to Clarkesworld in 2014. That was a huge break for me.

Eleven years later, your debut novel Mazes of Power is coming out with DAW. Is this the first novel you wrote, or are there other books you worked on along the way? Had you been working on this one since the beginning?

Mazes of Power is not the first novel I wrote—technically, it’s the fifth. However, it’s set in Varin, and it’s therefore a piece that has thirty plus years of cumulative work behind it, even though writing the book itself only took about two years. The novel idea I attempted in ninth grade proved to be a different part of the far larger timeline of Variner history. I have three Varin books that I have attempted, put down, broken, and reinvented as I learned the skills to make them work the way they needed to. I also have a completely different novel world that I started working on when I worried I had all my eggs in the Varin basket! That one is a linguistics- and literature-based fantasy setting.

How does format or length change your approach to writing fiction?

My initial attempts at writing were all novels, and for a time I had no concept of writing short fiction at all. When I first attempted short fiction, the stories were vignettes pulled from the larger Varin setting, which didn’t stand alone. Discovering that I love writing linguistic science fiction stories had a great impact. Those stories tend to be puzzles, constructed scene by scene as a person or alien tries to find a linguistic and cultural answer in a complex situation. For a long time, I despaired of writing anything shorter than a novelette, but my skills have improved! For me, writing a shorter piece is more about getting an idea of the right size than it is about word-cutting. I came to the novella length relatively late, but it has turned out to be a length I love to work at, especially when I’m exploring the complexities of the Varin world.

Some writers use shorter fiction to experiment with style or ideas. You have over a dozen shorter pieces out, most recently “The Persistence of Blood” in Clarkesworld #138 (technically a novella). Has writing short fiction or novella-length fiction helped with the novel in any way, or are they unrelated for you?

I have learned a ton from writing short fiction. I found it really helped me deepen my understanding of story structure. Manipulating structure in a short format helped me to understand how to move structural pieces on a smaller scale, and from there to begin seeing what I was doing structurally in my novels. I also will often write short fiction to explore a character from a larger work in more depth. Lady Selemei, from “The Persistence of Blood,” is one of those characters.

The Mazes of Power copy calls it “sociological science fiction.” What does this mean exactly, and how does this term apply to Mazes? What are a few of your favorite sociological science fiction novels and how are they similar or different from Mazes?

Sociological science fiction, sometimes also called social science fiction, is science fiction that sets its major focus on society and its impact rather than on other elements like gadgets, technologies, or frontiers. This is not to say that those other things are not involved! The term definitely applies to Mazes of Power, which features a complex caste system with seven different levels, each of which has its own vocation, ideals, manners, and culture. Members of the castes struggle to cope with the expectations of their caste identities just as people in our world struggle with the identities that are placed on them. My favorite past work of sociological science fiction is Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, which was one of the works that inspired me to explore characters’ culturally grounded judgments and flout readers’ underlying expectations. (The other major work that had the same effect was not science fiction, but the diary of Sei Shonagon, The Pillow Book.) I also consider Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch series an example of sociological science fiction, though it’s more typically categorized as space opera. I love how Leckie keeps her focus tight and examines characters’ social and cultural expectations even as she works with the larger politics of the Radchaai Empire.

“The Persistence of Blood” is a tale about aristocrats, gender, childbirth, tradition, law, and more, with a female protagonist. Are there important similarities and differences in themes, concerns, characters, or style between this story and Mazes? Are there elements in the two that often appear in your fiction?

“The Persistence of Blood” is a prequel to Mazes of Power, and it is written in the same style, inasmuch as it uses a very tight third person point of view and looks at how the character reacts to both personal and political events. Lady Selemei does appear in Mazes, although she’s a secondary character there. Mazes uses three points of view, and takes a broader view of Variner society. I would call it a “zoom out” effect. Women’s issues are very important in Mazes as well, but they are only the beginning. I’m always fascinated by the way people exist inside of larger societal systems, and how the biases and influences of those systems show in the behaviors of individuals. That is a theme that can be seen in a great many of the stories I’ve written.

What is special or most important to you about Mazes of Power; what do you really want fans and readers to know about this book?

The social systems of Varin are what make this book unique. I designed Varin intending the society to feel very familiar to many readers, but to subvert expectations constantly. A reader should feel strangely at home—but while Varin features many of the same social issues as our own world, you should never quite know where those issues are going to become relevant. One friend who read the book said it reflected our own society as if in a fun house mirror. The social systems of Varin are inextricable from the characters, and inextricable from the power struggle the characters experience; they are almost a character in themselves.

What are you working on now that readers can look forward to?

Right now I’m writing hard on the sequel to Mazes of Power, which will be called Transgressions of Power. It’s going to change the camera angle in some interesting ways, and continue to explore regions of Varin that no one has yet seen.

About the Author

Arley Sorg is a 2014 graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop. He writes SF/F/H, reviews for Cascadia Subduction Zone Magazine, and is associate editor at both Locus and Lightspeed magazines.

Editor’s Desk:
Staring at the Hole

Neil Clarke

This month’s editorial was supposed to be about my adventures at a pair of science fiction conventions in China, but it won’t be. I’m sitting on the floor of my house, blasting some music by Infected Mushroom, and trying to work out how to tell you the story of how none of that came to be, at least for me.

The first convention, China SF Con, was set to take place at the start of November in Beijing. In addition to attending the conference, I was scheduled to do a few interviews, a signing, and a twenty-minute talk entitled “The Future of Science Fiction is International.” I had been looking forward to returning to China since I was there in 2017, but after over twelve hours at the airport—and a couple of hours sitting in the plane just outside our gate—we returned to the terminal. Due to mechanical problems they had known about all day (and from the previous flight) my flight was canceled. The next available flight was leaving two days later, on Saturday, so I’d arrive at the hotel as the convention was wrapping up. Much to my disappointment, I had them cancel the flight and issue a refund to the people hosting my trip. I was given a $500 travel voucher for my troubles and went home.

This was the second international flight I’ve had canceled at Newark in the last six months, so I was a bit concerned about the viability of my trip to the 5th International Science Fiction Conference in Chengdu later in the month. It turns out that I had nothing to worry about there. That flight left on-time, just without me. Earlier in the month, my father-in-law, Donald Rodriguez, had ended up in the critical care unit. It wasn’t looking good, but the Friday before my trip he was in good form, cracking jokes, and talking with us. It seemed like progress, but things took a turn for the worse over the weekend. We were warned that he only had days left, so I canceled my flight. He passed away right around the time I would have arrived in Chengdu.

Try as I might, I can’t really write much more about him or the rest of the month. There’s a hole in our family and looking into it is just too much right now. I’m just glad I was here.

Oh and did I mention that, in all of this, the beeping I mentioned in the last issue started. I’m heading out the door to visit my electrocardiologist in a few minutes. They want to schedule my surgery, but I think I’ve seen enough hospitals for the moment. Maybe they’ll let me push this off to January . . . but then, I’m a slave to the battery and that might be beyond acceptable risk.

Sorry if you were looking for a more upbeat editorial this month. From what I heard from my friends, the two conventions I missed were wonderful, so there’s that. (I was there in spirit, or rather, Flat Neil form.)

“The Future of Science Fiction is International” talk I was supposed to give in Beijing—and later rescheduled for Chengdu—obviously never happened, but the slides are complete (in English and Chinese). I’m hoping to record a voiceover for the presentation and post it on our YouTube channel sometime soon. Given the chaos that remains, I’m not entirely sure when, but I’ll let you know when I do.

This issue closes out 2019 for Clarkesworld, so I wanted to say thank you for all your support we’ve received for the magazine this year and my family this month. Should you celebrate, happy holidays, and I wish you all a wonderful 2020!

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, Touchable Unreality, The Final Frontier, Not One of Us, and the Best Science Fiction of the Years series. His latest anthology, The Eagle has Landed, was published in July by Night Shade Books. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two sons.

Cover Art: Halo

Derek Stenning

About the Artist

Trained as a traditional animator, Derek Stenning works as a concept artist in the game development field and as a freelance illustrator. He is currently working on Nintendo products with Vancouver based developer Next Level Games. His personal work, Entartete Kunst (EK), has been featured in numerous publications and translated into snowboard graphics, book covers and model kits. His art book, Born In Concrete: The EK Series was published by Design Studio Press.