Clarkesworld Magazine

Issue 176

Table of Contents

Best-Laid Plans

by David D. Levine

A Home for Mrs. Biswas

by Amal Singh

The Force Exerted on the Mass of a Body

by Bo Balder

Vanishing Point

by Robert V.S. Redick

Dancing with Ereshkigal

by Sameem Siddiqui

Spore

by Tang Fei

A Star for Every Word Unspoken

by Kai Hudson

A Brief History of Russian Science Fiction

by Alex Shvartsman

Raising Science Fictional Children: A Conversation with Kelly Robson

by Arley Sorg

The Cost of Doing Good: A Conversation with Octavia Cade

by Arley Sorg

Editor’s Desk: A Quarantine Soapbox

by Neil Clarke

Isolation

Art by Matt Dixon

© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2021
www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

Best-Laid Plans

David D. Levine

The mouse floated in the air in the middle of its cage.

It was an ordinary lab mouse, with white fur, beady red eyes, and an adorable little pink nose. The left ear was tattooed with a constellation of dots that identified it uniquely from all its siblings and cousins. A small nick in its tail showed where I’d taken a tissue sample soon after it had been born. The fact that it was alive today, a fully grown thirty-one-gram adult, showed that it had passed that test: it carried a modification in CHRNB2, the cholinergic receptor nicotinic beta 2 subunit gene, which we hoped would positively affect its ability to socialize with and learn from its peers.

The mouse looked at me. I looked back.

It clutched a shiny blue marble in its front paws.

It wasn’t a surprise that the mouse was floating peacefully in midair. Mice adapt quite well to zero gravity, and this particular mouse had been bred, born, and raised here on Lasky Station, as had generations of its forebears. Foremice. Predecessors.

As for myself, I floated on my side of the glass with my hands folded behind my back, my face carefully neutral. Not that it mattered directly, given that I was wearing a surgical mask, goggles, and face shield, but we’d all learned as undergrads that controlling your expression is a quick shortcut to controlling your body language and pheromones, and you do not want to influence your lab subjects in any way.

But I really, really, wanted it to put the marble in the black ring.

This particular mouse had never before been presented with a blue marble in an experimental setting. One of its peers had, yesterday, been trained to place a blue marble in a black ring in exchange for a reward. (Mice are red-green colorblind, but they can distinguish yellow and blue, and can tell light from dark.) After demonstrating its command of the task, that mouse had been placed back in the colony. Cameras had captured its interactions with the other mice and now, twenty-four hours later, I had snagged this particular mouse—one with which the first test subject had interacted repeatedly—and presented it with a blue marble and the standard array of five colored rings to which they were all accustomed.

Mice don’t talk. They are extremely social; they groom, they wrestle, they snuggle . . . they even sing to one another, after a fashion, in voices too high for people to hear. But unmodified mice have never been shown to teach this sort of complex learned behavior to their offspring or peers. Bees, on the other hand, do something similar all the time, despite their minuscule brains. Could this gene modification, just a few molecules affecting the temporal lobe, result in a significant change in social behavior?

The mouse’s whiskers twitched. Then, with a flick of its tail, it propelled itself forward and plunked the marble into the ring like a champion basketball player.

The white ring.

No treat for you, mousie.

I repeated the trial four more times, as the experimental protocol dictated, and the mouse got the black ring once. No better than chance. “Sorry,” I muttered as I gently retrieved it from the experimental enclosure and returned it to the colony, “you have to repeat a grade.”

I checked that the experiment had been properly video-recorded, logged the results, then started looking for my next subject. White mice all look alike, but the cameras in the colony could at least read their ear codes and point out the candidates—mice that had repeatedly interacted with the first test subject—on the screen for me. But I still had to catch them by hand.

Have I mentioned that mice function quite well in zero gravity?

I was sipping a bulb of coffee in the break room when Samantha Clarke, my friendly local neighborhood maintenance tech, drifted in. “Hey, Sam,” I said.

“Hey, Chelle.” (Only my mother calls me Michelle, and Sam and I were familiar enough that she didn’t have to call me Dr. Yan.) She sniffed theatrically. “Not too bad today.”

I gave her a middle-finger salute. She maintains that I always smell of mouse pee. I . . . wish I could disagree. I keep as clean as I can, considering my department’s limited water budget. Most of which goes to the mice.

Lasky Station is thirty-five years old. That’s, like, two hundred and fifty in people years. It was sent up by the Portuguese during the Second Space Rush, and when it was retired after many years of service it was purchased and donated to Grinnell University by billionaire alumnus Leslie Lasky. That’s why it’s named after him. Unfortunately, he cheaped out on the operating endowment, leaving us the underdogs in the never-ending battle against the forces of entropy.

Still, we’re lucky to have a station of our own. Not many small universities do. Among other things, it means that we can still do genetic research on animals, which is prohibited in most places on Earth’s surface because of the risk of modified test subjects escaping.

Which is not to say the mice never get out. They do. They just can’t escape to anywhere they could crossbreed with wild types and possibly cause all kinds of havoc.

(Unless one escapes the lab and manages to make it to a shuttle and then escapes the shuttle facility after landing. Which has never happened to me, thank god, but it happened to a friend of mine at another institution. Would have lost their certification forever if anyone had found out.)

“Catch any elves lately?” I asked.

“Nah. And I’ve tried everything for bait. Peanut butter, chocolate, even toothpaste.”

“Toothpaste?”

She shrugged. “I figure even elves like to freshen up after a snack.”

Sam and I have been ribbing each other all term about the “elves,” who she claims live in the walls and fix things if you leave out little treats for them. I don’t think she actually believes in them, despite her unwavering nominal support of the idea, but, as she says, there must be something keeping this ramshackle old station from disintegrating into a cloud of free-floating parts. It certainly isn’t stable funding and scrupulous maintenance.

“We wouldn’t have these problems,” Sam continued, “if you could just keep your test subjects from going walkabout.”

Sam has, of course, frequently proposed that the elves—for which she has never presented the slightest bit of hard evidence—might be escaped, superintelligent mice from my lab. “Yes, they are modified,” I said, just like I do every time something like this comes up, “but they are still just mice. They have literally one-tenth of one percent the number of neurons that we do.”

“Spiders have even fewer neurons,” Sam replied, “and yet they are mighty hunters. Almost as good as cats.”

“Where’d you read that?” I countered, surprised.

“Haven’t you kept up with your field, doctor?”

“Can’t read everything,” I muttered, making a note to look that up later.

In the afternoon I did maintenance work on the colony. The mice lived better than I did, frankly. They were provided with food, water, clean bedding, spaces for both privacy and socialization, and lots of enrichment activities, and they didn’t even need to do their own laundry. They were free to go wherever they wished within the colony and do whatever they wanted, and the population was carefully controlled so they were never overcrowded or isolated. And there were plenty of colored marbles and rings scattered about so they could practice what they’d learned in the experimental enclosure . . . and hopefully share it with their friends. Apart from the complete lack of privacy and the inability to leave, it was basically Mouse Utopia. “You wouldn’t want to go outside anyway,” I told one mouse as it made a break for the door. “It’s very, very cold out there.”

I always counted the mice in the main space before I exited the colony, to make sure none of them slipped out the double door with me. They were fast and adroit, and in the early days occasionally one would make it past the first door. But I’d learned their tricks and it had been a long time since one got even that far.

Yet still they went missing. The cameras were omnipresent and their census was automated and very thorough; there was no doubt that eighteen mice had somehow managed to vanish from their enclosure in this term alone. I even knew exactly which mice they were, by their ear tags. But though I had studied the recordings and even tracked the individual mice right up to the hour of their disappearance, I hadn’t been able to figure out how they were escaping.

This was tremendously annoying to me.

The whole point of running a mouse lab in space—the reason we put up with the dehydrated food and the constant noise and the loss of muscle and bone mass and, oh yeah, the ever-present threat of sudden death from equipment failure—is to keep the mice from getting away. And, yes, I could be fairly confident they hadn’t gotten back to Earth, which was the primary rationale . . . and there was the view and the zero-G sex, which are both as great as you’ve heard. But it was still worrisome that, despite everything, I’d managed to lose track of eighteen of the little buggers.

“It’s the smell that bothers me,” I complained to my department chair, Dr. Prentis, on our weekly call.

“You should be used to it by now,” she said. Her face was streaked with glitches and there was a noticeable lag. We must be on the other side of the world from Iowa at the moment.

“Sorry, I meant the lack of smell. If they were getting out of the colony and dying in the walls somewhere, we’d smell the decomposition. Or, if they actually found a way to survive, we’d smell their leavings eventually. But no one has mentioned it. And, believe me, if anyone on this station smelled anything even vaguely mouselike outside of my lab I would never hear the end of it.” I blew out a frustrated breath through my nose. “They aren’t in the colony. So where are they?”

“Here’s my best guess. They are making it to an airlock and getting blown out the next time it opens.”

I nodded. There were numerous small airlocks for service, maintenance, and disposal, as well as the main cargo and personnel locks, and they might seem an attractive place for an escaped mouse to settle down. For a while. “Possible. But all of them?”

She shrugged. “As long as they aren’t damaging the station or escaping to Earth, and as long as you record the losses in your logs, I consider this a low priority. Now let’s talk about those error bars.”

Another day, another experiment. This was run one hundred twenty-eight, phase A, which meant that I was training a mouse to put a marble in a ring. This part of the experiment was more immediately satisfying, because the mice and I both knew how to do it. It was just a matter of repeating the behavior and the reward until the mouse could perform the behavior reliably. But it was also boring, and Not Science, because the results were so well understood. Phase B—the part that so often didn’t work the way we hoped it would—was more interesting, and Definitely Science, but also the most frustrating. It wouldn’t be until I’d collected all the data and returned to Earth with it that we would know whether or not we had done something worth publishing.

It wasn’t looking great so far. The phase B mice seemed to be doing a bit better than chance, but we wouldn’t know until we’d crunched all the numbers, controlling for things like age and sex and the presence of certain other genes, whether the difference was statistically significant. If it wasn’t significant, that implied that our whole theory about the function of the superior temporal sulcus in social communication and learning was a bust, at least in the mouse model. Of course, a negative result is still a result . . . but they don’t give Nobel Prizes for negative results.

One thing I had noticed—anecdotal evidence, I suppose, though can something be anecdotal if you haven’t told anyone else about it?—was that certain phase A mice seemed to be much better teachers than others. Or just lucky. At this point it was impossible to be sure.

“Tell me about your friends,” I said to the mouse I’d just caught as I carried it to the experimental enclosure. “Are you close? Do you like to do things together? Will they be excited to hear about what you learned on your vacation? Will there be slides?” I placed the mouse inside and closed the door. It quickly oriented itself to its new environment and looked back at me through the scratched, transparent plastic. Its nose wiggled adorably. “I hope you are an engaging speaker. And for god’s sake don’t read every word on every slide.”

We watched each other for a while, the mouse’s red eyes meeting mine unblinkingly. What was it feeling? Terrified of this giant, incomprehensible creature? Eagerly looking forward to a new adventure, and maybe a treat? Bored? Horny? Planning escape?

Was it wondering the same things about me?

The computer had randomly selected a marble color and ring color, and all the mice had been exposed to the experimental setup before, so it wasn’t long before the mouse found the marble and put it into one of the colored rings. Wrong ring, mousie . . . no donut. A soft buzzer sounded and the marble vanished into the mechanism, replaced by another one of the same color.

The mouse wasn’t discouraged; it kept trying, and it wasn’t long before it happened to hit upon the correct ring. A light flashed, a beeper beeped, and a pellet emerged from the dispenser, which the mouse immediately pounced upon and devoured. The mechanism then produced a marble of a different color. This part wasn’t as much fun . . . no matter which ring the mouse selected, the marble would disappear with no sound at all and certainly no treat. Life isn’t fair.

We played this thrilling game for an hour, with me carefully selecting the color of the next marble to optimally reinforce the desired behavior and the mouse catching on quickly. Good for you, mousie. When we reached the point that, when presented with two marbles of different colors, the mouse selected the correct marble and placed it in the correct ring five trials in a row, I declared victory and pulled out. I delicately scratched the champion’s ears and gave it a little smooch on the head—though with my mask and face shield, it was more of an air-kiss—before sending it back into the colony to preach the gospel to all creation.

And then I heard a bang.

That wasn’t good.

Everyone knows that there is no sound in space. Everyone is wrong; space is loud. At least, the inside of a space station is. Fans whir, plumbing gurgles, structures creak, a thousand electronic things bleep and burble. Almost everyone has difficulty sleeping. But a bang, especially a sharp metallic bang like this one, is very uncommon and is never good news. Could be an explosion; could be an overstressed structural member giving way; could be a meteoroid strike.

A moment later a klaxon began sounding. Air pressure drop.

That really wasn’t good.

“Okay, here’s what we know.”

We were gathered in the main dining hall in module C, all sixty-three of us, peering past each other’s shoulders, many in the corridors outside straining to hear. Dr. Ivanovic, the station administrator, looked even more worried than usual.

“We’ve taken a micrometeoroid strike,” she said. “It’s somewhere in module A. But we don’t know where.”

A sound combining a groan and a sigh came from the assembled crowd. A groan because it was bad news, and a sigh because this was typical for Lasky Station.

Lasky was an old-fashioned design, with module A—the oldest and largest of the station’s eight modules—as the central spine to which all of the others attached. It couldn’t be subdivided, and if it lost pressure, the station as a whole would be unusable. There had been talk for years of upgrading the station to a more modern, robust design, but that would require money we didn’t have.

This is what happens when a small liberal-arts school has its own space program, I guess.

“We are losing atmosphere, albeit slowly.” More groans. She patted the air with her hands, signaling for calm. “We have people working the issue. Inside, there’s a lot of equipment that has to be moved. Outside, drones have failed to spot the impact point as of yet.” The outside of the station, I knew, was just as much of a mess of accreted junk as the inside. Even worse, perhaps, because obsolete and unused equipment on the station’s outer hull wasn’t in anyone’s way, so it tended to just stay where it was. And then something else got bolted to it, so now there was even more reason to leave it in place. Et cetera ad infinitum.

“So what’s the ETA for a fix?” came a voice from the back of the crowd.

Dr. Ivanovic sighed and shook her head. “Don’t have one yet. But if we don’t manage to find the leak in . . . ?” She shot an inquisitive glance off to the side. Her face showed she didn’t like what she got in response. “ . . . twenty-one hours, we’ll have to begin evacuation procedures.”

The crowd got really ugly then, with people shouting “I can’t possibly . . . !” and “What do you mean . . . !” and “What kind of . . . !” and no amount of air-patting would bring it under control. I was one of the ones shouting, I must admit.

Dr. Kwok, head of Facilities, finally screamed loud enough to be heard over the pandemonium. “Stop behaving like academics!” she yelled. “This isn’t about who took the last donut in the break room! This is life and death!”

That shut us up.

“Twenty-one hours,” Dr. Ivanovic repeated into the embarrassed silence. “If anyone from the repair crew asks for your help, make that your top priority. Otherwise . . . use that time to get ready to evacuate.” As we muttered and jostled our way out of the lab, she called out, “And remember: two kilos each, max. No exceptions. Anything that can be replaced, no matter how expensive—leave it here.”

I stopped dead in the corridor, not really hearing the annoyed exclamations of the people bunching up behind me.

My mice. My unique, purebred, genetically modified, carefully trained mice.

Shit.

I wasted an entire precious hour arguing with the administration, both locally and back in Iowa, but there was no possibility of a reprieve. There were only two shuttles, and they had only so much capacity. Not to mention that my mice were illegal on Earth, which I’d managed to forget in the initial moment of panic.

So if we had to evacuate—and by the end of the hour nothing had changed on that score—the mice would have to stay behind. All of them. And even if I didn’t euthanize them before leaving, which I wasn’t yet ready to consider, given that we were evacuating because of an air leak, they would likely die before the station could be repaired and reinhabited. Assuming we didn’t just decommission it, which given our finances was the more likely outcome.

I floated in the middle of my lab, face in my hands, gently bumping into walls, trying to control my breathing. Filled with anger and regret and . . . and grief. Grief for the project, certainly, for the years of work that would be lost, but also grief for the mice. The innocent lives that would be snuffed out.

Yes, okay, I had culled a lot of mice in my time. Every pup that wasn’t genetically correct, every juvenile that fought with its peers, every adult that got sick or injured in a way that couldn’t be easily corrected. Gently, painlessly, respectfully, but still culled. Killed. But most of my mice lived out full lives, well cared for and, I hope, provided with a pleasant and interesting environment. And their lives had purpose! They served the advancement of human knowledge. But if they all died now . . . those lives, and the lives of their predecessors, would simply be wasted. We didn’t even have enough results yet to be statistically significant, and when we resumed the experiment—if we even did—we’d have to start from scratch.

I had been given a lightweight plastic box for my two-kilo allowance. I began filling it with data bricks, tissue samples, vials of crystallized DNA. It didn’t seem like much, for all those years of work, but it filled the box surprisingly quickly.

As I worked I dislodged a yellow marble—the damn things got everywhere—and absentmindedly caught it before it could get away and cause trouble. The stupid little things were like Barbie shoes, omnipresent, always getting caught in some mechanism or clogging an air vent.

Then I stopped and looked at it.

Held it between my fingers.

Looked at the tidy array of five rings in the experimental enclosure.

And went off in search of the nearest emergency equipment locker.

“Okay,” I said to the mouse, “this is a micrometeoroid repair patch.”

The mouse just stared at me.

I’d picked the best mouse for the job. I hoped. Its ID number was 23070418—born on the Fourth of July, hooray—and according to a quick crunch of the experimental results it was the best of my “superteachers.” Or, as I said before, just very lucky. At this point I didn’t care which, as long as past performance was indicative of future results.

I tried not to think about the fact that that phrase usually appears in the negative.

I’d made some modifications to the experimental enclosure. I’d removed the marble dispenser, leaving an opening into the enclosure, and added to the five rings a crudely hacked hole, which was glued to a tube, which was taped to a hose, which led to a vacuum cleaner in the next room. (Yes we use vacuum cleaners in space, and yes I have heard all the jokes.) The cleaner was not yet running. That would come later.

What I was about to ask this mouse to do was certainly outside its experience and very likely beyond its capacity. But I had to try.

I pushed the patch through the hole. The mouse first skittered away, then approached it hesitantly. I had lightly smeared the patch with peanut butter, to make it attractive and to mask the smell of the chemicals within.

At first the mouse simply sniffed at the patch—a two-centimeter circle of tough fabric with a bulge in the center. Then it licked at the peanut oil.

I held my breath.

It delicately nibbled at the patch.

Good mousie! I pushed the reward button. Beep, flash, treat. The mouse abandoned the patch and went off for the treat, as I’d known it would, but it was a start. I retrieved the patch and prepared another one.

You’ve probably seen videos of squirrels running through amazing obstacle courses of anti-squirrel measures in order to get food from a bird feeder. This generally happens because the bird feeder owner, deliberately or accidentally, set up the obstacles one by one as the squirrel learned to overcome them. And that was what I was trying to do right now: to inculcate a series of arbitrary tasks in order to achieve a reward. Except the tasks were not arbitrary and the ultimate reward was not a treat, it was life.

I would most likely only have time to do this once. At most. I had to hope that would be enough.

I ran through an entire box of patches and had to steal another one from another equipment locker. What I was doing was a violation of safety standards and several codes of honor and ethics, but lives were at stake.

Okay, they were only mouse lives. But they were lives nonetheless, and my career and the careers of my colleagues back in Iowa were also in jeopardy. I kept working, ignoring the noise of everyone else running around getting ready to evacuate and listening to the increasingly anxious announcements on the public address system with only half an ear.

I did hope that my work would not be needed—that some human being would find the hole and patch it before it was too late. But what I was hearing made that sound increasingly unlikely.

I reached into the box for another patch, and cursed as my fingers found it empty. But I felt I was getting close; I went and found another box. On my way back, I ran into Sam.

“What are you doing with those patches?” she asked. “Did you find the leak?”

“Not yet,” I temporized, trying to push past her.

“But if you even think you’ve narrowed it down—you have to let Dr. Kwok know right away!” She kept blocking my way, and she was better at free-fall maneuvering than I was.

“I’m . . . I’m just working a hunch, okay?”

“But we might need those patches!”

Then I saw an opening and leaped, pushing off the wall behind me and shooting past Sam. “I’m going to give them to the elves!” I called as I passed.

I hoped that she’d be too busy with evacuation prep to follow me. And, indeed, she didn’t. But this encounter reminded me that my time was extremely limited.

I had finished up the third box of patches and had just started on a fourth when we had a breakthrough. The mouse caught the patch as soon as I pushed it through the hole, then began nibbling at the edge of the paper covering the adhesive. This wasn’t an easy task, but with teeth and busy little paws it managed to pull the paper away, exposing the adhesive, without getting its nose or whiskers stuck. Then, with a neat little push of its back legs, it propelled itself toward the hissing hole where the tube from the vacuum cleaner—now running—was attached.

Now came the part that it had failed in the last few tries. I held my breath.

For a moment the mouse, clearly hesitant of the noise and moving air, held back. Then it moved toward the hole, holding out the patch . . . the wrong way up. Again. I let out my held breath as a sigh and began preparing the next patch.

But at the last moment the mouse turned the patch over and released it. The vacuum pulled the patch onto the hole, sticky side down, forming a tidy seal.

Then the mouse, I swear, turned and looked me right in the eye.

I looked back at it, stunned.

I mashed the reward button. Beep, flash, treat.

I reset the experiment as the mouse was enjoying its reward—the adhesive took a little time to set, fortunately—and tried it again. Okay, mousie, you wowed ’em at the matinee. But are you ready for the main event?

It was. It nailed the task. And a third time, and a fourth, and a fifth.

I hammered the reward button. A cascade of beeps, flashes, and treats gushed into the enclosure, which the mouse immediately snagged from the air and devoured.

Congratulations, mousie, you’re a star!

I retrieved the star from the experimental enclosure, giving it a gentle scritch behind the ears—its eyes closed in pleasure—and released it into the colony, along with the remaining contents of the fourth box of patches. “I’m sorry the career of a prima ballerina is so short,” I told it as I closed the door. “But now you retire to what I deeply hope is a successful second career as a teacher.”

I took in a breath, let it out. It’s all up to you now, mousie.

I checked my watch. Thirteen hours left. Not as much as I’d hoped, more than I’d feared. More than I’d had any reason to expect, frankly—this mouse was a freaking genius. I had to hope it was a genius teacher as well, because I could only allow it . . . let’s say six or seven hours to pass along what it had learned, before I started moving the students into module A. I figured I could smuggle at least a dozen of them at a time in a carrier under my lab coat.

And then there came a knock on the door.

“Dr. Ivanovic!” I cried. “What a . . . what a pleasure.” This was, I was pretty sure, the first time the director of the whole station had come to visit my lab. And alone, to boot. She entered without a word and closed the door behind herself. She seemed troubled—not meeting my eyes—and I was sure she was about to give me some bad news.

“I was a mouse handler myself, in my grad student days,” she said by way of introduction. This wasn’t something I had known. “So I understand the . . . concern you must feel for your charges.”

I nodded, not trusting myself to say anything. Sam must have gone straight to the top with the news that I was stealing repair patches. I was in serious trouble.

Now she did meet my eyes. “Now you have to promise to keep this news to yourself.”

“I promise,” I said, my guts in an uproar. Bad news for sure, but maybe not the news I’d been expecting?

“There’s been no progress in finding the leak. I’ve been told that the chances of avoiding evacuation are extremely slim.” She reached out for my hands, and I numbly accepted her grasp. “It is time to begin the . . . the unfortunate but necessary task of euthanizing your animals.”

My eyes darted involuntarily to the colony. There was no sign of my genius teacher. I hoped it was already inside, conducting the introductory lecture. “I . . . I can’t do that.”

Dr. Ivanovic squeezed my hands, gave me a motherly look. “I understand how you must be feeling, Dr. Yan. But it’s better that they die by your hand—a quiet, respectful death—than to suffocate as the air runs out.”

“I hope we can avoid both of those.” But I couldn’t possibly tell her why I had that hope. Frankly, it was an insane plan—barely deserving of the name “plan” at all—and almost certain to fail. But if I had to euthanize the mice . . . there went even that tiny sliver of hope.

She squeezed my hands again. “There is a time for hope, Dr. Yan, and a time for realism. We are scientists. We understand that facts are facts. That means accepting that sometimes a theory doesn’t bear out . . . sometimes an experiment fails. And when that happens, we cut our losses and move on to the next thing.”

I could have given this speech to one of my own undergrads. In fact, I think I did, just last term. But that didn’t make it any easier to hear. I pulled my hands free of hers. “I . . . I need some time to prepare.”

She sighed, as though disappointed. “All right. But don’t take too long about it, okay?” She turned to leave, then paused. “Would you rather have someone else do it? I can send one of my grad students.”

“No! I, I mean, ah, no thank you. I . . . I need to do this myself.”

“I understand. I’ll check back in a bit and see how you’re doing.”

Shit. “Thank you so much.”

“You’re welcome. This is a hard time for all of us.”

I closed the door behind her. It was just a partition door, not an airtight hatch. It didn’t even have a lock. And barricading a door in free fall? Not really a thing. I couldn’t exactly push a heavy cabinet up against it.

I needed to give the mice time. Time to learn, time to make their way to module A, time to find and fix the hole.

I thought about welding the door shut. I had a soldering iron, but no welding torch. I thought about putting up a biohazard sign. “Mouse plague!” I’d moan weakly. “Save yourselves!” But they wouldn’t believe me. Or else they would believe me and leave me behind, which given my own assessment of the plan’s chance of success didn’t seem like a great outcome either.

This was a matter of survival. And there’s nothing better at surviving than mice. They’ve made it through millions of years of evolution despite the fact that everything wants to eat them.

So. Think like a mouse.

There’s a lot of random stuff in a bio lab. I set to work.

It was about an hour and a half later that my pocket comm trilled. It was Dr. Ivanovic, of course. I ignored it and kept working. A few more calls and then came a text message: “OPEN THE DOOR.”

“Open it yourself,” I texted back, and kept working.

I was surprised that it took nearly another hour before the crash of the outer lab door opening came to my ears. I guess she thought I might come to my senses if she waited? Or maybe the glue I’d used had been more of an impediment than I’d expected.

After the crash came a tearing sound, followed by cursing. A few minutes later another tearing sound, then more vehement cursing. And again. Then a pause. “This isn’t funny!” Dr. Ivanovic yelled. I could barely hear her, and didn’t bother trying to reply.

It wasn’t intended to be funny. It was intended to be annoying and time-consuming. I’d glued ten sheets of tough plastic across the width of the outer lab at half-meter intervals. Even with a sharp knife it would take her some time to cut through them all.

I kept working.

Given time a mouse, or a squirrel, will overcome any number of obstacles to obtain a reward. But if you present those obstacles one at a time, the subject will tackle them one at a time rather than stopping, thinking, and finding another way around. They are, in some ways, no smarter than administrators.

The tearing and cursing stopped for a while. Then I heard new voices, and a buzzing whir. Sounded like she’d come back with help, and they’d brought a hot cutter, or maybe something even more destructive.

I’d anticipated this. But they made much quicker progress than I’d hoped, the sounds getting louder and louder as one plastic sheet after another gave way. I checked my watch and redoubled my efforts. I’d bought the mice nearly three hours already. Four, I thought, was the minimum; five would be better; every minute after that would be gravy.

The buzzing whir got louder still, then stopped. “What the actual fuck?” came an unfamiliar voice.

I smiled.

The space between the last plastic sheet and the inner lab door was filled with polymeric polyol—a tough, sticky foam resulting from a reaction between two common organic chemicals. It was a trick I’d learned as an undergrad—I’d been the victim of a nasty chem lab prank, and had learned the formula in revenge—and it was messy, stinky stuff, which stuck to skin and had a tendency to clog up anything you used to try to cut it.

After a period of muttering and shouted threats, accompanied by a fusillade of ignored signals on my comm, the buzzing whir started up again. A moment later there came a zownt sound and a gurgle, and a god-awful stink I could even smell in here. It must be ten times worse out there. The sound of the cutter stopped, replaced by rapidly diminishing coughing and gagging.

That tube full of butyric acid was just one of the surprises I’d embedded in the foam as an enrichment activity for my adversaries. It’s important to keep your test subjects’ minds active and engaged.

I kept working.

By the time they made it through the foam and I could hear them hammering at the lab door, which I had simply wedged shut, I had nearly completed my to-do list.

I had cut numerous holes in the walls, leading to the air ducts, the spaces between walls, and the space between the inner and outer hull. Check.

I had dumped two boxes of repair patches into those spaces, using a blower to move them as far in as possible. Check.

And I had gently carried the mice, in groups of three or four, out of their colony and released them into those holes.

Every single mouse.

Check!

I felt accomplished. I’d managed to save all the mice from euthanasia—for the moment, at least—and stolen between four and a half and five and a half hours for their training. Using the cameras in the colony, I’d snagged and released the ones who had had the most and earliest contact with my superteacher first, leaving the less enthusiastic students in place for makeup classes. But now, with—I checked my watch—six hours left before we were to begin evacuating, they had all at least had an opportunity to be trained, and now were free, with what I sincerely hoped would be sufficient time and resources for at least some of them to make their way to module A, find the leak, and fix it, saving their own lives in the process.

Personally, I was completely fucked. But I’d done what I could for the mice, and for the station.

The door crashed inward and two burly grad students in gas masks came tumbling through. They seemed surprised that no further obstacles lay before them. Just me, floating placidly in my badly deranged lab, holding up my hands.

“Uh, Dr. Yan,” said one. “We, uh, I’m sorry, but Dr. Ivanovic sent us to euthanize your mice.”

“What mice?” I asked innocently.

We don’t exactly have security staff on Lasky Station, but we do have Dr. Kwok, and after some searching she came up with a pair of cable ties, which she used to fasten my wrists to a structural member in one of the escape shuttles. She wasn’t gentle about it.

“You are in deep shit,” she reassured me, “but I don’t have time to deal with you now. You just stay here, stay out of the way, and try not to get into any more trouble. We’ll deal with you when we get back to Iowa.”

She didn’t even leave me my comm, the bitch. But my hearing is pretty good, and I was able to follow the ongoing story from what echoed through the station and into the shuttle. And occasionally someone would come into the shuttle to fetch or carry something; a few of them were even still speaking to me.

For the first couple of hours most of the staff were still focusing on getting themselves and their labs packed up for evacuation, while the Facilities crew continued, with ever-diminishing confidence, to try and find the leak. But gradually the emphasis changed, with more and more announcements asking people to please finish up packing and help deal with the mice. Over time the evacuation morphed into a full-on mouse hunt. And the mice were clearly winning. I was ashamed of myself for causing so much trouble, and at the same time smugly proud of my charges.

I would say I was also concerned for my career, but I knew better; that ship had sunk. I would have to find some other way to pay back my student loans. If I were lucky, I wouldn’t be doing it from prison.

Suddenly everything changed. There was a loud and rather frenetic announcement on the public address system, which I couldn’t quite make out, but it was followed by raucous cheering, which then devolved into scattered applause and a babble of conversation. I didn’t know for sure what had just happened, but I had my suspicions . . . and my hopes.

They left me stewing in the shuttle for another hour before Dr. Kwok came and got me. “Can you explain . . . this?” she said, thrusting something in my face.

It was a mouse.

It was alive.

It had a micrometeoroid repair patch stuck to one front paw.

And it was not my genius superteacher.

Yes, lab mice all look the same. But a teacher, even a postdoc, doesn’t forget her best student.

It was touch and go for a while there, but they let me stay on the station. Just long enough to recapture the mice, at first, but eventually everyone admitted that we’d stumbled onto a significant new result in the genetic basis of socialization and learning—and teaching, which we hadn’t expected at all—and there wasn’t anyone better than me to follow through on it. Or any better facility or population of test subjects.

I’m now a principal investigator, with a staff of three grad students. The mouse lab has expanded to completely fill module D, and the Lasky Foundation was persuaded by the publicity to increase our operating endowment. We are still underfunded, of course, but less so than before.

Mouse number 23070418, now called Maria Montessori, retired from the ballet completely and became a mascot, living in a small luxurious cage in my office—yes, I have my own office now!—and gratefully accepting treats from her legions of fans.

And as for the rest . . .

Well, I must confess I never recaptured all the mice I released that day. Most of them, yes. And I found thirteen little corpses, eventually. But that still leaves thirty-one unaccounted for, not including the original eighteen. And there’s still no smell of mice, alive or dead, anywhere on the station outside the mouse lab. It is a puzzlement.

And people keep coming to me with strange stories of missing items mysteriously reappearing, or small problems being repaired, if you just leave out treats overnight.

They want to know what the best kind of treats might be.

“How are the elves today?” Sam asks whenever we meet up in the break room.

“What elves?” I always say. And wink.

About the Author

David D. Levine is the author of Andre Norton Award winning novel Arabella of Mars, sequels Arabella and the Battle of Venus and Arabella the Traitor of Mars, and over fifty science fiction and fantasy stories. His story “Tk’Tk’Tk” won the Hugo, and he has been shortlisted for awards including the Hugo, Nebula, Campbell, and Sturgeon. Stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF, Tor.com, numerous Year’s Best anthologies, and his award-winning collection Space Magic.

A Home for Mrs. Biswas

Amal Singh

Once she saw the red sands stretch across miles, craters as big as the stadium her father played hockey in, and golden spires shimmering brighter than Amritsar’s Golden Temple, Aparna Biswas didn’t want to live on Earth. Of course they were a far cry from her own backyard where, in summers, she would sit on a cane chair and watch the bougainvillea bloom the shade of a bride’s blush, “string of pearls” flowers wrapped around the wooden railing on her porch, eating a succulent dussehri aam as a pair of ducks swam in the small pond she liked to call her Pacific. But those summers only existed behind a dim haze of memory. She would take a living planet over a dying one any day.

“Beta, I think I might find god there,” she said to her son, tearing her gaze away from the Mars hologram. “Build me a home on that planet and all will be mangal.” She chortled at her own joke. Puns on the red planet had filled the Internet, and ever since Sunehri, her granddaughter, had taught her how to use a phone, she kept finding these odd little information trinkets.

“I might have to break all our deposits and still not be able to book a single one-way ticket, Maa,” said Nishant, her son. “Forget about building a home.” In his eyes too, there was a deep yearning to go to the red planet. He stood near the window of the living room of his Chembur apartment, looking at the once-blue sky, blotted out by an eternal gray smog that was here to stay.

“But our PM said in his last speech there was a lottery system,” she said. “And you know how lucky I am.” It was true. Stories of Aparna Biswas’ luck were splattered on the walls of Kolkata, and the gullies of Bombay.

When she was twelve years old, Aparna once sat in the front row seats of a stadium, watching her father, Ashok “the lightning” Biswas, drive the hockey ball around like it was glued to his stick. When he was six yards from the penalty line, a sparrow perched atop a stadium floodlight took flight and glided toward the goalpost, thinking it was an eagle. Near the penalty line, Ashok took his trademark stance, right leg backward, hanging in the air, left foot firmly on the ground, the hockey stick coming down on the ball like Indra’s vajra. The ball sped like a bullet, missing the goalpost by six inches, toward the stands where Aparna stood cheering her father. It would have shattered her skull had it not been for the timely intervention of the poor sparrow, who hit the ground immediately in a tangle of feathers and beak.

It was her extreme good luck that she met Sujit, her later husband—a writer of Bengali pulp magazines and a great admirer of Basu Chatterjee’s cinema—inside a dingy movie theater that smelled of cigarettes and leather and moist fabric. She was on her way out, leaving a movie in between, and he was on his way in, hiding from cops. That day, Aparna ended up watching a movie two times in a row when she had no intention of watching more than twenty minutes. During the first showing, her eyes were glued to the neon-lit exit sign, even as Sujit rambled on about how his latest book had caused a stir. The second show, they both actually watched the movie in silence, while sharing a massive tub of oversalted popcorn.

Aparna’s string of good luck rubbed off on people she loved. This shower of good fortune saved Sujit from two cancers in life. But, in the end, he was undone by a fall. A fall that Aparna couldn’t quite recover from. Now she saw Sujit in all faces and all movies, even at seventy-eight years of age. But she had also come to accept that if her luck was Hari’s will, then so was Sujit’s passing. And that’s just the way things were.

Perhaps Mars—mangal—wouldn’t make her miss Sujit as much. Perhaps making a life there would be its own challenge that would drown out all past griefs in one giant wave.

So, on the day she expressed her desire to go to the red planet to her son, she also expressed the same desire in mute prayer, with incense and chants, and fruits and laddoos, and a garland of dahlias, to Hari, her god. And her wish was fulfilled.

Nishant’s work in the Department of External Affairs was of a clerical nature. The department was an island of nontechnological bureaucracy amid a sea of other departments where supercomputers had replaced every human. And thus, in the last year of the twenty-second century, he still had to push papers around. Stacks of applications for the generation ship Madhubani stood in front of him, all with a red stamp of rejection where the wax was still wet. One of the applications was his, which had miraculously escaped the Attorney General’s stamp. An application that wasn’t rejected already was automatically accepted—no one wanted to waste extra wax of a different color to signify acceptance.

“See, I told you,” said Aparna Biswas, gazing at the bright golden card embossed with the new crimson insignia of ISRO that was issued to the passengers of Madhubani, even as the generation ship left Earth’s orbit, and spun to bring Earthlike gravity inside. Soon, as per the new travel directive, the gravity would reduce to a third to acclimatize passengers to a Martian way of existence. It was to happen so gradually that the passengers wouldn’t feel the change.

On the fifteenth day of the voyage, as Aparna Biswas sat in her climate-controlled resting pod, looking out toward the unmoving stars against the purple-black expanse of the Milky Way, she heard faint music sieve through the metallic walls of the cabin. Her granddaughter had long since given up listening to her iPod, and her son hadn’t taken up softly humming old classical music from his father, much to her chagrin.

“What time is it, Nishant?” she asked, wondering if it was still night, as the space outside suggested. She couldn’t much tell, but she wondered if there was any point to a twenty-four-hour cycle, considering soon, all of that would change. She always considered herself a good adapter to change in patterns, and this was the biggest change of all. Her medications, though, would still need to be consumed, only the intervals would change. She was sure a doctor on board would sort it out.

“It’s four in the afternoon,” said Nishant.

“Someone is playing Pancham Da’s songs,” she said. Putting on her glasses, she strutted toward the source of the sound barefoot. She crossed a narrow corridor that was filled with people at all times, some the crew of the Madhubani engrossed in eternal calculations, some the passengers, engrossed in eternal small talk that would last them the voyage.

A bend later Aparna arrived in a spacious foyer. Gray-white walls, with large windows looking out into the universe speckled with wonder and stardust. Bright Narad droids wheeling about carrying trays of food and beverages. A smattering of chosen populace who had given up their old home, now sitting huddled in front of a mock stage. And on the stage, the source of the music. A man with wavy gray hair, and a thin moustache, and of an overall bashful bearing was playing the sitar. A man who reminded Aparna very much of her Sujit. A man who kindled an intense yearning in Aparna to be young again.

She sat on the cold floor and listened to the music. Each note a reminiscence of a warm and cloudy past. An evening inside a radio station building, walls a dusky sepia, scents of cement and tea and jasmine and tobacco and almond oil. A midmorning rush of the Virar fast local train, and the visions of sunbaked stones beside gleaming metal rails. The air rented with shrill sounds of the motor of the auto rickshaws, the ring of their meters. All sounds, all scents, all sights, snuffed out in space, yet brought together in space. An irony.

The music played on, plunging Aparna deeper and deeper into the memories of Sujit. In that moment, she considered herself profoundly lucky, having an anchor to hold on to in the vastness of space. But perhaps her good fortunes were reserved only for Earth.

In that moment, the hull of the Madhubani became an innocent sparrow to the hockey ball of an approaching meteor, perhaps saving Earth in the process. In space, feather and beak, metal and rock and bone, like a million shards of a metal star.

“Mn. Lla, what is that star?”

Tripti pointed a finger at a blue dot, a hazy smear against the Mars sky. Mn. Lla, an indigenous Martian, skin like ceramic, six-limbed invertebrate, yet held together vertically by a life force yet alien to humans, looked at her, and then at the sky, then back at her. Mn. Lla spoke in a vocal register only Tripti could discern, because of the nature of their relationship—Martian Guardian to a second-generation Terran.

“That’s not a star,” said Mn. Lla. “That’s the home of your ancestors.”

“You mean that’s Dharti?”

“You’re looking at it through the translucence of the dome. That’s why it appears the way it appears.”

“I dream of it sometimes,” said Tripti. “A vast green field. Sky gray as graphite. I see a boy who calls me by a name that is not mine.”

“Are these dreams recurring?”

“On and off.”

“And are they causing any trouble to you, Tripti?”

She shook her head. But what was trouble for a fourteen-year-old child who had grown knowing the red planet as her only home? Born inside the Sistrom-Raja facility, a great campus spreading across a thousand acres of Martian land, surrounded by a shimmering dome that controlled the climate inside, Tripti had gone only as far as the Holden Crater, and that too, suited up and supervised. Her best friend was a Martian child named Kka.

And yet in her dreams she dreamed of a boy who was a Terran and grinned at her, a front tooth missing. A boy who called himself Sujit.

“Well, if they do cause trouble, let me know,” said Mn Lla. Mir wiry frame swayed against the manufactured wind inside the dome.

“Is Dharti dying?” she asked.

“It is,” said Mn Lla after a long, lingering pause. Tripti could almost taste the mournful bitterness in Mn Lla’s answer.

“I’m afraid of dying,” said Tripti. In her dreams, she was always falling. In her dreams, her skin crawled with spiders and pus oozed out of wrinkles. And now she had told Mn Lla about her troubles.

Mn Lla held her hand with one of mir limbs. A warmth surged through her in that moment. Mem understood her fear.

Kka lay beside her on the rug staring at the ceiling, a history book sprawled open on mir porcelain body. Tripti’s nineteenth attempt to solve a 32×32x32 Rubik’s Cube had failed miserably, and her twentieth try—where the cube was now an impossible jumble of colors deep into the spectrum that the human eye couldn’t even appreciate—didn’t look like it would come to fruition, either. Kka flipped the book to the thirtieth page and spoke aloud the first line.

“Not subscribing to the idea of monotheism, one of the world’s largest religions had in its pantheon a multitude of deities.”

“What are you reading?” asked Tripti.

“The Idea of God by Astrid Ahuja,” said Kka. “Fascinating. People on terra really were into this stuff you know.”

“Oh Lord, asked Arjun to Lord Krishna. The ones standing before me are my own brothers. How could I pick up my bow and arrow to strike them down?” Tripti said, but the register of her voice was alien. Kka sat up straight, mir spineless frame undulating without wind, mir bulbous eyes fixated on Tripti.

“What did you say?”

“It’s in the ‘Bhagavad Gita,’ the scripture,” she said, her voice reverting to normalcy. “Lord Krishna responded by urging Arjuna, the great warrior, to do his duty.”

“How do you know all this?”

The words she had given shape to vaporized inside her. She had always known these details, and these weren’t even from her dreams. She was born with an inexplicable knowledge, and it was only now, at eight years of age, that she had disclosed any of it.

“Let’s go outside,” she said, putting the cube aside. Kka followed her as she strode out of the room, into the metallic hallway that led to Garden Karla, a playground for Martians and Earthlings alike, with myriad surfaces, carefully controlled zero-G slides, and stick and ball games of a kind where the ground was just a nuisance and the sky was the limit.

In that moment an inexplicable trance took hold of Tripti as she strode toward a group playing a stick and ball game. One Terran child was floating in the air, clumsily holding a stick as the ball bounced between the sticks of the other children, similarly hovering a few yards away, in a haphazard formation.

“I want to see the captain,” she said to the child. Kka stopped in mir tracks, looking at the scene unfold with increased trepidation.

“Can you step away from the line, please?” said the child.

“Your way of holding the stick is all wrong. You can’t swing it with enough momentum if your grip is faulty,” said Tripti with a surge of confidence.

Somewhere a shrill whistle blew. The other hovering children came down to the gray-purple ground in one collective heap. Play was stopped and Tripti was the cause. The child she was speaking to walked over to her, his eyes narrow as slits. He was joined by a girl whose skin flushed with anger.

“You have quite a nerve obstructing play like this,” said the girl.

“You look like the captain,” said Tripti. “Good. I want to play.”

“What makes you think you can join us just like that? What makes you think you can master Kekepes?”

“I can hit the ball better than most of you,” said Tripti.

“Tripti, it’s a waste of time, c’mon,” Kka interjected. Tripti gave Kka a look, then raised her hand, palm raised, toward the captain, as if expecting her to just hand over the stick. Then Tripti gazed stoically at the captain and she relented, almost miraculously. What was a moment ago an altercation, became a camaraderie.

In Tripti’s dreams the boy grew up to be a tall, gaunt man, who sang songs in a language she hadn’t heard, and wrote on surfaces she hadn’t seen. And yet she found herself singing and humming the same songs, and searching throughout the Sistrom-Raja facility for old video files. Perhaps in those videos there lay a key to solving the mystery of the boy she saw so often in her dreams. Perhaps in those videos lay answers to her inexplicable abilities to play a sport like the best champions.

But as she grew up all these memories and visions faded like afterthought, like dew evaporating from a snake plant. She became a Champion of Kekepes, but left the game when she got riddled with frequent injuries. In every game, as she hit the ball, and it came flying back, an ancient, childhood fear of dying soared back to haunt her. In her dreams, she was always getting hit by a stone, or a ball. In her dreams, she was always falling.

She soon joined Mn Lla and Kka in an expedition far beyond the Holden Crater, to look for the elusive Rock of Esnu. Mn Lla, a Martian archeologist, and his nephew—Tripti’s friend, Lla—a chemist, had between them postulated that the rock held an entirely new kind of mineral, an inorganic compound that had properties to aid life span, a mineral called elasium. It was only recently found that elasium was present in trace quantities in Martians but not in humans. But Mn Lla’s experiments had suggested that ingesting elasium might work in favor for humans who were bound by the zincs and magnesiums and sodiums and potassiums of the old world. And so, twenty years after remarking upon the smear in the sky that was old Earth, Tripti willingly became an object of experimentation to two Martians she loved.

“Tripti, you can say no and I will understand. I don’t want the burden of this discovery to hinge on your decision,” said Mn Lla. The shadow of mir undulating figure fell upon the red sands like a dark flag fluttering. Tripti’s breath fogged her helmet as she held Mn Lla’s gaze. Kka stood by her right. The words mem spoke radiated inward, to her mind, finding a home in her, a technique they’d learned when they were younger and had just learned the mechanics of telepathy. Those were the words of hope, a promise of a better future.

“I will do this,” she said out loud to Mn Lla. Mem injected Tripti with a concoction that held a tenth of a microgram of elasium, the recommended quantity as per their experiments, which would not overwhelm the human body. But of course Tripti was the first live subject, and anything could have gone wrong. But Tripti had in her being a far greater force that worked by its own rules. Tripti ingested the mineral.

For a week, there was no noticeable change in her metabolism. For a month, she waited to see any side effects. There were none. Tripti began actively participating in Kekepes again, for she felt a renewed vigor for the game like a fire by the seaside that refused to go out, embers licking wood relentlessly. For the next four years, her body refused to show any ill effects of elasium. For the next fifteen years, her liver secreted bile like it always did, her stomach digested food like it always did, her skin glowed radiant, like a bougainvillea blooming in the shade of a bride’s blush, not wrinkling at all.

It was after twenty-five years, sitting two feet from where the dome met the red ground, in a garden at the north edge of the Sistrom-Raja facility, holding in her hands an old videocassette of the old Terran movie named Rajnigandha, that she realized she had stopped aging. On the contrary, though, Kka—her friend and companion—lay beside her on the sand, mir once-smooth ceramic skin now blackened like soot in places and wrinkly like dried lemon.

“I enjoyed what you showed me, even though I didn’t understand it,” said Kka.

“Companionship in terra didn’t work like companionship here,” said Tripti. “What we have . . . this movie’s characters didn’t and never could.”

“Do you yearn for that other type of companionship?”

Tripti didn’t have an answer to Kka’s question. She had never told Kka, but she knew Kka understood the nature of her recurring dreams. She had yearned to meet the boy who had called her with a different name. In the eyes of that boy who often changed form and took the appearance of a young man, there was a love the kind that Kka couldn’t give her.

“How does it feel to defeat death?” asked Kka. Tripti knew this question was coming, but she didn’t have an answer to it. Not yet.

“I haven’t defeated it. Just prolonged life.” It felt like the right answer. Until she could see otherwise.

“They remove the dome tomorrow,” said Kka. “Sistrom-Raja will never be the same again.”

“It will be better,” said Tripti. “Children born now will know a life beyond the Holden Crater.”

Kka’s skin shimmered a golden sigh. “Do you think terra will accept elasium?” Mem asked.

“I don’t know,” said Tripti with a sigh. She hadn’t considered the many elaborate viewpoints of Terrans when it came to nigh immortality. Inside the Sistrom-Raja facility, first-generation Terrans who had grown old on Mars had expressed a deep longing for Earth. They had lived their time here on an alien land and when it came to bid goodbye to their lives, they wanted to do so in their homeland. When given an option to ingest elasium and elongate their lives, they had plainly refused. When she was chosen as the Chief Ambassador from Sistrom-Raja to visit Earth, Tripti had eaten a ripe mango in front of a cheering crowd full of aging Terrans who gave her longing, mournful glances, perhaps tasting the juiciness of the king of fruits, the memory of their once-glorious home given a form. At that moment the gesture had felt symbolic, special. Now it felt hollow.

But she understood.

“I will miss you,” said Kka, in an un-Martian manner. The rhythm of the words was all wrong, the vocal register barren. Kka’s shimmering sigh was gone and now replaced by a greenish hue over the ceramic skin. To make up for the broken vocals, in their mute, telepathic way, they communicated again, through shapes and figures, their love for each other. A lone tear trickled down Tripti’s cheek, dropped on the Martian soil, marked their separation briefly, and fizzled away.

When Aparna Biswas was six years old she had painted on a canvas a city inside a dome with skies the color of mud. Inside the dome there was a small rectangular nook atop which she had scribbled, in dull black paint, home. The curve of the “e” had begun to weep soon, forming a trail of black across the length of the painting, pooling on the floor in a small puddle.

Her father had come home, sweaty from a training session, and found her gazing at the unfinished painting. “I don’t like it,” she’d said, choking back a hitch and a sob.

“You can make it again,” said Ashok Biswas. “Until you get it right.”

Tripti, at the age of eight, had seen a splinterfly—a seven-winged, Martian bug species—buzzing near her residential quarters. She had gazed at it in mute wonder; it was impossible for it to have taken birth inside the facility. Now, at the age of thirty-nine, inside the generation ship Kalamkari, she wondered if it had merely been a vision, or was it really a fossilized specimen come to life. She remembered, though, the wonder in her eyes, and the same wonder was reflected when she saw Earth approaching, a burst of blue surrounding swathes of dark green and foamy white.

As the Kalamkari descended, she could already feel the difference in gravity, the extra weighty pull, inexorable, the pull of a land that was once home to her ancestors. She looked around her cabin and saw wrinkled faces light up, de-aging twenty years in three seconds.

“All descendants are requested to assemble in the waiting pod where they will be provided with breathing masks and sanitizing equipment.” A robotic voice chimed through the walls of her cabin. She got up, and took a deep, clean, almost metallic-smelling breath of the generation ship, for the last time.

“If you could just listen, for once!”

The front porch was caked in mud. Dark crumbs of soil mixed with bug entrails lay all over the creaking wood. The lower half of an ivy creeper lay sprawled on the floor, the green leaves gathering brown motes even as its upper half dangled from a railing. The pond outside had mostly evaporated in the heat and all that remained was watery mulch. Through that mulch, Sujit had dragged his sandals, as he’d come back from work in rage. And in his rage, he had slipped his sandals off carelessly, splattering mud all over the porch, much to Aparna’s anguish.

“I’ll clean it later,” said Sujit, lighting a cigarette, his dark face engulfed by a smoke cloud. Aparna waited for it to vanish before speaking.

“What’s the matter?”

“The movie is not happening. I am getting no advance.” He said simply, as if it were the plainest, most ordinary thing to say in the whole world. “We might have to sell the house.”

In that moment, Aparna could have said what she had always wanted to say to him, but she knew he wouldn’t listen. If only Sujit could hear without her saying it. If only Sujit could see inside her mind. She wanted what he wanted, and she wanted it harder and better. But there was no way to get it.

“Maybe I should apologize to that harami bank manager who fired me. Beg him to take me back.” Sujit laughed as he spoke these words. His thin frame rattled as he laughed and coughed.

They spent ten minutes in silence; Sujit gazing at the dried pond, Aparna looking at Sujit’s creased, tired face. Then, Sujit asked her where she had put the broom.

The idea of a home she’d carried with her vaporized as she set foot inside the dome. Tripti blinked as a fading sun sent rays filtering through the dome’s cracked surface. The skies were a thick gray, and the ever-present smog she’d only heard of in stories leaked through the protective shield one mote at a time. This wasn’t what her dreams of a perfect land had prepared her for.

She was inside the Govardhan sector, a sprawling two hundred-acre rocky land to the south of what was once known as the Hooghly River. To the east was a marshy wasteland. To the west was a hill that rose to an annoying height and then stopped, as if told to not exist anymore. Much of the population was densely concentrated in a small town-like unit, with blocky, cement houses. An inhabitant of one of those houses was to be the first resident to receive elasium. Aparna, accompanied by a doctor who had been debriefed by Mn Lla, entered the house. The house was bare and empty and cold and so was the person who lived in it.

“Why are you here?” said the old man, whose wispy white hair fell on his shoulders in a broken way. Tripti didn’t understand what he said. It was the problem of the vocal register she’d grown up speaking with. The doctor elaborated and Tripti nodded alongside him.

“I won’t take it,” said the man after listening to the doctor. His voice was solemn, his skin sallow, and his eyes resigned. It was enough. What help would elasium be to him? Even if he ingested the mineral, and didn’t die of any natural causes, what use would that be in a land such as this?

When they came out, the doctor lit a cigarette. The thick plume of smoke shaded his face for a brief moment.

“Why are we even doing this? This place, these people don’t need a magic mineral. They need a home.”

“It’s a trinket to keep them satiated,” said the doctor. “The government here has promised them big things, and this is just a start.”

“Does Mn Lla know this?”

The doctor nodded. It sounded like a betrayal, but Tripti knew it wasn’t.

“I hope this entire endeavor doesn’t go to waste,” said the doctor.

The dingy Mumbai chawl was a far cry from the airy mini-bungalow Aparna had lived in most of her life. Cobwebs clung to walls where plaster came off in gray-black splotches. Moss grew with abandon in the wet corners of an Indian-style toilet, whose white marble was smeared with the brown of age and neglect. A small window gave a view of Dharavi below, matchbox homes with blue and white roofs, sprawled across acres.

“This could be home,” said Sujit, sitting down cross-legged on the cold stone floor. Aparna placed incense sticks on the windowsill to keep away the stench of cow dung wafting from below. She turned and saw Sujit dusting his Remington typewriter. The entire space of the chawl was barely twice their porch area. This wasn’t home by any stretch of imagination. But they’d have to make do. Until Sujit got a promotion at the bank or a hefty advance, neither of which was likely soon considering his whimsical nature and inclination toward tobacco.

That evening, when Sujit had gone out, Aparna thumbed through the classifieds section of Navbharat Times. Perhaps her profound good luck would help her land a job and then all will be mangal, as her father would say most days after dinner.

Tripti spent six weeks inside the Govardhan sector. Her instinct was right; no one was keen on ingesting elasium. A good day of living was hard to find, and no one wanted prolonged agony. When the sun set, the nights were chillier than usual inside the dome, and there weren’t enough blankets to go around. When the acid rains came, the ill-maintained dome took a hit, and fumes hissed out of its cracked surface, death liquid falling down on the ground in drops, killing the grass and flowers and soil.

Tripti and the doctor went on a trip across the wasteland, to see the farther reaches of the sector, where the ground met the edge of the dome, way beyond the Hooghly River, where there were close-knit dwellings made of rock and cement. Grass managed to grow with abandon here. Slanted sunrays splashed on mud puddles where once rested small ponds.

“My great-great-great grandfather was born here,” said the doctor, gazing forlornly at the last of the huts. “A place known as Murshidabad. I’ve only ever seen it in yellowed photos shown to me by my mother on Mangal.”

“An orchard might have grown there,” said Tripti, after a long pause. “A small lake there. This place was home to many, now only a place to some.”

The doctor nodded. A young woman wearing a yellow sari waved at them from inside her hut. Tripti waved back. Then, she bent down and dug her fingers inside the warm, moist soil.

When she got back up, her hands were caked with mud, holding a piece of a different home.

“Come, Doctor, it’s time to go home,” she said.

On the Kalamkari’s trip back to Mars, Tripti dreamed of the boy again. She dreamed of falling, of things hitting her, relentlessly. A ball, a meteor, a bird. She dreamed of a pond, of mangoes in sunbaked orchards, of flowers blooming. She brushed aside these dreams, taking comfort in the fact that they didn’t mean anything, really.

Aparna clutched the cool, sweat-soaked hand of her son, Nishant, as she watched the monitors attached to the wall by Sujit’s bedside. His dark frame, once lean and muscular, now a husk, lay on an elevated bed, his beady eyes staring at the ceiling, his patchy lips murmuring something.

“Nishant, go outside, Maa has to speak to Papa,” said Aparna. Nishant let go of her hand and touched his father’s feet. Sujit’s eyes watched Nishant go, then rested on Aparna.

“I’m sorry,” he wheezed. “I wanted to give you . . . him . . . a good life, but look where we are.”

Aparna took a bony finger of his and curled her own fingers around it. Like they did in the theater all those years ago.

“You remember Rajnigandha?” she said.

“How could I forget?”

“Did you know Basu Chatterjee originally wanted Amitabh in the film?”

Sujit smiled. “I’m glad that didn’t happen.”

“Something tells me if that had happened, we wouldn’t have happened,” said Aparna. Sujit’s fingers curled tightly around Aparna’s. The silence was long and lingered until Sujit’s fingers went limp. The monitor didn’t make any sound. It was better this way.

“We’ll be together in another age, another time,” whispered Aparna. “We’ll have another home.”

The Sistrom-Raja facility was exactly the way she had left it, eighteen months ago, sans the dome. The blocky, metallic dwellings underneath a gray, sometimes mud-colored sky she called home. The spacious library where she’d spent hours poring over old books and requesting videocassettes and USB drives containing Earth movies. The playground she’d played Kekepes in.

She saw Kka in a deep state of meditation, levitating four feet from the ground, mir four limbs undulating against an absent wind. Mem was inside their old quarters, mir skin the same porcelain, albeit with some splotches of age. She didn’t want to announce out loud her arrival.

“I’m here.” She reached out to Kka. “I brought you something.” A warm pulse inside Tripti’s brain told her that Kka had listened.

“Welcome, Tripti.” Kka responded. “I’m doing something for the first time. I’m sure you would want to hear all about it.”

“What is that?”

“I’m dreaming,” said Kka. “In my dream, I’m a small boy from Earth and you’re a small girl. We have a home near a pond. There’s a porch that is caked with mud.”

Tripti placed the gift she had got for Kka—a piece of Earth soil she’d picked, encased inside a bulbous dome—on a table. Then, she curled her finger against Kka’s undulating limb. The limb responded with genuine warmth. Kka’s porcelain skin changed colors, a dull gray to a vibrant purple.

“Show it to me,” she said, and closed her eyes.

About the Author

Amal Singh is screenwriter, author, and a cat dad from Mumbai, India. While his cat silently judges him, he can be seen drafting a novel, or trying to bake brownies in a cooker. His short fiction has appeared in venues like Apex Magazine, Translunar Travelers Lounge, Mithila Review, and is forthcoming in F&SF. He tweets about writing, cooking, and other miscellaneous stuff at @jerun_onto.

The Force Exerted on the Mass of a Body

Bo Balder

Sifan put her exoskeleton on after breakfast. Her private space in the IG-pod was cramped, and even an act as simple as eating drained her in Wenshi’s heavy gravity. That gravity demanded so much of her body she had to eat twice as much as she wanted to.

She opened the door and stepped outside. Despite the suit supporting her head, spine, and limbs, it still felt like two people had jumped on her back and were choking her. She started up her Gagarin breathing and tackled the two steps up to ground level. This was a psychological trick designed to make you think about effort from the get-go. Sifan hated it.

She summoned the cart. It was hard for her unsupported fingers to make the micro-movements on her other wrist. Someone should design an exoskeleton for hands. And also facial muscles. A frown was demanding, a smile even more so. It was said invisible facial patches existed, developed for actors who had to perform on location in Wenshi action movies—very popular these days—but Sifan didn’t really believe that. Otherwise she could have bought some.

The cart trundled up. Sifan tried to avoid any unnecessary walking. Still, everything ached as she got into the cart and sat down. The corset to protect her organs and the special slings to protect her pelvis just weren’t doing enough. Her stomach churned. How she hated the high-calorie packages she had to squeeze down her throat.

She should stop whining. She was here for a good reason. Today she was going to visit the cork plantation where the nose covering for her revolutionary new rockets was grown. There was nothing new about the materials, but her design was going to break the speed records of space transition. She’d always been an inventor and a creator, but for this invention she’d left the university and joined a mega-dollar start-up.

The engines that brought spaceships to transition speed were standard; that wasn’t her specialty. She had optimized the helix of the rocket nose so breaking through the seventeen layers of space into the trans-luminary flow happened in microseconds instead of seconds. That meant exponentially more safety.

The materials to create the rocket only grew here on Wenshi. Organisms grew denser and more resilient here, not just her oaks, but also the titanium bees that made the honeycomb plates for her rockets. The supergravity would cost her two months of life for every year of her stay, but it was worth it.

The cart juddered along the path through the orchards. The cork orchard was up on the lower slopes of the mountain. Sifan tried to settle down in the least uncomfortable position, but she felt like the princess and the pea every time the wheels jolted over a pebble.

A man stepped out of the vineyard at the halfway point. Sifan didn’t turn her head to look. Too much effort.

“Hey! Mx. Vandervoort!”

Now she had to swivel her fifty-pound head. “Do I know you?”

“My name is Zlatopec Zhu.” He stuck his hand out, and changed it halfway through to an awkward wave.

She’d seen him before. He had the characteristic short, stocky build and massive muscles from growing up in two point seven G.

“How may I help you?” she said, her tongue heavy in her mouth.

“I read that piece on you on Weibo. I would like to discuss it with you, over dinner maybe?”

Sifan would have grimaced but didn’t want to waste the effort. “Dinner is not very joyful for me here, Mx. Zhu. Just a quick meeting in my pod later?”

Zhu grimaced, Sifan didn’t know why. “I wish we could just walk through the orchards, talk in a more natural setting.”

Sifan shrugged with her eyebrow, because it cost her so much less.

“Yes, I understand why you can’t. Would today be possible?”

Sifan thought. Would she have the energy left at the end of the day? She was pretty bored all by herself in her pod. And she couldn’t live like that for five more years. Eventually, her developing skeletal strength and muscle mass would make things easier. A little. But she couldn’t wait for that moment to start socializing.

“All right, four o’clock?”

Zhu agreed. Sifan lifted two fingers in goodbye and set the cart in motion again. She passed through other cork orchards in several stages of their existence. In this one, workers peeled off the bark in rectangles and tossed it in waiting carts. The product was so rough and organic that Sifan always marveled at the idea it could become a superfine, heat-resistant nose covering for rockets. For that, it had to be ground and pressed into shape during a lengthy factory process.

The next orchard stood bare-limbed below its greenery, the one after that looked ready to harvest. At the end was her patch, one thousand square meters of low-slung oak growth.

Only for her oaks would she make the effort of getting out of the cart and walking around. To fortify herself she took an energy drink, glucose tablets, and breathed extra oxygen. Lungs, too, had to work extra hard here to expand.

She lowered herself carefully to the earth and started walking, eyes on her feet so she wouldn’t misstep and have to correct herself. A twisted ankle or a fall were serious injuries here, even with the antigravity harness.

She reached the first gnarled oak and took a moment to rest. Her instinct was to lean her back against the tree, but it was too risky to get off-balance. Instead she rested her hand lightly on the growing bark. She felt a tingling sense of presence when touching a large old oak tree like this, thick and short and sturdy like the people of Wenshi. Did the tree sense her back? She’d read that on Old Earth trees had formed large networks with other trees and fungi, creating an arboreal intelligence. She didn’t know whether the soil of Wenshi provided the same kind of support for the trees here. She wondered if they felt alone.

She’d plotted out a course that would take her past the most trees in the least number of steps. A year ago, she wouldn’t have believed this kind of preparation. But now the course chart was a lifesaver. She visited forty-three trees before the route took her back past her cart, which was a decision point. Go on or go back.

She went back. If she wanted to meet Zhu later in the afternoon, she’d need to rest first.

For the first time, she hesitated to enter the pod. It offered relief from the relentless gravity, but the pod didn’t have a view. This little corner of Wenshi was beautiful. Gentle hills rolled into the distance, growing taller and bluer as they receded. The soil was bright orange, the trees an eye-searing green. The air smelled of moisture and sunshine and growing things. She took a couple of pictures to project on a wall in lieu of a window. She was in an actual physical place, and she shouldn’t forget that. Even a station-dweller like herself loved a planetary landscape. Enjoyment of nature seemed to be genetically programmed into humans.

For a moment she allowed herself to daydream about inventing pods with actual windows. The tensile stress on transparent material . . . she shook herself out of it. She had to focus on this project.

Sifan did her mandatory strengthening exercises after her nap and then put on the exoskeleton again. It was necessary even for the short hop to the one-G suite at the back of the pod.

Two steps before entering the suite, she received two files from Zhu. One had a long, academic title, something about communication between universe layers, the other was an op-ed piece about the Fermi paradox. Both had dozens of links to more articles. Fine, she’d probably at least skim them, but there was no way she could read them before the meeting. Why hadn’t he sent them earlier?

Zhu was already waiting for her as she entered the anteroom. She didn’t want him watching as she extracted herself from the skeleton suit with her clothes in disarray, but there was nowhere to hide.

“Hi,” she said. “Got your files, but I didn’t have time to read them.”

He smiled. “No, no, of course not, it’s just for reference later on.”

Sifan had already forgotten the subjects of the papers. But it didn’t matter, she could access them any time she wanted.

She stood stock-still a few meters before her chair. Something was different here. It set every cell of her on fire. Her neck hairs rose. She stood on the balls of her feet and curled her fingers. Her nostrils opened wide. There was a scent in the air.

The scent of a fellow human being hung in the one-G room and her adrenaline levels shot to high heaven. She wanted to scoot over and touch Zhu, sniff his neck and his wrists and even his armpits.

Sifan sat down rigidly, trying not to let these thoughts appear on her face or body. How embarrassing! Not that she was surprised about her reaction after months of isolation, but it was her problem, and it would be rude to saddle Mx. Zhu with her inner turmoil.

“So,” she said, and had to clear her throat a couple of times to unclog her voice. “What did you want to talk to me about?”

He inclined his head. “How have you been, Mx. Vandervoort? Adjusting to our gravity isn’t always easy.”

“It is hard on the body,” Sifan said. “I’d been in training for months before I landed but still, the reality, even with the suit, is pretty crushing.”

“I hope you will manage to walk around outside this facility one day,” he said. “We have much beautiful, untouched nature to be enjoyed.”

Sifan’s AI flagged the second sentence as deeply emotionally significant to him. The AI helped Sifan interpret the facial cues of a culture she didn’t know, and a physiognomy changed by the gravity. She called up the titles of the papers he’d sent. Nature. Something with untouched nature. Her hackles rose. Was he telling her something about the project?

“That sounds like a wonderful prospect. I share your hope. Sitting in a lonely pod in the middle of nowhere is quite daunting.”

Zhu smiled. “When will your colleagues arrive? You must look forward to that.”

That certainly was something to look forward to. “Sadly, they won’t be able to come until next year.”

Sifan put up her best social smile and bent slightly forward. Everything was so easy in one G. Even feeling emotions seemed lighter, now that she could smile and frown and wag her head without spraining important muscles. “Tell me about yourself and your community, Mx. Zhu. I’m looking forward very much to meeting more of you.”

“Nothing much to tell, Mx. Vandervoort. I grew up here in Wenshi, trained in forest management, worked all over the continent.”

Forest management. “You’re managing my cork, yes?”

“Not exactly. My work is with the wild environment and trying to mitigate humanity’s influence on it,” he said.

“But if it’s not about my cork, what are we meeting about?”

“I represent NatPre,” Zhu said finally.

Natural Preservation tried to prevent human settlements from ruining the ecologies of their new homes. Sifan felt that he’d already said this, wild forest management, wasn’t it? She couldn’t see what it had to do with her. She’d bought a cork harvest. If that was evil, shouldn’t his beef be with the plantation owners? Or planetary management? She was just a buyer.

“We concern ourselves not only with planetary environments, Mx. Vandervoort, but also with interplanetary environments.”

Sifan still couldn’t guess where he was going.

“There is evidence that space travel is doing permanent damage to the spatial layering of the universe. Our measurements indicate that the routes our spaceships take never heal.”

“Space is huge, how could human travel possibly damage something like that?” Sifan asked.

“Humanity has been in space for centuries, and although space is enormous, locally the damage is starting to add up.”

Sifan didn’t want to hear this. She’d dedicated her life to studying the branch of physics that applied to space travel, and it had always seemed to be a beautiful, worthy thing to her. She tried to suppress the feeling that was building in her stomach. “What evidence? What measurements?”

Zhu gestured slowly toward her. “The pop science papers I sent you. There’s links in there to more serious publications.”

Sifan wanted to bite back that she was an actual physicist and quite capable of reading real science articles, but managed to stop herself. Don’t kill the messenger.

“So, why are you telling me this?”

Zhu’s face shone earnestly. “First, we were hoping that you would be our advocate. You’re a well-known innovator, your inventions have made you famous. Your support to our cause would mean a lot.”

“You want me for PR? So it’s got nothing to do with my cork here or my new Borer design?” As soon as she’d said it, Sifan knew that it had to be. Her spiral Borer did what other space drives did, just faster and more effectively. The Borer would not just rip a hole between space layers, it would shred them. “No. No way. This is my life’s work. My money. My investors’ money. How can you ask me to stop this?” Not to mention the nine fucking months she already spent on his fucking planet, and the four more years she’d planned to.

“Mx. Vandervoort, space is not simply a void. It’s alive. It’s talking to us. We’re killing a sentient being.”

That was too much. Sifan jumped up. She misjudged the force in the light gravity and only just managed to prevent a fall, milling her arms and bumping her knees against the table. “I’m sorry, that’s nonsense. I was prepared to listen to you, but you’re going too far now.”

If only she could storm out. But no, Zhu would be able to watch her struggle into the skeleton suit in the airlock. She started to take off her outer clothes anyway. She couldn’t storm, but she could stride off with dignity.

“Please wait and listen. It’s not nonsense, it’s scientific inquiry. I wanted to invite you to come visit the physics lab.”

Sifan snorted and went on putting her legs in the skeleton suit. Its sensors clicked against the implants in her legs, locking onto the bracing network threaded throughout her body.

“Aren’t you a physicist? This is new research, new questions. How can you not be curious about something in your own field?” Zhu said.

Sifan clicked on the helmet and experienced the second of dizziness as the circuits closed and the suit’s AI came online.

“Thanks, but no thanks,” she said, all her muscles already tense for gravity’s onslaught, her teeth clenching. “Bye.”

She stepped outside and forced herself toward the buggy at the briskest clip she could, ignoring the scream of her suffering spine.

When Sifan returned to her pod, steaming, she turned the view to Penikett Station Concourse. The soothing grays and pinks, so different from the busy green and terracotta tones of Wenshi, calmed her at once. She’d promised herself to stay in the present to be reminded of where she was, but right now she needed soothing. That Zhu. How dare he.

She started her favorite guided meditation but could find no peace. Her anger was the kind that needed burning off instead of meditating off. The hamster wheel it would have to be. She’d already done her morning calisthenics, but she’d bear with the extra calories she’d have to eat after this.

The half hour of running did make her anger go away. She lay down on the bed for the mandated rest after and forced herself to sip the dreadful high-calorie cocktail, knowing it would leave her queasy, but also knowing she had to eat. She already didn’t recognize the Sifan in the mirror. Her body had lost all the extra fat it had ever had and bulked up instead. Her shoulders and thighs looked like a weight lifter’s. She’d never cared about sports but gaining strength in bone and muscle was absolutely necessary for her stay on Wenshi.

She might as well read Zhu’s excerpts. She was a scientist, of course she was curious. Even if he was trying to drag her into some crazy cult. Pfft.

Okay, that was an interesting paper. The authors had measured pattern resonances in the twenty-ninth layer of space, the very one that starships needed to enter for FTL travel. Sifan told herself that the human mind was made to see patterns, even where none existed, but the papers kindled a little flame of curiosity. A sentient universe. Hidden deep in the layers of space, invisible to human eyes but now, only recently, detectable by human instruments and human mathematics. It was such a tempting idea. If space was talking, what did it say? And to who?

She couldn’t help herself and looked up the location of the physics laboratory. She’d expected it to be in deep space somewhere, but it was actually situated here on Wenshi. Unmanned probes registered the waves in deep space and brought it here.

So, the lab was on Wenshi. Theoretically close, in practice a grueling six-hour three-G train journey away. No way she was going there. The daily trek to her cork trees was hard enough. No, this was one time scientific curiosity would have to take a back seat. She had gone all in on her spiral rocket project, and she had to see it through, no matter how enticing the new idea was.

She swiped the papers away and crawled into bed. Her bones ached, as always. Her stomach churned from eating too much, her intestines labored to get the food processed under the extra gravity. Sifan cued her sleeping macro and switched off.

The next day, Sifan set off for her trees again.

She wished she could walk over the lush grass, through the orchard’s shadows, unimpeded, free. But laboriously, in a suit, would have to do for now. She patted her favorite tree’s bark. It grew in a convoluted, twisted shape that in a human being or a mammal would denote agony, but all she got from the tree was contentment and quiet power. “Good tree,” she whispered. Nobody could see her being silly. “Good, thick cork.”

If the trees screamed when their bark was harvested, was that like space when her rocket tore through it? What if everything was alive and aware, trees, space, the universe?

Back in the pod, she looked up when she was due to visit her space bees. The shuttle port was halfway to the space lab. She asked the AI if it thought she could go to the space lab instead of the bee visit. The AI needed all of half a minute to think about that. The answer was yes, if she rested up for a week before the journey and snacked every hour to store up energy. That meant fat. Sivan pinched her waist. It hadn’t seen fat for months now. She sighed. Eating, more eating. Who’d have ever thought she’d balk at extra chocolate?

The mandated week of rest left Sifan feeling uncommonly fit and frisky. Maybe the AI should schedule rest periods more often. She put on the dreaded suit with anticipation and the short walk to the cart didn’t feel as arduous as usual.

People hardly looked her in the face as they helped her into the train to the physics laboratory. Did everyone hate outworlders or something?

But then she caught a glimpse of her face in a mirror and realized what signals she gave off. Downward lines around the mouth and eyes denoted misery and anger and hopelessness. She might not feel that, but the heavy gravity’s drag on her facial muscles told a different story. Great. She was doomed to live among people who disliked her on sight. And even worse, when she left here, her face might never go back to its normal state. She’d be all bunched-up jaw muscle and heavy brow ridge, and normal people would shy away from her.

The AI recommended a dose of mood lightener and for once she complied. This was already a hard day, and it would get worse. She was entitled to a little help.

The train rolled through the beautiful hilly landscape, dotted with the lavish blues and turquoises of the native flora instead of the imported Earth species. The train crested a rise and started to travel downward. Sifan spotted the building that must be the physics lab at once. It was huge. That had to be a black hole suspension station. Her vague fantasy of Wenshi being a rural, backward place had clearly been all wrong.

The head of the lab met Sifan in person. She was an elderly woman, as short and powerfully built as everybody here. She took one look at Sifan and offered to skip the planned lunch and speeches.

Sifan could have cried at the kindness but took the opportunity to skip the formalities with both hands. A wheelchair had been set out for her and the director personally pushed Sifan to the demonstration of the space resonance work.

The director wheeled her into a large room full of people hunched over workstations. A few large screens displayed data flows.

“We send out below AI-threshold drones to gather data,” the director explained, “to circumvent quantum effects, and compile and sort them here. We’ve prepared some samples for you on screen.”

The presentation flipped through the different resonances of space layers, which Sifan knew all too well. But she’d never seen them plotted onto time like this. Space layer eighteen resonated a certain pattern, repeated it for years on end. The presentation skipped to layer twenty-nine. This too, showed certain resonances, seemingly random. But then they flipped to the same resonances, although in a different register.”

“How does this compare in real time?” Sifan asked, excited.

“First layer eighteen, for almost two years, then layer twenty-nine, for several months.”

“What’s your hypothesis?” Sifan asked.

“It seems like a conversation to me, to us,” Director Pailaa said. “So we’ve built a station far away from gravity wells and space lanes to project this resonance to layers eighteen and twenty-nine.”

“And?”

“We got an answer! Look at the charts. It returns the Fibonacci sequence.”

After the presentation wound up, Sifan was invited to go for drinks with the whole crew. The director rescued her from the social dilemma of refusing.

“Mx. Vandervoort has only been in our gravity for a few months, she doesn’t have the stamina yet to join us right now.”

“Rain check?” Sifan said, working her smile muscles as hard as she could, hoping they would project happiness and warmth.

“Rain check.”

Sifan fell asleep on the train journey back, something she regretted very much when she woke stiff and aching, stiffer and achier than usual, still in her skeleton suit. And she still had to trek back to her pod.

As the large, orange sun started to set, it was hard to concentrate on the road. Not just because of her tiredness, but because the graphs the physicists had shown her danced before her eyes. Sure, it was only a Fibonacci sequence, one of the most basic ways to communicate intelligence, but what if they were right? What did that mean for her?

That night, she dreamed of rainbow-colored space trees singing to each other. Even dream-Sifan sighed at the silliness of her own imagination.

The next day Sifan went out on her planned tour of the cork orchard. She didn’t override it, although her sore body and buzzing mind would have been a good excuse. But she felt the need to stick to her routine for now. She didn’t examine those feelings too closely. Not yet.

The cork orchard bathed in early morning light, everything more orange than under the Earth-normal lighting at the pod. Which was kind of silly if you thought about how long ago humanity had first left Earth, but if you had to have standardized units, it might as well be those of your planet of origin.

She flipped her vision to what the orchard would look like under the Earth sun, and for the first time, she found the cooler beiges and greens dull and chilly. Maybe she was finally getting acclimated.

She took away the filter and enjoyed the intense blue of the sky, the greenness of the grass, the warm ocher colors of the bark. Wenshi was beautiful. She wished she could walk around without the skeleton suit already. She wanted to lie down in the grass and smell the earth.

Well, she could do that. Just very carefully.

The AI showed her the kneeling sequence. It wasn’t a thing to do lightly, because her weight would be on one leg most of the time, a bent leg at that. Risky. First she had to carefully position her hand on the nearest tree, turn on extra support on that wrist, and then turn on extra support on the outer leg. Only then could she start to slowly lift the inner leg and move it backward.

The servos whined, or was that her imagination?

Freeze that position, unfreeze the wrist, move the hand downward, slowly. And repeat.

Briefly she focused on the grass. She could smell it already.

Her hand slipped, and the next thing she knew she was facedown on the earth. Her legs were in the right position, but her right hand had transferred the weight too soon onto the left hand, and that had made her torso bend down too far. And now she had a nosebleed and had probably broken her left wrist. She was in agony.

“Request to cede control,” the AI said. “Counting down from five, four, three . . . ”

“Cede!” Sifan screamed.

The medical stinger shot her full of muscle relaxant so she wouldn’t accidentally work against the suit. It repositioned itself in brief bursts to minimize the injury and prepare itself to lift Sifan back up. There was no possible help out here.

“Pain relief,” Sifan gasped.

Almost instantly the pain went away. She was such an idiot. Why hadn’t she given the AI more control?

The suit’s process of getting her upright again was nothing like the way a human would do it. Sifan had to close her eyes to keep herself from seeing the way her knees and feet were being used. Better. Now she was alone in her own head. She cut off audio as well.

But not all senses could be cut off. A sudden surge of nausea forced her to open her eyes, to discover her head was now hanging midway before her torso, her arms somewhere behind her, her legs herky-jerkying backward in something not quite like walking.

“Please put me upright,” Sifan gasped. “I’m going to throw up.”

This is the optimal position for regurgitation in this moment, the AI sent back.

Yup, there she went. Look at all those calories she would have to re-eat, puddling there on the ground. Sad.

The process was a little better with an empty stomach. Sifan managed to reach the car without further mishaps. The AI sat her down.

I advise turning audio on, the AI said.

Sifan sighed but followed the advice. Oh, that’s why it had said that. A vehicle was coming. At great speed, too. The AI wouldn’t allow her to turn her head, probably wise considering the fall, so she had to wait until it drove into her field of vision.

It was Zhu’s jeep, careening into view at hair-raising speeds. Sifan wondered at the g-forces that his body would suffer in those tight curves and the thought of them would have made her ache if her pain receptors had still been working. What was he doing?

“Zhu?” she croaked.

“Mx. Vandervoort!” Zhu jumped out of the jeep, landing with a thud on the orange soil. Sifan winced, but he seemed fine, and even bounced a little as he ran up to her vehicle.

“What are you doing here?” she said. “Don’t touch me. The AI’s got it.”

“I know I shouldn’t touch you,” he said, sounding exasperated. “I read the guidelines. But you are hurt, and I wanted to offer you my support.”

“What kind of support?” Sifan regretted that she was snapping, but the mood enhancers and pain suppressors ironed out her fine voice control.

“Emotional support? You can suppress pain, but you must feel so helpless right now. Let me go with you to your pod. You shouldn’t be alone.”

What difference would that make?

But Sifan felt something burn in her eye. Tears, for god’s sake. Suppress them, she ordered the AI. She didn’t think it could actually directly influence her tear ducts, but it did something. She was now floating on a cloud and Zhu had receded.

“Thank you,” she said with a thick voice. She wanted to be mad at her own weakness, but all she felt was gratitude.

Sifan was aware of time and landscape passing her by, but it didn’t affect her. The various orchard trees waved their branches over her head—oak, apple, quince, pear, chestnut. Then just blue sky. Then a sliver of beige at the edge of her field of vision.

For a while, she couldn’t think which tree was beige, until at last she realized it was her pod. Oh. Zhu had brought her home. How kind. She couldn’t recall what should come next. She might get very hot during the afternoon, and very cold during the night. The suit might help with that though.

And then she floated inside the pod and was lowered onto the bed. Oh, right, her vehicle had a detachable float for heavy luggage and such.

The AI was directing someone to take the skeleton suit off her. She felt some jostling, and would have laughed at Zhu’s painstakingly clumsy antics in the standard gravity, if she could have mustered sufficient oomph. But all her oomph was gone, dissolved in a cloud of painkillers. So nice.

When she opened her eyes again, the light was different. It was the next morning. Her whole body ached, but only in a pleasant way, like after a hike.

She levered herself up very carefully on her right elbow and looked down on the left arm. Yup, cast. The readout said, “Compound fracture. Cast will disintegrate in approximately four days and twelve hours.”

Great, that meant four days locked up in the pod. She’d lose so much muscle mass!

A sound.

Sifan found that she was wearing a pair of comfortable pajamas, with practical closures for the one-armed, that she didn’t remember printing or putting on. Zhu? Carefully, testing out the limits of her pain meds, she shuffled to the door.

“Yeah?” she said.

Zhu stood there in the hot sunlight. Judging by the slant, it was late afternoon. “Here to cheer up the wounded!”

Sifan didn’t feel cheered up yet. Socializing seemed daunting and exhausting.

Zhu gestured behind him. “We’re having a party, and you’re invited.”

“I can’t go out into three G for a week until the fracture is healed,” Sifan said. What an excellent excuse that was. She should break her wrist more often.

“I know,” Zhu said with a wide grin. “And that’s why the party has come to you!”

Sifan just gaped.

“Open your door, put a chair in the doorway, and you’re good.”

Sifan couldn’t think of an excuse.

She opened the door wider. It was strange and unpleasantly thrilling to do that without her skeleton suit on, even though she knew the pod would extend the gravity on for at least a meter.

The scent of hot air and grass drifted in.

People were bustling around a barbecue and a water station, others setting up chairs and tables.

“See? You don’t have to do anything. Go get your chair and enjoy!”

Sifan didn’t even enjoy parties all that much in one G, let alone in the crushing three G environment. But let’s face it, she had nothing better to do today. She might as well pig out and get drunk.

She dragged her office chair over to the doorway.

A young relative of Zhu’s brought her a plate, sticking it very carefully into the one G field. Pouring wine from three G to one G led to many spills and much laughter, but eventually Sifan could sip the rough red from her glass and relax.

People walked up to chat with her. She didn’t manage to remember any of the names, but keeping up the stream of chatter was oddly soothing. She settled deeper into the chair. Apparently, this was just what she’d needed. And Zhu had somehow divined that.

After some furious activity over the grills, children started bringing her plates with veggies and tofu.

Zhu sat down next to her. There was barely room for his wide body in the one G field, but he was painstakingly not pushing accidental elbows into the planet’s gravity. Sifan idly wondered what that would do to the body, having half of it in and half out of different gravities. Nothing good, she suspected.

A couple of kids set up their play screens at her feet. Sifan couldn’t make head or tail of the game they were playing. Their opponents seemed to have extremely variable wait times. But it made the kids squeal in delight when the answers did come through.

“What are they playing? A new kind of game?” she said. No adult who wasn’t a professional gamer could keep up with the rapidly changing fashions in gaming.

“They’re communicating with the universe. Or a universe,” Zhu said.

“What?” Sifan turned her head dangerously close to the gravity field’s limit to properly check out Zhu’s expression.

“Really. We tried communication with the universe, or universes, or layers, we don’t know yet, and at first we got responses. But after a while it dried up, and we didn’t know why. Did we do something wrong, did they die, did the circumstances changes, well, lots of variables. But then someone brilliant, not me, got the idea that maybe it had gotten bored. So we let kids use the interface. Not because we took that idea very seriously at first, but more because, why not?”

Zhu spread his hands. “And the universe answered. And kept answering! So now we have a group of kids who play with the universe.”

Fascinating! “Do you have any idea why children communicate better with the universe, or whatever it is, than adults?”

“We’re just guessing. Playfulness, unexpectedness? Who knows. It works. We’re grateful that something works.”

“What is it that you want from the universe?” Sifan asked. The two species, if you could call the universe a species, could have little in common.

“Good question. To acknowledge each other’s existence, to communicate? Are humans beings of good will? I like to think we are. So they’d want us to stop destroying their habitat, or their physical being.”

Zhu got up to get some more beautifully charred tofu, and left Sifan to stare at the giggling, shrieking children. Apparently the universe was a fun playmate. The mind boggled.

Sifan couldn’t see what the kids did on the screen, or what they reacted to, but their mood was infectious. She found herself smiling and lifting her face to the last sunshine. When had she truly relaxed or played for the last time? Well before her arrival here. Probably when she’d been experimenting with her rocket drive.

Tears pricked in her eyes when she recalled how joyful that had been. Hard work, but filled with pleasure and anticipation and the sheer exhilaration of creating something new. Why, oh why had she thought she had to be the person to not only invent the new drive, but to bring it to market as well? The weight of the investors’ fortunes dragged her down and sucked the joy out of life.

Not the gravity. Never the gravity.

Without realizing it, Sifan had brought up on her screen the name of the man who had begged for the job she was doing now. Who’d wanted to organize grants for her so she could continue doing what she did best, play and experiment and invent. And she’d been too proud and ambitious to accept that offer.

Would he still want to do it now?

Because what she really wanted to do was storm out of her one G bubble and join those kids on their screens. Already her mind was fizzing and popping with imminent ideas, tickling against the surface of her brain like champagne bubbles against glass.

The evening closed in, soft and purple, all around the picnickers and Sifan. The edges of people and trees shimmered and blurred, erasing the differences between them.

Sifan bent forward as far as she dared. “If we asked the universe to let our ships through more easily, what would it say?” she asked the children.

They giggled and shrugged, turning back to their screens.

Sifan composed the first of a string of emails in her mind. To Tarik, to take over her job. To her broker, to sell her shares in the cork rocket company. To her old university, to ask if her deferred job was open as of next month.

She couldn’t stop the production of her Borer rockets. There was too much financial and political weight behind the venture. But if she could find a kinder way to travel, her invention would become obsolete soon enough.

She sent the emails. The relief was enormous. An asteroid-sized weight slid off her shoulders.

No more dull routines and tight deadlines. She was, and always had been, an inventor. She needed to play, to be free. These children had shown her the error in her thinking. You shouldn’t need to break the universe to travel through it.

She would find another way.

About the Author

Bo Balder lives and works close to Amsterdam. She is the first Dutch author to have been published in F&SF, Clarkesworld, Analog, and other places. Her sf novel The Wan was published by Pink Narcissus Press. When not writing, she knits, reads and gardens, preferably all three at the same time.

Vanishing Point

Robert V.S. Redick

1. Eyepiece

Disaster, betrayal, and the ship already blasting its horn. The family clusters around the packing crates, destitute, stunned. We must go regardless, says their father, this is the last ship, what else can we do? Their mother nods, frowning so as not to cry. The girl and the boy stand expressionless, shoulder to shoulder, gaping at the bedlam of the port.

The family driver is cursing freely. He takes a crowbar to their last packing crate but it is just like the others, the nails loose and the palm fibers discarded, and within is not what they’ve already ceased to hope for, not the silver service or the ten rolled tapestries, not the bank records or their grandmother’s bridal dress, not the nine gold bricks they have always joked about needing one day, not the lead crystal, not the children’s uniforms purchased for a school, which last night they had watched burning like a sacrifice, not the button accordion the boy was struggling to master under his mother’s tutelage, not the etching of the small packet ship from which their ancestors alighted here two centuries ago, not the House Diary, that long black book of their lives. Only sand. Bags of river sand, still wet, cleverly arranged.

In hindsight the theft is no mystery. The girl, Davka, easily follows what the grown-ups are saying: the security checkpoint, that dithering commandant, the tent he marched us into, why weren’t we suspicious, all that delay?

Now they’re ruined. The war within earshot, their future snatched like a purse. Jisan, the boy, will be nine tomorrow. Davka is a tall fifteen.

I still have the tickets, says their mother, and their father nods, the same pensive nod his wife often employs, they have converged like facing mirrors after long years of love. I have the deed, he says, hefting the medical bag. That house is ours no matter how long we’re abroad. The law is perfectly clear.

The house is burning, says Mother.

You don’t know that, Clépha.

The law is burning. I know that.

Father looks at his shoes. Mr. Kijuto will be expecting us, he says feebly. He’ll have my letter in hand. We’re not going to starve.

A second blast from the steamer. The girl and boy exchange a look. This is the face of the monster, this is how exile begins.

What is left to them? A duffle each for the children. Fruit plucked from their own trees at the last possible instant, by lamplight. Mangoes, rose apples, rambutan.

Four white sweaters, purchased yesterday.

Two pounds of tea from the farm behind the mountain.

Their mother’s journal, their father’s bag of scalpels and pills.

In the girl’s pocket, a folding knife with fourteen implements. In the boy’s hands, the morphocular telescope. The last item is rare and curious: Brass body wrapped in sealskin, three cylinders and four thick lenses and a color wheel of transposable filters. Difficult to operate, dizzying to use. An ancient thing, and beautiful. Their father had scolded the boy for playing with it in secret while a hundred other treasures were sealed in the crates. Now the morphocular is all they have.

Jisan feels his sister’s stare: Davka is beckoning at the scope. Give, she whispers. Hurry.

Jisan shakes his head.

She snatches. He jumps out of reach. I’m better at it than you, she whispers.

It is an old habit, that whisper, for between them the morphocular is a kind of secret, a pact. What can you see with it? they’d asked their mother, years ago. Nothing much with that substitute eyepiece, she’d lamented. It’s just a spyglass now. Priceless, but a toy.

And with the original eyepiece?

Oh, the original! Ships at fifty miles, sea serpents, the rainbows locked in storm clouds, the deep veins in your flesh. But Mother will never touch the morphocular herself, never demonstrate, and Father says he lacks the gift.

The children do not press. For in fact they see all their mother’s recollected wonders and more through the device, new eyepiece notwithstanding. Somehow they know better than to speak of it.

Davka snatches again. Jisan turns his shoulder, moves away. It is not like him to defy his sister, but Davka has been angry for a week, and especially sharp this morning. Get dressed, stop sniveling, do you think the world’s turning for you?

In fact all she wants is to hold him. Not his fault. Last week Jisan had slept like an angel through their parents’ midnight coffee with the solicitor, that round lisping man with eyes like raisins on a pie who kept saying Jithan, leave it all to Jithan, every lasht thing you own.

We might not be going anywhere, Father had protested. We’ve not lost hope.

Hope as you pleash, doctor, but leave the boy your eshtate.

Davka had listened through the signing, the stamping, the handshake at the door. When would they decide that he was old enough to know? All yours one day and not a scrap for your sister, take care of her maybe, there’s a decent young man.

Now of course it is a tasteless joke. One day little Jisan will inherit—nothing. Old clothes and a medical bag. A worthless deed to a ruin across the sea.

Mother’s composure breaks when the driver tries to return his pay. She embraces him, Father pumps his hand, not on your life my dear fellow, only spend it, spend it, tomorrow it might not buy a thing.

Jisan, at a distance, aims the morphocular back the way they have come. The road unspools: there is the checkpoint, the muddy river, the churchyard where his parents married, the yard of slate stones where their ancestors sleep, the gates of the provincial hospital, the somewhat grander gates of their home. A twist of the cylinders: he is through the iron bars. The mango tree is laden, the bats will feast, or the rebels. Or the flames. Davka has left a book in the windowsill, her father has left his garden shoes. Rugged lilacs, turquoise bees, and something falling over everything, black feathers or a dry black snow. Another twist: it is ash that is falling, a silent rain from the not-so-distant front, settling on the whorls of the frangipani, melting on the marble stairs.

The third horn-blast, the crowd is moving, Davka tugs at his arm. Put the scope away, says his mother, but he cannot obey her, cannot turn without a last reclamation. By the side door, his cat sits untroubled in the smutty rain, tail curled about her forepaws, waiting for her morning milk.

2. Focal Plain

The war pursues them out to sea. What they took for a matter of local jealousies and a few contested hills turns out to be part of a cataclysm, one square on the game board where faceless giants squabble over the world. Jisan busies himself with games of his own when talk turns to fleets and supply lines, trenches, bayonets. Davka worries about his sanity, deeply and with little reason, perhaps this is all her purpose, perhaps this is what elder sisters are for. They share a bunk in the tidy cabin. There are nights when he suddenly gasps and clutches her, eyes open but still asleep, and she is chilled to imagine where his mind has gone, some refracted world, some weird, distorted kingdom that entrances and appalls.

Then dawn breaks and life crumbles into prose. The world is one, war is everywhere. The tinned milk is rationed, Mother drinks her tea black. The ship’s company divides along bewildering fault lines, the bearded westerners refused to eat with those from the clean-shaven east, the business passengers despise the captain, the captain mutters his suspicions of the engine crew. Yet they all bring their ailments to her father, paying for treatment with extra soap, extra drinking water, blankets against the cold. War doesn’t matter, Father tells the children, the land we’re making for is neutral, enlightened, you will come to love it, Mr. Kijuto is the kindest man I’ve ever known.

Davka tries to be comforted. She lets a cabin boy teach her to fish, and to use the scaler on her folding knife. In ports of call she mingles with the villagers who come aboard hawking anything and everything, cane liquor and palm nuts, ruby geckos and hyacinth macaws, sea urchins, spiny lobsters, speckled eggs pilfered from the shorebirds’ nests. She counts dolphins, keeps a journal. One evening, blushing and stammering, the boy gives her a pearl.

After dinner she hides it among her underthings, tied it up in a kerchief, but somehow without so much as glancing at her, Jisan knows, crouching in a corner, wearing that grin that meant he was wise to you and might wield your secret like an axe. Oh, but she hates him, the small smelly gargoyle, turning the color wheel on the morphocular with an insolent click-snap, click-snap, click until Mother cannot take it, rises from her chair, and confiscates the telescope, and delivers her favorite a rare rebuke.

God in heaven, Jisan. You’re old enough not to treat this like a toy.

Davka sniggers. A moment’s carelessness, a little swallowed snort, it means nothing and changes everything, six decades later the echo will not have died.

I think, Father says genially from behind his month-old newspaper, We should cease to play with the morphocular. Worth more than I am, at the moment. What if you break that pretty glass? What will you tell your own children, hmm?

That Mother broke it, Davka blurts.

Mother has the grace to laugh, but her eyes are troubled. I did break it. The eyepiece it came with was special, something to do with cedar oil, without it that scope won’t ever be right.

Now dear, the replacement’s perfectly—

You don’t know, Davka snaps at her father. You never use it at all.

The paper lowers. Father’s face is benevolent and thoughtful, it never changes, Davka could scream.

Do you know what’s extraordinary about glass?

Oh God, Papa. No, and I don’t want—

Glass is an illusion, says the man of science. A trick played on our poor sense of time. We think it’s a solid, but in fact it’s in motion, constantly flowing, the very windows in a cathedral will one day stand empty, their glazing puddled on the floor.

You’re showing off because you’re jealous, says Davka. Jisan’s not much good with the scope, but you’re hopeless, you can’t make it do a thing.

Make it!

Three heads turn to Mother, whose hands are shaking in her lap. Davka’s ears are ringing. She cannot recall the last time Mother shouted.

In her sleep that night the girl strays into a hall of mirrors, everywhere she turns there are beckoning forms, loved ones infinitely repeated and dwindling with distance, eyes accusing, why won’t she step forward, why won’t she come back? She’s in tears, they cannot ask this, how can anyone be expected to move both forward and back?

When Davka awakes the ship is silent, the engines cut. This happens sometimes on the calmest seas: maintenance, perhaps, or the malice of perfidious engineers. She slides from the bunk and into her father’s coat, lifts the morphocular from her mother’s nightstand, slips out of the cabin and across the deck. It is late. The few sailors move like phantoms, the starry spine of the heavens reaches down to the sea. Davka crouches by the rail and waits for sunrise. But the boy arrives first, roused by some mate sympathetic or amused by his crush, too frightened to approach her, too smitten to retreat. They share a stillness, they share the pipe-organ boom of a whale’s breath as it passes, when she sneezes he whispers a word she does not understand.

She could vanish with him. There will be more ports of call. But what a terrible thought! It would be frightful, she doesn’t want such a thing—but why not see it, why not know what could have been? When the dawn breaks the boy finds her standing, looking at him through a curious instrument, the lips that have held him spellbound gaping open in surprise. Is she blushing? Can that thing pierce his clothes?

No, it’s worse, she has devoured him, all it pierces is his heart. He stumbles away and the girl stands there stricken, his life from infancy to old age thrust upon her, never to marry, never to prosper, barefoot now and barefoot at seventy, what a heartless world, and how much worse the hall of mirrors when there are no other figures, when you walk it alone. Davka trembles, men are staring, she has sinned.

What refuge does she have but the morphocular? She hides behind it, aims it north at no one, and as always it coughs up a world. Landfall, their destination, a city of icy buildings, interchangeable streets. A frowning city imprisoned in a horseshoe bay, stark ruins on one headland, on the other a blue lamp that pulses in the fog. A waterfront, long piers like snaggletoothed combs, this very ship moored and the people disembarking.

But their ship’s gangway is a blur. She is perplexed: why that one spot alone? Then she realizes that the blur is spreading with the passengers as they file landward along the pier. In sudden fright she refocuses, spins the color wheel, twists the replacement eyepiece. No use: over the faces of the passengers there is only a smudge, as of something erased.

3. Aperture Stop

The city changes with the moon, says Mr. Kijuto, their father’s friend, from the shadows of the carriage seat across from the children. Right now you see black doorways and broken windows, emaciated street dogs, men adrift. But there is also the city of festivals and feast days, libraries, amphitheaters, magnolias lining the market square, swans in the Park of the Evangels, black and regal. Every year the swans return, splashing down in the reflecting pool, fighting, feeding, choosing mates, nesting in the corner reserved for them, nothing is hopeless while such cycles endure.

The faces of the children—depleted, blank—appear and vanish with the street lamps. Kijuto clears his throat.

My little niece is frightened of the swans. They can be quite aggressive. But she always begs to go and see them. I’ll introduce you. She’s the same age as you, Jisan.

They thank him, in unison. Kijuto gives them a helpless smile. They can’t really hear him yet. The doctor and his wife have taught them courtesy, and that is something to cling to, something of their own. But courtesy is also a mask. What can they be thinking? What part of them can feel?

Jisan holds the morphocular propped on his knee, upright like a club. Suddenly he twists around to kneel on the carriage seat: the rear window is leaded glass, and through its mud-flecked oval he has a final glimpse of the steamer, once hated as the instrument of exile, now cherished as a last link with home. See that ship? That’s the proof. My world existed. We may be here in this roaring darkness, but we were also there, all of us, we had orchids and ginger flowers, a cat that dozed in the garden, lazy-eyed lizards, a clock that told the seasons and the shape of the moon, and parents, and a kettle always wailing on the stove top.

The carriage turns, the ship is gone. The Kijuto man is watching him in silence, rugged hands gripping his knees. It was fortunate, this gray-templed scientist finding them so swiftly, but then they must have been eye-catching, two children marooned on the quay beside a sea chest, the girl clutching a medical bag and the boy a curious spyglass, more numb than fearful, newly orphaned by the typhus that struck late in the voyage and carried off eighty-seven souls.

When his parents died Jisan had not felt it correctly, his mind went wandering, he ached, but a part of him floated free about the vessel, uncaring, a heartless little ghost. He might never have returned to himself but for the ceremony on the top deck, the white forms lined up on planks, hints of knees and breasts and noses under the bedsheets, the captain’s prayer and the last salute, a bullet fired at God for every death. The planks tipped and the sheets gave up the bodies, no argument, they called it burial at sea. Then he did cry, soundless, furious, this is why Mother quit using the telescope, this is the serpent she glimpsed.

After the deaths they had more room in the cabin, the man assigned to watch over them slept in the passage for fear of the disease, his sister cried day and night, but the boy just stared at the ceiling, and though the room was stuffy he ached with cold, nothing could warm him, it was as though he were naked or the windows shattered, or a wall peeled back, or his skin.

The carriage stops. Dumplings for dinner, says Kijuto. These are the best in the city, wait here and I’ll fetch them, do you like chicken or pork?

We like all sorts of dumplings, sir, says Davka. The boy nods slowly. Kijuto ducks out of the carriage and is swallowed by the night.

Jisan looks at his sister. He could kick her sometimes. He’s not sure what dumplings are, but he knows they’ve never had any, chicken or pork or potting soil, in their lives.

What are you doing? asks Davka, for he is reaching across her for the carriage door.

Fresh air, he says.

She cracks the door open but keeps a grip on the handle. She has caught him out, heard the twitchy something in his voice.

Put down the morphocular, Jisan.

He shakes his head. We shouldn’t have it. No one should.

They wanted us to have it, says Davka. Besides, it’s the most valuable thing we own.

It killed them, he says.

Jisan! The typhus killed them. Don’t you go crazy on me.

In the other world there was no typhus.

Of course there was, she says. Daddy talked about it, a few cases each year.

Not that world, not home, he says. I mean the world before the morphocular. Don’t you know how it works? We raise it to our eye and twist and focus, but it’s our world that changes, so fast we can’t feel a thing. And the change is forever, we lower the scope and the old world’s gone.

That’s not true.

In the other world they’re still alive, Davka.

Stop it, she says. There’s just this one world, Jiji, we have to live in it now.

Fine, he says. Let’s live. I’m going to smash it in the street.

She bars the door with her body, the fight is on.

Give me the scope if you don’t want it.

Let me out, let me out.

Sit down, don’t be a coward.

You pig, he screams, kicking savagely at her. It’s not right, it could get worse, we haven’t lost everything, I still have you.

4. Objective Lens

What is there to say about summer, about happiness? It is here and gone too swiftly, dewdrops on a web. As Davka climbs the stairs to the ruined temple overlooking the city, Jisan tunes his new accordion behind the amphitheater. Both basking in the light of late afternoon, both eager for the night. Around Davka the cliff swallows are flitting, and the breeze is cool, at her back the city sprawls like a banquet, under her smart leather shoes the blue flagstones flow by like the frames of the moving pictures her lover projects on the garden wall for the local children, blazing images of elsewhere, parades and coronations, elephants, great spotted cats, camel trains vanishing into deserts, a steam engine emerging fearless from the snow.

Like everyone Davka is entranced by this new magic, film, bestower of endless worlds. It hardly compares with the morphocular telescope, for what can film show you but the already-happened, the dead event, a flag thrust cockeyed in the riverbank as the raft sweeps helplessly by? But such flags! Davka believes that she and her lover will capture them all, one day—board the trains, ride the elephants, cheer with the mob when the crown prince ascends to the throne, laugh secretly at her adopted land’s adoration of that figurehead still in his teens, raise their own children, grow old together in a warm wooden house. The sun climbs and Davka climbs, the cracked eggshell of the temple dome looms nearer, that path winds among statues the years have rendered anonymous, is that cherub or chicken, maiden or man, is that torso arched in ecstasy or pain? Oh, let it be ecstasy: the cry released from a thousand lips as Jisan and his fellow players take the stage in the Park of the Evangels, the roar of joy their music incites, the collective need. Survival, pleasure, plenty! Art without suffering, sex without duplicity, children ignorant of war. Davka gains the summit and there is Mr. Kijuto, older now but beaming, waving with the cane he only leans on when he must, arm in arm with beautiful Bilakri, her eyes all mischief as she looks Davka up and down.

I thought you were here to paint, she says, almost rudely.

Sketches, first, says Davka, lofting the pad clenched in her hand. But I’ve made the sketch already; on the first landing, there was this boy in a flannel shirt, I just had to, his eyes—

Look at her, Uncle, Bilakri interrupts. Sweating like a farmhand. Will you ride downwith us at least, you stubborn girl?

Kijuto pads up to her, bends stiffly to kiss her cheek. That scarf, he says, pausing to touch the red sash about her neck. Raw silk. Very beautiful.

It’s from Eriath, says Davka, a little nervously. Eriath is the rival country, their bellicose neighbor across the straits.

Trading with the enemy, says Bilakri, mock severe.

A very civilized enemy, says Kijuto. Your aunt and I thought of moving there, before things grew tense. Davka, won’t you come and eat with us? You can’t just paint all the time.

She tries, says Bilakri. That’s what these artists do, you know. They neglect their basic needs.

Davka looks away, grinning, helpless, Bilakri cannot utter a word without arousing her, they both know it, surely her uncle knows it but wasn’t he ever a master of silence, whenever silence was required?

(He’s all in favor, you know, Bilakri had assured her, weeks before. It surprised him a little, that’s all. He thought I’d end up with your brother, but so what, everyone did, even I did until you sorted me out. And Uncle’s mad about you, besotted, I’d be jealous if I didn’t have you in the palm of my hand. Frequently.)

Davka had turned crimson, how can she say such things, straight-faced, aloud, how is it possible to love anyone as deliriously as she loves this laughing girl? But she is also frightened of Bilakri, the perfection of her cheekbones, her hair, the fall of one curl like a fishhook across her eye, how did it go, that song of their mother’s, love alights on the shoulder but can’t lend us its wings, will you abandon me, will you leave me thirsting for the sky? Jisan plays his own version of the tune, high and wild and forlorn and free, his accordion keening and the fiddler possessed and the broad beautiful singer hurling the lyric to the crowd on her voice of silver, tears of joy in her eyes as she catches Jisan’s own, Where do you find the music, you secretive sly charmer, where do you get the stories and the sounds?

And if the answer is itself a secret, a magic thing that fell into a child’s hands half a world away and serves him still? If he never did smash it but goes to it for vision and courage like a drunkard to the flask? Surely he’ll be pardoned. He has no venal motives, he doesn’t seek the winner of the horse race, the unplundered shipwrecks, veins of gold in the earth. He has mined the world for music, that’s all: music veiled by distance, in the past, in the future, in the heart-truths the scope lays bare. And if it has brought him some comfort, a little adoration even, well surely he has paid for it, you don’t drink from that cup without burning your lips, the memories too sharp and what you’ve lost too enormous, not just parents but a wholeness of heart the exile never recaptures, no matter who he sleeps with, no matter how fast he plays. I’ve swallowed fire, he thinks, I’ve stuck a telescopic straw into this town and drunk its blood, as far above on the hilltop Bilakri squeezes Davka’s hand and old Kijuto turns his failing eyes to the east.

Is it clear today? Can you see the volcano?

The women assure him they can: it’s right there beyond the olive groves and the vineyards, a cone perfect as a child’s drawing, but capped as always with a plume of smoke.

I want to see it erupt, says Bilakri.

No you don’t! cry Davka and Kijuto, suddenly immigrants again.

You’re terribly mean, both of you, Bilakri scolds. You’ve seen earthquakes, warships, revolution. Things have happened to you. Real things, not just notions and make-believe, moving pictures on the wall.

Look at that fog lamp, says Kijuto severely, waving his cane at the cliffs across the horseshoe bay. The blue lamp has yet to be turned on, but neither woman tells him. It’s very pretty, says his niece.

Pretty is not its purpose, he says. The lamp warns boats off the sandbars. When I was nineteen it failed in a late-season squall and a pleasure boat was wrecked. Three couples, four children. We were all called out to search for survivors.

Well, there you are, says Bilakri, triumphant. The real world.

Kijuto shakes his head. They washed ashore when the tide receded, he says. Miles away, the gulls led us to the spot. There’s a memorial stone up near the fog lamp, I used to take my students, for years I could recite the victim’s names. The real world will find you, Billi. Don’t hurry it. You’re still young.

But for how much longer? cries Bilakri, mawkish, only half believing in her woes.

I could arrange to have you kidnapped, says Davka.

What a mistake: Bilakri’s dark eyes lift and melt her, Yes please Davka, and the descent by funicular has never been so slow, nor the drive through the city, crowded with visitors to the music festival, does Kijuto sense how breathless they are, seated across from him, is that her heart or Jisan’s drummer, the racing life, life of the beat that is the heart’s word and the song at once, a cry of thanks to the universe, sweat on Jisan’s brow and blissful pain in his fingers, the accordion drawing racehorse breaths, and the singer’s arms flung wide to embrace it all, voluptuous youth and brilliant sunset, musical flight and the crowd’s adoration, here is Kijuto’s home at last, the jangling keys, the old eyes seeking Davka over his shoulder, You’ll want to shower off that dust, light the boiler for her, Billi, and with the speed of dream Bilakri leads her down the hall and into the bath chamber, Davka closes the door and in the same instant, her eyes, Bilakri’s hands are warm and fearless, this is why the torso arches, a thousand years in this instant, ecstasy and affirmation, life life life.

5. Fresnel Loss

A handbill surrenders its grip on a lamppost and takes to the wind. For a moment it rises, aspiring to the nude arms of the cherry trees, then gravity prevails and the bill crab-scuttles across the plaza, dodging the benches and the frost-withered rose trellis, dampening, darkening, clinging at last in mute supplication to a boot. Lift me, read me. This message is for you.

Jisan knows better. Scarlet words, a stylized arm lofting a gun: political tract. He shakes it from his boot like something filthy, you never know whose eyes are on you, New Order is everywhere, the gendarmes roam the park day and night. Look at those four by the kiosk, sipping tea over their rifles: what if they’ve been watching? He’s just back from abroad, five countries in six weeks, and the last of them Eriath, New Order’s enemy across the straits. They snapped his photo at the airport, and such photos end up in booklets, in the hands of interrogators, in rooms that don’t officially exist.

The breeze is cold off the reflecting pool. He must be normal, a private citizen in a public park. He walks past the kiosk, manages a good-natured grimace, can you believe this wind? They smile in return, young wolfish good looks, the ones in uniform are not the worst of the lot, no, the thugs who come for you in the night, they’re the worst, front and back doors together and extra cars along the street, unmarked cars, unremarkable clothing, if they were after your neighbor you’d hear the door beaten in, if you dared to go on listening you might hear your neighbor’s shout.

But the shouts he hears today make him smile. He turns, spreading his arms, and there are the twins, taller in six weeks, dashing toward him with the cocoa-brown spaniel, faces pink under woolen hats. Nico, Chaz. Boys with Bilakri’s energy, Davka’s thoughtfulness, eyebrows dark and thin like his own. Bilakri trails behind them, struggling with bags and coats.

The boys crash against his legs, shouting with laughter. He has to fight his urge to hush them. What law are they breaking, what directive? Children, surely, may still laugh in a park?

What a greeting, he says. I should tour more often.

Jisan, Jisan!

That is what they call him: Jisan. Never uncle. Never anything else.

One gift each, this time, I’m sorry, I couldn’t carry—

Gifts? they cry. Who needs them? Come and play, we just wanted you back!

They’ve been coached, the dear little elves.

Bilakri, haggard, damp locks glued to her forehead, offers her cheek and the bags of groceries. He takes them, trying to boost the wattage of his smile. Bilakri has been fragile for years.

Thank God you’re on time. The screeching! Today, today, he comes home today!

Thanks for watching the apartment, he says. It looks better than when I left. You made the orchid bloom.

The spaniel whines, Jisan plucks the ball from its mouth and sends it skittering across the square. From his pockets come the gifts Nico and Chaz won’t admit to craving, a yo-yo that whistles, a snap-together glider. They beam as if he’s showered them in gold.

I’ll just have a chat with your mother. Start without me. Show me what you can do.

When they oblige, his hand goes to his pocket again and withdraws an envelope. Just one? cries Bilakri, snatching the letter and tearing at the seal.

The twins were more composed, he says.

Well they’re not starved for sex, are they?

He doesn’t laugh. His eyes lead her own to the kiosk and she sees the gendarmes and God how she jumps—crushing the letter into her coat pocket, disastrous. This is the Bilakri that scares him. Seven years since the coup and she has not learned the habits of survival, the dissembling, the erasure of affect, of passion in any form. The denial of love, that great hindrance to dictators. Some never master the performance. Others, like his sister, refuse to try.

Bilakri takes his arm and leads him to a bench: she recovers quickly, he must give her that. They sit watching the children, he can’t decide what to say, his four days with Davka have left him shattered, and he wonders if it shows.

It’s her birthday tomorrow, he blurts at last. We celebrated early, but she was missing you and the children. Awfully.

Not enough, though.

Jisan bites his lips. Davka had fled in the regime’s third year, when the purges began. Like so many artists, activists, nonconformists, those with suspect surnames, suspect skin. Like Old Mr. Kijuto, whose departure has rendered the city alien again. Kijuto, wherever he has fled, has taken with him the last living memory of their parents.

Davka herself has gone only as far as Eriath, three hours by ferry—but for a dissident it might as well be another world. For years Bilakri’s professed not to blame her. The escape was harrowing: safe house to safe house, midnight scuttle to the port, a cut fence, a bribed stevedore. Unthinkable with children. Davka had been right to go alone.

But for a year now there have been amnesties. Many hundreds have returned, the generals crow about it: “New Order will meet you halfway.” One need only swear loyalty to the regime, join its list of apologists, discard one’s pride.

Bilakri has not a shred of doubt that his sister will yield, take the pledge, rejoin her and the children. Jisan could cry, the tables turned so cruelly: Bilakri was always the heartbreaker, drop her name and watch the exes go witless, men and women both, it happens to this day. Davka had been lost in an instant, and who could blame her? This woman so proud and rare and naked, a rosewood flute in a cathedral.

Now look at her—smiling, hoping. They should not have met in this park.

Is she healthy? Bilakri asks.

Davka? He nods, swallows. Very, I’d say.

Painting much?

Oh yes, she’s painting.

Seasides, fruit bowls, nudes? Tell me something, damn it!

Murals, says Jisan.

Bilakri turns to face him. He must explain, he can’t slouch like a third sack of vegetables, he finds himself describing the new mural, Davka’s masterwork he’s sure. A trash-strewn lot. A warehouse wall. Peasant girl in the foreground with her headscarf awry, evening light, the girl’s back turned and her unseen eyes taking in the sweep of a meadow, receding hills cloaked in conifers, geese in flight, a church on a lonely summit tiny as a snowdrop, beyond it mountains and farther mountains, and others farther still, and then clouds writhing to infinity, a painting you did not so much see as fall into, vanishing like a shot.

They must love her in Eriath. Bilakri’s voice has gone hollow.

She’s popular, he admits. But it’s not just her gifts. They love her victimhood. They love to hate this regime.

Don’t we all.

Jisan crosses his arms, eyes locked on the children. The silence cannot hold. Bilakri will learn before the night is out. Only not here, not in plain view of—

How about you read it at home, he says brightly, nodding at the letter. I’ll romp with the boys a bit, then I’ll walk you home.

You’re an angel. Nico’s dying to show off his trumpet playing. He’s already better than that fool on State Radio.

That’s my boy, says Jisan.

His words make them both flinch. My boys, all right. Except that they’re not and never will be. For what claim could he assert? The biological fact of it? Hell no. That’s a coin he must never try to spend.

The memory is sweet, and lacerating. A meal in his back garden, scallops and mussels and far too much wine, the coup a month old and not yet the horror it would become, more an embarrassment, an inconvenience, If only the women kept saying we’d found a kid before the coup. New Order was prudish, prejudiced, would never let them adopt.

And what if one of you gets pregnant? he asked.

Davka snapped a mussel shell.

The regime wouldn’t give a damn, if that’s what you mean, said Bilakri. A man has his fun, disappears, leaves the mother holding the nappies—that’s just the way of things, isn’t it? Let her deal with the brat. They don’t care. Single mothers all over this town.

So then you could—

No, said Davka. We don’t go with men.

And I don’t buy milk at the Army Exchange, says Bilakri, but if it was the only shop for a hundred miles—

I’d skip the milk, said Davka.

Bilakri had turned to him, beseeching. Talk to her, Jisan. I know you’re on my side.

I don’t have a side, he said.

Because he’s never had to take one, said Davka. My brother Jisan, lord of the estate.

At that Jisan had lowered his eyes. Cheap shot. Their country had died even as they boarded that ship, the fire groping for the mansion, what did it matter, that old deed moldering in a strongbox? Why couldn’t she leave it alone?

If only you could think, said Bilakri, rubbing Davka’s shoulders. A man’s the obvious solution. Less trouble than getting someone in here to fix the stove.

I’m not a stove, said Davka.

You’re an ass, said Bilakri, and brayed.

They laughed, drank. When dinner was over they shared the last pre-coup joint in Jisan’s stash and Bilakri tried again.

We’d choose him together, of course.

Forget it, Davka begged.

A nice clean boy with fine features, said Bilakri. Help me, Jisan. You must know someone.

But when he named specific friends both women recoiled, Oh no, fuck no, those ears, God forbid.

Weeks slid by. Jisan avoided the subject, but the women could not, it plagued them like a rash. On his birthday that autumn they were together again, the women’s flat, cake and brandy. The argument grew bitter, Davka said something about nostalgia for penises, Bilakri called her a paint-dabber hiding from the world, Jisan begged for calm, both women looked at him in rage.

Some family, said Bilakri. The brother who never commits to anything, not a lover, not even an opinion. What am I doing with you two? Turning in circles, year after year, because this one’s afraid of a ten-minute inconvenience.

Davka laughed, You little fool, nothing bad’s ever happened to you so you think nothing can, ten minutes in bed could mean ten years fighting that man, It’s my child, I’m the normal one, I should have that kid, give her to me. What if he takes us to court, idiot? The courts packed with New Order stooges? What if the judge doesn’t like our kind?

An awful silence. Jisan was abashed to realize he’d never considered such a turn of events. Their wounded glances are still with him today, six years later, here on this bench watching the children, those gorgeous improbable creatures who exist because no silence ever holds.

What if, what if, Bilakri had grumbled at last. There’s no need for your what ifs. You have this magic between you, although Davka pretends it’s dried up. Do me a favor and go get it, Jisan. Use the morphocular. Point it at my womb.

Davka hurled her glass into the fireplace.

Jisan, horrified, rose and told them he wanted no part of this, that he had to get home. But Bilakri’s gaze had followed him across the chamber, unblinking as he snatched at keys and boots and jacket, and all that night he waited, sleepless, silent, until with the first light of dawn a hand tapped at his window, and her voice spoke his name.

He looks at her now, huddled beside him on the bench. She’s put her free hand in the pocket with Davka’s letter, just touching it, proving it exists. They had avoided his bed because this was a favor and not a sacrament, and so the kitchen, the dusty rug, chaste kisses and then a frenzy, her hands tight on his ass Don’t pull out fool, that’s the whole fucking point, his tears for the joy of it, and the misery, what if I’ve just lost my sister, what if I’ve just lost them both.

Have you hurt yourself? he asks, for she is leaning oddly into the bench.

Bilakri shakes her head, clutches at her ribs, and Jisan is suddenly afraid she has been beaten.

You haven’t started back—

Organizing? Fighting the bastards? No, Jiji, I’ve stayed at home like a docile mother, you’d be proud.

We all hate them, he says. But right now, while you’re alone with the boys—

I’ve done nothing. I’m a perfect coward. You satisfied?

He puts an arm around her, draws her close. Of course the approval she craves has never been his own.

What’s wrong with your side, then?

Not a thing. Here, take it.

From inside her coat she produces the morphocular, still tied up in his mother’s shawl as he had left it on his departure. All at once he is rigid from head to toe. What the hell is she doing? He is afraid to turn his head.

I need to know what’s coming, says Bilakri. For the boys’ sake. I need to know what I should do.

You’re doing it, he tells her. You’re feeding them, raising them.

Not enough. You should see their textbooks. Their New Order textbooks. You should hear what they come home spouting from that school.

Bilakri—his voice is a whisper—we’re going to outlive these shits. Just keep it together, you’ll see.

Nico and Chaz are drinking poison, she says. Hate the foreigner. Masturbate to the flag. I’m afraid each day when they come home. I fight it, I tell them to love and be skeptical, but what if the bastards stay in power? What will they be like in a few years?

You’re overexcited, he says, hating himself. She presses the scope into his unwilling hands.

Find them a future, Jisan. Look at our boys.

You’ve never understood the morphocular, he says. Maybe it’s the bad eyepiece, maybe it’s me. But it doesn’t answer your questions. It increases them, doubles them over and over until you drown.

Shut up and do it, will you? You know I don’t like to beg.

He sets the device on the bench between them, gets to his feet.

You’re a selfish prick, says Bilakri.Happy to use it for your own precious career, aren’t you? Davka told me all about it. Your gift was never really your own.

He shuts his eyes. Of course Davka had told her: in the early years they’d kept no secrets. What Davka cannot have told her is that that since the coup he has not touched the device. Hasn’t dared. The very thought of it fills him with dread.

You’re supposed to drown in music, is all he manages to say. It’s safe. Art is safe.

I’ve always envied you, Jisan. Your priorities are so clear.

Stop, he pleads. That fucking thing’s too dangerous. Some things you just can’t ask.

Clearly not.

She turns away. Trembling, he goes to play with the children, who have not even glanced at them. Nico flings the glider in an access of joy. Chaz struggles with the yo-yo, his face serene and perfect and Jisan is suddenly seeing his own father as a child, a commissioned portrait in a spare room in their lost home across the sea, twenty years since he’s thought of that, sometimes memory’s ambush requires no tricks.

Priorities. In those first giddy years with the scope, he had stockpiled music, seeing it as a slide of light, a luminous image, a breaking open of this dropped glove, that whisky jar, that mossy grave. But never a person. Never what Bilakri is asking, what Davka did at sea. The violation that brought total disaster, shuffled the deck of the universe, ended lives.

Look at our boys. Could anything compel him to such an act? No, never: unless it was to save these elves and their mothers, both their mothers or either, unless it was the only—

Help, help!

Jisan’s head snaps up. It is nothing—Nico’s glider has landed in the fountain, he will have to be a little stern with them, explain the notion of crying wolf, pretend for a moment that they’re his sons.

But not this moment. He sits on the fountain’s marble rim and scoops water and the glider inches near, the boys hopping beside him, Brace my legs you two, that’s it, they are laughing and cheering, and he has almost reached the glider when a dark thought pounces, and he turns.

Bilakri is reading Davka’s letter. He pulls away from the boys and runs to her. She is livid, worse than livid. Much worse.

Yanelle? she shouts.

Listen—

Yanelle, Jisan? A jarhead? Sergeant fucking Yanelle?

It’s a fling, he says. Let her have it, you can’t stop her anyway, she’ll tire of him before you—

Him?

Bilakri, Bilakri, don’t go jumping—

When did you sister start liking dicks?

It is not a thing one can shout in a public park. Not after the coup, not with the gendarme close at hand and clearly watching, witnessing her collapse.

The boys have turned to stone. Jisan tries to embrace her and takes an elbow to the jaw.

Yanelle, she’s howling. Sergeant Yanelle from across the water, a soldier with sperm.

Her face so beautiful, her mouth a cave from which a moaning comes, ancient, he cannot silence it, his lip is bloody, she won’t let him hold her, the gendarme close in and pull him away and pound Bilakri with their voices, Wanton behavior, produce your citizen’s card, vulgarity before children, produce that card, are you married to this man?

She’s my—

A fist cuffs Jisan, a warning, for a hideous moment he thinks they will drag her off then and there. Bilakri herself smells the danger: she grows quiet, produces the card, begs forgiveness, bows her head.

When they back off a few steps she leaps for her children, hugs them against her coat. Her meekness before the soldiers does not transfer to Jisan, she stares at him with hatred over their hats.

How long?

Bilakri, she made me swear on our mother and father—

How fucking long I said.

How could I know that? They didn’t tell me, I had four days with them, I didn’t search their apartment—

He freezes. Their apartment. If only words could be clawed back from the air.

When she lunges again the gendarme are too slow to stop her. She slaps him hard, catches the hands of the twins, and stalks off toward the park gate, the frightened spaniel at her heels. Jisan’s boys twist their necks to look back at him. Bilakri does not.

The gendarmes hold a muttered conference. One follows Bilakri and the children, notebook in hand, the others make for the park’s opposite gate, where the tomb-like edifice of the Civil Security Complex looms over the street.

Jisan is alone with his panic. The grocery bags wait on the bench, the morphocular beside them, still wrapped in the shawl. He is plunged in ice water, unable to breathe. The man following Bilakri will note down her address. They have already taken her name. She will be marked. The children will be marked. Late at night anything could happen.

Look at our boys.

He cannot. He will not. Bilakri does not know what he lives with, the shame and the horror, he knew the night they came to this city that he should destroy it, but he did not destroy it, he turned the scope on the city itself and found his music, wealth, fame, illustrious friends, women competing for the chance to undress him, and then one morning he lowered the scope from the window and there were tanks in the street.

No, no, no, he’d mumbled. The stranger he had brought home the night before looked out the window and began to cry.

Not possible, he’d muttered.

At that she’d recoiled. Of course it’s possible! Where have you been?

Then he’d understood. Not just possible but inevitable. This was the world he’d spun into being. His old world had slipped away down the barrel of the scope.

His sleeve is wet from the fountain. He turns in a bewildered circle. Find them a future, Jisan.

It is as if he has already done it, used the scope again, knocked the world out of true. No black swans in the Park of the Evangels. No blue sky, no warmth in the wind. Nico’s glider has vanished from the fountain—but no, there it is, borne away across the square in small wet fingers, another child has taken it for his own.

6. Parallax

Pavement, says Davka. How long has there been pavement here? And what’s that, what am I seeing? Shops?

Just the one boutique, says Arjuna. And the café, thank God. The cliffs themselves are protected. Rare birds, I think.

The girl corners dizzyingly into the parking lot, a huge shimmering slab where there were sheep and rabbits once. Davka winces. All this asphalt.

Are there so many visitors, then?

Oh sure, says Arjuna. Hundreds, on the weekends. I never come weekends. They should widen the road.

She slaps a button, releases the wheel. Checks her makeup as the car parks itself, bleating and blinking and chattering with mindless cheer. You’re still in motion. Please wait for the green light on the dash. Outdoor air quality is acceptable and visibility is good. Davka, less passenger than cargo, feels an idiotic anger, this damned automation, perhaps in a few years they’ll dispense with passengers, only the cars will congregate here, rubbing shoulders, admiring the view.

Davka struggles with the seat belt latch, smiles her dopey septuagenarian smile as Arjuna leans in to help. Then the greater struggle to stand: Infuriating, comical. She’s still clawing at the doorframe when Arjuna rounds the car and takes her elbow.

You’re so strong.

Arjuna pulls her to standing. You’re the one with the iron grip, Gramma.

Davka smiles. Yes, they said that about her once. Strong grip, rugged forearms. The murals, of course. Whole days on ladders in the sun.

They set out across the parking lot. The wind is fierce—that at least has not changed. She anchors herself on this athletic granddaughter, Chaz’s youngest, this alien creature she loves.

They’ll turn on the fog lamp any minute, says Arjuna. Could you see it, Gramma? I mean from Eriath, from exile?

Sometimes, says Davka. On a dark bit of beach. I thought about the light more than I saw it—the light, and the pretty round stone. Where is it, anyway? The memorial for the drowned.

That thing? says Arjuna. Gone for years. I thought you knew.

I’m just a week back in the country, says Davka. I don’t know a bloody thing.

For some reason, the girl whips out her phone. Flicks it with impatient fingers. Reads.

“The descendants of the pleasure boat disaster included opponents of the New Order regime. The vindictive generals smashed the memorial and flung the pieces in the sea.”

The generals smashed quite a lot to pieces, Davka says.

You want coffee, Gramma?

No, no.

Maybe a sandwich? Or some sugar? They have these great macaroons.

Nothing, love. Let’s just go to the cliffs.

Arjuna is scrolling, hypnotized, effectively elsewhere.

And you, creature: do you love me back? With a flash of spite, Davka thinks that Arjuna’s only true love is for the little screens in her life. If Gramma fell and shattered her hip, if she pulled a gun and stormed the café demanding great macaroons, if she sprouted wings and flew home across the ocean in search of a lost pile of cinders, this girl would carry on fondling that phone.

Of course it’s not as bad as that. We age, we stiffen, we resist the new when no resistance is necessary, how can the constant presence of friends in one’s pocket be anything but good? Davka the artist has a ready answer to that question, but Davka the grandmother is in no mood to indulge. The world’s moved on. It does not care, nor ought to care, about her morbid fear of change.

Besides, not even the pile of cinders had ever belonged to her. All to Jithan, every lasht thing you own.

So—she clears her throat—we’re the first to arrive.

Arjuna looks up sharply.

Ah, says Davka. The first and only, then? No one else confirmed?

I don’t, I never—I mean we didn’t exactly—

Davka pats her arm. Just the two of us. I’m glad. We’ll have a real chance to talk.

Arjuna smiles, but Davka knows she feels terrible, what is a reunion, a reconciliation, if no one cares enough to reconcile? Jisan takes drugs and Bilakri is happily married, and the twins have surely just tired of Davka, their long-absent self-important Other Mum. No one is coming, and the wasteland of Davka’s choices sprawls about her like this endless macadam, black and neat and lifeless, what did they ever matter, her civic wrath and noble convictions, the outward gaze of her art? Why should anyone spare them a glance, an afterthought, those products of a soul that neglected love?

We saw whales from these cliffs, she says. Jisan and I, that first summer. Just footpaths up here then; Mr. Kijuto had to draw us a map. But the whales! Sixteen splendid monsters, we counted, and those bubble-wakes trailing behind them, and a tiny calf welded to her mother whale, it was too beautiful for words.

Arjuna’s eyes are darting about the blacktop, the scattered vehicles, the sparse crowd by the cliffs. In her car is a basket with sparkling wine and six sturdy glasses. She is embarrassed. She stabs at her phone.

I believe I’ll try one of those things after all, says Davka, opening her purse.

Arjuna looks up, brightening. Macaroons?

Yes, dear, macaroons.

I’ll get them, my pleasure, the place is cash-free anyway, you’ll be all right won’t you Gramma, see you out by the cliffs!

She is gone, a hare sprung from a trap. Davka creeps on. The next time, if there is a next time, she’ll be leaning on a cane.

Cash-free, she says aloud, detesting the bitterness in her voice. She had lived on cash in Eriath, after Sergeant Yanelle disappeared with his bank account. Cash in her sofa cushions. In the laundry basket, under soiled clothes. She had started out as the celebrity exile, the doe-eyed enemy of the generals across the straits. But time passes, celebrities wrinkle, generals evolve into business partners. A morning came when she understood that she was now only an irritant, an inconvenient old crank.

She held out. Nineteen years in the end. Returned only when the generals fell, when return no longer meant cutting her vocal chords, kissing their feet. Tried to pick up the life she’d abandoned. Tried to talk to Jisan, heroin-gaunt, in the halfway house he liked to jokingly downgrade: one-quarter house is nearer the truth.

Tried as well, did silly Davka, to make time with Bilakri. Coaxed and begged for furtive meetings in cafés, bistros, parks. Desperate to believe that Bilakri’s wife was an error, correctable and brief, the mirror of her own fling with Yanelle. One sunless day, mad with loneliness, she scribbled down the name of her hotel and sent it by courier, along with a key.

How dare you? asked Chaz, twenty-two and righteous, in the wreckage of that attempt. Who was she to scoff at Bilakri’s choice? What was she even doing here? Had she come to torture Bilakri? To steal her back from that sweet dull dermatologist who kept her fed and healthy, who had paid for her children’s degrees? Was Davka going to prove—for the second time, Mother, and I’m sorry you make me say it—how much contempt she had for loyalty?

Maybe you should draft an oath for me to sign, Davka had shot back, weeping. Loyalty! Blind and stupid, no questions allowed! Where have I heard that before?

Chaz’s glance was pure ice. I’m sure Bilakri did ask her some questions, he said. Are you committed. Do you plan to stick around.

Nothing to say to that. Nothing to do but turn tail. Over time she and the boys had made up, after a fashion. They had come to see her in Eriath. Jisan too, before the needle became his life. There was forgiveness, there was love of a defeated kind. Calls on her birthday, crayon drawings from baby Arjuna, a card at the death of her cat, brown and black like the one left behind in the old country, most enduring of her relationships by far.

How strangely time has dilated. The boys are forty now. Chaz an international lawyer, Nico an engineer. And her beautiful granddaughter: she writes in code. No: writes code. For these gadgets, these phones and tablets and toys: the way of the future, Nico says. Perhaps her whole life will be like Davka and Jisan’s early years across the sea: free of want, free of violence. If she could ensure that, Davka thinks, she’d gladly cut off both her arms.

She turns her ankle, winces. Old cheap shoes. The fact of the matter is that she will have to ask Arjuna for more than sweets. She will need a loan, if she is to start a life over here, find an apartment, struggle on to the end.

At least the view is familiar. Slate infinity of ocean, tankers squatting on the world’s gray rim, white worms of the breakers below. The gulls are wheeling, laughing, Ha haaaa you old cow, why should brothers or children or anyone else wish to celebrate the return of an old activist crank, foreign-born, withered, a relic from across the sea?

Also familiar: the poor precautions by the cliff. Scandalous really, with all they’ve spent to lure the hordes. Fencing only in the worst of spots, where a stumble means death. In other places a flimsy chain. In others, nothing at all.

You could make a plea for understanding. The risks, the false amnesties, the black-market thyroid drugs she took every day and might never have secured if she returned. You could tell your boys in letters to expect you by springtime, or summer at the latest, or summer next year. You could do that, and let the lie grow inside you like a cyst.

Better if she’d stayed in Eriath, begged her last limping allies there to support her. Better really if she’d never crossed the ocean, run off with that doomed cabin boy or caught the typhus with her parents, two flickers in the morphocular, erased by a twist of the hand.

She is alone at the cliffside, the chain is cold against her knees. They are ghosting her, that’s the hideous new term. I ghost. They ghost. Something more than just declining a summons. A final erasure. An assertion that there is nothing to decline.

This vile city. This noxious bay. Fifty-eight years and counting (yes she’s counting) since she disembarked with little Jisan, dragging their sea chest along the quay. What is left to her here? Frigid justice, the right to ghost and be ghosted, a little practice run for death. Well fuck it, who needs practice, I’m not an amateur thank you very—

Davka.

A hand on her arm. She turns and there he is, little lord Jisan, a gaunt impoverished junky, sixty-six and gray. His grip tighter than she has ever felt it. Davka’s intentions, she supposes, were all too plain.

She allows him to turn her. Jisan’s car is sideways, steaming, he must have bolted from it, the others are parking, spilling out into the wind. Nico. Nico’s girlfriend. Chaz’s plump second husband, wiping the nose of their son. Chaz himself with his lawyer’s briefcase. Then Bilakri. Then Bilakri’s wife.

You’re as fearless as ever, says Jisan, but I promise you I’m not.

Before Davka can think how to avoid it, they draw her away from death and into their warm exhalations, smells of cough drops and alcohol and cigarettes and mint, the twins kissing her until her cheeks are raw from their three-day stubble, the dermatologist grinning, actually grinning, Bilakri trembling with lowered eyes.

Davka struggles to breathe. What is that hated skin doctor doing now? Embracing, laughing at her, Davka, we’re divorced, it was amiable, we’re best bloody friends.

You’re not divorced, Davka mutters.

Nine months already, says her rival. Where have you been?

Bilakri will not look at anyone, of course she won’t, it’s a lie. Their sick joke, their collective vengeance. Davka is not so easily fooled.

Arjuna rounds the corner of the gift shop, macaroon-less, bereft. She hasn’t noticed them, she’s looking down at her phone. Closed! she shouts over the wind. For a private function, can you beat that? No warning, nothing posted on their—

She sees them, and her face lights up like sunrise. Mother, says Chaz to Davka, I have something to show you.

Not yet, says his husband.

I’m pregnant, Nico’s girlfriend declares.

Hugs, howling, mayhem. Davka is coming unmoored. She and Bilakri move like opposing magnets: one turns her face inward, the other pivots away. Jisan speaks of savings bonds. Arjuna grins and socks her father’s arm: You? You rented this whole goddamn place?

Everyone inside! Chaz says grandly. But he’s hushed again. Someone is touching Davka’s hand.

It’s the fucking dermatologist. Closing Davka’s fingers around something small and cold. Welcome home, she says.

I’ll write you a check for that, says Jisan, but the dermatologist laughs and shakes her head. Tell me I’m brilliant, that’ll do.

In Davka’s hand is a brass eyepiece. Madam Skin is still talking, From your home country, Davka, a flawless original, one of six ever made.

You’re brilliant, says Davka, ready for death. They’re still lovers, they must be, Bilakri will never let this woman go.

If I’m honest, it was just about plodding on, says the pimple-fighting paladin. You can find anything online these days.

Which brings us back to this. Chaz taps at his briefcase. Mother, you really—

Let’s go in, says Nico, before he opens that case and his surprise blows away on the breeze.

We brought wine, says Bilakri, as if to prove that she can speak.

Oh Davka! shouts the dermatologist. I’m so glad you’re here! I’ve never talked with you properly, I have so many questions, when are you coming for dinner, I’ll make dumplings from scratch.

Davka bursts into tears.

7. Vanishing Point

The surprise in Chaz’s briefcase surpasses all expectations: a notarized letter from the Office of Deeds and Titles in the old country, old issues resolved in the spirit of bilateral harmony, the family house never burned after all and “eligible for ownership review.” Meaning it will be yours, with persistence, Chaz explains. Yours and Jisan’s, to sell or rent or even live in again. But I hope you won’t sail away and leave us.

Right, gulps Bilakri, queen of monosyllables.

The night that follows is endless. A dozen friends of the younger folk are waiting inside. A trio of cooks fry calamari and scallion pancakes. Arjuna flirts with the waiter; Nico and his husband dance. Jisan succumbs to Arjuna’s pleading and takes out his accordion, and Davka watches her brother’s hands change from dead cramped claws into fluid implements of love before her eyes.

What’s the catch? she wants to scream at them. What are you not telling me? What do you think I can’t bear?

Under the table, Bilakri’s foot grazes her calf. Davka cannot speak, she’s too frightened, if she utters a word the spell will snap and she will wake into solitude, her old fanged friend.

Well past midnight she and Jisan don their coats and slip away to the cliffs. Bright stars, artic air, but as she clings to him Davka realizes with a start that her brother is not trembling. The arm she’s clinging to is steady. Jisan, she murmurs, are you clean?

Jisan sniffs. I’ll call myself clean when I don’t feel like stealing, screaming, murdering someone for the drug every week.

You’re better, though? You look better.

Watching her, Jisan takes the morphocular from his bulky coat. She was expecting this: in his eyes there is a glaze of hunger much older than heroin, one she’s glimpsed there since childhood. She hands him the eyepiece, watches him tighten the objective lens. He looks a long time at the city, the ocean, the headlands. Not a sound escapes him, but when he hands the scope to Davka the eyepiece is slippery with tears.

She pulls down her sleeve to dry it, then does not. Tears are yet another filter. Look through them, find out what they reveal.

Davka looks. There it is, the pounce of revelation, the knowledge waiting to swallow her whole. Her hands shake, the image jumps and shudders, over and over a shadow eclipses it—and that of course is the catch, that raven’s wing, that black blade that will grow sharper and blacker each time they use the scope from here to the end of ends. This is the gift they’ve been unwrapping all their lives: knowledge of death, her own death, and his.

Not fair, she whispers.

Jisan sniffs, then chuckles. No worse than wondering, is it? And you have the harder job.

Which is?

Living longer. What a bitch.

And just like that she is free. His laugh, his offhand vulgarity, have dispelled the guilt and fear and self-reproach, those curses that have torn her like a pack of hounds for fifty-eight years three months and five days, and her hands on the scope are as firm as the granite headland as she bends and sees a younger Jisan fleeing the Park of the Evangels with a decision burning in his chest and bounding up the stairs of his building and out upon the roof and sweeping the morphocular left and right swearing, sobbing, snarling as he flays the city open until it gives up a safe house for Bilakri and the children, and the only price the music he lived for drained from his hands and heart for decades and a wound left gaping that he’d poulticed with heroin, and working the focus Davka tunnels back to Mr. Kijuto, who never fled at all, but was seized and beaten and given shocks to his genitals, yet never betrayed the ones he’d sheltered and so was bundled with others into an army helicopter and tossed alive into the sea, and back she looks through her own tears now at the steamer captain demanding cash from their well-dressed parents, contemptuous when they say they’ve been robbed, threatening to fling them ashore but settling at last for their self-sacrifice in the typhus ward working twenty-hour shifts and inevitably sickened and given at last like Kijuto to the waves, and still Davka probes twisting cylinders, switching color wheels until she is seeing the eventual tumor in the dermatologist’s lung, the cataracts already blooming in Bilakri’s eyes, the vaccine research Arjuna will fund when her code makes her a millionaire, the white rocket Nico’s unborn child will ride into space—

—and beneath the rocket (oh astonishing sight) the planet revolving whole and unified, the white tonsures of the poles and the flung gems of archipelagos, the torn edge of the old country beyond the sea waiting for Davka to claim it, tunneling back the years reversing in a clatter of celluloid frames until she’s through the cast-iron gates and up the porch steps and there in the kitchen with her parents and the lisping solicitor and the words her teenage self never heard The inthurgents are thugs, doctor, medieval thugs who would shred any deed in a woman’s name, and thus her parents had left the house to Jisan not to dispossess their daughter but quite the opposite, and Davka pushes back back free-falling now to an age when all the codes were different, before engines, science, steel, a time when nothing was final nothing decided and great serpents prowled the margins of the vellum map, and the sage placed the morphocular pristine and untouched on a satin pillow before his prince and bowed his forehead to the ground Only your children will unlock its secrets, for the gift takes hold in childhood or not at all, and though the prince was angry, the sage laid his palsied hand upon the map beside them Radiant master the world is writ in lines of fire only a little may we read or else our eyes must be scorched—

She breaks off, reeling. Who is she? When is she? Where has she been?

Easy there. Had enough?

Jisan is supporting her, gripping her shoulders. Davka meets his eye, steadies herself. Jisan removes the eyepiece and slips it into his pocket. She flings her arms about him like a mast, he has never failed her, this thief of music, this baby brother she is doomed to outlive.

They stand there a long time, wordless with knowing, with the feast of life and the certainty of shadow, until Jisan clears his throat and says Come on, love, no point in freezing, the party’s not over yet.

About the Author

Robert V.S. Redick is the author of the epic fantasy Sidewinders (July 2021), sequel to the critically acclaimed Master Assassins. The latter was a finalist for the Booknest Award for Best Novel and was praised by Patrick Rothfuss as “a book I like so much I wish I could have written it.” He is also the author of the young adult epic fantasy series The Chathrand Voyage Quartet (The Red Wolf Conspiracy and sequels) and has taught fiction writing in the Stonecoast and University of Nevada, Reno, MFA Programs. A former environmental justice researcher and consultant, he has lived and worked in Indonesia (where he wrote Master Assassins), Argentina, Colombia, and many other countries. He lives with his partner, Dr. Kiran Asher, in Western Massachusetts.

Dancing with Ereshkigal

Sameem Siddiqui

If only I could be as direct as you, Pyn. Like when you announced you’d carry my baby, and that I’d carry yours. I wish I had that clarity and confidence now. Back then I thought you might be clairvoyant because you were so decisive when you made arrangements to trade eggs. So decisive when you made plans for us to make love with [him]. So convinced there wouldn’t be any emotional complications since [he]’d be off beyond the Kuiper belt in a few months. You like clean breaks.

But you know I can’t be direct. So, let me just tell you about the goddess Ereshkigal, who leers at me every time I pass by.

I saw her on my first day of work, but only after Jianyu showed me the thirty-meter-high tunnel boring machine that was named after her. I stared up at the groaning white circle as it slowly dragged itself centimeters ahead. He told me it’s an old Earth tradition to name these machines after women. I looked her up and laughed because why would Earth’s underworld goddesses be concerned here? I asked Jianyu, but he just shrugged and gave me my assignment for the day. I shut the RailPod door and accelerated into the orange glow of the freshly minted tunnel to do my inspections.

I was around four kilometers in when I first saw her. I could barely make out her purple hair under the red lights. She was leaning back into an emergency alcove, like it was her royal niche. No pressure suit and no expression on her face.

She reminds me of you, and I’m not saying that because her silence is constant and icy. No, it’s that her silence is somehow inquisitive. Like it’s leaving me infinite space to answer the question, “Who are you?”

I wanted to ask her if she felt abandoned. If that’s why she was here. Was she spiteful and patiently waiting for her chance at vengeance? I honestly couldn’t make sense of her myths. Though I studied them when I probably should have been monitoring the tensile stresses of the tunnel’s inner ring. My typical lack of focus, that you said would always get me into trouble.

These myths seem focused. And straightforward. But, they lack emotional specificity for me. Maybe they make more sense in their contexts. Maybe they need to be told with theatrics and hijinks. Maybe what they need isn’t focus, but scattered multilayered expression acting in divergent unity. Because these myths were never intended to convey emotion in just words, but rather performance.

I was staring at her when I had this thought and that’s the first time she perked up and took a step toward me. I froze. Arms, legs, thoughts, and all. I couldn’t tell in the dimly lit tunnel, but I’m almost positive she rolled her eyes as she spun back into her alcove. She slouched as her excitement deflated.

I’m sure there are some myths perennially relevant, though tired, whose context never drifts. But others, with every retelling, dissipate until they’re just a series of difficult-to-bridge events because the motivation to go across each bridge is no longer apparent or just no longer compelling. Or maybe I’m just not meant to understand the motivations of a goddess.

Want to hear my secret to staying motivated at this job? (I mean aside from the residency sponsorship.) If no one’s waiting for a ride at either end, no one really cares where I am. I can take time doing my inspections. I just ride the RailPod between the machine and the office and do basically whatever I want.

I was checking for structural inconsistencies today, around the thirty-first kilometer marker, when I noticed her from the corner of my eye. I did my best to ignore her. What would I say to a goddess?

I jumped to get a closer reading of a tensile stress oddity I thought I detected. As I floated back down, I reclined and reviewed the data. It was nothing, so I closed my eyes and let my arms fall back as I waited for the ground to come back to me.

But it didn’t.

I felt her hands touch the back of my pressure suit and guide me back to standing position. Before I had a chance to panic, she slid a hand up my back, to my shoulder, down my arm, and to my hand. She pulled it forward, above me, and spun me around to face her.

Pyn, she was smiling. She was tall and I was eye level with her mouth, so her bright purple lips were the first thing I saw. Her teeth were black as charcoal, yet looked sharp as polished diamond. I could see the glare of blue light bleed from her eyes, but I was too afraid to look up. Too afraid of what it’d mean. Too afraid of being consumed.

She put a hand on the base of my helmet and tilted my head up until my eyes met her own. They radiated gentle light that pulsed and swirled in the diminishing space between us.

I assumed I was paralyzed. That I was prey. That this was my end.

But she simply held me close by the hips of my suit and then pushed off until there was a meter between us. Our eyes remained locked until she stretched her arms wide and sunk to her knees. Her wrists, palms, and knuckles on each hand followed the same inverted curve. Her head turned to the side, and she looked upward.

I studied her peculiar stance wondering why it looked familiar? Why it felt like hearing a word I’d once used but whose meaning I had now forgotten.

She flashed her eyes back at me and glared at my arms and legs. I hurriedly adjusted my legs to mimic her stance but immediately tumbled over. She looked up at me with an intensifying glare leaking from her eye sockets.

I tried again, slowly, bending my legs, moving my arms, and feeling my atrophied muscles stretch. I was shaking when I looked back at her for approval. She was smiling again. Her eyes beaming at me, locking me into a trance until I remembered something.

This is the pose. The one you said was your first memory of me.

At my performance at the Dome Theater on ChandOrb. You were there with [him]. Of course, [he] knew that’s when you noticed me, because [he]’s the one who pushed you to come say hi to me after the show.

What was it you said to me? Something about how you never appreciated low-gravity arts, but here you were. I thought your disdain was charmingly quaint. You didn’t think my air quote “Earth” art was charming or quaint. He apologized for you when you stormed out. I never told you that. I guess I knew pretty quickly how it’d hurt your ego, and I honestly never liked to hurt your ego.

Ereshkigal broke her gaze and leaned back to let her torso and arms match the curvature of the tunnel walls. I followed suit, and when my insulated palms touched down on the cold gravel, I closed my eyes and remembered seeing you in my audience a few months later. It was obvious, even from the brightly lit stage, how carefully you maneuvered your neck as you tried to look at everything but me. I’m sure if someone tracked your eye movement with dots in that moment, there’d be a hollow space in the shape of me rolling backward like a wheel.

I had to go up to you at the reception afterward. You were all “Majd, isn’t it?” It was cute, but I was impatient so I ignored it and asked you to follow me so we could grab a bite somewhere quieter. I just started walking without looking back, because I was pretty sure you were about to storm off again. I was too afraid to look back until I got to the theater’s exit. But you were right there. You didn’t look too happy, so I figured you’d been mentally rehearsing your telling me off speech for when we stopped. So I just kept walking.

I was relieved to see the shawarma stall was still open. I ordered for both of us, because I’m pretty sure if I addressed you, you’d just launch into the tirade you’d been prepping. But by the time I handed you your shawarma, you were just looking at me confused. I know it’s funny to say now that I’ve complained about your inability to emote, but I loved the quietness and calm tension between us while we awkwardly stole glances at each other and people watched.

I could tell you wanted to say something else when you asked me if I’d like to walk to Terra Vista. What was it you wanted to say? When we got to the vista and leaned over the railing, I stared out at the swirling white clouds and asked you what your favorite place on Earth was. You took a deep breath and told me your grandmother was an admiral in the Oceanic Fleet and that you didn’t stick around too long in any one place. That your mother almost let you leave without her because she couldn’t stand moving once more. That it was weird leaving in the middle of your first crush. That you met him in Sri Lanka, so that feels like the most special place. You thought it was maybe just because it was the last place you really were. That you felt like maybe you died there, and your spirit floated up to the Moon, leaving most of your memories down on Earth. But, is this what you wanted to say? Or had you changed between the shawarma stall and the vista?

You said your mother had four kids and two cats. You said the first kid grew up to be a fucking nightmare. An asshole who broke hearts and bodies. But you said she wasn’t the worst because the second grew up to be an asteroid-mining lobbyist. Yet you still let her pay your way on exotic vacations, don’t you?

The third was the sweetest, kindest soul. You missed his face. It was all you had left of your father. And his voice, all you had left of your mother. But he died of brain cancer in his thirties, so what the fuck was I even supposed to do with that information? I’m sorry, but you never let me know what this did to you.

You’re the fourth. You aren’t great, but you aren’t terrible either. Growing up you didn’t contribute much, but you didn’t take all that much either. You told me that, before you told me about the chained elephant you rode at some roadside attraction in Sri Lanka. When you showed me the video, your eyes watered, and you whispered to the elephant, asking for forgiveness. I know I’ve said this a million times, but it made my heart well up so much that I reached out to kiss you for the first time.

Maybe it’s the change in gravity, but your kisses never felt the same after we left the Moon. I know they should have felt heavier, but they got lighter. More careful. More restrained. As if you were worried that I’d be able to feel secret words pressing through your lips.

Ereshkigal flipped into a headstand eventually and just stared at me as if I was expected to know how to follow suit. But I did know how, didn’t I. Except I was a bit lighter the last time I did this, on the Moon.

Jianyu checked in on me as my hands finally gained balance. Said “someone” noticed my elevated heart rate and thought I might be panicking. I assured him that I don’t panic.

You hated when I didn’t panic about the things that you panicked about. When Nabeel was born, I remember catching you trying to latch him to your breast when you thought I wasn’t looking. It was still a few days until Hamida was born, but you were so desperate to finally experience motherhood. I wanted to try to calm you down, but I knew you’d lash out. So I just watched you plead with his crying face to just latch. I didn’t tell you, but I heard you ask him why—why he didn’t want his own mother. I was crying when you asked him if he was upset that you evicted him. That you let him grow in a foreign space. If that’s why he was in such a rush to come out. Were you jealous when I delivered first?

You and Nabeel. Everything you two have gone through, I can trace back to that moment. Please go easier on him. You’ve layered your insecurities into him so hard that I don’t think he can handle it. I know, I didn’t mean to go into this right now, but you have to understand that I’ve left so much in your hands. Please. He’s a teenager. Don’t take what he thinks of you seriously until he’s at least thirty. You once told me fifteen-year-old you suspected your mom might have been a real live demon, because she wanted you to be an orbital engineer.

Nabeel will even out. He went through a phase with me too, remember? Because you always made sure that I was the one who said no to his stupid Lunar Scout trips on ChandOrb. I know the idea of his going out to the open surface for a week with a bunch of strangers bothered you as much as it bothered me. But I’m the one who had to listen to him scream through his ugly crying that I wasn’t really his mother. You laughed when he stormed off and you told me he fucking hates me. That’s the first time I wondered if it would have been better if we had left our need for water on Earth, becauseI fucking hated the satisfied look in your eyes when you made me cry.

But, Nabeel evened out with me eventually. And I needed the comfort of a child’s neediness as I stroked his head and stared out the window on our flight back from the Martian Performing Arts Center. As I looked at the desert pockmarked by a generation of rudimentary settlements, I realized what devastated this landscape is no longer so different from Earth’s most despicable forces of nature. Earthquakes, floods, drought, capitalism, volcanoes, hurricanes, colonialism. I know, you’d say capitalism and colonialism aren’t forces of nature, but why not? Aren’t they natural processes that can be explained? I know, you’d ask me to explain their nature, but you’d be off in an adorable huff before I could even ask you to explain the nature of some more tangible complex natural phenomena.

I went to see Counselor Chen the day after we got back. I told her that I’d thought about walking out into that thin air, letting this world consume me as we’re consuming it. I was curious how long it’d take me to just dry up and die. She said Martian law is somewhat inspired by its atmosphere in that it’s as efficient as it’s indifferent. It can’t afford to be anything but decisive. Chen said if she did her job right, and if terraformers did theirs right, then maybe in a generation or two the law would change with the atmosphere. But for now, the system was unmalleable. And so with my death, Hamida would lose her residency.

This isn’t ChandOrb, Pyn. No amount of your pride would convince immigration that she’s just as much yours as she is mine. What a quirky spinning world you brought us to.

I love that they’d make sure you’d pay me well enough to live here on my own if I left you. And I love that they’d immediately offworld me if I failed to find job that’d not only sponsor me, but also pay me well enough to live. Who wrote these laws, Pyn?

Did I tell you how I let my sock-laden feet shuffle over Counselor Chen’s Persian rug while she explained to me that I’d never get an exit visa for Nabeel and Hamida without your consent? I just wanted them to see Earth’s oceans from orbit. To be honest I was afraid I was forgetting what they looked like myself. And if I was forgetting, how could I expect them to remember? Did you even want to remember? I asked you, but the look in your eyes when you sipped the last of your whiskey confused me. And when you threw your glass at me it didn’t quite clarify your perspective. And I forgot to follow up, because the anticlimax of the glass bouncing off my shoulder and landing gently on our rug made me burst out laughing while you stormed off to your room. I could hear the weight of Hamida and Nabeel’s ears leave their doors as they returned to their beds to sulk. And so I went to my bed to do the same.

I was probably mopier than I needed to be, you’re right. But it gave me something to do. It’s funny, because whenever I complained about just needing something to do, you’d snap as if it were obvious. That one should be able to find a way to occupy themselves on a strange barren planet. I never asked how it felt so obvious to you and why, if it was so obvious to you, you never offered any ideas. I figured you were being tactless, not vicious.

I hummed “Forgiveness is a Red Ocean” as I cartwheeled along the tracks, pushing off the curved ceiling before touching down for another spin. I still remember the way Hamida sang it at her first talent show. Hugging her together was one of the only joyous moments I can remember with you here. There was a rush of sweet earnestness from you to her and to me. It filled the room with a glow that drowned everything else out.

Until Hamida showed us her prize. Four tickets, one for each of us, to the Performing Arts Center. And as I watched the glow dim back into your face, I remembered the countless times you made up excuses not to take me. I figured one of your excuses must be valid. The cost? The hour flight across planet? Leaving behind your patients?

Hamida knew never to ask you directly. I wonder now, did she train extra hard because she knew this was the only way she’d ever get to go? Even that, she didn’t know for sure, but was this incredibly slight chance worth the extra hour of practice every night?

But you couldn’t say no, because some part of you knew she was all you had at this point. Nabeel had barely spoken to you for months. Do you think he could tell that you considered him less than yours? And did you ever imagine that that’d make you feel less than his? So how could you say no?

I thought I felt a breeze through my suit as I kicked off the wall. Do you remember what real breezes were like? I’d love to know one day what a planet could be whispering as it fidgets through space.

You fidgeted nonstop when we arrived at the MPAC. So nervous about leaving your patients with an attending for the first time, you said. But I knew the way you fidgeted when you were stressed about work. This was different fidgeting, but I knew it too. I had seen it long before. When you’d hide out in my audiences, scuttling your eyes, trying not to notice when I notice you. But I couldn’t imagine that there would be someone you were expecting to see. I had been looking for signs that there was someone else, but you just seemed too bland, boring, and buried in work. And thinking of it now, I can’t remember you any other way, so I’m wondering if that’s what I fell in love with? I don’t mean that as an insult. I think it truly is what I loved, until I myself became bland, boring, but buried in nothingness.

At intermission you rushed off to call your attending and check on your hospital. I wanted to sulk in the dimly lit auditorium, but the kids insisted we go get some snacks. I think that might have been your fatal mistake. Letting me out of your sight. Away from your ability to steer my attention toward your broody exterior. I guess if you had heard Hamida mention the director of the MPAC would be meeting the contest winner, you might have wandered out with us, or convinced me to wait in the dark while you went out.

I didn’t think much of the fact that S’nious knew my name at first. Figured the school gave out that information ahead of time. But when he began asking about my work, I was unsettled because he seemed to remember more about my work than I could myself. I scanned my brain wondering what I even did, but in that moment, I felt so distracted. And by moment I don’t mean standing there in the ornate gallery lobby. I mean that phase of our life together. That whole ordeal just feels like a tangible moment that I can define. And it is, by definition, the moment I was distracted from who I was. Where my entire being was devoted to defining the lives of those around me. Nabeel’s and Hamida’s and yours, Pyn.

But that moment ended there. The next moment started. A rush of my achievements, my loves, the everythings that defined who I am and where I wanted to go. But this moment was short. Just a glimpse.

The following moment was watching Nabeel and Hamida peel off to get some snacks. Wanting to run after them but feeling inexplicably rooted to my spot next to S’nious. Listening to him say that he’d still love to have me be part of the MPAC somehow.

Still? I begged him to explain. He shuffled uncomfortably, uncertain of what he was stumbling into, but I’m certain he knew it was not where he wanted to be. He stared at my ear as if he were focused on pushing into it the shape of the words “spousal hire” as quietly as he could. Was it dawning on him that I had no idea what he was talking about as he expressed how disappointed he was when I turned down the position? I think it must have, but he played along and told me he begged my spouse, what was their name? Pyn! That he begged them to let him speak to me directly, but that they insisted that I was too busy with other projects and couldn’t even entertain the idea. He asked if I’d like to meet the low-gravity arts director they ended up hiring. The one from Earth. A low-gravity arts director. From Earth. It apparently took him a year to find them. He was sure they’d love to have me volunteer in some capacity. I couldn’t tell if the buzzing in my temples was my blood boiling or the high blood pressure warnings in my contacts.

When I got back to my seat, you could have felt the blue heat radiating from my burning skin. But, you were stewing in your own anxious oblivion. We both stared ahead, as if we could see through the blue pulsing acrobats and into the future. I thought I’d tell you when we got home, but I think by then the fact had cooked so deeply into my muscles that I came to accept where I was. Where we were.

I launched into a bimodal cartwheel, and I jumped off the upward curve of the tunnel. When I looked down at the floor, I saw Ereshkigal standing there, arms open, waiting to catch me. I closed my eyes and waited for her embrace. I waited longer than I thought I would.

I opened my eyes, and she was gone, and I was slowly floating to the concrete. I swung my arms down and rolled myself into a landing. The lights of the RailPod leered at me. I lifted myself up and didn’t bother looking for her. I knew she was gone, already back on Earth, convinced I wasn’t ready for death when she saw me finally dancing of my own direction.

About the Author

Sameem Siddiqui is a speculative fiction writer currently living in the United States. He enjoys writing to explore the near future realities people of South Asian ancestry and Muslim heritage will face in the coming centuries. His stories explore issues of migration, gender, family structure, economics and space habitation. He’s attended the Tin House and FutureScapes workshops and his stories have appeared in Clarkesworld and ApparitionLit. Some of Sameem’s favorite authors include Kurt Vonnegut, Octavia Butler and Haruki Murakami. When he’s not writing, Sameem enjoys reveling in fatherhood, watching 90’s Star Trek and tinkering with data and music. You can find him on Twitter @s_meems.

Spore

Tang Fei, translated by Andy Dudak

This is a small story, so don’t expect too much from it. The tale proceeds directly from beginning to end and wastes no time about it. Truth be told, I never thought the day would come I’d write it down.

The first time I saw her, I didn’t think anything would happen.

Nothing worthwhile ever really happens here.

They call this place End City, though some call it The Looking Glass City.

Fortunately, it’s not as affected and unconventional as these names would imply.

Four months of snow, six months of thick fog—abandoned industrial zones as far as the eye can see, failed experiments in urban sculpture and installation, neglected historical buildings, unfinished residential parks, forever-pending road repairs and road plans. There’s no shortage of broken dreams here, no lack of unoccupied, derelict structures, no dearth of things attempted and forsaken halfway through.

It was supposed to be the northern hemisphere’s leading electronics industrial zone, a grand prospect indeed. When that aspiration had been shattered, artists were freighted in by the truckload. That’s when Gatekeeper showed up. The idea, he said, was to stimulate speculation and raise property values via art. I asked him how that was meant to work. He said something about using artists and their art to cultivate the land. But who could have anticipated the imminent tide of planetary colonization? This tract of land was soon deserted.

We were the left behind, a batch of useless human beings. But later you all came back. Unceasingly, people came. A whole world’s worth of useless people were drawn to this place. That’s what Gatekeeper said.

And not long after she came here, she ran into me.

It was spring then. The snow had just melted. The sunlight was warm, the wind a bit cool. She sat atop a wall. I watched her long, snow-white legs gently swing, watched the sun shift position, its rays stabbing my eyes. She was something dazzling, rare, and remote, like a mountain’s snowpack in early spring, not yet begun to melt.

“Pretty?” She stared down at me.

I nodded.

She bent down to watch her leg shadows on the wall—like fish darting to and fro. I watched with her, avidly, enjoying myself. After a spell, I asked if she’d like to come down and join me for some food.

She ruminated on her legs. If it had been me up there on the wall, I would certainly have lost my balance and come toppling down. I was still staring, spellbound. She leaped down and landed by my side. I smelled something like sea salt, the tang of salt on the wind.

An AI shouldn’t smell like anything.

I discerned at a glance she was an AI: too perfect, facial features so symmetrical, as if meticulously cut and polished to form an ideal East Asian face, high cheekbones, exquisite snow-white skin, faintly visible blue veins, body tall and slender, long-boned. Only her carelessly shorn black hair didn’t fit. Even though I spent my days absorbed in imaginary space romances, I couldn’t believe I’d stumbled across such a beautiful girl in End City—never mind an AI escaped from who-knew-where. End City had long been legendary as a place of freedom, attracting every sort of asylum seeker. Among these were runaway AIs. They abandoned their pasts and carried their secrets, coming here and doing their utmost to find a hiding place.

Some succeeded, some failed. Most of the time it depended on luck.

I brought her to my riverbank, and we looked at the reeds in the shallows and ate Chinese lettuce sandwiches. She ate convincingly. The chewing and swallowing movements were standard issue but didn’t lack in style. She even had a savoring subroutine. A good AI must fit the occasion and not vex humans. She did very well. While chewing, her expression was cheerful and content. Another subroutine created a natural-looking smile—not that she had the slightest inkling what the smile meant.

Not that she had the slightest inkling what the smile meant to me.

Among their algorithms, there was none for providing feedback based on long-term, attentive observation of other people. This was fine by me. Being able to pay extended and close attention to someone, without awkwardness, without embarrassment, was ideal.

“Did you cut your hair yourself?”

She turned toward me, appearing perplexed. Was she thinking of how to answer my question, or how to lie? Her pupils had been made excessively dark.

“Delicious?” I asked, continuing to pretend I didn’t know she was an AI.

“Mm-hm.” Another smile.

“When you’re done, how about I take you to see where I work?” I reached out and wiped yogurt from the corner of her mouth.

Wasn’t it true that all stray AIs yearned for someone to take them home, a temporary safe harbor? A stray AI was surely in danger of reclamation, even here in End City. She ought to be thrilled with my offer. Indeed, it was easy to get her back to my workspace. Didn’t they know fear? If I’d taken her to a more sinister place, she might’ve found herself consigned to a more tragic fate.

Do AIs experience fear?

Then again, there were rumors of dangerous AIs, stories of people who’d brought strays home only to get strangled, or worse. Who reaps without sowing? There’s generally no such thing as a free lunch. Was it possible to just stumble upon a useful AI that was up for grabs? Only a daydreaming wretch would think so. I never thought there’d come a day I’d be bringing an AI home.

Perhaps I’d been cooped up too long. In order to deliver my new trace-tatt design by the festival deadline, I’d been in my workspace at least a month, racking my brains and draining my life force. That day I’d completed a first draft. My strained mind and body could finally relax. That’s why I’d gone out for a leisurely stroll.

It was a special day for me, and not just because of the completed work. Maybe that’s why I risked bringing this AI, this unknown quantity, home. One thing’s for sure: my mood wasn’t bad that day, not bad at all.

I showed her the culture dishes, the tattoo dye, the storage module for the nanites, and of course the all-important tattoo spores. Under quarantine casing, the dusting of infinitesimal purple spores on their fern fronds seemed unremarkable. But it was just these spores that would settle on people’s flesh and pierce dermis, dyestuff descending around damaged cells. Under nanite propulsion and according to our designs, the spores would take root between dermis and epidermis, and tattoo imagery would result. Unlike common tattoos, spore tattoos soon vanish. After three days, the dyes and nanites are metabolized. Many dazzling and complex designs disappear without a trace, thus the name “trace tattoos,” or “trace-tatts.”

She wasn’t too interested in the spores. After all, they could never enter her false flesh. If she saw—could she see?

I took her to the drafting room, switched on the workstation’s light, and showed her the drafting tools, the workspace currently dry and dull as empty air. Finally, we entered the greenhouse.

Assembly of the half-mechanical flowers was complete. They looked like biological flowers down to the petals, several flowers to a plant, petals overlapping in bunches, nearly submerging a gray-green underlayer of sepals. The wide expanse of pink-red flowers was resplendent, like a rosy cloud bank. She still seemed uninterested. Unsurprising, as they were, for the moment, just some unremarkable blooming flowers. It made sense that an AI like her would remain aloof from such a spectacle.

I wanted to tell her that these seemingly common flowers would be the vectors of the tattoo spores. On the evening of Trace-Tatt Festival, they would be fired into the air. They would blossom with fire-like radiance. They would form fluctuating, brilliant fantasy designs, then submit to wind dispersal, scattering spores down upon the carousing, half-naked multitude, seeding trace-tatts in their bodies—and three days later the tatts would be metabolized.

But for whatever reason, facing her indifference, I just said: “Look. These are the flowers that will drop on Trace-Tatt Day. Every petal will carry tattoo spores.”

“Spores that can tattoo?”

“The spores are just one tool that implements the work. They will soon be landing on skin tissue, piercing it, and dye will sink around damaged cells. Under nanite propulsion and according to randomly chosen designs, they will implant dye between dermis and epidermis. One nanite may store over a thousand designs. It’s those designs we work out in the drafting room. According to regulation, a design may only be used once, so every year we need lots of new designs. Leading up to Trace-Tatt Festival we’re always busy.”

She yawned. So, these latest AIs could express feelings. I sought to quickly bring this topic of conversation to an end:

“Generally speaking, tattoos are still done by people, not spores.”

But what was I really saying, in the end? We modern trace-tatt masters were only designers. In the old days we would’ve been part of the whole process. Back then, the real trace-tatt masters were programmers, nanotech engineers, botanists, molecular biologists, and most importantly design artists. They had to create from scratch. They plotted flower petal drift itineraries, bred new plants to host the spores, constructed the machine elements of the half-mech flowers, concocted the metabolic pathways for spore and nanite destruction.

Gatekeeper was the first and the best trace-tatt master. He pioneered the trace-tatt method, this magnificent art that consumes so much labor and material and leaves behind nothing.

Designs that drain artists’ life force, exquisite tatt brushwork, destined to be metabolized within three days, gone without a trace. Senseless.

So pointless it’s like a mockery of anything that means anything in this world.

Brilliant, ephemeral beauty, like fireworks. Reason temporarily abandoned in a safely prescribed, orgiastic carousal. A resource-exhausting show of Doomsday-style consumption. Trace-tatts, naked flesh, sex, alcohol, and drugs. Gatekeeper reckoned it a winning combo, and he was proved right. People worldwide—and colonists out among the stars—fell over themselves to pay him. They came from near and far. They bought transit at exorbitant scalper prices. They squeezed into foul hotel rooms with dozens of strangers. They braved theft and rape to come here for Trace-Tatt Day.

Gatekeeper really is a genius. He made his fortune long ago, could probably buy the solar system’s entire space fleet at this point. But Gatekeeper is just Gatekeeper.

I asked him once why he gave himself such a foolish-sounding nickname.

“I mean to keep the Gate of Time. I mean not to let the past get through. The past shouldn’t be forgotten. Without the past, the present is hell.” Such was his answer. I couldn’t resist laughing. It all sounded so half-baked, so twentieth century, an argument based on cultural relics, old-fashioned and trite.

“What are you laughing about?” The AI watched me, puzzled.

I hurriedly composed myself. Even today, Gatekeeper’s bold and foolish words could tickle me. It has always been this way, hasn’t it? The new era mocking the old? Aren’t all fathers misunderstood by their sons?

Gatekeeper is my father. I am his son, a worthless son he’d rather not have, to be sure.

“Nothing,” I said to the AI, smiling. I’d heard AIs have an algorithm for transferring information from the cloud, people’s personal data, as well as a mood reading for whoever they’re facing, a physiological value based on reckonings of previously known humans. In other words, my smile was in vain.

She saw me as a pile of numbers. And I saw her as a mass of ominous yet charming radiance.

They are beautiful, like trace-tatts. But they cannot self-metabolize and make themselves vanish. When people don’t need them anymore, they still exist. This is their sorrow. Despite understanding this, I couldn’t help wanting to make her happy, at least for a little while. “Well, that’s the grand tour, anyway. I suppose a human workspace seems pretty boring to you, right?” With that I shut my mouth, holding on to the question I almost blurted out, about her past, and what she did before.

Theoretically, I didn’t know she was an AI. This was better for us both.

“In such a workspace, what is your work?” She blinked.

It didn’t sound natural, and her expression was a bit stiff—signs she was, perhaps, an older model. Looking down, I saw our feet were very close. The arches of her insteps were not so beautiful.

“My work is nothing much really . . . just simple design drafting.”

“I’d like to see.”

Saying no to a pretty girl is nigh impossible, but if she’s an AI, it’s not so hard. Nevertheless, I didn’t feel like refusing anyone that day.

I sat down at the drawing board, opened a window, and dragged out some old designs from storage. The images floated into view one by one, glittering engravings of gold, flashing platinum etchings.

I took out the cathode pen. My first stroke was a bit hesitant, cautiously descending, halting, and before the second stroke I held my breath. Inspiration had just flashed electrically in the depths of my brain, a warm current, persistent, a kind of fervent hope affecting my whole body, investing my heart with a new rhythm. Fundamentally, it was the desire to communicate. I seized upon it, like taking into my hand fireworks trickling down from the night sky.

Dazedly, I watched my first draft emerge.

It had been a long time since I’d drafted with such inspired speed. And it was just so beautiful.

“What is it?” the AI asked.

“Something I just thought of, a trace-tatt design. It represents a kind of algorithm or subroutine in a computer program. I’ve expressed it graphically, then put it through several fundamental transformations.”

“What algorithm?”

“For generating interest in something. Not that there really is such an algorithm. I just imagined one, and pictured it in this form.” That was as honest as I could be about my process.

She nodded, seeming to understand the roots of my inspiration.

“I like them,” she said, lightly passing her fingertips through the nearest floating design. It broke into motes of light like dust, causing her to start, then spin once in a circle. Maybe this was how they expressed happiness. I watched her, fascinated. Unexpectedly, she snatched the pen from my hand and fell to modifying my latest design.

Her technique was adept. Not only that, but . . .

Gatekeeper always said I wasn’t a natural trace-tatt master. My brushwork was too realistic for his taste. “You’re always taking reality as your starting point,” he often criticized. “The real world projected onto the trace-tatt world. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, just a bit down-to-earth, a bit boring.”

Maybe he didn’t know he was the least qualified to say such things. No one was more single-mindedly devoted to leaving traces of the real world in the trace-tatt world. This was why he created the trace-tatt art in the first place.

The formative event had occurred in a faraway land, remote in time and space. I’ve never heard anyone but Gatekeeper mention it. I used to doubt the reality of that days-long and senseless mass slaughter.

Gatekeeper said it came without warning or portent. He was still a child then, part of a happy family.

Happy, despite having to wear red armbands signifying their low societal rank, thanks to paternal grandpa’s colonial pioneer sympathies. The armbands meant citizens could arbitrarily humiliate them—but still, generally speaking, they were happy. Their rank designation just meant some inconveniences. That was all.

Work limitations, housing restrictions. Priority-wise, near last in line for medical care, education, or purchasing rare goods.

Thus passed many years. The family accepted their fate and got used to it. Gatekeeper and the rest of them believed it couldn’t possibly get any worse. Life couldn’t get any worse.

In a sense, they were right.

Gatekeeper’s father was coming home from work when neighbors intercepted him at the residential district gate and surrounded him. They dragged him into a water fountain. He struggled and escaped, but they recaptured him and pressed him to the ground. This time they put their sense of ceremony first, and immediately set about their task, using a shovel, a paring knife, and a heavy bike lock to murder him. It was a protracted and chaotic process. No one knew whose was the killing blow.

His body was hung from the highest tree in the park. He would not be easily identified when the time came, and when it grew dark he was hardly noticeable up there.

So it was that Gatekeeper’s mother and two little sisters passed under the tree, oblivious to what had happened, when they came home. Following their evening routine, they began to prepare dinner and await the return of their menfolk. Instead, it was the killers who burst into the home. They interrogated mother and daughters as to the other men’s whereabouts. After several hours of deadlock, the hostiles were joined by reinforcements. The woman and two girls were taken up to the attic. They were forced to jump.

That was a fateful sunset, and not just for Gatekeeper’s family. The whole city, particularly the western district, erupted with violence against the armbanded, entirely without warning. The massacre went on for fifteen days. Whole family units were targeted, even if they merely supported the armbanded, and male infants were especially hunted. An official investigation subsequently reckoned the death toll at five hundred and forty-four souls. The executioners were nongovernmental and spontaneously organized. Although the seeds were sown by government-mandated viewing of the hostile faction’s propaganda, no one knew why the slaughter erupted on that day in particular. The murderers obtained unprecedented political legitimacy. They were able to use the crudest methods and most primitive tools to kill their neighbors and coworkers, even if the victim was a weeping, pleading child.

Gatekeeper’s paternal grandfather, the man who consigned his clan to shame and red armbands, hazarded returning home on the ninth day of the massacre. He’d been transferred to another city to undergo large-scale collective criticism. As it turned out, he might’ve evaded calamity, but he worried about his family members and returned home on the sly. Ultimately, this led him to the same fate as his son. I once asked Gatekeeper how he avoided extermination. He said that after he heard the news, he ran to the gate of the nearest police headquarters and began shouting reactionary slogans. He was sentenced as a political juvenile delinquent, and rode out the massacre in prison.

A living nightmare. Suddenly begun and as suddenly over. Without reason, there was only cruelty and fear.

I didn’t experience it, so it was hard for me to believe. Even though many of my blood relatives were among the dead, I could never feel Gatekeeper’s pain.

He grew up with death. He had survivor’s eyes.

Worse still, he planned never to forget.

As in his city, so it went in others, spreading like a plague over a large area, but soon suppressed. After forty-four days of bloodshed, peace was restored.

Soon enough, the slaughter was forgotten. Even without the intentional erasures and redactions, it would have vanished from people’s minds. Victims had been massacred by the family, so few were left to mourn the dead. The perpetrators were eager to evade justice. And history is, unavoidably, written by the survivors.

Gatekeeper tried many things before he finally created the art of trace-tatts. This was his final exertion—writing, audio, imagery, and every other attempt to record or narrate the nightmarish massacre had been erased, eliminated, purged. Like the slaughter itself, this great forgetting was accomplished by a tacit understanding between national will and the individual. Even the few surviving victims were eager to forget that chapter of history.

Except for Gatekeeper.

He painted those forty-four dreadful days on millions of strangers’ skins. He painted a mother hugging her infant just after it had been thrown down from a great height and killed. He painted a child noosed and dragged five hundred meters by his neighbor “uncle.” The tears of a grandmother begging to die in her grandson’s place. The indescribable panic on the face of the first victim just before the gang’s blows began to rain down. Clubs, shovels, and chains soaked in blood and brains. Arrogant, savage eyes, bright red. The dead hanging from trees like clusters of fruit. Crows filling the sky. Geometric forms, numbers, ancient pictograms in the Mayan or Egyptian mode, pointillism, large blocks of color, and of course traditional Japanese tattoo elements. All of this he made his obscure language of expression. He reproduced the past in myriad forms, destined to be metabolized after seventy-two hours.

I never understood why Gatekeeper did this to himself. Why tell these stories over and over? Why throw himself into that marrow-chilling nightmare again and again? It was a nightmare that the other survivors sought desperately to abandon. The trace-tatted tourists were oblivious to the history they temporarily recapitulated. As far as they were concerned, the tatts were just beautiful designs, party accessories, a bit of End City’s local color. For many people it was a mediocre amusement at best, a few sparkly memories doomed to fade within a year and merge with the sea of forgetfulness.

Perhaps this is why the tattoo arts were permitted to continue. I think people must have perceived Gatekeeper’s history lessons and message, but in such ambiguous ways and so fleetingly that it posed no danger. The powers that be must have thought of it that way.

In other words, Gatekeeper’s trace-tatt art had no real influence. It didn’t arouse anyone’s memories but his own. During quarrels I would cold-bloodedly deploy this truth. His persistence in remembering meant nothing to anyone but himself. Even I, his own son, had no interest in taking on the burden of these memories. Meaningless memories. He spent his life on them, and demanded I do the same. And I wasn’t having it.

“The truth is you’re fundamentally unqualified.” He liked to retaliate with this truth in the same unfeeling manner I’d refused his passing of the torch.

And it was true. I have no talent. I’m his flesh and blood, a random product of natural reproduction, but I haven’t inherited his ability, just as I didn’t get his memories. And why would I want to inherit those?

I felt I’d been created specifically as a vector for his memories, an heir to his esoteric mnemonics. So, refusal of that inheritance was my best reprisal. I liked to see his eyes flash with pain or anxiety. I never thought of him as my father at those times. I was so young, so calm. It overwhelmed him. Until that day five years ago. I was showing off one of my inane trace-tatt designs. This time he dispensed with trying to shame me. Rather, he was silent for a long time. Gazing at my design, he seemed to look through the graphene tablet and fall into some world forever beyond my reach. In that moment, I almost believed his telomere-treated body grew old. He lifted his head and turned toward me. He’d never looked at me with such bewilderment and tenderness in his eyes.

The next day, he vanished.

He left behind an art form and its inheritors, the trace-tatt masters, including me.

I often see that last look of his in my dreams. I have similar facial features, but I could never wear the expression he did that day. He was like a long-imprisoned criminal who’d just gotten early release. Using the review my dreams provided, I tried to decipher the meaning in his eyes at that moment. What was he thinking, that lone bearer of history trying to rouse a whole era’s memory? When his heart finally died, and he understood I was beyond redemption, where did he find hope? We, the skilled heirs he left behind, use what he taught us to create night skies bursting with incandescent mechanical flowers, and their raining spores, and the nano in those spores, and endlessly complicated and changing tatt designs. He would say our art is soulless.

But we wouldn’t care. Trace-tatting is merely our livelihood. We amuse tens of thousands of End City tourists, and it’s enough. The street graffiti gangs look down on us. They consider us mere buskers, selling our spirt and art. Big talk. Their scrawls may be full of moral implication, but they make no living.

Her drawing was impressive. On the flexible screen, lines flowed and developed from the cellulose pen, and colors were evoked. Of course, I knew it all proceeded from some AI algorithm, but the image itself still moved me. This was essentially human, wasn’t it? After a few minutes, she’d already completed two design drafts. She seemed completely absorbed in her work, and she started on a third design. I watched closely. Something subtle seemed to leap out of the two completed drafts: abstract geometric forms overlapping, a strange combination I never could have imagined, yet arousing a sensation, a pulsing, uneasy, yet familiar feeling. My eyelids grew hot and I dropped my gaze.

She seemed to sense my discomfort. “You don’t like it?”

“What’s your name by the way?” I said, deflecting her question with another.

She paused, pen in hand, and sized me up. I instinctively avoided eye contact, yet knew that my heart rate and hormone levels had no doubt already betrayed me.

In the presence of AIs, human ruses and affectations are useless. In their eyes we are always naked.

She embraced me, pressing her body against mine. Her exposed flesh was soft and warm. I didn’t think too much. I was like a fish following a warm ocean current, naturally and rightly finding her. Movement answered movement. Moist lips answered a shiver.

She must have understood my lust, not to mention my loneliness, from the beginning. After Gatekeeper left, I stopped having anything to do with life based on carbon or silicon. During the first year, I couldn’t help fantasizing he would suddenly return. I would rehearse scenes of us getting along. By the time I abandoned these hopes, I found myself unable to bear life among other people.

I was a trace-tatt master. I treasured my relaxed, simple life. No history, no other people.

This was the only life I was fit for, even though sometimes, for a few specially designated days, it could be awfully lonely.

She had appeared at just the right time, like a seasonal flower. I weighed her down, firmly holding her wrists, lest we both get washed away by my body’s surging ecstasy. Her scent was intoxicating, reminiscent of sea salt.

Afterward, I lay motionless. I watched her straighten out her clothes. She was, by design, like a woman in an ancient movie, shyly turned away from the man she’d just fucked, getting dressed. Her sweat glistened. A drop ran down her back to her tailbone. I noticed the string of numbers down there.

That would be her inception date, or software installation date. By convention this served as an AI’s delivery date. It was the birthday of the invested “soul,” and some people jokingly called it an AI’s birthday.

Hers was today.

I sat up with a start, frightened of a sudden thought. I charged over to the central control screen and browsed her design drafts. I grabbed Gatekeeper’s designs from the cloud, but I already knew, and didn’t need to compare them with hers. I finally understood the cause of my recent flustered, familiar sensation. Without a doubt, her trace-tatt talent came directly from Gatekeeper. Maybe he participated in her entire manufacturing process, or maybe he was only responsible for her code. Maybe she was one of a large batch, or singular. It didn’t matter. What mattered was Gatekeeper had finally crafted a legitimate trace-tatt master, a total inheritor of his art and soul. They would contain history they’d never experienced. They would propagate records that had passed through many hands. Over and over they would, in vain, inscribe history on flesh. Again and again, it would vanish.

They were eminently qualified as his successors. That’s when I understood. That final look on his before he left: I knew what it had contained. A solution.

Veins don’t contain memories. They don’t contain the longing for memory. They only contain base pairs arranged in sequence. What veins can’t do, algorithms can. Code can.

Gatekeeper and I had warred over history, and he had won.

In order to ridicule me, it seemed, he’d chosen my birthday as this AI’s inception date.

We were both his children. He’d made us on the same day of the year. He’d exiled us. Perhaps he’d even coded her to return to End City.

I hate my father, that shade of history. Maybe he died back then after all, in that massacre whose causes he doesn’t understand today.

What is the past but something bound to be metabolized by tomorrow after tomorrow?

He won, but his victory is preposterous and fruitless.

Even if trace-tatts someday cover all the world’s flesh, people won’t understand what they mean, or once meant, or once tried to represent. History will be forgotten, as will Gatekeeper’s visual language. Trace-tatts will just be pretty designs indicating nothing.

“Where are you going?” the AI asked as I left the room.

“I’ll be right back.”

I smiled at her, full of longing and regret. There couldn’t be many in this world as tender as her.

She really was beautiful.

I didn’t return. I waited for the flashing red lights of the reclamation vehicle to play along the wall. And I waited for them to go away. Then, dragging my heels, I returned to my empty workspace. They’d taken the AI. She wouldn’t have struggled or resisted, I was sure. She would’ve been totally docile. Briefly I wondered if she really would’ve been such a bother, at my side. But no, I was too used to being alone. I asked myself if I would’ve reported her to reclamation if I hadn’t known her provenance, her relation to Gatekeeper. Her purpose, a trace-tatt master designed to surpass me. Maybe I would have.

I don’t know.

Regardless, the truth is never important.

I’ll wait for tomorrow night’s riverbank salvos, the air-to-ground clamor, the blossoming of great fire flowers in the night sky.

As countless dim figures boil below. Ignoring the half-naked men and women around them, the celebrants will be looking up at gently falling and whirling and unfolding petals. And they’ll become even more naked to welcome the tattoo spores.

And then three more fire flowers will be released in succession. Resplendent flowering trees on the curtain of the night sky, doomed to die in a flash, yet in that instant an eternity of brilliant blossoming, and then pink petals crumbling like snow, and perhaps a sea breeze, and the whole city trembling under petals.

But just now it is dusk. The sky is serene and exhausted. There is no trace of wind under the dark red clouds.

Nineteen years ago today I arrived in this world as Gatekeeper’s son.

My life began then, a lighthearted life that can’t bear heavy burdens. I said this story is quite short, preordained from beginning to end, unfolding inevitably. Of course I betrayed Gatekeeper, and of course I betrayed the AI.

Up here on the workspace’s rooftop, the city’s highest, the night sky feels close. Finally, the wind gusts and penetrates my chest.

Did I ever yearn to be loved? Did I yearn to become worthy of love?

Oh, that’s right! It’s just me, never loved, and unworthy of love.

Originally published in Chinese in Youth Literature, January 2019.

About the Author

Tang Fei is a member of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Her works have appeared in Shanghai Literature, Flower City, and Fiction World. She has written fantasy, science fiction, fairy tales, and wuxia, but prefers to write in a way that straddles or stretches genre boundaries. Many of her stories have been published internationally and her work has been included in The Year’s Best Science Fiction in the United States. She has published a collection of stories, The Person Who Sees Cetus, and a novel, The Unknown Feast. Her story “Panda Breeder” was selected as Smokelong Quarterly’s Best Flash Fiction of 2019. The same year, “Wu Ding’s Journey to the West” won Speculative Fiction in Translation’s Most Popular Short Story silver medal. “Spore” was awarded the 2020 Chinese Readers’ Choice Awards (Gravity Awards) for best short story.

She is also involved in different art forms such as literary criticism, poetry, installation, and photography.

A Star for Every Word Unspoken

Kai Hudson

They say Omma’s in there, but she’s not, she’s not. It’s just an empty metal capsule they’re lowering into the ground, and the rain is too wet and the flowers too bright and the wailing of the mourners—it’s so much, too much, and Na-Yeong slaps Appa’s hand away and shuts her eyes and—

Blink.

She flies forward with the force of the stop. The sling catches her, thick belts snapping back to punch the air out of her chest and Na-Yeong gasps, gags, tastes the sweet-sour acid of last night’s nutrient fluid flood the back of her mouth.

With effort, she swallows it back. Closes her eyes and breathes. Taps her thumb to the other fingers of her left hand in quick succession: pinky, ring, middle, index. Then backward: index, middle, ring, pinky. Repeat with the right: outward in, inward out.

The world settles, if only faintly.

She’s freezing. Even with the insulation of the slingsuit her body won’t stop shivering, and Na-Yeong rubs furiously at her arms, hissing through chattering teeth. Her slingsuit is the most advanced model available, but even its thick multiple layers and advanced nanotechnology weren’t designed to sustain a single lone human in deep space for more than a couple of days. And the pod itself was meant to transport the slipdrive, not a human being, so there are no life support systems. Right now the only things keeping her alive are the suit, the bladder of nutrient fluid that’s already running out of replication base, and her mission.

It’s waiting, somewhere out there in the vastness of empty space. She just has to get there and catch it.

“C-Computer,” she murmurs. The words taste thick and gooey, like overcooked juk. “Distance from. Distance. D-Distance from Earth.”

“Ma’am. We are approximately three point eight-seven-seven-one lightyears from Earth.”

Too soon. Far too soon. Na-Yeong swallows down the scream crawling up her throat. It’s her ninth jump already, she can feel it in her bones and the roots of her teeth, so why hasn’t she gotten it right yet? Why isn’t she better, smarter, faster—if she had been then maybe Omma would still be—

No. No, no, no. The modern English word “no” derives from Old English “na,” which in turn derives from Proto-Germanic “ne” and “aiw.” She taps her fingers: outward in, inward out. Ne+ aiw, identical to “nay,” same roots, same usage. No, no, no.

The insects crawling beneath her skin finally settle, temporarily calmed by the soothing rituals of repetition and concrete information. Facts don’t change. Facts are safe. Fact: this jump has failed. Fact: the slipdrive still works. Fact: she can keep going.

“Recalculate,” she blurts, birthing the word from her lips like an alien infant. “C-Countdown. Recalculate. Initiate c-c-countdown.”

The computer doesn’t hesitate. She has always liked computers. They never misunderstand her when she speaks. They never look at her like something unrecognizable.

A slow hum starts up from somewhere behind her, buried in a messy forest of struts and wires. “Coordinates recalculated,” the pod tells her. “Engaging slipdrive in three . . . ”

Na-Yeong closes her eyes.

“Two . . . ”

Blink.

“Na-Yeong-a!”

Through the haze of pain and noise and terror and why is there so much, she barely registers the voice. Fingers seize her wrist with a grip stronger than steel, slowly but firmly pulling her arm back from her mouth. “Na-Yeong, stop!”

Everything tastes of blood, the scent of it coppery and thick in her mouth, but that’s okay. It’s better than the rest, the other kids’ laughter that grates like glass, the too-scratchy uniform and too-tight shoes, and above all that the buzz, the endless humming zzz-zzz-zzz like the whole classroom is swarming with bees, like they’re looking for her, hunting her, trying to cover her in squirming fuzzy bodies and eat her up alive—

“Choe Na-Yeong.” Omma’s face resolves itself from the chaos: long red-brown hair, rumpled blouse, eyes kind above her smile. “Na-Yeong, what is it? Where’s the wrongness? Tell me. Tell Mommy where the wrongness is.”

Over Omma’s shoulder, Teacher frowns, crossing his arms. “There’s nothing wrong, Mrs. Kim,” he says, with that little twitch of his jaw that says he’s trying not to raise his voice. “Your daughter just started having a screaming fit in the middle of reading time. This sort of behavior—”

“My daughter,” Omma answers, and though she still smiles, her voice has the sharp edge of a diamond blade, “always knows when something is wrong, Teacher. You just have to ask. Na-Yeong, where is the wrongness?”

“Bzzz,” Na-Yeong answers. Little flecks of blood fly from her lips, joining the deep red bite marks already decorating her forearms. “Bzzz, bzzz.”

Omma blinks and looks around. Teacher’s frown goes all curly like he ate something bad. “Mrs. Kim—”

“There.” Omma squeezes Na-Yeong’s wrist, just a reminder, an assurance, before rising and crossing the room in three strides. As the other six year olds look on with wide, scared eyes, she reaches up and flips a switch on the bright UV light hovering over the green plants by the window. The beehive goes finally, blessedly silent.

“Mrs. Kim! That light feeds our sprouts! We are teaching the children—”

“That plants can live off of the sunlight coming through the window perfectly fine,” Omma finishes, coming back over. As Teacher splutters, she kneels down, still smiling. “Is there less wrong now, Na-Yeong?”

Na-Yeong nods. There’s still so much going on here, the feel of her clothes, the stares of the other students. But it’s not too much anymore. She can handle it. If she can just bite a little more, have a bit more of that pain to drown out the noise between her ears—

Omma’s smile trembles. “No, Na-Yeong-a,” she says. “No biting. That’s not good. Here. Remember what we learned? Tap, Na-Yeong. Let’s tap our fingers.”

Omma’s hands wrap around hers, encouraging, guiding. Thumb to pinky finger, then ring, then middle, then index. Outward in, inward out. “Good. Now the right hand. That’s it.” Outward in, inward out. Breathe. Breathe.

“We’re okay,” Omma says, and Na-Yeong nods because we are, we are.

“We’re okay,” she says.

“Mommy loves you.”

“Mommy loves you. Mommy loves you.”

“She does that all the time,” Teacher grumbles. “The mimicking. The other kids think she’s making fun of them.”

Omma sighs. It’s a tired sound, like all the air inside her is rushing out through a leak. Na-Yeong reaches out and presses a palm to Omma’s chest, feels the steady thrum of her heartbeat through the rumpled blouse. “Badum, badum,” she says, before pressing her other palm to her own heart. “Badum, badum, Mommy.”

There are sudden tears in Omma’s eyes. “Yes, Na-Yeong-a,” she whispers. “Thank you.” Then she tilts her head and squeezes Na-Yeong’s hand. “Hey, how about coming to work with me for the rest of the day?”

And Na-Yeong—

Blink.

It’s the worst stop yet, her body a lump of loose jelly jerked back and forth by the slings. Na-Yeong gags and loses the battle—acid and chalky nutrient fluid fly from her mouth as she retches and heaves, pale pink globules forming briefly inside the helmet before the slingsuit sucks them out in a burst of forced air.

She can barely see, everything spinning wildly all around. The suit seems to weigh a thousand pounds even in zero gravity. She coughs around the sticky thickness of saliva and vomit. “B-Badum,” she whispers. Her fingers tremble and begin to tap. “Badum, badum, M-Mommy . . . ”

“Apologies, ma’am,” says the pod. “I do not understand those commands.”

Inward out, outward in. Or was it the other way around? Na-Yeong forms the words like lumpy dough, like when Halmeoni used to let her help in the kitchen making sweet songpyeon. “D-Distance. Earth. Distance.”

“Ma’am. We are approximately six point zero-zero-eight-nine lightyears from Earth.”

Too far. Tears sting her eyes, more salty little drops for the suit to eat. Now she’s too far. What if the slipdrive never gets it right? What if she never finds it, never gets to . . .

No. She has to keep going. There is nothing else. Next jump. Next jump.

“Re.” It’s a bare croak; she takes a breath, thin and reedy, and tries again. “Re-Re-Recalculate.”

“Acknowledged.” A brief pause. “Coordinates recalculated. Engaging slipdrive . . . ”

She loses consciousness before the countdown can start.

Blink.

Omma waves her chopsticks, barely avoiding hitting Na-Yeong with kimchi juice. “What would you do,” she says, “if you could travel anywhere in the universe in the blink of an eye?”

The cafeteria is overrun this time of day, crammed with engineers and researchers and technicians, all arguing and conversing over their food, all trying to solve one problem or another. Though she’s only been here a few times, already Na-Yeong loves it. The people don’t grate on her, not when they talk about numbers and theories with the fluency of a native language. And the layout of the labs, the lighting grid, even the ventilation system—it’s all so efficient, so predictable. Solid and unchanging.

Maybe she can work here one day. Maybe she won’t have to go back to school, school where the other kids look at her like a monster, and Teacher keeps asking why she can’t just be normal, like it’s a lesson she missed but can make up for with a report.

“Na-Yeong.” Omma’s voice goes soft yet sharp, the verbal equivalent of a tug on her sleeve. Omma knows Na-Yeong doesn’t like to be touched, not unless she asks for it. Omma knows a lot of things. “Na-Yeong, are your thoughts focused on me?”

Another one of her mother’s tricks: Na-Yeong sometimes has difficulty parsing Are you with me, too many possible interpretations. She nods, and Omma smiles.

“Okay. See here?” She tears a sheet of paper from her notebook; Omma is the kind of person who prefers paper to tablets, which Appa chuckles about but always indulges. “Let’s pretend this is an area of space. Currently, if you’re in a spaceship and you want to get from one point in space to another, what do you do?”

Na-Yeong touches her finger to one spot and draws it along the length of the page. Omma nods. “Correct. You have to go straight, for all intents and purposes. But what if you didn’t have to? What if you found a shortcut?”

“W-W-Wormholes.” Omma has a lot of astrophysics books at home; Na-Yeong has read them all.

“Not quite, although it’s the same basic theory.” Omma touches her finger to the same spot from before. “Let’s say you want to get from here—” She indicates another point near the opposite edge of the sheet. “—to here. But instead of going straight, you instead choose to curve.” She slowly curls the paper over so that both points align.

Na-Yeong frowns. “W-Wormholes.”

Omma shakes her head. “Generating a wormhole would require an immense amount of energy, not to mention a mess of calculations we just don’t have the processing power to achieve,” she says. “Think about it. Spontaneously building a tunnel from one part of space to another? That’s a lot of work.

“But what if, instead, you curved even further?” Omma curls the paper until it forms a cylinder. “You bring Point B directly onto Point A, completely superimposed in space-time. Then you no longer have to worry about building anything. You’re already at your destination.”

She smiles then, a spark in her eyes that warms something in Na-Yeong’s own heart, something she can’t express but she knows Omma will understand regardless. That’s what it means to be a mother. “At that point, it’s simple, really. All you have to do is—”

Blink.

Another sickening jolt. Na-Yeong groans weakly in the confines of the slingsuit. Her stomach rolls but there’s nothing left inside her.

Where is she? The pod has no windows, no screens for display. She coughs, thick and wet. Uh, oh. That doesn’t taste like spit.

How many jumps now? Twenty? Thirty?

Where is she?

“Commands, ma’am?” the pod asks.

Na-Yeong breathes. Her lungs scream and her head throbs, entire body a single raw, exposed nerve. Maybe she doesn’t even have a body anymore. Maybe she has dissolved into a gooey mess, with what remains of her brain only able to send a single directive: find it, find it, find it.

God, she wants to give up. She can still go home, can’t she? Appa will be waiting for her. Appa with his cheekbones stark, his eyes so full of grief. Appa who has lost, just as she has.

“Commands, ma’am?” the pod prompts once more.

“D-Diss . . . tance . . . ”

“Ma’am. We are approximately five point one-two-one-nine lightyears from Earth.”

Oh God, that’s close. Closer than she’s ever been. Something flickers in Na-Yeong’s chest, something small and weak and unmistakably warm. Something like hope.

Not close enough, but almost. Almost.

“Re . . . Re . . . calculate.”

As the computer drones its acknowledgment, Na-Yeong concentrates on breathing. She must survive this. If she dies, no one else will ever remember Omma. Not like Na-Yeong can.

Omma, Na-Yeong thinks, as the countdown starts and blackness rushes up. My thoughts are focused on you. My thoughts—

Blink.

“Honey!” Appa hurries up to them, one gloved hand pushing up his round, wire-framed glasses. “Honey, you’re not bringing her in here again?”

“Why not?” Omma glances at Na-Yeong. “I already cleared it with management.”

“She’s too young—”

“She’s thirteen,” Omma corrects him gently, “and got into yet another fight at school. What was I supposed to do, Choe Man-Soo?”

All the fight goes out of Appa at that. His shoulders slump and he looks at Na-Yeong with such sadness. It’s like her father is just made of sadness some days, like God long ago decided to build him out of other people’s tears. “Oh, Na-Yeong-a. Did they make fun of you again?”

Na-Yeong looks away. There are boys at school who don’t like a girl who can solve complex math equations in the blink of an eye. There are boys at school who don’t like a girl who barely talks, and stutters and echoes others when she does. There are boys at school who don’t like a girl.

Appa sighs. “Can you keep her out of the testing lab at least? Viewing window only. Mr. Oh complained last time about having a child in the same room as the prototype.”

Omma rolls her eyes. “Na-Yeong could calculate circles around all of our engineers and you know it,” she says, but backs off at Appa’s pleading look. “All right, honey. I’ll keep an eye on her.”

Appa grins and turns to Na-Yeong. “Say, how about after Omma shows you the slipdrive, you come by my lab? Maybe if you’re good, I’ll even let you try out a suit.” He indicates the clear double doors behind him. Na-Yeong glimpses a bunch of people in dark-blue uniforms, some with tablets, others soldering and welding behind thick protective gear. Beyond them, stuck to the smooth metal test wall like globs of spit, are several black suits wrapped around pale-yellow dummies, dozens of thick belts extending out to keep their cargo safely suspended.

Appa works on slingsuits, specialized gear that will allow future space-goers to withstand the horrible forces of slipdrive jumps and survive in deep space, without needing the additional weight of seats or sleeping bags or latrines. He met Omma when one of his prototypes failed, shooting a belt out through the wall of his lab and nearly impaling her as she walked by. Na-Yeong has never understood how they ended up married, but they love each other, it’s obvious in Appa’s gentle touches and Omma’s warm smiles, so she doesn’t ask.

Satoshi greets them in the viewing room. “Dr. Kim,” he says, bowing low. He’s one of the junior engineers under Omma’s supervision, fresh out of graduate school, who speaks Korean with a funny accent.

His gaze stutters only briefly on Na-Yeong before he turns to the window. Beyond is a giant metal room absolutely crammed with researchers and engineers, all of them conversing and arguing and taking notes, and at the center stands a thick nest of metal struts and wires, coiled and knotted together in a tangled mess. Na-Yeong can’t see what’s inside.

“So I think we finally fixed the coolant issue,” Satoshi says. “Kang generated a new matrix and rerouted the auxiliary valves. We should be ready for preliminary testing in—”

“Engineer Tanaka.”

The man striding up to them is Mr. Oh, Omma’s boss. Na-Yeong recognizes him because of his tendency to favor his right leg when he walks, an old injury he claims comes from his time in the military. Na-Yeong doubts that, personally. Mr. Oh doesn’t seem like the type of man who would ever show allegiance to anyone other than himself.

Behind him walks a man who looks like the president, except not nearly as fit and with many more wrinkles. He’s accompanied by a gaggle of reporters and aides, whom he ignores with the ease of long practice.

“It’s good to see you hard at work, as usual.” Mr. Oh indicates his sharply dressed companion. “This is Assemblyman Kim. I invited him here today to tour the building and gain a better understanding of the slipdrive.”

“The people deserve to know exactly what their taxes are funding,” says Kim. Na-Yeong steps back behind Omma. She doesn’t like this Kim. He speaks like they’re in a drama and he’s the only one with a script.

Satoshi and Omma both bow; the young engineer then glances at Na-Yeong’s mother. “We’re honored by your visit, Assemblyman,” he says. “This is Dr. Kim, our senior engineer and lead developer on the project. She can—”

“I’m interested to know how the slipdrive actually works,” the assemblyman interrupts. “I understand there have been several hiccups in developing the theory.”

“Ah, pardon my boldness, but the theory is in fact quite sound,” Satoshi says. “In fact, Dr. Kim authored one of the first papers on space-time supracurvature over ten years ago.”

“Hm, good.” Mr. Oh glances briefly at Omma with a bored smile before turning back to Satoshi. “I’m sure you can tell us all about the project’s latest advancements. You see, sir, Engineer Tanaka is one of our best and brightest. We recruited him straight out of UTokyo.”

Na-Yeong frowns and looks at Omma. Why has her mother not said anything? Why is she just standing there staring at the ground, letting Satoshi do all the explaining? She’s the one who always gets so excited about the slipdrive, making Appa roll his eyes indulgently as she raves about blueprints and tests over meals. Where is that energetic woman now? Who has taken Na-Yeong’s mother, the fearless Dr. Kim who memorizes theories and makes connections and gives orders in the lab, and replaced her with this meek, quiet woman who won’t even look Mr. Oh in the eye?

“Well.” Satoshi, to his credit, looks to Omma once more for guidance. Receiving none, he bows once more to his superiors. “So far we think we’ve got a working curler—that’s what we call the pod the slipdrive is housed in, which is responsible for actually curving that other part of space over and into the reach of the drive itself. With regard to the actual jump, we’re, ah, still working on the calculations—”

“Stupid.”

Everyone turns. Omma stiffens. Na-Yeong looks at the floor. “S-Stupid,” she repeats.

“Mrs. Kim.” Mr. Oh’s smile is a pasted-on thing as he waves toward the door. “Perhaps you should escort your . . . child out of the lab. You see, Assemblyman, we want to hire more women here, of course we do, but sometimes their family obligations simply—”

“Stupid.” Na-Yeong points at the whiteboard standing a few feet away, covered in scribbles and numbers in Omma’s handwriting. Satoshi can’t do that. Neither can Lee or Park or Jung or anyone else, and why doesn’t she say anything? “Omma, tell. Omma, tell!”

“Mrs. Kim.” There’s something jagged to Mr. Oh’s smile now, like the edges of a broken window, and it finally gets Omma moving.

“Please forgive me, Director,” she says. “My daughter, she has a—a condition—”

She’s reaching for Na-Yeong, but Na-Yeong isn’t having it. Where is her mother? She wants her mother! “Omma, tell! Tell tell tell, stupid stupid, tell—”

And then she’s screaming, and Omma is shouting, and the assemblyman is shouting, and Oh is shouting the loudest of them all, yelling for security, yelling at Omma to get that little brat out of here or so help me, and it’s too much, and Na-Yeong clamps her hands over her ears and squeezes her eyes shut and—

Blink.

She’s dead, she has to be. Why else would everything hurt so? Why else would it feel like she’s falling apart at the seams, all her individual cells dissolving into the cold emptiness of space?

“Commands, ma’am?”

Oh, God. Still here. Still searching. Where . . . Where is she? Why does she hurt?

She wants it to stop. She wants Omma.

“Ma’am. Extrapolating command based on previous history. We are approximately five point zero-zero-two-three lightyears from Earth.”

Somewhere through the haze: a spark. That’s close, so close. Maybe, finally, close enough. Maybe . . .

“S . . . Sc . . . an.” Someone else speaks the words; Na-Yeong simply hangs in the slingsuit and listens. “Radio. Pre. P-P-Preset fre . . . quency.”

“Ma’am. No broadcasts detected on the frequency you requested.”

No. Not right. Try again. Try again.

“Ma’am. Extrapolating command based on previous history. Confirm recalculation?”

“Y . . . Y . . . Yes.”

“Coordinates recalculated.”

One more, then she’ll go home. Or maybe she’ll die. That doesn’t sound so bad.

Blink.

Na-Yeong misses her mother.

They don’t talk anymore. Or, well. Her mother tries. She leaves voicemails throughout the week that Na-Yeong deletes without opening. She comes to Na-Yeong’s door and knocks and her voice comes through muffled, but Na-Yeong ignores it. This woman who accepted Oh’s censure without complaint, who now sits at a desk reviewing grant applications and spreadsheets while Satoshi leads the lab, cannot be Omma. She cannot be the same woman who turned off that light in Teacher’s classroom, who defended Na-Yeong from the judgments of the world with such grace and ferocity.

So Na-Yeong cuts her out.

Appa tries his best to bridge the gap. He tells Na-Yeong about the latest developments on the slipdrive, about how Omma works so hard to make sure they keep their funding even after Assemblyman Kim threatened to cancel all government contracts. He talks about slingsuit tech, and how Satoshi still can’t eat buldak without crying. But even Na-Yeong can sense the brittleness beneath. Appa’s foundations have always been rooted in family; without them, the cracks already present widen out into deep, crumbling fissures.

Which is why, when Na-Yeong leaves her room one evening looking for food and discovers Appa seated at the kitchen table, pale, staring at nothing, she barely reacts. It’s only when he says her name as she’s boiling water for ramyun, “Choe Na-Yeong,” like it’s been torn from him, that she turns.

Appa looks at her. No, past her, at something neither one of them understands. “There’s.” He swallows, everything about him suddenly lost and oh so small. “There’s been an accident.”

Na-Yeong doesn’t believe in accidents. The universe is built on structure and predictability; there’s a theory and calculation for everything, and thus nothing exists that was not somehow set in place by something else beforehand. But as Satoshi bows low, almost parallel to the ground, and tells them what happened, Na-Yeong can’t find the congruence in it. Why was Omma even in the testing room to begin with? What reason did she have to be working on the prototype directly?

And where did she go?

“We, uh.” Satoshi’s voice breaks and he coughs into his fist. Na-Yeong barely squashes the urge to hit him. Doesn’t he understand they need more information? Why is it that no one seems able to look at her and Appa without bursting into tears? “We reviewed what footage we had from the time of the . . . incident. It appears your wife was, um, in the middle of making a recording when the slipdrive failed. We don’t know what it was since the malfunction destroyed the servers, but we do know that she . . . ” He looks at Na-Yeong, expression crumbling. “She meant to send it to you, Choe Na-Yeong.”

Appa stands next to her perfectly still, a statue except for the tears streaming down his face. Satoshi turns away, shoulders trembling. People approach, offer condolences, but Na-Yeong ignores them because she knows. She’s known it since Appa gave her the terrible news.

She turns fourteen today.

Omma would have wanted to celebrate.

Blink.

Where.

Where is she.

Everything drifts. She is a mote floating in an endless dark ocean. She is small. She is nothing.

From far away: “ . . . ommands, ma’am?”

The voice sounds familiar.

“Extrapolating command based on previous history. We are approximately five point zero-zero-two-six lightyears from Earth.”

Omma?

“No broadcasts detected on the frequency you requested. Confirm recalculation?”

Maybe she says yes. Maybe she says nothing.

Na-Yeong goes away.

Blink.

They lower the empty capsule into the ground two weeks later. Na-Yeong falls into a fit; Appa manages to calm her down after twenty minutes, but not before she’s scratched herself bloody and bitten three people.

There’s talk of hospitalizing her, of giving her some time to herself, but somehow Appa manages to drag himself out of bed long enough to threaten to take it to the media, and that takes care of that. Na-Yeong spends long days locked in her room, curled up on her bed. She taps her fingers: outward in, inward out, until her knuckles stiffen and the pads go numb. She rocks back and forth, reciting numbers and equations, general relativity and s-quarks and the pulse period of PSR 1913+16, over and over and over, but none of it brings Omma back.

Satoshi snuck her the surveillance feeds after the funeral, so after she has picked her skin enough to bleed, and ripped all her favorite outfits to shreds, and screamed at Appa until he retreats into the master bedroom with haunted eyes for the nth time, Na-Yeong watches them. Again and again she sees Omma, wearing her old lab coat with the coffee stain on the lapel, hunched over one of the computer terminals, her body blocking the screen. Omma spinning around when the camera trembles. Omma, eyes wide and mouth open as bright light floods the world and washes everything out.

She will never see Omma again. The collection of particles and energies that once made up Na-Yeong’s mother no longer exist, but there is one tiny part of her left, one single floating bit that is all that remains of the only person who ever insisted on carving out a space for Na-Yeong in this universe.

So, with the certainty of a universal law of physics, Na-Yeong decides to find it.

It’s something of a media spectacle, those first few weeks as an assistant in Omma’s lab. Mr. Oh creates the position specifically for her, shifty eyes locked on the reporters taking pictures. “Hero Scientist’s Daughter Takes the Helm,” reads one of the biggest headlines.

The attention fades away eventually, of course. Appa seems grateful for it, retreating into the comfort of his work in the slingsuit lab. The other engineers don’t quite seem to know how to approach her in the beginning, but after Na-Yeong recreates Omma’s initial supracurve proof by hand from memory, they mostly let her do what she wants.

Months pass. Then years. Appa’s team finally perfects their slingsuit design, a truly impressive piece of nanotech that immediately has American defense contractors calling them at all hours. Assemblyman Kim loses reelection. Jung leaves the company after having her first child, Mr. Oh gets caught up in a scandal involving two mistresses, and Satoshi becomes Director Tanaka.

Through it all, Na-Yeong works. Her days blend together: go to the lab, work, ignore other people’s sidelong looks, return home, repeat repeat repeat. Appa appears in there sometimes, a brief blip in the form of a quick dinner together or a small, neatly wrapped present left outside her door on her birthday. Otherwise, they maneuver around each other like carefully arranged wineglasses: close, but never touching.

Na-Yeong doesn’t mind it so much. It helps to have a purpose again, a mission, something she can fall back on when the world becomes too much. Find it, she thinks, every time the insects inside her buzz up and make her want to bite and scratch. Find it, when the other engineers stare and whisper behind her back. Find it, when the despair threatens to swallow her whole. Find it, find it, find it.

Is it any wonder that, in the end, she does?

It’s chaos outside the pod. She can’t see it, but she knows: Men and women run around shouting, pointing, working frantically at their stations. She can see Satoshi’s face, the despair and terror as he yanks at the pod’s metal clamps. She can see the second pod gleaming atop its pad across the hangar, the backup they built in case this first one malfunctioned. But this one will not malfunction. Na-Yeong won’t allow it.

She takes a deep breath. The slingsuit’s belts tighten across her shoulders and chest, and she imagines they are Appa’s arms, wrapping her up in security and protection. She wishes she could have apologized for locking him and his team in the slingsuit lab, but he’ll be released soon enough. And he’ll understand. He lost Omma too, after all.

As the hum of the slipdrive starts up behind her, Na-Yeong doesn’t see her father stumble into the room, wild-eyed and disheveled. She doesn’t see him stare, eyes bright with desperation and a deep, all-encompassing instinct no amount of distance or diagnosis or grief could stamp out. She doesn’t see Appa turn and sprint for the second pod.

“Subroutine accepted,” drones a familiar, computerized voice. Na-Yeong’s heard it say all sorts of things over the last five years, errors and assessments and status reports, but this unlocks something inside her, something warm and clear and solid as a neutron star. She can be friends with this voice. They’ll be spending a lot of time together, after all.

Choe Na-Yeong turns nineteen today.

Omma would be proud.

She closes her eyes. “Engage,” she says, and the universe moves.

Blink.

Color. Light. What does this mean?

Na-Yeong whimpers, a bare, empty sound. She’s so cold. Why doesn’t she have a blanket? She can’t feel her fingers, either, which is odd. Hadn’t she been doing something with them before?

Noise. A faint, inaudible murmuring in the background. Na-Yeong moans and forces her eyes open. Everything stinks of vomit and sweat, and she doesn’t understand. Why are there so many colors? What do these shapes mean?

Then, with the slow-moving assurance of a rotating planet, it comes together. The slingsuit. She’s in Appa’s slingsuit, and it’s displaying something inside her helmet. A series of warnings: Low oxygen, water reservoir empty. Suit temperature critical, and falling.

She is dying. And she has failed.

There are no tears left. Instead, Na-Yeong sags, exhaustion pulling at her with the weight of a thousand chains. So here she is, an innumerable distance from home, having stolen the most advanced piece of technology in the world and pushed it nearly to its limit. She’s out of food and air and will, and now she dies without completing her mission. Her mother forever lost, and her father forever grieving.

Oh, Appa. Please forgive me.

“ . . . ayback?”

She blinks, slow, painful. The background noise, it’s . . . resolving. Transforming into a voice. The voice of a friend.

“Broadcast received. Confirm playback?”

Oh.

Oh, God.

“Disss . . . ” She licks dry, chapped lips, tastes the sour sting of acid and blood. “Disss . . . tance.”

“Ma’am. We are approximately five point zero-zero-two-seven lightyears from Earth. Broadcast received on preset radio frequency. Confirm playback?”

Oh. She’s here. She made it. She . . .

“Y . . . es. Yes. Yes.”

“Commencing playback.”

A brief burst of static, and then:

“Na-Yeong-a.”

A different voice. A wonderful voice, the best in the universe, and it turns out she has a few tears left after all because Na-Yeong tastes them as she chokes out, “Omma.”

Her mother’s voice continues, tinny and distorted, words flayed and broken up by time and distance, yet underneath it all it’s still warm, still unmistakably Omma.

“—might not get thi—anted to sing—or you. My Engli—not so good, but I will try my b—kay. Okay.”

A deep, crackly breath from five years ago.

“—ap-pee buss-day to yoo . . . ”

Na-Yeong closes her eyes. Omma’s voice surrounds her, suffuses her world with music and warmth. Outside, stars die and others are born, and a mother’s love for her child forms the foundation of the universe.

“Hap-pee buss—o yoo . . . hap-pee buss-day dear Choe—eong . . . hap—uss-day to yoo . . . ”

A woman dead half a decade gives an embarrassed chuckle. “That wasn’t ve—good, was it? Sorry—better next time. Re—mber, Mommy loves you, Na-Yeong-a. I’ll see—tonight, and we can—wait. Wha—”

Static, then silence.

In the confines of her failing slingsuit, blinded by warning lights and signals of her impending death, Choe Na-Yeong smiles. It cracks her lips and hurts her face, but she doesn’t care. Out here in cold vacuum, lightyears from home and any hope of return, she has found what she came to seek. Omma is here with her now. She will not die alone.

Slowly, Na-Yeong gathers her strength and her final few breaths, and forms them into those most important words.

“Mommy loves you,” she echoes. She imagines it rolling out from the pod into the reaches of deep space, her own tiny imprint on this universe, a neat little package containing all the love she has always held but never knew how to express. Perhaps, in time, someone else with a machine that outpaces light will pick it up, and it will make them smile too.

“Mommy loves you. M-Mommy loves you.”

The lights in the suit finally flicker and die. The world goes blessedly silent and dark. Na-Yeong sighs out a long, tired breath, and thinks about family and death and the bright gleaming pinpoint of a soul, and how maybe when God made the universe He wove all three of these things from the vast, unbreakable fabric of something called Love.

There is no such thing as time or distance, when measured in devotion.

Deep within the thrumming circuits of the pod’s computational system, the radar scanner registers a sudden, familiar blip.

About the Author

Kai Hudson lives in sunny California where she writes, hikes, and rock-climbs with enthusiasm if not skill. Her work has appeared in Podcastle, Interzone, Anathema: Spec from the Margins, and other fine places.

A Brief History of Russian Science Fiction

Alex Shvartsman

It’s telling that the Russian term used to describe speculative fiction doesn’t distinguish between science fiction and fantasy. The word is fantastika (фантастика)—the literature of the fantastic. It is used equally to reference the Three Laws stories of Asimov and the Middle Earth tales of Tolkien. It is this lack of distinction—combined with Russia’s rich heritage of fairy tales and its rigorous education in mathematics and the sciences—that may be responsible for so many genre-bending tales penned by Russian-speaking authors, which have become classics of world literature. The history of Russian fantastika is inseparable from the history of Russia itself, and the political, economic, and social forces that have shaped it over the course of the twentieth century.

Russians were early adopters of the genre, with a number of science fiction novels appearing in the late nineteenth century. Rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky wrote several such novels to popularize his ideas about space exploration among young readers. A number of other authors followed in the footsteps of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, whose works were popular in translation and remain so even now. From the earliest days, Russian readers of genre literature looked outward, with translations from English, French, Polish, and a variety of other languages matching or exceeding the popularity of domestic offerings.

The Bolshevik revolution and the subsequent civil war that lasted into the 1920s resulted in a schism among Russian speculative writers. Some had embraced the new Soviet regime, whether for ideological reasons or for reasons of convenience (one couldn’t get anything published in the USSR if it defied the Communist Party’s preferred narrative). Writers like Alexander Belyaev (Professor Dowell’s Head, The Amphibian Man) and Aleksei Tolstoy (Aelita, The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin) dominated the pre-World War II field with excellent pulp novels where communist heroes squared off against evil capitalists. Despite their overly politicized message, those works remain classics of Russian science fiction to this day.

On the other end of the spectrum were the dissidents. Writers disillusioned with the Soviet regime, who poured their discontent into their fiction. Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We became an instant classic of dystopian science fiction when it was published in English in 1924, but it was not officially printed in the Soviet Union until 1988, once the policies of perestroika and glasnost reshaped Russian society.

While Zamyatin wrote dystopian fiction, others found ways to criticize the regime through genre satire. Most notably, Mikhail Bulgakov wrote a Soviet-based riff on Wells’ The War of the Worlds titled The Fatal Eggs in 1924, following it a year later with Heart of a Dog—a scathing criticism of Soviet society, but also the general plot of Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon written thirty years earlier. Bulgakov went on to write one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, The Master and Margarita, which may be the earliest example of magical realism. It too did not find publication in the USSR until 1966, when an abbreviated version was serialized in a magazine. It was first published in book form in 1973 and was only reprinted with a significant print run in 1980.

While The Master and Margarita and We both had an undeniable influence on world literature and are rightfully cited as some of the greatest Russian literary works of their era, they were not discovered by the majority of Russian readers until many decades later, and therefore may have been paradoxically less influential on the development of other genre fiction in Russia than fiction outside of its borders—similar to the way Moby Dick did not become a major influence in English literature until many decades after it was published.

After the communists had consolidated power, genre writers hoping to get their work past the censors had to adhere to certain formulas. The future they envisioned had to depict a society where communism had won, and the villains were often the Americans and other holdout regressive capitalists. Much of this literature was derivative of Belyaev and Tolstoy and ultimately forgettable.

Many talented voices were silenced or at least muted by the Soviet regime, never to earn the level of posthumous success enjoyed by the likes of Bulgakov. Consider, for example, the career of Yefim Zozulya: he may have been the greatest fabulist of his generation, and one of the most interesting writers of dark, speculative, and macabre short fiction in 1920s Russia. He was both prolific and successful, his works published in popular literary magazines. His short story “The Tale of Ak and Humanity” directly inspired Zamyatin’s We and may be the foundational work of the anti-utopian genre. And yet, if you’ve never heard of him before, you would be in good company with most Russian-speaking fans today, save for a loyal but relatively minor cult following.

As Soviet censorship flourished, it became more and more difficult for Zozulya to find homes for his intellectual and potentially subversive stories. He barely managed to publish a few stories in the 1930s, and his work was becoming less ambitious and more conformist during this era. Although he was never arrested or directly prosecuted by the regime, his career was successfully terminated. When Russia was invaded and drawn into the Second World War in 1941, fifty-year-old Zozulya volunteered for the front and was mortally wounded in battle a month later.

A slim collection of his short stories was reprinted in 1962, but it wasn’t until the Internet age that his work was rediscovered by critics and connoisseurs.

Zozulya’s tragic biography is indicative of why there was a significant gap in quality genre fiction coming out of Russia during the Stalin era. It wasn’t until the late 1950s that notable speculative works began to pop up again, with increasing frequency and quality.

The herald of this mid-century renaissance was Ivan Yefremov. His best-known work was Andromeda Nebula, a space opera set in a communist utopian future. Although the book was no literary masterpiece, and its characters were largely mouthpieces for Yefremov’s ideas, the sheer scope and scale of the story was groundbreaking for Russian science fiction, perhaps in a way similar to E. E. “Doc” Smith’s works among their early American counterparts.

In a 2006 interview, Boris Strugatsky explained: “[Yefremov] has shown how one can and should write modern SF, and thus has ushered a new era of Soviet SF. Of course, those times were already different, the Stalin Ice Age was nearing its end, and I think that even without Andromeda, Soviet SF would soon start a new course. But the publication of Andromeda has become a symbol of the new era, its banner, in some sense. Without it, the new growth would have been an order of magnitude more difficult, and a thaw in our SF wouldn’t have come until later.”

Inspired by Yefremov’s example, young authors began producing more ambitious and interesting works, and while the vast majority of domestic fiction remained forgettable, more outstanding authors and works emerged during the Cold War.

As fantastika was viewed by the government primarily as literature for the youth, some of the best authors to have emerged in that period were writing children’s books. Vladislav Krapivin, who wrote both speculative and realistic fiction, inspired a generation of authors, including Sergei Lukyanenko. Kir Bulychev’s books, and especially his Girl from the Future series of short stories and novellas, captured the imaginations of young Russian readers in the 1970s and 1980s, much as Heinlein’s juveniles did for American readers. As with Belyaev and Tolstoy, Bulychev’s stories provided source material for countless films, cartoons, and TV shows, and remain popular in the present.

Popular science magazines played an enormous role in publishing both domestic and translated fiction, as well as many short stories. Throughout the Soviet Union era, there was no such thing as a “science fiction magazine.” There were many pop sci publications that serialized novels or published short stories in every issue, but never an equivalent of Amazing Stories or Weird Tales.

The Strugatsky brothers (Roadside Picnic, Stalker) dominated and defined Russian science fiction in the latter half of the twentieth century. From space exploration and alien contact, to supernatural thrillers, to humorous urban fantasy, the writing team of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky produced a string of bestsellers henceforth unequaled in Russian genre literature.

Some of the other notable writers of the seventies and eighties include Olga Larionova (The Sea Sonata, The Leopard from atop Mt. Kilimanjaro) and Lyudmila Kozinets (The Broken Chain, Three Seasons of the Meister).

The censors tightly controlled which Western books were allowed to be translated and published in Russia. They tended toward stories they deemed critical of capitalism and modern Western society, with uneven results. As such, Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics stories were widely published, but the Foundation series was obviously not. Those international authors whose work was seen by the censors as critical of capitalism (whether or not this was their intention) were published and often developed an enormous fan base in the USSR. Ironically, the works of Clifford Simak and Robert Sheckley are far more widely recognized in Russia than in the United States nowadays. Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles was extremely popular. However, like so many books of the time, it was translated and published without the author’s permission. Bradbury is said to have flown into a rage when asked to sign Russian editions of his book.

The proliferation of copy machine technology allowed the Russian samizdat to flourish. Banned works including We and The Master and Margarita were passed from reader to reader despite the inherent risks. In addition, many fan translations of popular Western novels that weren’t approved by the censors were also circulated.

In the late 1980s, as the Soviet Union was crumbling, it became possible to publish all manner of works, both translated and original, and there was an enormous boom in genre publishing. As republics seceded and economies tanked, the trend among Russian writers once again turned dystopian, with many imagining the horrors of the upcoming civil wars. And as the economy stabilized by the late 1990s, many Russian writers turned to aspirational stories, where Russia was depicted as having regained its dominant standing in the world community. Many of the books published in the 1990s and 2010s could be considered stylistic throwbacks to 1960s and 1970s Western science fiction. This is due to the fact that most of the translated works these younger writers grew up reading were from that era; their generation missed the New Age and the experimental Western sci-fi of the 1980s almost entirely.

The most notable standout in the nineties was Sergei Lukyanenko. A prolific writer, he has written everything from space opera to cyberpunk to alternate history, steadily gaining popularity and fans, but it was the Night Watch urban fantasy series launched in 1998 that propelled him to stardom. He remains the most popular Russian-language fantasist today. Some of the other outstanding authors from this era include Andrei Lazarchuk (Those Who Were Late to Summer, The Hyperborea Plague) and the husband-and-wife team of Sergey and Marina Dyachenko (Vita Nostra, Daughter from the Dark), whose books were recently published in English.

The Dyachenkos were among the pioneers of traditional fantasy, a subgenre that was virtually nonexistent in Russian fantastika until the 1990s. Fantasy works were hardly ever translated into Russian during the Soviet era, either, with the notable exception of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings series, which was enormously popular and shaped the Russian conception of fantasy literature while works of Robert E. Howard, Lin Carter, and the like weren’t published until the nineties.

A number of science fiction magazines have launched and closed their doors since then. For whatever reason, a short fiction environment similar to that of American zines has never emerged in Russia. Not even with the advent of the Internet have we seen strong, consistent webzines emerging in the Russian language.

Which isn’t to say that there isn’t an abundance of quality short fiction; it has taken a unique form, thriving through online contests. Authors are given a tight deadline (usually from a couple of days to a couple of weeks) to write a themed short story. Hundreds of entries are judged anonymously by the entrants, and (in some contests) the top entries are handed over to celebrity judges to select the winners. The theme is usually provided by a celebrity guest; these have included authors such as Liu Cixin, Lois McMaster Bujold, and Neil Gaiman.

Because the entrants are anonymous, it is commonplace for even the most successful authors to participate and test their mettle against the up-and-comers. Perhaps the best-known of such contests is Rvanaya Grelka (Рваная Грелка)—which translates as “The ripped hot water-bottle,” a reference to a humorous idiomatic expression implying an easy and complete victory—which has been ongoing since 2001. It’s been won by established pros such as Sergei Lukyanenko and Leonid Kaganov, among others, but it’s also served as a platform for new and emerging authors.

The new generation of writers, who have grown up in post-Soviet Russia and the age of the Internet, are far more likely to experiment and produce unusual and interesting stories in the spirit, the wit, and the genre-bending tradition of Bulgakov. It’s a great privilege to read and to help share with Anglophone readers the writing of his spiritual successors.

About the Author

Alex Shvartsman is a writer, translator, and anthologist from Brooklyn, NY. His political fantasy novel Eridani’s Crown was published in 2019. His short fiction and translations have appeared in Analog, Asimov’s, F&SF, Strange Horizons, and many other venues.

Raising Science Fictional Children:
A Conversation with Kelly Robson

Arley Sorg

Before Kelly Robson was a celebrated science fiction writer, she competed in rodeos, and was even a rodeo princess. “I like to say that being a rodeo princess is like having all the glamour and none of the responsibility. Also to be clear, this isn’t a beauty contest—it’s a riding contest.” Robson was born in Edmonton, Alberta and grew up in Hinton, Alberta, just east of the Canadian Rockies.

Even as a kid Robson had the writing bug: She wrote a horse book called Born Wild in fifth grade, and in sixth grade she wrote a one-act play based on C. S. Lewis’ The Last Battle. At sixteen, she decided she wanted to be a writer after reading Connie Willis’ “Blued Moon” in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine (January 1984). Robson earned a degree in English from the University of Alberta, and from 2008–2012, wrote the wine and spirits column for Canada’s biggest women’s magazine, Chatelaine.

Robson’s first fiction publication was in the February 2015 issue of Clarkesworld, “The Three Resurrections of Jessica Churchill.” That same year “Waters of Versailles” was published by Tor.com, “Two-Year Man” was published by Asimov’s, and “The Gladiator Lie” came out in anthology Licence Expired: The Unauthorized James Bond. The response from the genre community was immediate: “The Three Resurrections of Jessica Churchill” was a Sturgeon Award finalist, “Two-Year Man” was a Sunburst Award finalist, and “Waters of Versailles” was a finalist for the World Fantasy and SFWA Nebula awards and won an Aurora Award.

Since then, among many other accolades, including being a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Sturgeon, Locus, Sunburst, and Astounding awards, her 2017 novelette A Human Stain (Tor.com) won a Nebula Award and her 2018 novella, Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach (Tor.com) won an Aurora Award.

Kelly Robson lived in Vancouver, Canada for twenty-two years before moving to Toronto with her wife, author A.M. Dellamonica. Robson’s debut collection, Alias Space and Other Stories, is just out from Subterranean Press.

You hit the scene running in 2015: Not only did you have work in pro venues like Clarkesworld and Tor.com right out of the gate, but some of your work landed major awards nominations, and “Waters of Versailles” won an Aurora award. What was breaking in for you, how did it happen?

Like most overnight successes, it took decades. I had a long apprenticeship as a passionate SFFH short story reader from teenagerhood on. As a younger adult, I flirted with writing from time to time, but eventually made the commitment in 2005 to give it an honest hard try. I got my first publication nine years after deciding to buckle down, which seems like a reasonable length of time to learn to do a difficult thing at a professional level.

Aside from learning to wrestle with craft, most of the struggles were psychological—giving myself the permission to write, learning to ignore all the back-of-the-head voices that said I couldn’t. What’s neat is that I had no expectations, absolutely no idea that my work would be embraced by the most prestigious venues or win a lifetime-dream award.

I’ve actually wondered if someday I’ll wake up and find that I’ve been in a coma all this time. I’m only just beginning to get over that now.

Did the awards and acclaim have an impact on your writing or process?

I didn’t feel any pressure. I continue to be just so happy to have finally learned to write good stories. Award nominations are exciting, and winning an award is a fabulous surprise, but the biggest and best accomplishment is just writing a story that works.

Unfortunately, awards don’t make stories happen any quicker or easier. If they did, all bets would be off! Also, I’ve been on the edges of the SFFH writing world for long enough to know that plenty of superb writers never get nominations. With no false modesty: Luck has played a big part in my writing career so far. Hard work and skill too, but lots of luck.

Has anything changed about your writing—craft, approach, or anything else—since those days before landing your first sales?

I still have my full-time day job. Drafting hasn’t gotten any faster—three months for a story is typical—and wonky work still gets trunked.

One big change is now I get invitations to travel as a writer. The Future Affairs Administration (a Chinese short fiction organization) has brought me to China twice—amazing trips that blew my mind in so many ways. One of my Spanish publishers would like me to visit them when international travel is possible. I also got to visit the Banff Centre for Arts for some futurist consulting.

A very good change is that I have found some rubrics to help me solve storytelling problems. For me, when a story isn’t working, it’s usually a character problem. I wrote about this for Clarkesworld—“Luke Versus Han: An Approach to Characterization.”

Your work ranges from light and fun to violent and dark, even going into horror. Are there specific things that a dark/grim/violent narrative does for you (or for readers in general) that appeals to you as a writer?

For me, horror is the most difficult genre to write, first because of the emotional and sensory precision, and second, because I think horror should be applied with great sensitivity. I use horror when I try to address something that makes me really angry. I don’t get any joy from writing terrible things, so I have to have a really good reason to reach for a terror weapon—something besides just trying to make a good story.

You take on different topics, dig into different moods, write different kinds of stories, and use your fantastic imagination to wonderful effect. Are there aspects of storytelling/writing that you feel are more challenging for you, things you struggle with? And how do you deal with those elements?

That’s a huge compliment. I’m passionately interested in a wide range of things, and short stories give me the freedom to do whatever I want, without worrying if readers will follow me from book to book.

Writing novel-length is definitely a challenge. I like to hold the shape of a story in my mind, and past forty thousand words, that’s very difficult. It’s not necessarily a writing problem, it’s a thinking problem. I get to about forty thousand words and I’m no longer sure what I’m doing and why. I lose the shape and start flailing. I’ll keep working at it and get there eventually.

Your debut collection, Alias Space, offers readers fourteen pieces of fiction, spanning your career to date. If readers looked at three stories in this book, what would you want them to be, and why?

I’d like people to read “Alias Space,” “A Study in Oils,” and “We Who Live in The Heart”: near-future, mid-future, and far-future stories, because SF has always been and will always be the place where my heart rests.

Publishers Weekly gave Alias Space a glowing review, saying, among other things, “Robson’s work also frequently touches on feminism, gender, and queerness . . . ” Is feminism an important aspect of your work—is it deliberate, is it inevitable? Is it an accurate descriptor? Or is it an interpretation that doesn’t always fit?

Sure, all my stories are intersectional feminist, even when it’s not overt. It’s the air I breathe and it’s inevitable, yes, because I don’t even think about it. All art is political.

Gary K. Wolfe, in his Locus review of Alias Space, said, “ . . . as eclectic as her settings and narrative modes might be, Robson consistently writes about characters who, within their limitations, simply want to do better.” What is the key to writing great characters?

I have a trick to this, which I wrote about in “Luke Versus Han: An Approach to Characterization.” The TL;DR is that a character should know either who they are or what they’re doing. Not both. Not neither. I also tend to write characters that are workaholics. I think it’s because it makes them feel driven, and I have to temper that in the rewrite.

Also, I like to write about people who, in addition to emotions, have concepts and misconceptions, obsessions, judgments, prejudices, analyses flawed or accurate, suspicions, et cetera, et cetera. Everyone has a system for ordering and understanding the world. We don’t just feel, we analyze. All the time.

Looking at your career so far, and in particular, at the stories in this collection, are there themes and ideas in your fiction that you often come back to, that stand out as more important to you, or about which you feel passionate?

I’m constantly writing about people who choose (or are chosen by) parenthood. This is something I can’t seem to get away from; it pops up all the time. Part of the reason is because I’m interested in how systems work, and child-rearing is so rarely acknowledged as an underpinning of all human economic endeavor. If the world doesn’t have a semi-indentured class who are bound by religion and/or tradition to bear and raise children, how is the world getting peopled? Let’s not pretend that humanity wouldn’t die out if child-rearing wasn’t something most people were coerced into. But there’s also, of course, a huge emotional aspect to it, and I like that tension between the practical and the emotional. Parenthood: is it a job or a calling?

This is an especially weird obsession because I don’t have kids and never wanted them. But then, I think lots of queer people obsess over parenthood because it’s just never something we can take for granted.

Are there stories in this collection that were harder to write than others, or pieces that were far more personal than others?

Writing “La Vitesse,” I finally figured out how to use my own past as material. It’s funny to claim an action story about dragon killing as an illustration of my soul and the soil it grew in, but there we have it. I’m addicted to writing stories set in my hometown now. It’s so fun to populate that lonely landscape with stories. The stories live there now. They’re as real as the dirt.

What else are you working on now, and what do you have coming up that you can tell us about?

In summer 2022, I have a thirty-six thousand-word novella coming from Tor.com Publishing called High Times in the Low Parliament. It’s a neo-medieval lesbian stoner comedy with fairies, and is certified both hilarious and adorable by all who’ve read it. Right now, I’m working on the sequel, Down and Out in the High Parliament, which I hope will be even funnier than the original. I’m having a hoot writing light during these darker times.

About the Author

Arley Sorg is co-Editor-in-Chief at Fantasy Magazine. A 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate, he writes SF/F/H, reviews for Cascadia Subduction Zone Magazine, is senior editor at Locus magazine, and associate editor at Lightspeed and Nightmare magazines.

The Cost of Doing Good:
A Conversation with Octavia Cade

Arley Sorg

New Zealand author Octavia Cade had always planned to be a scientist when she grew up. “But as much as I love science, scientific writing sucked all my enthusiasm out. It’s the worst. It’s boring and inaccessible and scientists have no right to whine about people misunderstanding science when they have done everything they can to keep them from it.” Cade studied botany as an undergrad, and “became fascinated with algae and the intertidal zone.” She earned her master’s in biology, looking at reproductive strategies of a native seagrass, and her PhD in science communication at the University of Otago, “the biggest scicomm center in the world . . . and it’s a fantastic place to study.”

Cade attended Clarion West in 2016 and was the 2020 writer-in-residence at Massey University/Square Edge—the first time the residency has gone to a speculative fiction writer. But she’d been landing fiction sales long beforehand, starting with “Trading Rosemary” in the July 2010 issue of Bards and Sages Quarterly. By the time she started at Clarion West, she’d already sold a slew of work to a variety of venues, including Strange Horizons, The Dark, Apex, and Cosmos; she’d self-published novel The August Birds; and her short story, “The Mussel Eater,” published at The Book Smugglers, had landed a BSFA nomination.

Octavia Cade has been nominated for an Elgin Award and a Stoker Award, and has won three Vogel Awards, for novellas The Ghost of Matter (Paper Road Press) and The Convergence of Fairy Tales (The Book Smugglers), and for her articles on food and horror written for The Book Smugglers. Besides these, she’s written academic papers on speculative fiction, she has two poetry collections (Chemical Letters published by Popcorn Press and Mary Shelley Makes a Monster published by Aqueduct Press), a short story collection The Mythology of Salt and Other Stories (Lethe Press), and the well-received novel The Stone Wētā, expanded from a Clarkesworld story and published by Paper Road Press in 2020.

Octavia Cade’s newest title is novella The Impossible Resurrection of Grief, which she wrote during her Massey residency. The book is due from Stelliform Press on May 20, 2021.

What were some of the most important genre works for you when you were younger, and has your view of those works changed over time?

My parents were both big fans of SFF, and my mum made sure that me and my sister watched Star Trek. She didn’t have to work very hard to get us both interested, we very quickly became absolutely obsessed with it. The same with the Narnia series. I had the books—The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is the first book I really remember reading—but we also had the clunky old BBC version where poor Lucy had a bowl cut and the beavers had the worst costumes of all time, and we loved it. I did not love The Last Battle. It remains the only book I have ever thrown across a room in disgust. Child me hated it and adult me does as well—misogynistic, death-glorifying claptrap that it is. (One of my SFF bucket list goals is to edit a collection of stories about Susan, where she fucks off out of Narnia into the real world and is happy and successful there.)

Perhaps the most important books for me, though, were The Dark Is Rising series by Susan Cooper and Under the Mountain by NZ writer Maurice Gee. I read them over and over again and still do. They were the first stories I read where the good guys did absolutely terrible things in the service of good, and just had to live with it. Under the Mountain had its preteen protagonists commit genocide. Admittedly, it was against the most terrifying alien species I had ever encountered in fiction—to this day, nothing creeps me out like the Wilberforces—and if they hadn’t done it, all life on Earth would have been destroyed . . . but it was still genocide. Cooper and Gee dumped these terrible choices in front of their readers and really made them weigh what good cost. I adored them then and still do, so I guess you could say my reading opinions set solid early.

Did these books or stories have any measurable effect on your writing?

Yes. Choices cost. I do a lot of writing involving science history and the choices made there—the development of chemical warfare, the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb. Some scientists refused to work on these things. Some couldn’t wait to do so. Some of them, afterward, were crippled by guilt, and some were eager to work on the next iteration of horror. Neither The Dark Is Rising series nor Under the Mountain involved ethics in science, but every story I write about ethics and science is traced back to the influence of those stories.

You have two novels out, a number of novellas, and at this point, fifty or so short stories. Is your approach to writing short fiction different in important ways from your approach with novella- or novel-length work?

Ha. No. My longer work is essentially standalone short stories strung together. This has made a lot of the longer stuff particularly challenging to sell, as it often ends up quite unfocused, sort of unmoored within itself. I don’t care. I love writing short fiction. Novels are a chore, and I can only manage them by writing short fiction and smashing it together in the hope it’ll somehow stick. I actually like the amorphous, fractured nature of the faux-novels I write—I write exactly what I want to read.

What I like about short fiction is how much it expects from writers . . . and from readers. You don’t have the space, as a writer, to make every connection, to round out every character and plot point. You have to leave space and subtlety and trust that readers can fill in the gaps themselves. It encourages interaction between writer and reader in a very different way than longer works do, I think.

Your first short story publication was in 2010, and your most recent novel came out in 2020. Has your writing changed in specific ways since that first publication? Did working on novels impact the way you write shorter fiction?

It’s changed in that I have a much clearer focus in what I want to write now. The early stories were pretty basic, some of them—although the 2012 vampire short “Cuckoo” is still one of the most layered, interesting things I’ve ever written, I think—and they were mostly just fumbling around. I’d never wanted to be a writer as a kid, so I hadn’t any set expectations when I started. The better I got, however, and the more I worked, the clearer my focus became: science history, ecological fiction, extremely pragmatic and often very restrained female characters, who tend to come across as unpleasantly self-centered. (That’s the influence of Susan, I suppose—whatever else they are, they know their worth and they do not apologize for it.)

You recommend readers look at “We Feed the Bears of Fire and Ice” and “The Stone Weta.” What is it about these stories that makes them stand out for you?

They’re clever and they’re vicious. They’re products of anger. When I talk about science and ethics, this is what it comes to: the choices made by producers of science, and the choices made by consumers of it. “We Feed the Bears of Fire and Ice” links news articles of science being effectively censored by governments, and “The Stone Wētā” also developed from a news story of science being archived across borders, in order to save it from the censorship of anti-science governments.

These things matter. I’m not fumbling around with short stories for the hell of it. I do it because I have something to say.

“When I’m not thinking about science I’m thinking about horror.” Your work has appeared in a number of respected horror venues. What do you enjoy most about writing and reading horror, and what makes for a great piece of horror fiction?

Comprehension. I don’t care about slasher horror, and I don’t care about gore. I care about compromise, and horror is the genre of compromise. What will you do, what will you sacrifice? I had a story last year in The Dark called “Otto Hahn Speaks to the Dead.” The dead was Clara Immerwahr, who was a chemist married to another chemist: Fritz Haber, the guy who invented chlorine gas for use in WWI trenches. She was disgusted by him, and who can blame her.

After the first successful use of gas he came home and threw a party, and at the end of the party she shot herself in their garden with her husband’s gun. It was preferable, I imagine, to ever having to touch him again. Clara and Haber had a young son—she died in his arms. Haber went back to the front the next day, in order to gas more of other people’s sons, which just goes to show how much he cared for his own. Their son eventually killed himself as well.

That, to me, is horror in its purest form. It’s evil and tragedy and power, and temptation, because so many scientists have been so tempted.

It is so easy to justify the things we want to do.

One of the things The Impossible Resurrection of Grief tackles is human impact on the environment and nature. What is your relationship to this topic—is it something you come back to often? Is it something you’ve always addressed in your work?

It’s not something I’ve always addressed, but it’s increasingly become the focus of my work and I don’t see that changing. It’s the issue of our time, and the consequences will be monstrous.

What was the journey like with The Impossible Resurrection of Grief? What was the initial inspiration, how did the story develop, and did the book change much from conception?

The Great Barrier Reef is dying. That’s my inspiration. It’s dying and I’ve never seen it, and isn’t that an example of framing horror in petty and personal ways? An ecosystem you can see from space, and its absence is primarily filtered by how it will affect me. And I could go and see it, but the travel it would take to get there, the carbon cost, would push the Reef just a little closer to the edge. So the question is, fundamentally, how selfish am I? How much can I justify my choices? I don’t have children. That’s an enormous saving in carbon—does that mean I have earned a trip to the Reef, to see it before warming waters bleach it entirely?

I suspect I will justify it to myself one day. (It’s so easy to justify the things we want to do.)

What were the most challenging aspects of writing The Impossible Resurrection of Grief?

Probably the tone. It’s this bastard mix of science fiction and fairy tale and the uncanny, and it’s meant to be destabilizing. It’s meant to leave holes and unanswered questions and to be just plain fucking disturbing. I know I said above that I like to leave spaces for readers to inhabit, but sometimes the urge to explain things is so strong you need to take it out back and drown it in a bucket before you start telling people what to think instead of trying to make them decide for themselves.

Ruby, at the end of the novella, is on a knife-edge. Which way is she going to jump? It’s irrelevant. It doesn’t matter at all—what matters is what readers think they would do in her place. It’s a make your own ending, because it has to be, because that is the world that we live in so let’s look it in the face and make a choice and know what that choice is as we make it.

The book also delves into friendship, loneliness, and of course, The Grief. The writing feels intimate; the narrative brings the reader in close, and important moments feel deeply personal. What is the heart of this story for you?

Ecological grief. It’s an issue that’s getting more and more attention in academic literature. And it’s something, I think, that everyone can relate to. Most people have an environment, or an organism, that they’re attached to on a fundamental level—if it died, they’d bleed tears for it for the rest of their days. They may not understand why—and why am I so attached to an ecosystem I’ve never seen?—but that doesn’t matter either. Attached they are, and with the increasing effects of climate change and biodiversity loss, ecological grief is becoming an ever more pressing issue. And it’s a fascinating one . . .

What else are you working on, what else do you have coming up that readers can look forward to?

Oh, lots! I’m finishing up a mixed collection of short fiction and essays, The Biological Book of the Dead, that focuses on the intersections between science, experimentalism, ethics, and extinction. As well as the Massey residency last year, I spent some time as an artist-in-residence at the Christchurch Arts Centre, where I worked on a YA novel about Ernest Rutherford (I’m still working on it). And in July this year I have another residency at the Michael King Writers Centre in Auckland, where I’m working on a short fiction collection about conservation science in New Zealand after the apocalypse and how all the survivors come together to save our native birds. Basically because the poor things are all so endangered anyway and I’d prefer to see an optimistic postapocalyptic story, for once, where success is rated on a different scale than how violent you can be or how many resources (human or otherwise) that you can accumulate.

About the Author

Arley Sorg is co-Editor-in-Chief at Fantasy Magazine. A 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate, he writes SF/F/H, reviews for Cascadia Subduction Zone Magazine, is senior editor at Locus magazine, and associate editor at Lightspeed and Nightmare magazines.

Editor’s Desk:
A Quarantine Soapbox

Neil Clarke

Much like Matt Dixon’s robot on the cover of this month’s issue, I’ve felt a little boxed in this month. I’m currently in mandatory quarantine following a COVID test for the third time in the last two weeks. I should make it clear that I’m not at risk, though. This is solely for the protection of the doctors who will be performing my fifth procedure of the year. The fourth was just over a week ago, and the other quarantine was for a procedure that had to be canceled when the staff at the medical center looked at my chart and saw my history of cardiac issues.

I’ve tried to put all this time locked away to good use, as I had hundreds of packages to send out to print subscribers—all those back issues finally arrived from the new printer—and managed to get through them done ahead of schedule. The local postmaster hates me for it, but I was able to get everything to the post office during the small gap between quarantines. The packages are now making their way around the world.

Amidst test results and scheduling appointments, the 2021 Hugo Award finalists were announced. I was very pleased to see “Monster” by Naomi Kritzer and “Helicopter Story” by Isabel Fall—both from our January 2020 issue—on the ballot for Best Novelette. Unfortunately, if you go back and try to read them, you’ll only find one. Isabel’s story (originally published under another name) was removed from the issue after some particularly unpleasant and distressing online attacks and statements were made against her, the story, its defenders, and us. It’s unfortunate that legitimate and well-intentioned critiques of the story were lost among conspiracy theories and indefensible speculation about the author’s identity. We lost not only the story, but the opportunity to have a critical conversation about what it actually said. Instead, it became a story about what happened.

She ultimately requested that we remove the story for her own health, which, intended or not, was placed in jeopardy by the perpetrators of those attacks. We honored that request and continue to support Isabel’s right to have it published (or not published) where and how she sees fit. Will it return to publication? That’s Isabel’s decision and something she’s currently considering. Given all that happened, I do ask that people give her the time to properly weigh her options and respect her decision whatever it may be.

Every year, there are stories on the ballot that people don’t like or even hate. The fact of the matter is that a significant number of people believed she was worthy and legitimately honored her work. We celebrate both Isabel’s and Naomi’s nominations and all the other works/people on the ballot this year, even the ones we didn’t personally like or necessarily agree with.

This nomination is a big deal to Isabel, her fans, and us. It would be nice if more people would have respect for the moment, but in the Twitter age that would be nothing short of miraculous. Knowing it would come, even with the title change, the rain on the parade still felt painfully and disappointingly fast. However, to honor that side of the equation with more oxygen would simply add further insult to existing injury. Instead, we’d like to address the larger group of people we saw more cheering her on (publicly and privately). Your respect, support, and kind words mean more than you know. You are very much appreciated. Special kudos also go to the few people that actually apologized for their role in the original abuse. That gives hope where it is needed.

Stepping off my soapbox, I’d also like to thank the people who saw fit to nominate me for Best Editor Short Form. This is my ninth time on the ballot, and it never gets old. I’m currently 0-8, but this is a historically tough category. I’ve had the honor of losing to some of my favorite editors in the field and perhaps someday they’ll be able to say the same of me. In the meantime, I’m just thrilled to be a part of the gang. Thank you.

That’s all I have for now. I must return to my quarantine box. By the time you read this, my next (and almost definitely last) procedure will be completed. Hopefully without the unexpected. I look forward to all of us having a wonderful and safe May. Take care!

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine and Forever Magazine; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and a eight-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, The Eagle has Landed, and the Best Science Fiction of the Years series. His most recent anthology, The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 5, was published in October by Night Shade Books. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two sons.

Isolation

Cover Art by Matt Dixon

About the Artist

Matt Dixon is a freelance illustrator and concept artist from the UK. Digital art first captured his imagination when he began to assemble images from ASCII characters on a Commodore VIC-20 way back in 1980. Happily, things have moved along a little and Adobe Photoshop allows him to achieve slightly more sophisticated results these days.

His long association with the games industry began when he first contributed art to a video game in 1988. He was employed by one of the UK’s largest independent games developers for more than a decade, initially as a production artist, then as an art lead. During this time he was privileged to be involved with numerous high profile game and movie licenses, including Harry Potter, Crash Bandicoot, Spyro the Dragon and Pirates of the Caribbean.