Promises We Made Under A Brick-Dark Sky

Karen Osborne

I was standing on the dock when the angels fell.

Their blades stilled. Their lights dimmed. Their corpses shattered on streets and shingles and skulls, all the way from the cathedral at the crest of the world down to the blackwater at the end of it, where I waited on the dock with my baby. The noise was all crashing and squealing and screams—a bawling dirge for the world as it was, and a birthing-song for the world it would become.

From here, I could see into the windows of the bayside chapel, where the fisher-monks that had taken me in took their daily guidance from the god. All that remained was the scattered, swimming static of divine death, as cold and gray as a recycled human heart. The fisher-monks spilled out onto the street, screaming about the steel-prowed beast and the boundless obliteration and the end of all things. They’d fed us for eighteen months, taught me their prophecies, showed me how to fish and swim and survive. They’d taught me the divine language.

And I’d killed their god with it.

Our god.

Brothers and sisters, until that moment—sweating, shaking in ecstatic terror, my arms aching with the warm and wriggling weight of the most important person that ever lived—I did not believe the god could die. Certainly a god as powerful as ours, that dictated how we were to live and farm and marry, would not allow itself to be killed. But dead it was, and taking the world with it; far above, fires had caught where the angels had fallen, clogging the brick-dark sky with waves of black smoke. I could taste the broken air already, bright with stinking incandescence.

No, I thought, no, I killed the god to save us, not to burn us, and prayers sprung to my lips and died there in one breath. My daughter buried her face in the crook of my neck and cried, and in the blank space between her first long wail and the huffing, anger-caught sobs that followed, I doubted.

“He’s coming,” I whispered. “He’s on his way. Your daddy is coming. The ship is coming.”

It was the only prayer I had left.

Her smoke-drowned cry curled around my brain stem like a shot of adrenaline. Her little knuckles turned white on the edges of my robe, crying and crying and crying, screaming mamamama like she knew what I’d done. I knew my prayer would not help. In her circumscribed life so far, her father was as useless and dead as the god.

And with that, a new thought slipped in with the silt from the street: that the god had never existed in the first place.

That we were the god now, my daughter and I.

Steret arrived minutes later, out of breath from the run, a gun in each hand, looking for all the world like the burning wind delivered him there. Brothers and sisters, he was barely a silhouette of the boy I had known in the hills, a ragged black space drawn dark against the orange flames behind him. He was older now, but just as beautiful, fine silt and sand coloring his ash-bright hair.

I moved to greet him, my lips parting, joy in my throat, to say meet your daughter, finally, take her, look at her, when a woman in city silks, clattered heavy and unexpected onto the dock behind me. She was round-hipped and wife-beautiful where I was hunger-thin and monk-plain, and my elation choked in the smoke whirling in drunken circles around our feet.

“We need to move, Ster,” she said. “Where’s the ship?”

I moved my crying child to my other shoulder, fashioning a baby carrier out of a forgotten fishing net. “We?”

“The prophecy says a ship will come. We need to be on it.” The woman paused. Narrowed her eyes. “You didn’t tell her.”

Steret wavered. “How was I supposed to tell her?”

“A letter?”

“And have it be tracked by the angels?”

“You should have told her.”

He hauled in a shuddering breath. Checked his gun. “Elissa. This is Anaro, my wife. My second wife.”

I felt a wild dizziness. The angels gave him two wives while I was waiting for him to return? And he didn’t push back?

“This was for us,” I said. “You and I and the baby, you said there was a place we could be together. You said—what if we could live for fifty years and marry whom we pleased? You said—what if I could marry only you?”

Brothers and sisters, this promise had been a hot infection in my heart for the last two years, this memory of the two of us lying together on the hill above the cemetery farm, so close to heaven that we could see the rough outline of the sky above us, as brown and loamy as the ground below. We met as our mothers entered the recycler, as the monks tried to comfort us, saying that their death was blessed, that they would live underground forever, feeding the teeming thousands in the city below. We knew better about that—about our mothers, about ourselves, about all of it.

There was nothing blessed about how we were dying, about the illness that came up through the lungs in blood and black ichor. And the dead interred in the mushroom fields were getting younger every year. I had already begun to cough. Steret’s brothers were already dead and recycled—so, so young. And so we’d spent those long funereal days near the horizon, our hands and bodies and lips speaking a poetry I’d never thought possible.

And when Steret returned the city to enter his god-dictated marriage, I discovered there was a network for girls like me, for girls who are too poor and too sick with ichor to marry, who love someone hard enough to break the god’s restrictions on when a baby can be born.

And now—

Steret went silent and straight. In the bright firelight, I could see his cheeks flush, and he pointed at my daughter.

“Is that—”

“I haven’t named her.”

“Focus, Steret,” Anaro snapped.

I swung my eyes back onto the other woman. “She isn’t coming.”

Steret sighed. “The plan didn’t work. The cathedral guards wouldn’t let me in. I had to improvise. Anaro had to bring the prayer to the cathedral in my stead. You don’t expect me to leave her to die?”

I pointed up the hill. “Obviously, she messed it up.”

Anaro exhaled. “I didn’t write the prayer. If there is anyone who is responsible for this, it’s you.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“Of course you didn’t.” Her eyes flickered down to my squirming baby. “But that’s your thing, huh?”

Brothers and sisters, these are my true confessions. I will be frank. I did not want her there. I wanted to rip the gun from Steret’s hand and end the question of this sudden and ant-waisted gulf between us.

But I was not going to be the kind of god I had just slaughtered.

I pointed instead at the bags and crates at the dock, at Steret’s shovels and torches and tunneling tools. “Fine. When the ship comes, carry these aboard.”

Anaro did not answer—just looked over my shoulder. I followed her glassy gaze toward the end of the pier. Beyond was the great, wide darkness where no human could go, with a heavy, dark humidity rolling in—

—no, not just a darkness, a slickening obliteration—

—and behind that, a ship coming.

It was just as the prophecy said—a behemoth of plain, ancient metal, curved and smooth, dark water dripping from the rails and balustrades. It cut the surface of the quiet water like blood welling up around the edge of a knife. No oars, no wheel—just a grinding, growling sound that split the fish in the bay into two frightened schools, their tiny, slippery, ghost-white bodies disappearing into the darkness. I looked, and looked, and looked, but could find no true reason why it would move.

Steret loaded one of the guns and shoved it in my hand. “We were right,” he said. “Get ready. If there are demons aboard, we take the ship for ourselves.”

I looked down at my daughter’s scrunched-up face, her tight fists, her shaking shoulders. I was willing to kill a god for her—so why was I so afraid?

“Steret—”

“We already killed the god,” he said. “You can kill a demon.”

You did nothing, I thought, and then there was no more time to dwell—we watched a rope fly out from the deck of the ship, flopping limp against the edge of the pier. Above, the demons appeared in their hellish orange carapaces, their mock-human faces trapped behind the same clear heavenly material the fisher-monks used in water purification ceremonies. They carried bags marked with the sign of hell: two blood-red lines, crossed in the center.

They breathe a different air, the monks had told me, and they are blind from living in a constant fire humanity could hardly imagine. When they come here, they bring the air of hell with them in baskets on their backs. If you take their helmets off, they choke.

One of the demons opened his mouth, and sound came from a grille in front of his carapace. It sounded like language, like speech, calm like the few memories I had of my father’s voice before the coughing sickness took him below the earth. He moved forward, indicating that he would come down to our level.

“Come no further,” Steret roared. “The ship is ours.”

Behind us, a crowd was forming, a sobbing, angry mass of people covered in soot and tears and utter confusion. Even if I had wanted something different than Steret, even if I thought I could negotiate with demons, it was too late.

I told Steret I would follow him. I had to follow him. He was the one I loved. I yanked the gun from his hand. Held my baby light and kind with one, and the gun tight and hot in the other. I would kill for her, I’d said. Over and over and over.

“Do it!” he screamed.

I aimed. Closed my eyes.

Pulled the trigger.

Brothers and sisters, I know you have many questions about our journey, just as I know you have suffered since the death of the god.

Put simply: the god had to die. The ship had to come. The algorithmic prayers were wrong. The divine mathematics that linked men and women to one another had gone sour and unnoticed by the angels. Why would a god create children just to slip the smoke and ichor into their lungs, so mothers and fathers could watch their children writhe and gasp, their mouths open and breathless to the stone-caught sky? My daughter needed to live. I needed to live. Isn’t that enough of an answer?

We piled on the ship, using ropes and nets and pulleys. The fisher-monks worked in a neighborhood full of mushroom farmers and body recyclers and factory workers, and we took as many of them as we could, until Anaro realized that the ship was moving of its own volition—that even though the demons had died, they’d left behind some still-active prayer. When the ship turned away from the dock and picked up speed, I watched people on the shore throw themselves into the bay, falling under the water because they could not swim, choosing that death over the fire. And then—the city was gone, the world was gone, and from a place no human had ever ventured, we watched orange light hit the russet sky, making torches of the roots of heaven.

I vomited over the side of the ship.

“Get over it,” Anaro said.

“Have some humanity.”

Anaro narrowed her eyes. “You wrote the prayer. I didn’t think you’d be concerned.”

The baby grabbed at my matted hair, and I loosened the carrier, placing her on the deck. My shoulders ached. I needed a break. The baby looked around, her eyes wide, shoving her fingers in her mouth, excited by her new surroundings. “I didn’t know the angels could start fires. There’s only so much air in the world. Nothing we do will matter if we come back to a city full of corpses.”

“You should have thought of that.”

“You shouldn’t have married—”

“Both of you. Stop.” Steret squatted over the demon bodies. He’d dragged them to the center of the top deck and was using his day-knife to cut through their orange carapaces, revealing feet and fingers and faces that looked entirely too human. If I hadn’t already known that we were in the right, I would have started to question myself.

I’d imagined our reunion in shades of red and brown, passionate, and close, and skintight. This felt cold. Gray. Wrong. “Steret, I need you to meet your daughter.”

“In a second,” he said.

“You don’t have to recycle them. There are no machines here, and it’s not like you can bury them in a field.”

Steret didn’t look up from his task. His knife had moved to the demon-skins, slicing into the fatty, bloody layer beneath. “I don’t know what happens if I don’t.”

“Nothing happens. The god is dead. There’s nobody left to stop us living how we choose.”

“Then who sent the ship?”

“The ship is in the prophecy,” I said. “If the colony core machinery can no longer function, an automatic fail-safe beacon will be dispatched, and a rescue ship will arrive within—”

His hand tightened on the knife, which came back red. “I know. But we didn’t think. If the god is dead, who dispatched the ship?”

I felt a stab of bright annoyance. The baby started crawling toward the dead bodies, her fingers raking at the silent bootlaces. “Now you’re troubleshooting?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I didn’t actually think the ship would arrive.”

“You what?”

He looked down.

Behind us, Anaro found something useful to do, organizing the monks and factory workers milling around on the deck. A smart thing to do, replacing the god’s rules and algorithms with a structure that frightened people could follow for now. I was absurdly grateful to her; since I was an illegal mother of an extra mouth, I could not step forward to lead, and if Steret tried, I’d punch him in the jaw.

He must have seen it written on my face, that he’d gone too far, and he dropped the knife. “I got your letters. All of them. And I wasn’t just going to let you die in the basement of some fisher-abbey. I thought I’d humor you.”

“And then what?”

He flushed as red as my anger. “I thought you’d finally realize that the baby wasn’t a good idea, that you’d have it recycled like all the other extras.”

“And die on the street? You told me I’d be the only one! We were in love!”

He stared at the demon’s cracked skull. “We can’t fight reality, Liss.”

“But we did. And we won.”

I heard a squeal. I had not seen the baby crawl forward and close her tiny fingers around the bloodied hilt of the knife. I swore, dropping to the deck like a stone, wrestling the thing out of her deadlocked hands. I cast the knife aside, and it skittered toward the sloshing water; my baby cried. Furious that I’d saved her, just like her father.

“You don’t leave knives out around babies! She doesn’t even have a name, if something happened to her now—”

He blinked. “You never named her?”

“I was waiting on you.”

“I was thinking—”

I swept her up in my arms. “And now you won’t get to.”

With her weight against me, I felt ungainly. My legs burned. I rested my nose in her soft hair. Winced at her wail. She was everything I wanted. The very thing that had destroyed my life. The only person in this dying world I would die for.

And I’d wanted Steret to fall into that place in my life, too—straight back into our time together on the mountain, the smell of fertilizer and soil and fire all around like a benediction. Maybe, maybe, I could make him see—

“I couldn’t just leave Anaro,” he said, quietly, puncturing that dream.

“Like we left everyone else?”

As if summoned by an angel, Anaro appeared behind his shoulder and cleared her throat. The noise felt like a rock to my head.

“He’s right,” she said. “Just because the god is dead doesn’t mean the rules no longer apply. Luckily, though, we just might be able to write our own. You know the god’s language, Elissa; want to see what the monks found?”

I swept up the baby and followed Anaro down the ladder to the deck below. The corridor resembled the cathedral in every single way, almost godlike in its attention to detail. The artificial lights above burned cold like the angel-lamps, and the walls were made of frigid, smooth metal, too thin and too wide to be made by human blacksmiths, as well-worked as the guns we’d left with Steret. Had the guns been made by some hellish power, too?

Anaro coughed, covering her mouth, and I watched with veiled interest as her hand came away clean. I felt immediately conscious of the blood-spotted bandana in my pocket.

“If you’re not sick,” I said, “why is he keeping you around?”

“We shouldn’t fight.”

“He certainly can’t be in love with you.”

She kicked open a compartment door. “Does it matter? I’m pregnant.”

Nervous energy crackled between my ribs. The walls seemed a little closer, a little louder; a thin sheen of water on the deck licked my toes with the swaying of the waves. I felt for all the world like I wanted to drop through the bottom of the ship and drown. I hugged my own child closer.

“But you knew what he swore. That we would live a hundred years together, that he would love only me—”

Anaro set her jaw. “The angels want what they want. Do you think you’re the only miserable terror in this world? Steret’s first wife stayed home because she’d rather have one day alone than a hundred more with us. He’s not keeping me around. He’s keeping the baby around. If I had a choice, I’d be anywhere else. And now I do.”

I felt dizzy. Looked down at my baby. Her luminous, large eyes. Her lips, already lined like they would be for the rest of her life. I tightened the carrier around my shoulder, and she reached out to twist a lock of hair around her finger. To tug. Hard. She wanted to be put down again. “This doesn’t mean we’re friends,” I said.

Anaro laughed, then pointed inside the compartment. “We are definitely not friends.”

I walked in and stopped in my tracks. This was a cathedral; a small one, no question of it. The place crackled with godlight, the instruments of prayer square and stacked and blinking, locked into waterproof cabinets. I saw everything I needed—prayerboards and monitors, alive with ancient prayers, spilling onto the smooth black surface over and over again like we had never burned away our connection to heaven. I felt a great, dark whirl in my gut, then put the baby on the floor.

“Do you think you can—”

But my fingers were already on the prayerboard. “Oh yes,” I said.

I let the prayer flow through my fingers; brackets, and parentheses, and more of the god’s unsayable letters, time(NULL) and timePtr=localtime (&t) and int main(). I felt a frightened thrill as the monitor returned a set of numbers, as if everything outside was still completely normal.

“What did you do?” Anaro whispered.

“This is how you start a liturgy,” I said. “It’s how you ask what day and time it is in the god’s world, so you can enter the right prayers.”

“So the god is alive.”

I shook my head. My voice cracked. “I’m not sure what this is. We killed the god. The angels fell. The city burned.”

“But what if we didn’t,” she whispered, her eyes wide and filled with fear. “Or worse—what if Steret’s right?”

“The angels fell,” I repeated.

“I don’t know what’s going on.” Anaro laid her hand, suddenly protective, on one of the god-machines. Her other hand pushed away the dark hair that hung in front of her half-sunken eyes. “If you continue to pray, if we use this cathedral—”

“You’re worried about who will receive our prayers.” I locked eyes with her. We breathed in concert. In. Out. In again.

I turned to the monitor and brought up the ship’s prayer book. Some of the prayers I knew, and some I did not, which was what I expected. Some might have been needed to steer the ship, although they used words I did not understand. Other prayers seemed to be for communication with the god’s world. I recognized the words found and colony, but few others.

The silence between us grated. I wanted to end it. “How far along are you?”

Anaro turned to look elsewhere. Her eyes caught a blinking green light. “Four months, I think.”

“You don’t look happy.”

Anaro rested her fingers on the wall. “Back there. With you. If he was willing to dismiss one child so easily—”

The person Steret had once been popped up somewhere in the back of my mind, smiling at me with his gangling legs and yellow teeth. I ached. Love was a lie in every iteration. “You don’t need to worry. You’re the legal spouse. The child was angel-asked.”

“He does love you.”

“He has a funny way of showing it.” I prayed—straightened my wrists, just as the monks had taught me, and entered the sacred words to ask where the ship had come from, uttered every bracket and asterisk. When I was living in darkness, thinking Steret was coming for me, the monks had said I was the best they’d ever seen. They wanted me to say the vows and join us. You could keep the baby, they’d said, she could live her life in the basement and never go hungry.

They probably would have said something different if they knew I was going to kill their god.

Anaro gasped. “Is that—”

We were staring at a string of sacred numbers.

“That’s where we’re going,” I said.

She stared at the numbers. “I don’t understand. These coordinates aren’t even possible.”

“Heaven?”

She breathed out. “Or hell. Steret’s right.”

Or something else was going on, I thought, because I didn’t want Steret to be right. Something darker and more significant than any angel or demon or god-thing could promise, more terrible than the god that had trapped our ancestors in the world and starved us and fed us ash until we choked to death. Something with so much unfathomable power that it could live past the sins the three of us had committed together to welcome us into a life that was somehow beyond that. A being far, far beyond a simple god.

A being that had just returned a set of coordinates that were outside the world.

The baby was hungry.

I sat down on the floor of the cathedral while Anaro went to get Steret. She huffed eh eh eh and reached for my bedraggled collar, and I let her nurse, the tug of life to life making me feel warm and blank and exhausted. I leaned against the machine-stack, closing my eyes, letting myself drift. I did not know when I would sleep again.

Steret arrived in a rush of sweat and salt ocean. “It’s a demon-ship,” he said. “Those coordinates are for hell.”

“We’re not going home,” Anaro said.

“Well, I’m not going to hell,” he said.

“We don’t know that’s what—”

“I’m not going to let you take my baby to hell. I won’t allow it.”

I dragged my eyes open to stare at him. At his eyes, his mouth—the things about him I’d loved so much, now so different, twisted, and rancid with fear. Anaro stepped between us, her fingers wide and placating. “So what do you propose? We live here in the middle of the ocean with only demons to eat? Or have you magically found some sort of recycling facility, some mud for mushrooms, a vat for meat?”

“In hell—”

“They eat in hell, Ster.”

“Get out of the way. In my opinion—”

Anaro rolled her eyes. “—here we go again—”

“I brought the guns, I had the access to the supplies—”

I dragged myself off the floor as they argued, waving their words around in circles like the legs of starving cockroaches. Husband. Wife. Was this murky fight what I’d wanted? I spent so much time stoking memories in the hearth of my heart, trying to keep them god-bright, only to find that it was all just paint and glitter from the beginning. Promises as thin as paper.

The baby drank. I crossed the room to the prayerboard and entered the earliest prayer I’d learned—the one that stirred the god-engines on the fishing boats, the one that sent them into the bay to harvest anemic little fish. Around me, the ship groaned and shuddered like a womb, and an engine below spun and whined. I could feel a sudden force pushing against my feet, my back, my fingers, faster than any tiny fishing boat.

Steret’s voice fell into a whisper. “Liss. What have you done?”

“I made a promise.”

His eyes widened. “To love me. I know. This isn’t love, it’s—”

“Not you,” I said.

Steret tugged Anaro up the stairs. They screamed at each other, now, laying blame like a road beneath their feet. He wanted to go back to the taste of mushroom on his tongue, the scent of fertilizer in his nose, watching the bodies go into the recycler chunk by chunk. She wanted him to be quiet. It was all just fear. I knew what fear was like.

It was time for something new.

Up the stairs, air moved fast and cold against my face, and the boat cut like a dull knife through the water, leaving a white trail like welling blood. The fisher-monks had gone to their knees, their hands raised to the low, darkling sky, pleading for reconciliation. I turned to see what they were so afraid of. As if I already knew how terrible it would be, I covered my baby’s eyes.

The light.

The light.

Steret stood at the bow screaming about hell, his hair wild and limned with it—white light, white, a color I’d never truly understood until now. Surely this was hell, the place where light poured in shining gusts through a crack in the world. Light burned hot through my eyes to the back of my brain, but yet I did not die. Everyone else turned away, hiding their faces, their eyes, their futures.

I forced myself to look.

I saw a crack large enough to let a boat through, just as the prayers below had informed me.

There were no words in scripture for what I had done. Either the ship would crash, would fold underneath us like paper, and we would drown here, at the end of everything, or—

—or this was only another place where the ground met sky, a place where the entire world itself was bound in a sacred circle. Another cathedral.

I felt an excited chill.

Hunching away from the light, I tore long strips from my robe and tied them around my daughter’s eyes, and then my own. The darkness helped—enough to avoid the chunks of sky that fell onto the deck around us, loamy and wet, dislodged by the fast-moving air. I swept one into my hand.

I’d never touched the sky before. It felt thick and solid, yet crumbled between my fingers like the wet loam on the mountain. I brought it to my face; it smelled exactly like the land I’d tilled nearly every day of my life, like the dead it supported, like the promise of life itself. It stilled me, even as everything sped into hollering chaos—

“Hold on to something!” hollered Anaro. “Get below! Cover your eyes! Look away! We’re going to crash!”

And then Steret’s hands were on my shoulders, and he was dislodging me from my reverie, and his arms went around me, around the baby, as the light grew closer and the sky came for us.

But the ship did not crash.

We sailed right through the crack in the world like the ship knew how to do it in its metal skin and bones, then came to an easy stop directly outside. Even with the help of the blindfold I could barely keep my eyes open. I felt the movements of people below, smelled fish and salt and air that had never known sulfur. I saw ships, hovering in the distance. Flying things with piercing cries and white wings. People on the other deck, waving. Human voices. It was everything I dreamed.

And yet.

Nobody moved.

It’s funny, isn’t it, brothers and sisters, that even after we slaughtered a god, even after we took a demon’s ship to the edge of the world, that we were still scared to go the last few steps. We city folk prefer the coughing death to the death of pride, even as we called the darkness virtue. I think that was Steret’s problem. He was all for being a hero, until he realized that he didn’t have the answers. He’d always had the answers, even if they were wrong.

But that reticence, that frightened cowardice, was always our curse. That is what kept us under the geas of the angels for so many generations, what kept our ancestors from killing the god. I knew I couldn’t have been the first person to learn how to write that prayer. I was simply the first person desperate enough to do it.

“Get up, Steret,” I said, pushing away his arms.

“I can’t.”

“Get up,” I hissed.

“I—” His voice wavered. “I can’t see.”

I turned. In the light of hell, I could see his eyes as they truly were: green, the god’s color, the color we had so rarely seen outside the farms and the moss on the rocks to the north of the bay. Green like emeralds from the mines, cast against flame. I nearly stuttered to a stop to marvel at them, but—

“Go below, then,” I said, instead. “It’s darker. You’ll be able to see. Get the monks in order. We can make some sort of signaling apparatus, figure out what’s going on—”

He scrambled back. “What if we die?”

“We have killed the god for this,” I said. My lungs filled with the loamy scent of the fallen sky, rattled with the salt in the air. With my own sweat. With the breath of hell. “We have killed demons. We have come to the end of the world, and now you are afraid?”

“I’m not afraid,” he breathed. It was a lie. His chest rose and fell in the shallow rhythm of the god-choked, the rhythm that I had made my peace watching in the mirror every night. In the blaring light, I could see it now, the truth he’d been hiding from me this whole time: the rattle in his chest, the black spittle lodged at the corner of his mouth. “But if we die out here, if we die, what’s the point of everything we just did? Everything we’ve gone through? The angels—the city—the truth—”

I hated to explain it to him. I hated to tell him in words what had been implicit in my world for these last exhausting months of my life. I hated to give him any more of the time that was left to me. The baby cried, her little mouth a wide, aching maw. I unhooked the carrier, kissed the baby on her forehead, and slipped her into Anaro’s waiting arms.

“She is,” I said.

I turned toward the bow, brothers and sisters, feeling the air itself move, cold and clear like water, caressing my arm, my cheek, my entire body, the light slamming into my eyes. The air moved through my hair, dragging tendrils around my shoulders, and I felt like a god. Like the god. I felt that if I jumped, the air would hold my body and my child up like twin bats, like we would grow thin, leather-black wings and scream our truth to echo in the entire cramped world.

“You’re the demon,” said Steret, behind me, taking me out of my reverie. He pointed out to where the ships lay waiting for us. “You always have been—”

Anaro slapped him.

“You’re a coward, Steret,” said Anaro. “You say you can’t fight reality. That’s only because you won’t.”

I stared at her. At my baby.

“Go on,” Anaro said, giving me a thin smile. “Go say hello.”

I climbed up on the railing and took a long look back. Then I slipped into the water that tasted of bloody salt, swimming for the ships.

There is no god. There never was.

Brothers and sisters, you will see the light first as a pinprick on the horizon. You will gather, starving, at the quiet edges of the bay, where the skinny alabaster fish lie rotting in their thousands. As your false sky falls away, as we come for you, you will have to close your eyes, cover them with your hands, with cloth and with metal, but the pain will only last a little while.

Your eyes will adjust to the truth, and when you open them to the desperate blue beyond, you will see the prophecy in fruition: ships, dozens of them, coming to carry you to your true home—the place we turned away from generations ago because of a terrible lie, a place full of trees and lakes and sunlight. I will be standing on the bowsprit to greet you, with Anaro and our children and those who scooped us out of the water.

You will scream about the prophecy, the ship that will come at the end of the world.

I know you will not understand, when we come. It will look like the end of the world, but the end of the world is just a story told to you by people who want you to remain lost to what truly is. The world is so much bigger than we could ever imagine. There is music and dancing and fruit as big as your fist. The others, the astronauts who tried to find you, had been locked out from our systems for so many generations that they thought we were all dead. But some never gave up on us—just as we never gave up on them.

I know it hurts.

The truth always does.

As the sky falls, the air will move around you, press at your skin, worry at your mouth. You will taste salt on your tongue, salt and loam from some faraway place. Do not be afraid. It is only the wind. It is your birthright.

You need not worry about going to hell.

You were born there.

About the Author

Karen Osborne is a speculative fiction writer and visual storyteller living in Baltimore. She is the author of Architects of Memory and Engines of Oblivion from Tor Books, and her work has been nominated for the Nebula, Sturgeon and Locus Awards. A graduate of Viable Paradise and the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, her short fiction appears in Uncanny, Fireside, Escape Pod, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and more.

He Leaps for the Stars, He Leaps for the Stars

Grace Chan

Yennie’s new therapist started by checking his biorhythm recordings—sleep patterns, heart rate, blood pressure. Then, the therapist’s soma projection leaned into the space between them and asked what Yennie would like to talk about.

Yennie glanced out the window. An ice storm, a froth of glassy dust, was blowing in over the bone-colored hills. He was on Enceladus; his therapist was on Mars. He wanted to describe how sometimes his body felt hollow, and other times he felt his skin could not contain all that was within him—but he didn’t have the words. Half the solar system divided them, and more.

Yennie woke to a niggling headache, a finger poking into the base of his skull. Today’s lottery winner was already pacing in the waiting room of his mind.

The muscles of his neck, back, and legs groaned from yesterday’s eight-hour dance practice. His left knee, bruised and swollen from spinning on it, throbbed sweetly. On his tongue was the stale aftertaste of last night’s hastily scoffed dinner—three hundred grams of AtSal Fancy Fillet and two hundred and fifty ml of WheatGermProShake.

He opened his eyes. Ambient yellow light, a simulation of a sunrise. White marbled walls, sculpted to resemble a rocky cliff-face. Black ceiling, shimmering with rivers of projected content: news channels, line graphs tracking sales of his latest single, invitations for product endorsements, philanthropic appeals, a calendar detailing his daily schedule, an updated meal plan from his dietitian . . .

Suyi walked into the room, brown ponytail swinging to her trim waist. “Good morning, Yennie.” She waved a hand, and the sunrise sped through to the brightness of full morning light. “You’d better let her in. She’s been waiting almost an hour.”

“Can’t I at least brush up first?”

“Today’s guest is a VIP,” said Suyi. “A good review would really cement your spot in Sol’s Stars of the Soma Age. Plus, fans usually enjoy seeing the mundanities.”

Yennie shivered. His assistant was right. Fans were obsessed with the intimacy of a bodily merger with their favorite celebrities. Inside Your Idol had become a cornerstone of an entertainer’s profile. A couple of bad ratings could nosedive a promising career.

He swung his legs over the side of the bed. The cool air against his goose-pimpled thighs evoked the fuzzy remnants of a dream—dark corridors between rows of sleeping pods, bare feet soaking up noise from freezing tiles, someone’s nervous breath tickling the nape of his neck . . .

Shaking his head to dispel the last tendrils of sleep, he accessed the waiting room. The VIP’s profile bubbled up. Hespera Soo: eldest daughter of media tycoon Wesley Wen-Ching Soo and heir to his estate. Twenty years old, narrow eyes, black hair pulled into a twist, accentuating her round jawline. Studying new media and international relations at the University of Singapore.

He granted Hespera entry. The Ghost™ implant immediately linked to his visual, auditory, and somatosensory networks. A husky voice with a posh Earth accent spilled across his mind.

“Oh, finally. I thought there might be a connection issue, what with the Belt telecommunications strike this week and all that bother. Is this your bedroom? Gorgeous. Liisa Mäkinen, right? She did my lunar penthouse apartment.”

“We must have similar taste,” Yennie replied, quirking the corner of his mouth so Hespera could feel his smile. He was designed to charm, selected before birth for charisma, whetted and sharpened by every preceding moment of his life. He could swivel like a dial—aligned for banter, indignance, sympathy, tears, whatever the moment required.

“Maybe because I’ve tried to emulate you since I was a kid,” said Hespera, with an equally effortless air. “Your guests probably all say this, but I’m one of your oldest fans. You’ll be more delighted than my parents, at least, to know that I keep every album edition and product endorsement of yours in a vacuum-sealed collector’s vault.”

She wasn’t quite what he expected. Usually, Earth fans were dominating, entitled, squealy, and streetwise. Hespera’s ironic self-awareness didn’t feel like a cigarette burn in his frontal lobes. Despite her accent, she impressed as somewhat likeable. He let himself relax, just a millimeter. Maybe the next fourteen hours wouldn’t be so terrible.

“My truest fans have learned all my dance routines, too,” he teased.

“Anyone with an iota of common sense would not be encouraging me to dance. Are you questioning my devotion? Sad to say, I’ve bought a ticket for this Inside Your Idol lottery every day for five years. Unik Management guards their leading light so closely, even my glorious father couldn’t pull any strings.”

Yennie wondered if Hespera was telling the truth, or if she simply thought she was. There were always strings to be pulled, especially by those who coordinated the whole puppet show.

In the bathroom, Yennie brushed his teeth in front of transparent walls. Glittering ice dust drifted over a crystalline landscape of chipped hills and massive craters. Enceladus was in the height of a tidal summer. Saturn’s golden orb, tidally locked, glowed close and large in the pale sky. The subsurface oceans were quiescent, the crust fractures only emitting a fine spray of water and silica.

The thin young man in the mirror slowly disappeared under the cosmetic-bot’s deft touch. Sharp cheekbones, softened by shimmer. Concealer, dabbed over the shadows underscoring his eyes. Blush, to enliven his wan complexion. His long, dark-green locks, combed, ironed, pulled back into a braided tail.

Suyi laid out his breakfast on the kitchen bench: an espresso, a raspberry flavored protein bar, and two hundred and fifty ml of WheatGermProShake. Hespera asked to have a closer look at the android. Suyi obliged, standing and smiling as Yennie circled her.

“She’s gorgeous. Her micromovements and microexpressions are so seamlessly integrated. Is she a Biograftica model?”

“Good pick,” said Yennie, gulping the espresso. “She’s an expansion of the LR-10 line.”

“I thought that line was discontinued. Are they reviving it?”

“I’m part of a research and development project,” said Suyi, who was privy to the guest’s transmissions. “Biograftica haven’t decided whether to go commercial with me yet. Yennie, let’s talk through your schedule for today.”

The schedule was more or less the same as yesterday’s, but with new partners scheduled in for meetings. 9:00 a.m., vocal coaching. 10:00 a.m., charity morning tea. 11:30 a.m., cosmetic touch-up. 12:00 p.m., lunch with ProShake marketing rep. 1:00 p.m., acting lesson. 1:45 p.m., filming a variety segment for Kuiper Belt Tourism. 3:00 p.m., afternoon tea with Disney Merchandise. 3:30 p.m., dance practice. 7:30 p.m., dinner. 8:00 p.m. to12:00 a.m., dance practice.

“Eight hours of dancing again?” he groaned, just as Hespera muttered, “Does she also let you know when to pee and jerk off?”

Ignoring Hespera, his assistant continued, “Management has decided to bring forward the release of your new single from January seventh to December tenth.”

Yennie’s heart sank, but he tried to control his breathing and expression so they couldn’t sense his disappointment. December tenth was only two weeks away.

“They think Eyes Like Snowflakes will sell better in the lead up to the festive season. Plus, it’ll line up with Swarovski announcing their Snow Crystals range. Don’t forget they’re sponsoring your show. You need to be sharper than your last performance, Yennie. You need to sparkle.”

There was something chiding in Suyi’s tone. He peered suspiciously at her. He was sure that a human intermittently co-opted Suyi’s circuits. Maybe his doctor or acting coach or dance instructor, or more likely some tosser from Unik Management, wanting to make sure he wasn’t straying outside his position description.

“I’d like to see my therapist today,” Yennie said suddenly.

“Your therapist? Why?”

“Bringing the launch forward by a month is incredibly stressful. I need to make sure I’m in the best mental health to keep up with practice.”

“You don’t have time—”

“One hour, at the end of the day. Please, Suyi.”

The android contemplated him impassively. “Fine. I’ll schedule it in.”

Yennie knew the truth: he was not really one person. He held millions of potential lives within him. How were you supposed to live your life, when you were the convergent endpoint of so many spreading trajectories, terminated too soon?

“You look afraid,” Micah had observed, in one of their early sessions.

At first, he’d mistrusted this latest iteration of a listening ear. For one thing, Micah was younger than his previous therapists—probably only in his mid-twenties, not much older than Yennie, if he had to guess. His slender physique and grungy shirt inspired little confidence. For another thing, he didn’t speak with a refined sunward accent, as all the others had. His unusual blend of neutral interplanetary, with a twist of working class, dislocated him, made him impossible to pin down.

With the passing of weeks, unfamiliarity turned to curiosity. Yennie wanted to ask about Micah’s background, but he knew it was against professional code for therapists to reveal personal information. Moreover, to ask would be, in turn, to reveal too much about himself.

Yennie adjusted his features, pushed his spine against his seat. “No—just thinking.” He hesitated. “You know why they farm us out here, right?”

Micah waited.

“Two reasons. Climate and money. The average surface temperature on Enceladus is two hundred degrees below Celsius. In the cold, it’s easier to control gamete engineering in bulk. And here, it’s cheap. Rental on Earth and Mars costs you a kidney or three. But this far rimward, you can build whatever you want, in land or air space, for a fraction of the price.”

Yennie bit down hard on his lower lip, tasting flesh. He didn’t like the sound of his voice: boyish, frayed. This hadn’t happened with the others—this impulse to let everything pour from his throat, accompanied by a fear that the torrent might not end.

“Many people nowadays are born from gamete labs,” Micah said gently.

Yennie glanced away. The glow of the soma projection turned the rest of the room to grainy darkness. Micah wouldn’t be able to grasp the scale of the farms. Embryos with excellent probability genes for facial symmetry, coordination, musicality, and stamina, progressed along the Entertainer production line. Ship-sized factories of fetuses, suspended in sim-uterine stasis, selectively advanced through phases according to samples of their early epigenetic patterns, tests of rhythm responsiveness, quality of neural activity, resilience to environmental challenges.

“Did you know they held my embryo in stasis for twelve years? Ninety-nine percent of my germ line mates are still stuck in production. Maybe it would be better if they just destroyed them—but I guess you don’t delete old files until you run out of space.”

“What happened after you were selected for birth?”

“Management compressed my early development from three years into one. They said they were eager to see my potential. I joined the training program when I was four years old—biologically, at least. I won my first dance competition at five, started singing professionally at six, and was playing the adorable kid in serial dramas by seven.”

There were thousands of other trainees in the program. By probabilistic luck and the irresistible forces of calibration and design, he’d floated to the top, like pond muck.

He remembered yearning for stardom with every cell in his body. He poured this yearning into every vocal lesson, dance practice, audition, and performance. It wasn’t so much that he wanted to be better than his peers. His drive wasn’t external, but internal, burning, pure—a crater of molten lava in his belly. Like the final output of a complicated equation, he wanted to achieve the greatest amount with the immense potential invested in him.

The others in the program had all craved success just as deeply. Huddled in their sleeping pods at night, bruised and bone-weary from training sixteen hours a day, they’d whispered their dreams across airless shadows. Sometimes, Yennie wished he were still back there, holding hope and tears with his left-behind friends, urging one another on, knowing most would fall short. Only a few could be stars, but still they strived.

“They never told us we had to stay, but who would leave? I mean, how could we imagine anything different, when they taught us from conception what we wanted, and how to be happy?”

Yennie stepped into the soma projector to meet with the Kuiper Belt Tourism film crew. The machine sent a bodily projection of him back to Earth, to a studio above the flooded city of Melbourne. The technology to project physical and neural states near-instantaneously using quantum entanglement was commercialized in the late twenty-first century and had revolutionized interplanetary communication. Hespera, still leeched via the Ghost™ implant, came along too, her sensorium beamed all the way to Enceladus and back again.

“Sweet Mary, I better download a couple of aspirins,” Hespera muttered, as they materialized in a warehouse illuminated by floodlights.

The Kuiper Belt Tourism host quizzed Yennie about his traveling likes and dislikes, made Yennie play a slapstick game involving hopping around in an inflatable rocket ship, and cheered as Yennie read out the company’s festive season promotional deals.

“Your dream holiday is a Michelin-starred kaiseki aerial tour of Neptune’s rings?” Hespera asked skeptically, as they soma projected to afternoon tea.

“Sure,” Yennie said, knowing just as well as she did that he’d simply said what the host wanted to hear.

But as he strode, sure-shouldered and smiling, across a sunny Californian esplanade, extending his hand to the Disney reps in their pressed suits, Yennie wasn’t so sure if there was a border between his invented self and whatever lay beneath.

Halfway through Yennie’s second dance session, with his instructor looming impatiently and Suyi hovering nearby, ready to beam across a bunch of post-experience surveys, today’s Inside Your Idol finished. Hespera bid him goodbye. Yennie rubbed his aching knee and told her he hoped she’d had fun.

“Get that poor knee examined, my friend,” Hespera murmured, her voice coiling between his ears. “Oh—and look out for a parcel next week.”

“I’m sorry, Ms. Soo, but gifts are outside protocol—” Suyi interjected.

“My five-star reviews always come with a small token of appreciation.”

Hespera’s tone was clipped and emphatic. Suyi said nothing further. Then, today’s guest was gone, and Yennie’s head was empty again. There was only a gentle, ballooning space inside his skull, and the bloated pulsing of his left knee, almost comforting. He sat back on his heels, stretching out his sore calves. Eyes Like Snowflakes began to play from the top, for the billionth time, and his instructor’s soma projection gestured for him to stand.

Suyi observed the first few steps of Yennie’s routine before walking away briskly, her heels tapping on the tiles.

“Your blood pressure’s a bit low today,” said Micah, a crease dimpling between his brows as he glanced over the readings. The therapist’s previous pastel, spacious background was gone. He seemed condensed, shoulders hunched, attention darting intermittently to something out-of-capture.

“I’m probably just dehydrated,” Yennie said. He took a big mouthful of electrolyte water as appeasement, gripping the bottle tightly to hide his tremble of fatigue. “My instructor’s a failed military sergeant trapped in a dancer’s body.”

A soft smile, lopsided across a mobile mouth. “You must be exhausted.”

When their eyes met, Yennie had to look away after a mere two seconds. The intensity of concern in Micah’s gaze was unbearable, even terrifying. The other therapists had worn their kindness like an embroidered mantle: delicate, curated, and warm, but ultimately only a shroud of specific thickness. Micah, however, appeared to care with every fiber of his being—or he was an excellent actor.

Yennie thought back to how he’d terminated the last one’s contract, after enduring that saccharine smile for months, and rifled through the applications until he’d stilled over Micah’s animated hologram. There’d been something in Micah’s sweet, tentative movements that pulled a strange feeling from the depths of Yennie’s memory.

Since then, they’d learned to speak in layers of meaning. They knew someone was always monitoring. They parsed a subsurface language composed of brief glances, shifts of shoulder, quirks of the mouth, a flutter of fingers. Until finally, Micah found a hole in the shell around Yennie, and, in the secret hours, the real work began.

The feeling still came, from time to time—something shadow-swathed, and only remembered in glittering fragments like broken glass.

A week before the performance, Suyi sat down across from him at breakfast. Yennie paused with his spoon halfway to his mouth. Suyi never sat.

“What’s wrong with you?” the android asked.

Confused, Yennie glanced down at himself. His tresses, now back to their original black, were neatly braided. His cheeks and eyelids gleamed with psychedelic swirls. His pleated silk gown draped artfully across his lean waist.

“You’re hardly sleeping.” Suyi’s fingers twitched. His biometrics projected onto the high ceiling. Sure enough, his sleep score was a measly twelve percent, characterized by periods of nocturnal waking and restless activity. “What’s happening? Do I need to observe you overnight?”

“No, no.” Yennie rubbed his neck. “It’s not as bad as it looks.”

The android peered into his face. “You must be under too much stress from the upcoming launch. You’ve dropped three point one kilograms, your blood cell production has slowed, and your hair loss rate has nearly doubled. Do you feel unwell? Headaches? Stomach pains? Night sweats? Fatigue?”

“Are you worried about me, Suyi?”

“Of course I am. We need you in good health for next week. Let me cancel your talk show appearance tonight. I’m booking you in with Dr. Phuong and Dr. Vaz.”

“There’s no need for that.”

Suyi ignored him. “In fact, I’ll cancel all your interviews this week. A counterintuitive strategy might work in our favor, actually—build suspense leading up to the release. Yennie, make sure you ask Dr. Vaz to increase your calorie intake and check your micronutrients. And if Dr. Phuong wants to reformulate your sleeping meds, please don’t protest. I’m sure the side effect last time was a coincidence. All right?”

Yennie had no desire to see his dietitian or doctor, who both seemed bent on turning him into a superhuman and disappointed when he repeatedly proved to be an ordinary mortal. Nevertheless, a brief respite from publicity would be welcome. He’d be able to fit in an extra session with Micah, perhaps. And he’d have more time to prepare for the big day.

Hespera’s gift arrived in an unmarked silver box, only a little bigger than a ring box. The fingerprint-identification lock showed evidence of tampering; he knew Unik Management checked all his mail. Within the box was a velvet pouch. When he loosened the drawstring and tipped it upside down, two things fell into his palm: a brown paper-wrapped lolly, and a silver heart-shaped locket on a chain of delicate snake links.

Sitting in the corner of the bathroom, Yennie unwrapped the lolly and popped it into his mouth. It took him a while to find the locket’s clasp, which was disguised in a pattern of tiny, interwoven vines. When he hooked his fingernail beneath it, the heart split open. Two words were engraved on the mirror-flat surfaces within: Blueberry Masquerade.

The taste of caramel melted over his tongue, leaving a tiny, hard lump. He spat it onto his palm. The computer chip was the size of a lentil. Miniscule filaments on its surface gleamed like a maze of gold.

Creating a deepfake simulation of a person is just a function of enough data and processing power, Micah whispered into Yennie’s ear, in the unwatched hours between midnight and dawn. He murmured phrases no therapist should know, like autoencoder and unsupervised learning and generative adversarial networks.

“A generative network trains on your data and constructs outputs, and a discriminative network tries to pick the constructed from the real—until the fakes get good enough, the discriminator can’t tell them apart. The more training data we give the program, the better the models will be.”

“There’s an avalanche of media of me going back to when I was little,” Yennie whispered back. “Holos, videos . . . everything’s on record.”

“Then it will be easy to replicate the externalities—your appearance, your voice, the way you move. But we also need to replicate your internal world. The fake needs to mimic the kinds of things you’d say and do, how you’d go about them, your microexpressions, your unconscious habits, every subtle twitch as you process a decision tree. We want it to be as close to perfect as possible.”

“You think we need more data.”

“Yes,” said Micah, his tone growing even more hushed, until he was no more than a low tremble in the darkness. “Current data.”

Yennie wanted to ask so much. He wanted to ask how Micah knew all these things, how he had access to these programs. Even more, he wanted to ask who Micah was, and why he was here, in the dead of the night, whispering with him about deceit.

But Yennie swallowed his questions, because to ask might be to shatter hope.

“There’s still a few weeks until the launch. We’ll use these secret hours. I’ll just sleep less.”

“You’re sure about this?”

Micah’s soma projection shimmered, ghostly and mesmerizing, in Saturn’s faint aura. A lock of black hair crinkled around Micah’s left ear—touching helix, lobe, neck. Yennie stretched his hand out, sliding it into the shadowy space between jaw and collarbone, but catching only empty planetglow.

“I’m sure,” Yennie said. “Let’s start.”

Forty billion people were already soma projected into the concert, waiting for the young man prophesied to be the “Rising Comet of the 20s” to storm the stage with his shiny new song. There were rumors, cobbled together from interview answers extrapolated beyond-context and insider scoops from self-proclaimed close acquaintances, that Yennie had written Eyes Like Snowflakes about a current crush, or maybe a recent failed relationship, or maybe a childhood sweetheart. Whichever it was, it was sure to be spectacular and heartfelt.

The stage itself was real, constructed on a film set in Argyre Planitia. An elevated white platform, draped in Swarovski Snow Crystals and illuminated by gyrating floodlights, stood against a backdrop of ochre massifs and alluvial fans.

As the rear curtains began to rise, the soma crowd released a cheer like a battle roar. Anticipatory beats thumped from the sound system. A pair of gleaming white shoes appeared first, one heel tapping in time to the music. Then, inch by inch, a slender figure in a gauzy robe, silhouetted by a blue spotlight.

The beats rolled into a chord progression, floodlights twisted in rainbow spectra, sequined backup dancers poured from the wings, and fans thrust an ocean of hands toward a roiling, rust-red Martian sky.

Yennie danced.

More than a billion kilometers away, back in the quiet house, Suyi rearranged items on Yennie’s calendar. She graciously deleted a vocal coaching session the following morning so he could have a post-performance rest. A delicate smile curved the Biograftica android’s lips. Little did she know that just an hour ago, her treasured star had stood in front of her, face devoid of makeup, dressed in a plain gray Terra-Suit.

“What are you wearing?” she’d cried, horrified. “Where’s your show costume?”

But Yennie had only shouted, “Blueberry Masquerade! Blueberry Masquerade!”

He’d only needed to say it once to initiate her emergency shutdown, but no doubt he’d been nervous.

Immobilized and powered off, Suyi had not been aware as Yennie walked behind her and opened the control panel between her shoulder blades. She hadn’t seen him attach the lentil-sized computer chip to her central processing unit. And five minutes later, when Suyi’s system restarted, she hadn’t known that she was actually alone in the house—that the young man standing in front of the soma projector, limbering up for the big show, glinting like a knife’s blade in his silver gown, was merely a projection of the deepfake, cast continuously by the foreign chip into her sensory networks.

Yennie’s breath rattled against his eardrums. His eyeballs ached with the onslaught of blinding light, even though his visor’s filter was set to maximum. He stumbled in the direction indicated by his wrist-GPS.

It took all his concentration to stay upright. The ice was as slippery as wet glass and riddled with ridges and cracks; deprived of the artificial gravity of his house, he felt as though he might spontaneously drift into the sky. In a particularly treacherous patch, his legs flew out from beneath him and he landed on his stomach, his chin banging the base of his helmet, the world splintering into blissful shadows.

As he left, he’d glanced back briefly at his house. The tripartite black building seemed much smaller from the outside: a lonely beetle perched on the side of a tracing-paper mountain. In the distance, the colossal structures of the gamete farms were wreathed in ice-dust churns.

In the eight years since his recruitment from the training program, had he never ventured outside his house? There hadn’t been any need to leave, though—not when they could yank his mind or his body anywhere in the system, at any whim. He hadn’t imagined that Enceladus would be so frictionless, so swollen with silent light and terrifyingly spacious. Out here, a god’s finger could descend from the heavens and remove him from the landscape like a stray eyelash.

He brought the GPS close to his face. Four hundred meters to go. That didn’t sound so far. Gasping, he tackled an incline on all fours, losing purchase in the steepest section, jamming his fingers into a crack to keep from tumbling all the way back down. Cold and pain numbed his limbs.

A gloved hand closed around his wrist and pulled him over the crest. A helmet bumped against his. Behind the visor’s glare, a familiar face. Micah made a questioning sign, wobbling index and little finger near his chin. Yennie replied with an OK sign.

They scrambled together across the last stretch, to the flat of a crater where a black cuttlefish of a spacecraft waited, wearing a veil of icefall. A round door in the ship’s flank snapped open. They jumped in.

In the bubble of the airlock, they collapsed to the floor, quivering from the cold, waiting for their eyes to adjust to the dimness. Another person stepped through the inner door—a petite, plump young woman in a black jumpsuit, wearing motion capture gloves and a glowing lens over her left eye. In the flesh, Hespera looked different from her profile picture: less polished, more withdrawn, a little weary. She glanced from Yennie to Micah and back to Yennie.

“You’re burning up in Argyre Planitia. Ratings are beyond the belt. I think new Yennie’s already a bigger star than old Yennie.”

Yennie slumped against the wall. In his real body, without any projections or filters, he felt strangely vulnerable, his charisma trickled away. He hadn’t had time to assemble a new internal framework to replace the one that was slowly, soundlessly collapsing.

On the other side of the airlock, Micah was peeling his Terra-Suit away from his thin form. As Micah’s helmet lifted, that familiar lock of hair unfurled around his left ear. Something warm tugged at Yennie’s chest.

In all these months of preparation, Yennie hadn’t dared ask why two strangers would cross half the system to help him. He hadn’t been sure Hespera was an ally until the gift; and as hard as he’d tried, he couldn’t think of any rational explanation for Micah. Even now, at the end of one thing and the beginning of something else, he couldn’t find the words.

“I don’t know how to thank you both,” Yennie said.

“Don’t look at me.” Hespera turned away, a glimmer of concern disappearing behind a wry smile. She manipulated the info-feeds scrolling down her lens with dexterous fingers. “Iseul planned everything. You’re just lucky he reached out to me. Orchestrating an interplanetary escape for my childhood idol beats college assignments, that’s for sure. Plus, I’ve always wanted to steal my father’s favorite dartship. Sorry it took me a while to win a spot in the lottery. It wasn’t quite five years, but it was trickier than we’d expected.”

Yennie turned back to the young man who’d leaned across the system for nights on end, asking him if he was all right, as the battling networks gathered and tested and duplicated.

“Iseul?”

As Yennie spoke the name aloud, a dam broke. A memory reformed in a corner of his skull, like a window smashing in reverse. Micah was a false identity. How could he have forgotten something—someone—who painted his time in the program with such vivid color? Side-by-side in their sleeping pods, surrounded by hundreds of other trainees, their breath had fogged the translucent wall separating their pillows, as they traded secrets as bulwarks against despair. Hand-in-hand, they’d wandered unlit corridors with bare feet and roaring hearts, hunting for a way out—and then, when that proved impossible, a moment of relinquished control.

Had they erased Iseul from his mind because he was inconvenient to Yennie’s ascendance? Where had Iseul been these last eight years? Had he traveled from place to place, gathering knowledge, and shaping technology into an escape tunnel? How long had Iseul been searching for a lucky thread to follow into the walled maze of Yennie’s life?

As Yennie reached up to grasp Iseul’s proffered hand, he realized he would have plenty of time to ask all these questions, and to hear their answers. They followed Hespera out of the airlock and into the sleek, illuminated ship’s bridge, where she activated the protocol to reconnoiter with the orbiting module. Wipers swept icefall from the viewport, revealing a timeless Enceladean horizon: sunlight breaking over glassy mountains, haloed by a froth of silica spray.

One of the dozens of overhead screens showed Yennie on the Martian stage. How long would the fake last? Maybe this other version of Yennie would entertain the system for decades to come. Or maybe, next week, or tomorrow, a netizen’s surveillance-bot would pick out a discrepancy in his simulated movements. But by the time Management sent someone to Enceladus, his footprints would’ve already melted away.

Doubt wrenched his gut. He was choosing everything against his nature: a life of hiding instead of fame; anonymity and insignificance instead of worship. For the first time in a long time, his mind was private, his waiting room empty. Never again would his days be laid out before him in neat parcels, meticulously calibrated to both his immediate physiological needs and the highest possible projection of his future.

His bones ached to run back to his marble-walled house: to jump into the soma projector and stand before the frenzied crowd, to bask in their adulation, to simmer in dopamine waves. But he knew he couldn’t always trust his instincts, because they could betray him. No—that wasn’t quite right. He chose not to trust them, this time—and this act of choosing elsewhere, elsewhen, made it right.

As the ship shivered into the air, he glanced up at the screen. Spangled and breathless, chest heaving, Yennie struck a final pose and bowed deeply, twice, three times, his black hair trailing onto the floor. Then, seized by some uncanny impulse, he was running across the stage, accelerating as he flew down the sloping ramp. His robes unfurled in translucent wings. Without breaking pace, he leaped forth—an iridescent flash, resplendent with momentum and grace, before the soma crowd, a forest of arms outstretched in glee, consumed him.

About the Author

Grace Chan is an Aurealis and Norma K Hemming Award-nominated writer and doctor. She was born in Malaysia and lives in Australia. Her writing explores brains, minds, space, technology, and narrative identity. Her short fiction can be found in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Space and Time Magazine, Aurealis, Andromeda Spaceways, and other places. Her debut novel, Every Version of You, will be published by Affirm Press in 2022. You can find her on Twitter as @gracechanwrites.

When the Sheaves Are Gathered

Nick Wolven

1

It’s 3 a.m., and Kip’s been at it all night, to the point where Johnny has had enough. Coming into the kitchen, he can’t believe what he’s seeing. Bottles all over, spills of sugar, a fifth of tequila lying tipped in the sink. And shards, too, literal pieces of glass, because the stupid kid, in his coked-up excitement, has jumped and smashed his head into the kitchen fixture, raining wreckage into the room.

The bulb’s intact, so Johnny can see Kip’s face, see he has no idea what’s happened. “Johnny?” Kip holds up wounded palms. “What’d I do?”

“Come on, kid.” Johnny stabs hands into Kip’s armpits, forklifts him up. “On your feet.”

“Did I hit my head?” Kip looks into his palms, where blood and glass mix in peppermint-colored swirls. He’s an idiot, but a beautiful idiot.

“You hit the light.” Johnny points. “You’re high. This is what comes of mixing coke and Kraftwerk at 3 a.m.” For a second, they’re angled together, hip to hip, and of course that’s when Armin comes into the room, stands a beat with his tongue in his cheek, and says:

“My, my, my, what have I been missing?”

“All right, Joan Rivers. Help me with this guy.”

They get Kip across the hall into the bathroom, where he lolls on the toilet humming “Angel of the Morning” while Johnny holds him steady, and Armin cleans his hands. It’s not bad, not like it could’ve been, though God knows what eight shots of Cuervo will do to a poor young queen’s insides. The other guests cluster in the hall, gossiping, gawping at the grooves of muscle showing through Kip’s tight shirt.

“Poor boy,” someone says, “it’s past his bedtime.” That’s their cue to get Kip across the hall, flump him on the foldout, pour water between his teeth.

“What’s that?” Johnny whispers. Because Kip is muttering, words coming out slobbery and unclear.

Armin says from the door, “Just let him sleep.”

“I think he’s trying to tell us something.”

Kip sits up, gaping, then falls back, passes out. His eyelids droop, but his lips are still moving. Johnny has the idea if he parted Kip’s jaws, looked in the boy’s mouth, he’d see words in there, trapped, trying to fly free.

“He’s fucked up,” Armin says. “He needs to convalesce.”

It feels wrong to leave Kip lying in the dark, but Johnny backs out and shuts the door.

“You always do this,” Armin clucks. “You fuss.”

Lowering his voice, Johnny says, “What’s the count?”

Armin jerks a thumb. “Two on the patio. Roy and his friends are still at it in the living room. Chuck and the Slab . . . ”

The way he trails off, eyebrows jumping, sends a trail of ice down Johnny’s spine.

“Shit. Really?”

“’Fraid so.”

“In our bed?”

Armin holds up his hands, presenting the world in all its luxuriant absurdity.

They clear the living room first. Johnny scratches the record, making Chaka Khan choke off mid-wail. Then hall, kitchen, bathroom. Whoever was on the patio has already vanished, a cigarette left smoking on the bricks.

Johnny tackles the situation in the bedroom. Chuck and the guy they call the Slab haven’t used the bed, but are lying next to it, curled up in postcoital repose. Johnny digs a toe in. “Lovebirds. Up ‘n’ at ’em.”

Chuck rises, stretches, makes a kissy face. The Slab hauls his muscular ass off the floor. “Good party,” Chuck grunts, eyes bright above his Burt Reynolds mustache. He cops a feel of Johnny’s upper arm. Armin once said Chuck rubbed against so many hard bodies, it was a wonder friction hadn’t worn him smooth.

“Stop by sometime. I’ll give you a birthday gift.” Chuck winks, making his mustache wiggle. Johnny groans and shoves him away.

Then it’s out into the shivery dark, goodbye, goodbye, the guests straggling off, while overhead the city glows with all its tipsy towers. Johnny can already feel the dawn coming, a pressure of light beyond the sea. He wishes he could have this moment forever, the sad sweet end of a perfect day. Then hands weight his shoulders. Breath strokes his neck. Johnny pivots into the clutch of Armin’s kiss.

“Happy thirty-fifth, old-timer.”

“Thanks. You know how to make a boy feel special.”

“You’re ancient. A relic. And that means you’re all m-i-i-i-i-ne . . . ”

Armin pirouettes to the bedroom. Johnny still wants to check on Kip. He pads down the hall. The guest room smells of sleep farts and alcohol. On the foldout, Kip is sprawled limbs akimbo, sleeping the knockout slumber of the drunk. Johnny grabs his ankles and straightens him out. In the half-light, Kip looks achingly young, angelic, a vision. The change in position stirs something inside him.

“What’s that?” Johnny puts an ear to Kip’s mouth. In a superstitious way, he feels this could be important, a subliminal missive, a message from beyond. The boy’s voice comes out singsong and sloppy.

When the sheaves are gathered,

When the geese have flown,

Summer’s ribbons stored away,

Fruits and flowers grown . . .

Johnny shakes him. No response. He hesitates. Kip’s ditty isn’t the kind of thing you expect a drunk party boy to be humming in the era of MTV. Yet Johnny’s sure he’s heard it before, far back, a tune out of time.

When the sheaves are gathered . . .

Irrational fear tweaks the hairs on Johnny’s neck. Maybe this is what it’s like getting older, this tickle of death breathing down your spine. His last view is of the streetlight through the window, the spectral curve of Kip’s sleeping cheek. Then the door swings shut, the latch clicks, the day is done.

2

“Up ‘n’ at ’em, cowboy.”

Johnny groans in wan dawn light, so exhausted he can barely remember his name. He fumbles for the glass of water by the bed. In the bathroom, Armin is humming Boy George, making the faucets bark and cough. He comes to the bedroom, stands in the door, mimes shooting himself in the head.

“You alive?”

“Ugh,” Johnny groans.

“How’s your head?”

Johnny can only wince and moan.

Armin laughs. “Guess we better get to it, huh?”

They gulp Advil, toast, coffee, eggs, and face the aftermath of the night.

“Looks like we partied even harder than I thought.” Armin sweeps a slipper through piles of shattered glass. “Any idea who broke the light?”

Johnny squints at the heap of shards. It’s curious, the feeling that comes over him now, like he ought to remember, but can’t summon details. It’s there in his mind—a file ready for retrieval—but each time he tries, he comes up blank, a chunk of core knowledge deleted from his head.

Johnny toes the mess. “I feel like I should know. But I can’t—”

“We gotta stop doing this,” Armin laughs. “We’re getting old. Can’t party like we used to.”

“We’re not that old.” Johnny’s getting tired of these quips about their age, as if thirty-five is the leading edge of death.

“In all seriousness, I’d like to know who destroyed our kitchen fixture.” Armin peers at the naked bulb, which appears to have survived the catastrophe intact. “Maybe it’s time to reevaluate the company we keep.”

“Uh-huh.” Johnny checks the sink, the floor. It’s maddening, the feeling he has right now, like there’s something he’s forgotten, a clue to this scene, if only his brain hadn’t misplaced the data. A clue gone AWOL, a wayward detail. He has an urge to check the spare room.

“You think there’s someone in there?” Armin trails him through the hall. “You didn’t have anyone over, did you?”

“That’s the thing, I can’t remember.” Johnny stops at the door. It’s silly, surreal. He’s sure nothing’s wrong. Yet he shudders as he raps the wood.

No answer.

“Well?” Armin says.

Johnny hesitates. Grabs the knob. Gives a twist.

The room’s empty. A sour smell fills the air, as if someone’s been here, but there’s no other sign. The foldout’s open, covered with a sheet. A cairn of cushions teeters on the floor. Armin points his mug.

“Someone fixed up the bed. Doesn’t look like he used it, though.”

“Nope.” Johnny pats the mattress, the pillow. There’s nothing remarkable, no sign of trouble, yet he feels as if someone ought to be here. He peeks behind the couch.

“What exactly are you looking for?” Armin says.

“I feel like we’re missing someone, somehow.”

“Someone? Who? An adopted child? You kidnap somebody last night without telling me?”

“I wish I could remember.”

Armin laughs. “It was that good a party, huh?”

Johnny smiles. He has to force it. What bothers him isn’t the emptiness of the room, but the emptiness inside his own head. A gap in reality, a wound in the world.

“Come on,” Armin turns. “If someone was here, he’s already gone.”

Life settles into its usual groove, a weekly rhythm of chores and chats. There’s plenty to think about, plenty to do. Lunch at the office, Friday night dancing, exercise three days a week. It’s this, Johnny decides, that really shows they’re getting older. Not budding fears or physical wear, but the slow, steady creep of routine.

He can’t quite shake the sense of something missing, a tug of a memory that won’t quite come. Johnny makes Armin sit down one night and list every person who was at the party.

“Let’s see. There was Roy and Roger—”

“And Jim.”

“And Dave and Don. Plus Dave’s friend with the infected piercing.”

“Merv. Merv the Perv. And Tim and Chuck.”

“Yes. And the Slab.”

And Ed and Larry, and Lou and Joe, and Tracy the man and Traci the woman, and Jerry C and Jerry O and Jheri as in Jheri curl, and Logan and the man who came with Logan, whose name they’ve forgotten, but whose sideburns they’ll never forget. Everyone checked-off, accounted for. But Johnny could swear a face has been misplaced.

“I don’t see who could be missing.” Armin caps his pen. “This is everyone we know.”

“Someone with a K, maybe? Katy? Kevin?”

“You mean Kayla? She moved to LA.”

They give up, though Johnny’s still not satisfied. He’s sure someone slept in the guest room that night. He just can’t seem to remember who.

Life goes on, as it always does, and Johnny does his best to move on. There are other incidents, missing details, a feeling that something’s been misplaced: a note, a book, a face, a friend. Johnny finds himself pausing on the street, looking into random apartments, marveling at the number of strangers in this town.

Nothing to worry about, right? Stress. Fatigue. Or just the chaos of city life. Johnny chalks it up to ordinary absentmindedness, mental wear from a harried life.

Meanwhile, life offers new challenges. Business at the gallery, lost youthful dreams, summer crowds that seem wearier than ever. Was the city always like this, Johnny wonders, strange and alien, like a monument to a forgotten past?

A few months later, there’s also this.

Slow morning at the office. A buzz of flies. The phone jangles at Johnny’s elbow, and he grabs the receiver, hoists it to his ear. The voice on the line is weirdly familiar, making Johnny narrow his eyes.

“Chuck?”

“You know it.” A husky laugh blasts into Johnny’s ear, evoking visions of bright teeth, a mustache. “How you been? I’ve been thinking about you, buddy.”

Johnny glances up. The office is silent, filled like a fishbowl with summer heat. There’s no rule against personal calls.

“Didn’t recognize me, huh?” Chuck grates out a laugh. “Guess we’ve never done this before. Talked, I mean. On the phone. You and me.” His voice drops to new depths of intimacy. “Listen, man, you free for lunch?”

“I could be.” Johnny pauses to wipe the receiver. “Why?”

The silence is so long, Johnny jiggles the cord.

“Nothing,” Chuck chirps. “Just been thinking. How you and me need to have a talk.”

“About what?”

“About the stuff we need to talk about.”

Johnny sighs. They make plans to meet in an hour, at Chuck’s club, the Sports Palace, eight blocks south. It’s one of those everything-plus-racquetball affairs, aerobics classes, courts and pools, a carpeted lounge where sexy singles meet and preen. Out front, in a café with juice and sandwiches, Chuck slides his hips into a sixties-style pod chair, shoving over a meal someone’s left on the table. The girl at the stand doesn’t even look up but smacks her gum and gives a rustle of her Vogue. The club seems weirdly empty today, but Johnny figures that’s the Friday lull.

“Guess it’s obvious what this is about.” Chuck’s uncharacteristically fidgety, toying with his laminated membership card. Beefcakes and bombshells strut behind him, white towels draped over taut brown arms.

“It is?” Johnny says.

“Come on, man. Are we gonna talk about this or what?”

Johnny’s stomach fizzes. Behind Chuck, women mill in a glass-walled room, restless in their leotards. A mirrored wall reflects puzzled pouts. Something’s wrong. A rubber mat lies empty. The instructor hasn’t shown, or a classmate’s missing, or a special guest has failed to appear. Who’s running this joint, anyway?

“Johnny? Hello? You with me, man?”

“Sorry.” Johnny drags his eyes to Chuck’s smile. “You were saying?”

“I’m saying, your party. Remember? The bedroom? Something happened in there. Or am I crazy?”

Johnny’s head feels light and airy, scooped out like a pitted fruit. He’s been wanting to discuss this subject for weeks, the strange suspicion that’s dogging his mind. A surge of superstition stops his voice. Like something will be ruptured if he voices his fears, a jinx, a hex, a cosmic balance.

“You mean what happened in the guest room, right?”

“Guest room? I’m talking about the bedroom, man. Your bedroom. Talking about you and me.” Chuck slaps the table. “Come on, you know what’s up. This has been coming for a long, long time.”

In the glass-walled room, the women are arguing, stamping feet, checking pocket planners. Johnny senses a vacancy in the air, as if the universe has gotten slightly larger, too big for the people floating inside.

“I’ll put it like this.” Chuck crosses his arms. “Remember Bobby?”

“Who?”

“Bobby Plotz. Tall guy, brown eyes?”

Johnny squints. He can almost remember. Then the face pops into his mind, a blurred cameo.

“Bobby, right. With the long hair? Kind of homely, but in a hot sort of way?”

“If that’s your type. Listen, here’s what I’m saying. You remember Bobby. But do you remember what happened to him?”

Johnny scrunches his forehead. “Did he move?”

“See, this is what I’m saying, man.” Chuck throws up beefy arms. “People leave, we barely remember. Connections break and no one cares. Me? Bobby? We used to be like that. Now? How long’s it been? I couldn’t even say.”

“Guess that’s what it’s like getting older,” Johnny mumbles.

“Is that what you tell yourself? Come on, man. We were a tribe. A pack, a crew. Now? When’s the last time you called an old friend? Guys like us, we can’t let this happen. We can’t let those connections slip.”

Johnny squints. He sees where this is heading. He knows where Chuck wants it to go. But he needs to discuss what’s on his own mind.

“I hear you.” Johnny nods. “I get it, I do. People drift apart. But those are just the ones we remember, right? You ever think about . . . ” Johnny swallows. “About the ones we don’t remember?”

Chuck nods as if in deep agreement, then freezes. “Huh?”

“You know.” Johnny feels like his head has gone hollow, filled with light, a frail Jack-o-lantern. In the exercise room, the leotarded women are giving up, heading for the door, shaking masses of thickly permed hair. A scheduling error? A glitch in the books?

“The others.” Johnny licks dry lips. “The ones we lost but can’t remember. The people we used to know, at one time, and now we don’t even know they’re gone.”

“What the hell are you talking about, man?”

“I mean, there must be people like that, right?” Johnny leans over, almost tipping a cup of carrot juice that’s sitting on the table, still full. He glances at the clutter Chuck’s pushed aside. A newspaper, open to the wanted ads. A sandwich. A leather case. Who left this stuff here, anyway?

“At school.” Johnny struggles to order his thoughts. “The office. Old coworkers. Classmates, colleagues. People we used to see every day. Acquaintances, relatives, friends of friends. Now they’re gone. And we’ve forgotten them so completely, we can’t even really be sure they were there. Gaps in our memory, vanished ghosts. As if they might as well not have existed.”

Chuck’s looking past him, at the open door. A woman stands with a hand on the glass, holding it open, staring into the street. No one’s there, just empty sidewalk, until a man bolts out of a taxi.

“You’re scaring me, man,” Chuck laughs.

“Don’t you feel it, though?” Johnny insists. “At certain times, on certain days? This nagging feeling, like something’s missing? Like there’s something you can almost remember, but not quite?” Johnny leans forward. “You know I play squash at eighty-sixth?”

“Sure.”

“I was at the courts the other day, ready for the match, and . . . ”

“Yeah?”

“No one’s there.”

“What, at the club?”

“Of course there were people at the club. But not at my court. My partner didn’t show.”

“He do that often?”

“I don’t know,” Johnny says. “I have no idea who my partner is. I have no recollection of ever having a partner. But I must have had one at some time, right? Why would I schedule a match without a partner?”

Chuck’s mouth opens, then shuts, like he knows there must be a reasonable explanation, but can’t quite figure out what it is.

“It’s like déjà vu,” Johnny says. “Like losing your keys. Like that feeling you get when you could swear you own the White Album, but you look and look and it’s not anywhere.”

He scoots closer.

“How about this? Happy hour at Elmo’s. We’re there, the usual crew, saving a seat. People come. Anyone using this chair? Yes, we say, yes, yes, yes. Five times this happens. Then Roger looks up, asks, ‘Who are we saving this chair for, anyway?’ No one could remember. We all laughed, but I’m telling you, it was weird, man. Creepy.”

Chuck shakes his head. “Things like that happen all the time.”

“So why did we all make the same mistake? Why did it happen to all of us at once?”

“Who else was there?”

“Me. Armin. Lou. Roger.”

“See, this is my point,” Chuck says. “Ten years back—”

“There are other things.” Johnny rushes on, aware he’s talking too loudly, but needing now to get it all out. “The gym. Last week. I looked up, no one was spotting my reps. I swear someone had been, a second ago. Where’d they go? The other day, I was looking through my books. A bunch were missing. The Drowning Season. Valley of the Dolls. I lent them to someone, I’m sure, but who? It’s like there are fewer people, somehow. Like something, someone, has been whittling down the numbers.”

Chuck’s head is shaking. “This is what I’m talking about.”

“No,” Johnny insists. “This is different. This isn’t just people moving away. Who left this stuff sitting here, on this table? This sandwich, this juice? Why’s this club so empty? Why aren’t instructors showing up for their classes?”

“Johnny, listen to yourself.”

“You know what I’m saying. You have to know. You have to have noticed.”

Chuck’s leaning back, hands pressed to his chest. “Do I know what you’re saying? Sure. And I know where it’s coming from. Look, man, I’m not a guy to point fingers. But I can’t help but notice, since you moved in with that stiff—”

“Excuse me?”

“Don’t act like you don’t know. Ten years ago? We were animals, man. We’d hit the clubs and know every face. Now? I hardly see you. Ever since you and that mummy started playing house, it’s been—”

“Jesus.” Johnny groans. “This isn’t about me and Armin, Chuck.”

“You don’t think so?” Chuck folds his arms. “Let me tell you something about Armin. Armin was born with a foot in the grave. You and me, Johnny? Guys like us? We need to live while we’re alive.”

“I’m trying to tell you something, Chuck.”

“And I’m trying to tell you something. You’ve always been like this. You fuss. You fret. You worry about stuff you can’t change. If you give me a chance—”

Johnny doesn’t hear the rest of what Chuck’s saying. A sound floats over the café tables, faint, lilting. The girl at the register is bent over her magazine, singing softly between smacks of gum.

When the sheaves are gathered,

When the geese have flown,

Summer’s ribbons stored away,

Fruits and flowers grown,

When the frost gleams on the glass

Where sun and raindrops shone . . .

“Johnny?” Chuck’s standing, hands spread on top of his chair. Johnny realizes he’s standing, too, lured by the tune floating over the tables. He crosses the room.

“Hey. Where’d you hear that?”

The girl’s eyes narrow above her magazine. “Hear what?”

“That song. The one you were singing just now. Where’d you learn it?”

She frowns, tonguing her gum into her cheek.

“Come on, you know, the one you were just—” Johnny groans and wheels away, lurching back to the waiting table, where Chuck holds up baffled hands.

“The hell, man?”

Johnny picks up the uneaten sandwich. The bread is still soft. Fresh. Untasted.

“Was someone sitting here?” Johnny calls over his shoulder. “At this table? Before we came?”

The girl stares.

“Goddamn,” Johnny grunts, letting the sandwich fall.

“Johnny, are you even listening to me?”

Johnny’s already moving, hurrying through the lobby, out into the midtown streets, which he can’t help but notice are ethereally silent, strangely uncrowded for this time of day.

The train ride home is eerily speedy, the seats mostly empty, the platforms bare. The streets of the Lower East Side are serene. Johnny counts cars as he hurries down his block. Three, four. Traffic is light, but maybe that’s the effect of the recession. Were there this many shuttered shops last week?

A man slumps in a doorway. A woman peers from an alley. How many of these people could vanish, Johnny wonders, before someone noticed and raised an alarm? If a day came when the unthinkable happened, if these worn, huddled figures dispersed into mist, would Johnny remember them? Would anyone?

He opens the door. The apartment is hushed. Johnny hurries down the hall. The tick of a typewriter comes from the guest room. Fridays are Armin’s do-not-disturb time. Johnny barges right on in.

“Uh, okay.” Armin swivels from the desk. “Everything all right?”

“You tell me.” Johnny paces the thinning carpet. Sweat tickles his nose. He spins, hands fisted. “Are we all right? You and me? Be honest.”

Armin takes off his glasses. Johnny sees a sheet curling out of the typewriter, speckled with print. Armin points with his glasses. “I’m three hours shy of my deadline here. Is there a chance this can wait?”

“No, I don’t think so. No, I really have to know.” Johnny throws himself onto the sofa, startled by how dazzle-brained he feels, shattered inside, a man of glass. “Listen. If I suddenly disappeared—no, just listen. If I vanished this instant, fell out of your life, would you . . . would you remember me?”

Armin tips his chair. “Where is this coming from?”

“I’m sorry, I just, I have this feeling. Like it’s all slipping away. And we don’t talk about it. No one ever talks about it. But we’re losing people, aren’t we? Losing people from our lives?”

Armin clacks shut his glasses. Frowns. Considers. “We have fewer friends than we used to, that’s true.”

“So you’ve noticed it.”

Armin sighs. “I wish I knew what brings this on.”

Johnny clutches his knees. The room, the world, is pumping like a giant heart, too big one second, too small the next. Johnny feels like he did at sixteen, starting a new school, that world of strange faces.

“I mean, you’re not wrong.” Armin pinches his nose. “Not a week goes by I don’t think about my mother. Or my cousin. Or my grandma. Or . . . well, all the others. But can’t we enjoy what we have while we have it?”

“I know, I know.” Johnny nods with a conviction that surprises him. It feels good to agree with these obvious facts, to have something to share, a basic understanding. “I know, you’re right, I just—”

“We’ve been fortunate.” Armin looks at the floor. “We have a home, a community. Can’t we savor it while it lasts?”

“You’re right.” Johnny gulps, embarrassed. He feels infinitely grateful for these sane, simple words. “Of course you’re right.”

“It’s just that you always do this, dear. You obsess.” Armin waits a beat before smiling. “Can I please finish this bitch of an article, now?”

Johnny laughs. Armin rises, stands over him, reaching down to tickle his neck. “I don’t give a shit about the rest of the world, OK? Whatever’s coming, whatever life has in store, the past can’t be changed. That’s something, right? Nothing can ever undo what we’ve had.” He nudges up Johnny’s head. “You understand?”

The worries of the week seem remote now, ridiculous, but Johnny’s laugh comes out shaky and faint. “Wanna hear something weird?”

“Five minutes.” Armin goes back to his chair.

“I was out with Chuck. Today. At his gym.”

“Uh-huh.”

“No, but listen. And this girl who works there, she was singing this old-timey song. It was odd, you know, hearing a kid today sing something like that. Quaint.”

“I see.”

“But here’s the thing. I was sure, I could swear, I’d heard it before. The tune, the words . . . it was so familiar . . . ”

Johnny snatches empty air, grasping a fact already receding, even as Armin leans back, closes his eyes, and intones with rich solemnity:

When the sheaves are gathered,

When the geese have flown,

Summer’s ribbons stored away,

Fruits and flowers grown,

When the frost gleams on the glass

Where sun and raindrops shone,

And winter’s silver trims the turf—

“Stop.” Johnny’s voice comes out faint and slurred, the ghost of a shout. But Armin carries on, finishing the second verse, launching into the third, before Johnny jumps up shouting, “Stop, stop, stop!”

“Jesus. All right. What’s the matter with you?”

“Why did you do that?” Johnny’s shaking.

“Do what?” Armin scoots closer to his desk. “Really, Johnny, sometimes you drive me crazy.”

Armin pokes papers, looking over what he’s written, tapping keys, squinting through his glasses. Johnny stares, openmouthed, as the world fills up with a feeling of wrongness as vivid as a bath of blood. He clenches his hands. “You shouldn’t have done that, Armin. You shouldn’t have sung it.”

“Sung what? Johnny, come here.” Armin’s hand flaps. Johnny drifts over, to be taken by the wrist, drawn toward the desk, Armin’s upturned eyes.

“I love you, Johnny. Honestly I do. But sometimes? Dear? Sometimes you need to let things go.”

3

With one thing and another, it’s three months before Johnny manages to see Chuck again. The meeting almost doesn’t happen. Johnny shows up forty minutes late, and Chuck’s even later. The trains have been awful. Buses, too. It’s a system-wide problem, people are saying, a municipal crisis, bad city management. There are absentee issues, budget shortfalls, a decline in tax revenues. Johnny’s too busy to keep up with the news.

The club is deserted, a glass mausoleum, though Chuck says that’s typical for weekday afternoons. In the café, Johnny rings the bell three times, shouts for service, but no one comes. Chuck shrugs it off. “They’ve been short-staffed.”

They buy coffee from a roach coach and sit on the curb. Chuck’s mustache is gone. His hair’s a mess. He tells the usual tales of dating in the city, a litany of dropped plans, unanswered calls. It’s slim pickings out there, Chuck says. Empty. The old meat market has gone vegetarian. Really, though, when’s it ever been different? That’s the problem with city living, Chuck grumbles. Bad men are so hard to find.

He laughs. It trails off into a sigh. “I’ll go through my wallet,” Chucks says, “find ten numbers, then I call ’em all and don’t get a thing. Zip. I mean, what the hell? Did everyone simultaneously forget how to party?”

Chuck laughs again, but there’s weight to his voice, a load of unnamed anxieties. It’s something everyone feels, these days, though no one’s brave enough to say it. A mysterious mournfulness, a sense of decline. Johnny sees it in faces on the street, sometimes in the bathroom mirror, where his reflection peers back with a lack of expression, eyes uninterested in their own deadness, lips too lazy to sketch a fake smile.

“Anyway.” Chuck sips. “How’s your problem working out?”

“Don’t ask.” Johnny shivers. “I thought I had a buyer, but they bailed. Didn’t give a reason, just stopped returning calls. The realtor says it’s a buyer’s market.”

“You’ve got a great place, anyway. All that space.”

“I know . . . ” Johnny grimaces. Truthfully, he can’t imagine why he needed so much space. A two-person apartment? All to himself? He can hardly stand to live there, sometimes. The empty rooms, the surfeit of area. Even worse are the haunted nights, when he feels like a ghost is sleeping beside him, a chilly specter sharing the bed.

The loneliness can get so intense that little things will set Johnny off: the record collection full of bands he doesn’t like, the shelves of books he’ll never read. How much junk does one bachelor need?

“Must get lonely,” Chuck says, looking hard in Johnny’s eyes. And there’s an air of inevitability to the exchange when he adds, “It’s been a while since I was over . . . ”

Neither man bothers to call into the office. There isn’t much work to be done these days. Employers are lax about monitoring hours. Sometimes employees don’t show up at all. As their taxi jounces down empty streets, Johnny gazes up into rows of blank windows, some curtained, some boarded up. Few people are out. Must be the cold. Heat’s been spotty. Power, too. Johnny secretly loves the night view from his window, the scant golden squares scattered in the deep dusk.

In the vestibule, the two men embrace like mourners, holding each other before they kiss. For all his experience, Chuck’s a hasty lover. That’s fine, Johnny thinks, he’s not looking for excitement, only a little extra warmth in the bed. After finishing, they lie nude under the covers, watching daylight leak down the walls. Johnny says, “Hey, want to hear something funny?”

“Fire away,” Chuck mumbles, half asleep.

“I was talking with Merv today. Merv the Perv?”

“Is that the funny part?”

“Come on, just listen.” Johnny twists under the covers. “We were chatting about the news. The shortages, you know. Suddenly, he breaks out singing. Right in the phone. This folksy tune. Not the kind of thing you expect from a guy like Merv, huh?”

“What was the song?”

“I’m not sure what it’s called. Here’s the thing, though. All the time he was singing, I had this feeling, like I’d heard it before.”

“I hate that feeling.”

“No, but this time I got it. I figured out where I know it from.”

“Yeah?”

“My Aunt Clari.”

“Fascinating,” Chuck says.

Johnny looks out the window, where stars crowd the sky, unobstructed by the waning lights. “She used to sing to me, when I was . . . oh, gosh, this must have been thirty years ago. That was when she came to live with us, when she couldn’t keep looking after herself. I’d go to her room, bring her dinner and things. And she’d sing that song.”

“Old women are the worst,” Chuck says.

“I liked it, though. I don’t think I understood, you know, what it means . . . well, to lose your faculties. I found it soothing. I’d sit by her chair.”

“How’s Merv doing these days, anyway?”

Johnny’s silent. The city has tipped into night, plunging past the indefinite instant when shadows deepen from blue to black. Johnny can’t see Chuck’s face in the dark, not even the eyes, but he can hear the night noises, the hum of the fridge, a distant horn.

“Think about it,” Johnny murmurs. “Losing your mind. Not only your wits, but everything, all of it. Your memories, your past. Lovers. Friends. Jobs and hobbies. Even the names of your own children. And losing them so completely, so deeply, you don’t even know they were there at all. The only things Aunt Clari remembered were things from her own childhood. Her dog, her brother. Like the rest of her life might as well not have happened. Like her whole soul froze at the age of nine.”

“I guess that is as good a time as any,” Chuck says.

With the coming of night, the room has grown cold. Johnny pulls up the blanket. Chuck is talking in a drone, words tumbling out like electric signals, something preprogrammed, a canned announcement.

“ . . . didn’t want to just spring it on you. But it’s happening. Tomorrow. It’s all set up. I just . . . I can’t stay in this place, anymore.”

Johnny listens from far away, like a child listening for a train in the night. He waits for a noise from the street to interrupt, a siren, a shout, a crash of cans. But there’s nothing, the city is holding its breath, and Johnny realizes he’s been expecting this, though his tongue is like cotton and his fingertips are cold.

“Where to?” he says.

“Chicago.” Chuck sighs. “A part of me hates to leave, you know, but . . . I dunno, man. Lately—it’s strange. It’s not like anything has changed. I just, I look around, and I see—”

“Slim pickings,” Johnny says.

“You understand.”

In the neighboring building, a window brightens. A woman strides through the room in sweatpants, holding a phone.

“Johnny? You understand, right?”

It’s impossible, from here, to hear what the woman’s saying, but Johnny can see her lips at the receiver, flexing in a regular rhythm, miming words to a lilting song. He squeezes Chuck’s hand. He can picture the woman’s voice, the lonely tune she’s sending out into the night. The image is so clear, so vivid in his mind, that it doesn’t surprise Johnny when Chuck sings along, his rough voice picking up the tune, tempo, phrasing, every old-fashioned phrase, every solitary word.

4

It’s over, Johnny decides. It’s time.

He takes a last turn through the apartment, a silent tour to say goodbye. He barely notices the objects he passes, the king-size bed, the cooler, the magazines. There’s nothing in this place to hold him, now. The clothes in the closets, the pictures on the walls, are faded mementos of lives never lived, memorials to forgotten souls.

The hard part, Johnny thinks, will be telling Byron. They don’t communicate much, these days. When they do, it’s rote, automatic, a matter of necessity. They have endless arguments about food and fuel. Fights over books and snacks and games. Quarrels over whether to lock the door.

Johnny heads to the bedroom. He raids dressers, working slowly, stuffing a backpack full of socks. He tries to remember if they’ve used this place before. In the old days, they wandered far afield, sleeping in new apartments every night, forcing open doors, whispering like graverobbers. Searching, always searching, for other people like themselves. But the buildings they found were shuttered and brooding, bereft of any sign of life, and now they now stick to the places they know, jumping from one apartment to another, traveling a circuit in the urban core.

Johnny scrounges in a closet for tools. Flashlight, food, disinfectant, nails. There are times, even now, when he lets his mind wander, pondering the mystery of this vast empty town. Surely there were people here, at one time. Hands to raise these looming buildings, voices to crowd the empty cafés. But whoever they were, they’re long gone, leaving no clue to say where they fled. Only solitude, spreading in the streets like shadow, seeping from a million cold stones.

Johnny finishes packing as the front door creaks. From the kitchen comes a rumble of cans, a muffled curse. Johnny finds Byron at the counter, sorting soup, his movements brusque and efficient. Byron sees the backpack.

“Come on, man.” His eyes go dark. He looks beaten, resigned, but he puts out a hand.

Johnny steps past him. Grabs a few cans. There was a time, way back, when they tried to mean something to one another. But their bond now is strictly survival-based. Byron’s built like Stallone, not Johnny’s type, and the sex they had was labored and joyless, both of them working to push aside the weight of half-forgotten feelings. One night, without thinking, Johnny called Byron, “The Slab.” Their laughter faded into chilly silence, a ghost of mirth, waning into regret.

“You’re not pulling this crap again, are you?”

“I have to.” Johnny shoulders the pack. “I have to try.”

“Sure. Then what? You’ll be out there five hours, tops, then you’ll come moping back.”

“No. Not this time.”

Johnny heads for the door. Byron stomps behind him, grabs a shoulder, and spins him around. “You know, I’m getting sick of this human yo-yo crap. Get it through your head, Johnny. There is no one else out there. No one. Never will be, never was. Can’t we be content with what we have?”

Johnny sags. Byron’s right. Johnny knows he’s right. But a spooky sensation, a specter of memory, has slowly built up inside Johnny’s mind. With the wind weeping and sobbing outside, he shrugs off Byron’s hand.

“Sorry, man. This time it’s for real.”

The streets are cluttered with abandoned cars. Johnny hunts for one with keys. By the time he’s ready, the sun’s going down. As darkness settles the unpeopled town, he wonders why he waited to leave. What’s there to hold him in this place, anyway? A friend? A companion? A roommate? A lover? He can’t recall a single face.

Why has he spent his life in this ruin, Johnny wonders, wandering these empty streets? Was there ever someone to hold him here? He can’t remember anything but these sidewalks, the tomb-like towers, the phantom halls.

Johnny gets in the car and turns the key. He follows the highway north over the bridge, into a land of hills and cliffs. Snow powders the earth between the brown trees. There are houses, swimming pools, tidy lawns. Swing sets stand like props on a stage, waiting for actors to enter from the wings. Johnny knows no actors will be coming. The world has always looked this way, a project neglected by a lazy god.

He scoffs. When will he give up these fantasies? When will he accept that this is how things are, an empty world inhabited by one lonely soul? There have never been other human beings, never will be, and he’d better learn to accept that fact. Learn to be content with what he was, to simply give up and let things go.

High in the hills, Johnny turns off the highway. He stops and parks and takes a stroll. The homes here are small, suburban, prim. Johnny dodges tipped garbage cans, scars of ice that mar the sidewalks.

It shocks him, at first, when he finds the old house. But of course he’s been heading here all along, he realizes, drawn to this particular door.

The house is bland, a simple foursquare, rain gutters sagging like demented smiles. Johnny follows the root-heaved path. The porch welcomes him with a crooked grin. It’s like no time has passed since he last stood here, like decades have been compacted into moments. He pushes open the broken door.

The foyer’s dark. A window has smashed. The living room is stiff with cold. Warped furniture crowds a moldy carpet. Johnny eases the door shut behind him. That’s when he hears it.

A voice upstairs.

Johnny freezes. The voice carries on, singing faintly. Johnny heads for the water-warped stairs. On the landing, he pauses, a palm to the stucco. The tune is quaint, simple, soothing. Johnny’s sure he’s heard it before.

He mounts the last stairs. As expected, a door stands ajar at the end of the hall.

Johnny knows what he’ll find in the room beyond. It shocks him, all the same, the sight of her there, those soft gray eyes, the startled merriment of her smile.

“Why, Barry, what a wonderful surprise!”

“It’s Johnny, Aunt Clari,” he says, stepping in. “Your great nephew Johnny.”

She gropes for the handle on the side of the recliner. Her afghan slumps off her knees to the floor. She doesn’t notice, she’s too happy to see him, throwing out her hands, beckoning him forward. “What brings you here, Barry?”

“Johnny, Aunt Clari. You remember, right?”

“Oh, dear, don’t tease me, I know who you are.” She thumps the chair. “Come. Sit with me.”

He kneels on the carpet. Reflections glint in her age-misted eyes as she smiles down, pressing her fingers to his hand. Outside, the sky is tarnished with dusk, houses shrunk to inky cutouts, every alley blotted with dark. Johnny considers how curious it is, that they’ve lived here forever, just the two of them, alone in this enormous world. She strokes his cheek.

“You came back, did you? I knew you wouldn’t forget. Tell me, Barry, did you have fun?”

Johnny swallows the fear in his throat. “How do you do it?” he asks, voice shaking. “How do you face it, Aunt Clari?”

“Oh, child. Come here. Right here.”

He rests his head in her lap. As her fingers smooth his hair, he begins to sob.

“I’m scared, Aunt Clari.”

“Now, now. It’s simple, dear. All you have to do is let go.”

In a shaky soprano, she begins to sing. Her voice falters, at first, but gradually strengthens, spreading through the vanishing sky, over the hills, and the extinguished stars, and all the fading folds of the Earth, until at last, in the darkness, he sings along with her.

When the sheaves are gathered,

When the geese have flown,

Summer’s ribbons stored away,

Fruits and flowers grown,

When the frost gleams on the glass

Where sun and raindrops shone,

And winter’s silver trims the turf,

Where spring’s new seeds were sown,

Slumber, then, as night takes in,

The forests, fields, and stones,

And follow those who went before

To face the dark alo—

5

“Johnny? Johnny?”

“I think he’s waking.”

Awareness spears through Johnny’s mind. He can feel his thoughts stirring, stretching, collecting, scraps of consciousness struggling to cohere.

“Johnny?”

“Let him take his time.”

Sun breaks in. Johnny opens his eyes. Residues of sleep still blur his sight, but he sees that the room is small and bright, and that two vague faces hang over the bed.

“There he is. There’s my guy.”

“His numbers look good.”

“Johnny? Right here. Why does he look like that?”

“He’s probably confused. It takes time for the networks to self-organize.”

“He seems upset.”

“Give it a sec.”

A hand presses Johnny’s shoulder. The faces bend down. Johnny understands that something is required, a special effort, a mental feat. His mind is like honey, rich and thick.

“Armin.” The name comes from somewhere deep inside, a bubble of memory bursting on his lips.

“There we go!” The faces draw back. Hands clap. “Bravo, Johnny!”

Armin, Armin. Johnny knows him now, dear old Armin, the white hair, the wrinkled hands. In one ecstatic explosion, it all comes back.

“You’re Doctor Natarajan.”

“Now we’re cooking.” The doctor pokes a machine. “His major nodes are lighting up. You’ll see exponential progress now.”

It’s happening in a rush, memories stampeding back, faces, places, names, details. An almost tactile tingle as the facts sock home. Johnny laughs.

“Well, what do you think?” Armin grins. “Should I call ’em in?”

“I don’t think it can hurt.” Doctor Natarajan goes to the door.

A moment later, the room is filled with figures. Johnny sees cardigans, khakis, canes. Familiar faces smile down. Johnny points.

“Byron. Roger. Jheri. Chuck. And you’re Merv. Merv the Perv. Where’s Kip? Is Kip here?”

“Kip couldn’t make it. He’ll see you at the house.” Armin glances at the doctor. “When do you think . . . ?”

“We’ll have to keep an eye on those numbers. Unless something changes, though . . . ” Her eyes skim the screen. “Looking at these trend lines? I’d call this a success.”

It’s a party, that noon, in the clinic cafeteria. There are gallons of coffee, a stale pound cake, heaps of cookies from the gluten-free café. And streams of giddy, endless questions, testing the miracle of Johnny’s new mind.

“How about that time in oh-eight, Johnny, huh? ’Member that? The camping trip?”

“What about eighty-six? That horrible year?”

“Let’s talk about the seventies. You remember the seventies? ’Cause I sure don’t.”

“It’s kind of amazing, isn’t it?” someone says. “I mean, that so many of us made it through?”

The laughter is incessant, excessive, celebratory, commemorating not only Johnny’s recovery, but the power of memory, the depth of the past. Joys and sorrows, lives, and loves, crash over Johnny in a stupefying flood. He’s grateful when Armin guides him to the door.

“All right, guys, I think he could use a break. Till next week, right? Goodbye, goodbye . . . ”

After all the fuss, the recovery room is eerily silent. Light through the window reflects off steel railings, tinting the air the color of leaves.

“Well.” Johnny sits. “That was exhausting.”

Armin grins. “They’ve been waiting for weeks to come by. I wasn’t sure what to tell them.”

Johnny reaches for Armin’s hands. It’s hard to convey everything he’s feeling now, the drowning abundance of moods and impressions that seem to assail him with every new second. “Listen.” He pauses, biting his tongue. “When I was under just now—”

“Oh, the operation was nothing.” Armin waves. “It was the pre-op that did us in.”

“Pre-op. Sure. But while I was out, did I . . . did I do anything, or say anything . . . ?”

“You did, actually.” Armin’s mouth quirks up. “You were singing.”

“Singing?”

“Sort of a funny old song. Didn’t catch the words. Why? Does it mean something?”

Johnny’s eyes slide to the window. The spring air is golden, leaves swishing against the glass. “No. I don’t think so. I just . . . did you ever wonder?” Johnny grasps empty air. “All those cells they killed—”

“Replaced,” Armin corrects.

“Replaced, of course. But I mean, they had to kill the old ones first.”

“They were sick.” Armin shrugs. “They were dying, diseased. Anyway, the individual neurons don’t matter, right? It’s the pattern. The network. The structure of the brain.”

“Sure. Networks. I know, I just . . . ” Johnny sits, mouth open, waiting for a thought to surface, a worry he’s forgotten, a doubt he’s misplaced.

“Listen.” Armin points at him, bang, between the eyes. “You’re here. You’re you. You’re alive and handsome and old as shit, and you’re all, all mine. So what do you have to complain about, champ?”

Johnny grins, looking down at their clasped, wrinkled hands. “I just, I wonder about it, I guess. What it was like for him. You know?”

“Him?”

“Sure.” Johnny taps his brow. “The old brain. The old Johnny. The one they replaced.” He pauses, frowning, thinking it over. “The guy who used to be in my head.”

On the ride home, the streets are jammed with traffic, every intersection a riot of cars.

“Don’t do that,” Johnny says.

“Do what?”

“You were singing.”

“I was?”

“Under your breath.”

“What’s wrong with singing?”

Johnny doesn’t answer. He reaches for the radio. It’s a little thing, a very little thing. But right now, he’d like to have some music.

Something light, preferably.

Something new.

About the Author

Nick Wolven’s science fiction has appeared in popular magazines and anthologies around the world. His novella Snowflake will appear in early 2021.

Preserved in Amber

Samantha Murray

You can leave a place for a long, long time. You can leave a place for a long time and never really leave. And yet never know it, until you come back to find that a part of you is waiting there, has been waiting there, all along.

Niu Yi

The taxi from Guiyang Airport passed through long tunnels with curved white crescents every fifty or so meters along. It was simply some reflective material, but the bright curves leading her off into the distance through the darkness of the tunnel made her think of an Einstein-Rosen bridge, a tunnel through space-time. Is this what it will be like? Niu Yi thought, slightly nauseated from the jet lag and the speed with which the driver was taking the bends, and from the acrid sweetness of his cigarette smoke that still invaded the car’s cabin even though he has hand rested nonchalantly out of the window. Probably not. It probably wouldn’t be anything like this at all. And yet, this endless car ride, this long, long tunnel under the mountain, she could feel herself leaving one world for another. And maybe it would be a little like that, after all.

After nearly two hours of quiet smoking and occasional spitting out the window, Niu Yi’s driver abruptly started talking.

“I took my sister out on a long drive like this with a passenger once,” he said, making eye contact with Niu Yi in the rearview mirror. “It made her throw up, the trip was so long. That wasn’t even as far as this one, but I’m a driver, I’ve been driving more than twenty years now. I know distance. Still, this is far. This is a long way.”

A long way.

He’d been arranged to come out from Guizhou province to pick her up, as drivers from the airport would not have taken this fare. So it was a return journey for him, and people in this part of Zhenyuan County typically still did not travel far, Niu Yi knew. A long way. She thought of where she would be going in only a few months, and the irony flickered lightly over her and then vanished. For this was. She agreed with her driver. This was a long way.

“I have two sons now,” he told her later, after the roads had become more winding, nearing Danzhai. He took his other hand off the wheel too for one alarming moment, to pass her his phone, two small boys on the screen, the larger one smirking at the camera, the other wide-eyed and solemn.

“Congratulations,” Niu Yi said, and meant it. “They’re cute.”

“Yes, yes, and they’re smart,” he said. “So smart. I never thought we’d have two. But it raises a dilemma now.” Now that he had started talking, the words were like a stream trickling down the mountain, picking up speed and volume as it went. “When I die, I’d like to make the memory-gift, and now I have to choose among my boys. Fu is my firstborn, but it does not feel fair that his brother gets nothing.” He used the Miao word for gift, Khoom Plig, but the Han word for memory, Jiyi, marrying them together.

“I’m sure they’ll understand,” she reassured him warmly, because it seemed important, and because after the hours and the distance and the darkness of the tunnels, she felt like they were in this together, somehow.

“Yes,” he said, and his cigarette ash tipped, toppled, and swirled by the window past her and away. “Yes.”

Niu Yi’s grandmother’s village was called “The end of the mountain,” in Miao language. The next leg of Niu Yi’s journey to get there was a precarious minivan ride up an unenclosed road. The left side of the road dropped away steeply, opening up to a hazy vista of rice-terraces stepping in their graduated deliberate way down the mountain. Niu Yi moved over in her seat, almost unconsciously. She felt like her mind was clinging to the side of the mountain, as if not gripping hard mentally, she might drift away. All of the stilted houses clung to the mountain too. Niu Yi could imagine the mountain waking up, shaking itself like a shaggy dog, and flinging them all off, into the broad openness, into the misty sky.

Her grandmother was making her way out of the front of her house as Niu Yi wheeled her small case of luggage up the steep gravelly path, chickens scattering out of her way, their quick rapid steps followed by slow wandering, to quicken again as she got closer. Quick-quick-quick-slow-slow.

Soft Miao words were murmured in greeting, as Niu Yi bent down so that she could be squeezed hard. My dear. Her grandmother’s previously bright dark eyes were filmy and distant, and she reached out for Niu Yi with her hands. The deep lines on her face had become crevasses and gulches. But Niu Yi could read welcome in the way her grandmother gripped her arms tightly.

Everything looked the same. Niu Yi had tried to remember her grandmother’s house several times on the journey here, but she’d known her mind wouldn’t work that way, and details remained stubbornly elusive. But now a surge of familiarity coursed through her in a way that felt warming and relaxing both together. That’s right, this is how it was. Just like this.

Out through the window Niu Yi could see a drone glinting off in the distance, and her grandmother’s phone resting on a little batik mat at the edge of the table was almost as sleek and modern and shiny as Niu Yi’s own, but these touches of technology felt fleeting, superimposed over a village that felt somehow outside of time, untouched by the sweep of years.

Her grandmother scooped her oil tea from an earthen pot older than Niu Yi herself.

“Mmm, it’s good,” Niu Yi nodded over her tea. The ginger salt and oil was hot and sour, and sustaining.

“You are welcome,” her grandmother said. The warmth of the word spread out, encompassing more than just the tea.

“I wanted to come back here, to see you again before . . . ”

“Before you go.” Her grandmother nodded. “You wanted to come home.

Biological immortality is a state in which the rate of mortality from senescence is stable or decreasing, thus decoupling it from chronological age.

There are no defined limits to life for amoebas, they have no set life span and have the potential to maintain their structure indefinitely. They die—of injury or disease or changes to the environment. But not old age.

But we are wired to self-destruct over time-immortal genes in throwaway bodies.

Vanda

The ship Vermilion-Amber-Sunset-Tangerine looked like streaks of thick paint, plastered heavy-handedly across an arc of the sky. Sunlight loved it, sunlight bounced off it in all directions, faceted, fractured. At night you couldn’t see it at all, only the familiar stars displaced into shifted positions, slightly blurred.

Vanda had first seen the VAST in the sky, not on a viewer or screen or image, not as a newsbreak or on social media or one of the messages that spread around the globe with wildfire speed.

She had been staying at Carbla Station, studying the stromatolites as part of her genomics research. Carbla Station was a private property, a huge sheep station, but the owners allowed particular scientific groups access to the property, because their land had the only access to the section of beach she needed. Carbla beach was made of tiny white shells, and on the edge of the beach, and in the water, were living stromatolites. They looked like rocks, but the structures were actually produced by the excretions of microorganisms. The genes of these lifeforms were the same as those that had existed over three billion years ago. Genes were little Von Neumann machines, and these were the closest they came to being immortal.

Vanda had been outside, close to her accommodation at the shearer’s quarters on the station. It was very basic accommodation, and Vanda had had to remove a tick from her calf after her first night there on the little wire-framed camp bed. Later, her mind would keep persisting that there had been a sound, something to make her look up. But she could not remember an actual sound, and no one else reported one, later. It may instead have been an absence of sound or an odd quality to the air, like a sucking-in of oxygen, or a limning of the light. Whatever it was that she couldn’t quite recall, it prickled her like prescience, and she looked up.

Dr. Vanda Michael was part of the multidisciplinary team based just outside of the small coastal town of Denham in Western Australia, working to translate the alien communications. Teams were working this same problem all around the world, but the Denham site was the most prestigious, working in the shadow of the VAST itself, figuratively anyway, as the VAST cast no real shadow. Vanda still battled with her own internal imposter syndrome at the elements of luck and timing to her own inclusion, getting to work with the eminent and brilliant academics and scientists that had gathered here.

One of them was speaking to her now. Dr. Liah Je was small, sleek, and solemn, and somewhat younger in person than her reputation had suggested.

“These calculations are nefarious,” she said to Vanda, stepping away from her screen and pushing a strand of dark hair back from her face.

“Iniquitous even,” Vanda answered, grinning.

“Heinous,” Liah noted, with her usual reserved manner. Vanda wasn’t fooled, not anymore. In the weeks since they had started working together, the unfailingly dedicated and highly regarded Dr. Je had shown herself to be in possession of a previously unguessed sly sense of humor. “It’s almost enough to drive me to drink.” she added, then.

It might be an overture. Vanda generally had trouble with social cues.

“There’s that pub in Shark Bay the physics crew were talking about,” she ventured. “And it’s Friday. We could have beer?”

A small pause followed her words. Vanda knew that if she took three strides toward the window, she would be able to catch a glimpse of the VAST overhead. Their makeshift lab had been quickly constructed, but it was much more comfortable than the shearers’ quarters had been. She didn’t usually ever drink. And she didn’t usually do well at making friends either. But an alien ship was sitting in the sky, with colors that made your heart break. And maybe all bets were off now. Maybe old things would just fall away.

“Beer, hmm?” said Dr. Liah Je. “I could do that.”

Niu Yi

From where Niu Yi sat she could see the village sprawling below her, and she scanned the sky as if there was something missing, although she’d never seen the VAST, not in person, not yet. The sky was reaching toward blue today. It would be summer soon. The seasons got under Niu Yi’s skin, sometimes it felt like she could trace the origin of her moods to the weather, the wind, the temperature. As the days warmed and grew longer, something in Niu Yi always woke, and stretched. It was an uplift to her spirit that somehow managed to catch her by surprise every time. She called it the “gasp of summer.” But there would be no seasons in space. And definitely not Underlight, or wherever it was she was going. She wondered if her mind and her emotions would be smooth and unchanging there, rather than changing in quick sharp spikes like they were wont to do.

She looked down at the paper in her lap. I wish I could draw. She’d tried. She’d brought a sketch pad and a selection of felt pens out here to try and record what she saw. Not that she could take it with her. But somehow she felt like if she could get it to stay on the page, maybe she could get it to stick in her mind too.

There were so many sketches and paintings on small canvasses piled up against one another in the corners of her grandmother’s small house. Stacks of them in the corner of the room Niu Yi slept in, depicting so many different slants of life in this village. Her grandmother always drew the things she could see, the huts and motorbikes and chickens. The mountain and the sky. The faces of the people, a story to be read in every expression, in the lines on a face. Niu Yi wished she had inherited the skill, even a little of it. The ability to draw some marks on a page, and have them suddenly become meaningful. The lines Niu Yi drew remained stubbornly just lines and nothing else, and she crumpled up her pages in frustration.

With a pang, Niu Yi thought of her grandmother’s filmy eyes and the way her grandmother tilted her chin toward wherever Niu Yi’s voice was coming from, or turned her face with small seeking movements toward the sunlight coming in the window. Her grandmother couldn’t draw anymore, either.

Niu Yi tried to press the images into her mind, like flowers into velvet. The particular deep green to the thatched roofs, the little curve up at the edge, the line it made against the sky. The rich red of the flaking wood.

But it would not stay. It never did.

Niu Yi couldn’t remember when she’d found out that other people could see pictures in their head. She could remember her dumbfounded disbelief though, when it had clicked that when other people spoke of imagining things in their mind that they meant it literally. When Niu Yi closed her eyes and tried to conjure her grandmother’s face, she couldn’t get the image to coalesce. Her mental canvass remained blank and unresponsive. She’d looked this up on her phone a couple of years ago and only found an English word for it; aphantasia. While it was nice to know she wasn’t the only one who lacked this ability, she wished there was a word in Miao language for it.

Many of the stilted houses in the village had red signs running down the length of their windows, tacked up both sides and over the top. “They’re prayers,” Niu Yi could remember her grandmother telling her when she was a little girl, watching her crane her head to try and read the writing. “Prayers for a better life.” Her grandmother’s windows were bare. Niu Yi had always supposed that was because her grandmother already had the best life.

There was a sense here, of everything falling down and being built up at the same time. Building materials stacked in precarious piles everywhere, construction, villagers industriously working on roofs all together, digging trenches. Children and dogs and chickens spilling forth into the road. Niu Yi wished she could take a picture, a video, something that would last, an image that would stick with her that she could trust. Unlike her fractured memory, her blank mind. Her thoughts preceded her down the mountain, tumbling and broken. There was rubble on the side of the road, part of the mountain, already fallen.

Vanda

When she was four, Vanda had worked out the concept of death, and she’d gripped it tightly, or it had gripped her, or both, unable to let go. When her mother had tucked her up in bed, when the sleepy songs had been sung and the kisses and hugs and goodnights all done and uttered, and her mother was trying to drift ghostlike out of the room, that was when the questions would swell like a wave within her.

“When will you die, Mummy?”

Her mother sighed. “Not for a long time. Not for many years. You’ll be all grown up yourself.”

Vanda tried to imagine being all grown up. It didn’t help.

“I don’t want you to die, Mummy. Ever.” And she’d started to cry soft tears.

Her mother would be a little reluctantly drawn back into the darkened room by her distress.

“It’s okay. Everything dies one day, in the end.”

Vanda did not know how her mother could possibly mean this to be comforting. “Everything?”

“Yes.”

“And everyone?”

“Eventually. After a long, long time. Don’t worry about it now, it’s sleepy time.”

Vanda did not see how she would sleep with this enormous truth sitting on the middle of her chest.

“But I don’t want you to die! Don’t you care? Don’t you mind?”

Her mother hesitated a little. “I’ll have lived a good long life by then.” There was something about the edges of her mother’s eyes that Vanda wasn’t sure about.

“Sleep tight now,” her mother kissed her forehead and drew her hand slowly out of Vanda’s clutching fingers. “No more calling out.”

“I don’t want to die either,” Vanda said, very softly. Her mother had gone back to her television show, Vanda could hear the muted sounds of tinned laughter. Even when she was very old, with wrinkly hands and white, white hair, she knew she would still mind.

Genes are memories. The delicate patterning of a dragonfly’s wings can persist long after mountains have worn down into the sea.

The pub at Shark Bay bore the literal name of “The Old Pub.” It was right off Main Street, and pleasant, if mediocre. The signage proclaimed it the most Western pub in Australia.

“So many people,” murmured Vanda as she maneuvered to their little high corner table with two beers in her hands.

“Of course,” said Liah. She’d changed into a dark-blue collared shirt of some delicate material, and looked immaculate as ever. “They’ve all come to see the VAST.”

“Poor dolphins,” said Vanda. Tourists had historically come to this region of Western Australia to see the dolphins as they swam up to the beach at Monkey Mia to be fed.

“Oh, I’m sure they stop in at the dolphins too while they’re here,” Liah said with a wry note in her voice. She sipped her beer. Then her head came up and she looked into the distance, as if stunned.

“Liah?” Vanda said, after a moment.

Liah turned to her, eyes still unfocused. “My father came here once,” she said, her voice so soft Vanda had to lean in to catch it over the background hubbub.

“He worked in Western Australia for a while in his early twenties,” Liah continued slowly. “This I knew. But he came up here one weekend. Not with my mother, this was before he met my mother. He came with another girl. They sat . . . ” Liah turned toward the bar and pointed. “Over there. There used to be a pool table in the middle there.”

“You have your father’s memories?” Vanda’s voice inflected upward, but it wasn’t really a question. She’d known that Liah Je had been one of the first few people in Australia to undergo the M-transfer, it had been on the news broadcasts, over a year ago. In China and a lot of Europe the procedure was becoming really common, available to wide swathes of the populations, but Australia was a slow adopter of the technology. Currently it was restricted to people who could show a case for potential advancement of knowledge in some field considered valuable in terms of likelihood of paying back to society.

“The girl was pretty,” Liah said. “She wore this flimsy orange sundress, and a bead of sweat ran down her neck and rested at her collarbone. It was hot, I guess.” Liah looked up then, and straight into Vanda’s eyes. “Yes, I have his memories,” she said, as if only just hearing the question.

“Did it hurt?” Vanda asked before wanting to kick herself in case she was prying. She really didn’t know how to navigate this friendship stuff.

“Not in the way you think,” Liah said. She still hadn’t dropped her gaze.

“Your father was brilliant,” Vanda said.

“Yes.” Liah said. “He was driven too. That is good, sometimes.” She looked away, and Vanda felt a brief stab that felt like the loss of something. “I was concerned, about the transfer. I did not want to become my father.” She looked at her beer as if she had forgotten she held it. “But it doesn’t work that way.”

“How does it work?” Vanda said gently.

“I don’t get his emotions, his thoughts,” Liah said, her detached scientific manner returning. “Just the content, not the context I guess. I’ve tried to leave the personal stuff alone, not look at it. But sometimes, like just then, it just bobs up at the surface. Like flotsam. The flotsam of a life.”

“Your father must have been glad he had you,” Vanda thought of her own parents. Her father, gone, all of his memories, lost, irretrievable. And her mother’s memories would not be gifts.

Something about Liah’s mouth hardened, and Vanda thought she’d probably said the wrong thing. This sharing of confidence with her much-respected colleague felt new and fragile, and Vanda was afraid it would drift away like dandelion fluff at the slightest disruption.

“He was a . . . possessive man, my father,” Liah said finally. “He held his knowledge tight against his chest, as if other people wanted to steal it from him. But he was dying. It makes people desperate, sometimes. He wanted to live on. And so.”

Vanda didn’t say anything, letting the silence pool between them. Her ex-husband had not been a fan of silence. If Vanda fell silent, searching for what she wanted to say or trying to work out what it was she really felt, or just simply pausing to consider, he would dash in and fill the space with his own words. His words were charming, convincing, and charismatic most of the time. But they were his, not hers.

Liah’s words came slowly forth into the space that had been left for them. “But he doesn’t. I have his memories. But I am not him.”

I’m glad, thought Vanda, but she looked down at the dregs of her beer instead of saying so.

“At first I was worried too, that people would think my results . . . weren’t mine somehow, anymore. But I don’t care. If it helps me. It opens doors.” The look she threw Vanda was oddly defiant. “People want my father’s insights. The way he would combine two apparently separate ideas, and only then would you see that they were fundamentally isomorphic at some deep level. That is what he had, that is what he could do. I would do anything to get that.”

Vanda waited.

“It doesn’t really work like that, but I’ll take anything I can and use anything I can. I’ll take it.” The ambition that Liah Je was known for made a stark and sudden appearance in her face.

“Yes,” Vanda said. And if they were going to decode the VAST’s secrets they would need all the help they could get. “What did you think when you—”

“First saw the VAST?” Liah smiled, her tension fading, and Vanda could not help smiling in response. It was one of those oft-asked and discussed questions, almost a cliché already. “I was in Sydney,” Liah said. “A friend sent me a message. I thought it was a joke. Once I was finally convinced it was real, I knew it was a game changer. That nothing would ever go back in its box again, you know? I was excited and terrified all at once. I was all lit up and kind of expanded by it. And I kept just . . . crying. It was like being tossed around on some turbulent sea.” She paused. “It’s like there are not the proper words for it.” She shook her head and her dark hair drifted back to where it had been.

“Not the proper words for it,” repeated Vanda. “Do you think that’s our problem? Do you think it’s all in there, but we just won’t ever have the proper words?” She knew that Liah knew what she was talking about. The physicists and cryptanalysts had found mathematical structure in the communications the VAST had been continuously broadcasting since it arrived. They could already tell that some of the data concerned the five platonic solids, and another section the electron configuration of the chemical elements. But the messages were built from only six protein structures, combining, and twining around each other in a way reminiscent of triple-stranded DNA. Vanda knew they were only scratching the surface.

“I’m hoping we’ll find the words,” Liah said. “I’m betting that we do.” She gave a rather irreverent grin. “But you never answered the question.”

“What question?” Vanda said.

“The question you asked me. What was your reaction when you first saw the VAST?”

Vanda paused, to let all of the things she couldn’t express rush into the space.

“I thought it was the end of the world,” she said.

Vanda, somewhere at the back of her mind, had always been waiting for the end of the world. Ruffled out of sleep by the noise of a jet or a truck making an odd low noise in the distance, she would sit up, and wait, and think, is this it? Is this how it comes? She used to wonder what it would sound like; a splintering crash; a high-pitched whine; a deep vibration on the very edge of what she could hear? She felt like she would recognize that moment, when everything ceased to be normal, and became something else instead. The moment when the end came hurtling toward her. The world could end in a million ways, but at its heart, that moment of realization would be deeply familiar, a coming home, a recognition. After all, it wouldn’t be the first time the world had ended.

Niu Yi

“Look at this,” said her grandmother, rubbing her fingers over the top of the picture as if she could glean the information through touch. Her grandmother couldn’t see the photos hardly at all, Niu Yi guessed, but she could remember what each one was, and was unerringly correct.

Niu Yi took the photo out of her grandmother’s hands, and when she looked down at it something hurt. Here was that younger part of herself she thought she’d outgrown and outcast. Here all along, waiting. It was a picture of herself, her hair bunched on both sides of her head, gap-toothed and smiling. Niu Yi had lived with her grandmother here at the end of the mountain until she was nine years old. She looked to be about six in the photo. Her naïve, innocent, hopeful self. It was a happy photo. A happy time.

“You’re just like your mother here,” her grandmother said, tapping the photo gently. “You could be her, almost.”

No. I’m not like her. Niu Yi thought. She put the photo down on the table.

“Grandmother, the hospitals are really good now, they could do a good job to help your eyes. And I have credits, we can use my credits, I have more than enough.” The government had given her more credits than she’d ever dreamed of when she’d been chosen as one of the eight thousand.

Her grandmother shook her head slowly from side to side. “It doesn’t trouble me, I haven’t lost anything, it’s all up here,” she tapped the side of her head, and Niu Yi felt an odd small envy.

“But it would be a gift, grandmother,” Niu Yi said. It was custom to always accept a gift given with a whole heart.

That night, as she tried to go to sleep listening to the eerie unearthly crooning of her grandmother’s chickens roosting under the house, Niu Yi wished she could remember her mother’s face.

Vanda

The first time the world had ended Vanda had been thirteen. Her family had been coming back from the beach, from her brother’s junior swim-squad training. Her mother and father had been in the front of the car. Declan had been eight, only eight, he’d been in the back with her, and she’d just snapped at him to shut up because he’d been trying to sing his stupid team song too loudly in a nasally purposely-out-of-tune voice. They went to overtake a truck that was turning in front of them, but a broken axle caused the truck to spin out of the corner, right into them.

Time had folded back and over on itself like dough, and Vanda had felt like she was lost in the spinning and the screeching sound that was all around her. And then the endless motion and the noise had stopped, and she was sitting in what was left of the back seat, her side wet and warm although nothing hurt yet, nothing hurt at all, listening to her mother howling.

Niu Yi

“You’ve got a visitor,” Niu Yi’s grandmother told her, as she returned to her grandmother’s with yams and carrots. It was such an unexpected and implausible thing for her grandmother to say that Niu Yi stopped and stood still.

A lean, well-dressed man came to the doorway. “Niu Yi,” he said, and took the hand that was not holding the vegetables.

“Jing,” she said. “How can you be here?”

She had met Wan Jing when they had both lived and worked at the Danzhai Wanda Tourist Village. Wanda’s poverty abatement program had built the village back in 2017, nearly thirty years ago. Her mother had moved there shortly after the village was opened, one of the first students to attend the vocational college, leaving Niu Yi with her grandmother. And Niu Yi in her turn had lived there for nearly five years before heading to Shenzhen University. Her grandmother had never left her mountain, thought Niu Yi, then her mother spent her life in within the Qiandongnan Miao and Dong Autonomous Prefecture, and now Niu Yi herself . . . who would go further than dreams.

Jing had left Danzhai Wanda Village seven or eight months earlier than she did, and she hadn’t seen him since.

“You went to study engineering,” she ventured almost shyly, as she showed him through the village, walking under the maple trees. Her grandmother would be killing a chicken to entertain their guest for dinner and had shooed them both out of the house.

“I am an engineer,” Jing said. “I work on the new high-speed train lines. And you wanted to study science.”

Niu Yi shot him a quick look before nodding in acknowledgement. She was surprised he remembered, and he’d left before she’d gone. But he hadn’t stayed in touch, and after he hadn’t returned her first message, she’d not pursued it. He’d vanished like he’d been made of mist. And now he was here.

“I remember you doing the Golden Pheasant Dance at Spring Festival,” Jing said with his soft and easy syllables. “Your face fringed with silver.” The traditional Miao garments involved an intricately beautiful silver headdress, spun light enough to wear on her head. She’d worn a bright pleated skirt, embroidered in the way her grandmother had taught her. And she’d been decked with silver bracelets, anklets, and earrings. There’d been a trick to walking without making noise, although usually making noise was exactly what you wanted to do.

They passed three men tiling a roof, singing together in antiphonal layers.

“And I remember you playing the lusheng,” Niu Yi returned. He’d been good at it, she’d admired his sensitive fingers, and the delicate strains of his music. But she was much more direct these days than she used to be. “Jing, how are you here?”

“Can I not be here?” he said, his voice light, and reminiscent somehow of the way he sang, light yet rich with undertones.

No, thought Niu Yi. This was not the village Jing was from. It made no sense to find him here.

But she made bright conversation with him as they walked up the steep trails, and found herself laughing at his anecdotes. He told her how one of the main problems they were having with the train lines was due to millipedes. The millipedes were drawn to the tracks for some inexplicable reason and made their way along them. But when the train squishes the millipedes, all of those squishy millipede bodies reduce the friction between the train and the track, and all of the stopping time calculations are thrown out, and the drivers have trouble making the trains stop in time. As always, he knew how to pick just the right details to make a story compelling.

“But why, why are they there?” Niu Yi said, her hand over her mouth to try and hold back her giggle.

“No one knows,” Jing said with perfect solemnity.

Jing had always been popular. He had always been at the center of things. Niu Yi had been caught in his orbit, with everyone else. Although it was a far-flung orbit, where she never got too close, always on the periphery.

“Look,” Niu Yi said when she saw where their footsteps had led them. In the center of the village was a long rectangular mural, the sketching engraved directly into long panels of the wood itself. “It’s our history,” she said, almost reverently, her fingers tracing the grooves in the wood, the line of a tree, of maple leaves. The long journey to find a new home. Over mountains, through rivers. The Miao people had only had a written language since the 1950s. Before then the oral histories of a thousand years were passed down in word and song, flowing like a stream. But here it was, right here, in pictures. Pictures she couldn’t take with her.

“There’s some room at the end here.” Jing said, laying his palm on the blank wood.

“I guess the future is unwritten. Or undrawn.” Niu Yi said lightly.

“What’s next for our people? What goes here?” he said, his tone matching the lightness of hers, although his eyes caught hers with an odd intensity. “Space? The stars? The wide universe? Maybe we should draw that?”

Niu Yi wanted to drop her eyes, but his gaze held her. “You know.” Her voice raised up at the end, but it was not a question.

“Niu Yi,” he said, and she felt like she was thrown back through time to the days were she would have given anything to have had him say her name like that. “Of course. Of course I know. The news pods said there was a woman who used to dance in Wanda Danzhai Tourist Village. But even before I did the research, found all of the clues, asked all of the questions, somehow I knew it was going to turn out to be you.”

“Oh, really?” Niu Yi tried to scoff. Why would anyone think that it would be her? And why should it be her anyway?

But Jing’s tone stayed serious. “Really,” he said.

Children are time capsules, carrying our genes into the future.

Vanda

On Sundays Vanda usually flew down to Perth to visit her mother. There were multiple flights available per day now catering to the Denham Research Center and the influx of people heading up to catch a glimpse of the VAST in the sky.

Vanda’s mother sat out on her patio in her retirement community villa in a little wicker chair, with the sun streaming down. In one hand she held a small pair of silver nail-scissors, and the end of her braid in the other. Holding her hair up right in front of her eyes she was slowly and deliberately snipping the little ends of her hair where it forked and split. Her mother could sit and do this for hours, not looking up.

“Hi Mum,” Vanda said. Her mother paused, offered up her cheek to be kissed, then returned her focus to her hair. Snip. “I brought you over some lasagna.”

“Did you put it in the fridge?” her mother asked, with exactly the same tone she would have used when she was the mother Vanda still remembered, her scissors glinting as they caught the sunlight. Snip, snip, snip.

“Yes,” Vanda caught her mother’s hand and gently extracted the scissors, which she put down on the patio table. Her mother’s hair was long and incongruously dark still, coiled in its braid. You could see the aging in her face though, in her sunken eyes and the lines around her mouth. Her hands, bereft of the scissors, fluttered around like little birds.

Her mother looked at Vanda, shaking her head as if agitated. “Why is it you?” she said. “Why can’t Declan be here?”

“Declan’s gone, Mum,” Vanda said. Her mother still knew that, she was pretty sure. It had been a long time since she had heard her brother’s name, and saying it made something catch inside her, still.

“All the other women in here are grandmothers,” her mother said, her gaze suddenly sharpening and fixing on Vanda.

Vanda swallowed something that was either a sigh, a sob, a hysterical giggle, or some messy hybrid of the three. “That’s not going to happen, Mum,” she said, keeping her voice as gentle as she could. Her mother got caught by certain topics sometimes, and would circle around them, unable to leave them alone. This one came up a lot. But the internal injuries she’d sustained during the car accident when she was a teenager had left her without a spleen, and without a uterus, and she’d never carry a child.

“I guess you’d need a husband for that, anyhow,” her mother sniffed.

Vanda could remember her mother, the mother she’d had before the accident. Funny and intelligent and hotheaded. She’d yell and throw her hands around dramatically, but she would soon be laughing and making up silly songs again soon enough. She was fiery, but she was never cruel.

“And I haven’t got one of those anymore,” Vanda said composedly. Her ex-husband had moved to Singapore two years ago for a new job. He’d taken all of his words with him, all his funny, bright, charming words. I can’t ask you to give up everything here to come with me, he’d said. What he’d meant was, I’m leaving, it’s over, I’ve met someone else, although Vanda hadn’t realized that till a bit later. She’d told herself that she was devastated when he left, and she was, in a way. She’d thought the house would be too quiet. But she’d found that she had room, instead, to breathe, to expand.

“I don’t want grandchildren anyway.” Her mother, once on a track, could be hard to derail. She sat hunched in on herself, as if caught by her own gravity. A gravity so strong that the person she had been could never get out. Vanda thought that her mother probably had other words for her; nicer, kinder words, but they had collapsed inward, they would never make it past her mother’s event horizon. “It’s all a trick.”

“What’s a trick, Mum?” said Vanda, thinking as she said it that probably she shouldn’t have asked.

“Having children,” her mother said with a surprising amount of vehemence. “My body made me love you. It suffused me with oxytocin hormone, and I couldn’t help it. And I do. I do yet.”

Vanda felt like she was holding her breath. When had she last ever heard her mother say she loved her, or even obliquely reference the fact?

“And this is what you think when your children are born. For a while you think that it’s okay. It’s okay that you are going to die one day, because your child exists, and your child will keep going, and because they are what is truly important. But it’s a trick,” her mother’s voice rose up in a wail and Vanda made soft shushing sounds to try and soothe her. “They die when they are eight. Or they turn into a fully-grown human, and you don’t know what goes on in their head or in their life. Because they are not yours anymore. And they are not you.

“They come over and visit sometimes and make small talk and the line of their chin reminds you of yourself, but they are not you, they are some other person. You don’t go on at all. You end. So it’s a trick.” Her mother’s voice faded away as if she were becalmed. Vanda held one of her hands, and chatted of inconsequential things, although she didn’t think her mother was listening. And she thought of the all the questions about death she had cast at her mother when she was a small child, and when her mother walked on the earth still a whole person, not just all sharp jagged remnants of a person. Don’t you mind? she had asked, bright and inquisitive, and terrified to her core by the thought of not existing, with the impunity of a four year old who had not yet learned not to ask these questions. And watching her mother’s retreat back into herself now, shrinking under her own gravity, she knew that her mother did mind, that her mother had always minded.

“You never stay long,” her mother said as she got up to leave.

“I’ve got my flight back up to Shark Bay,” Vanda said, “Working on the VAST communications is pretty intense.”

“I don’t know what that is,” her mother said, her voice thin and pale, the words coming up from somewhere very far, like they were red-shifted, moving away from her.

Vanda brought up an image on her phone. She realized that she missed having the VAST overhead, missed being able to look up and see it. She was only some seven hundred kilometers away from it down in Perth, but the sky felt lacking now somehow. She didn’t know what that meant.

“See,” she showed her mother. “It’s called the Vermilion-Amber-Sunset-Tangerine, Mum. It’s a spaceship.”

Her mother craned her neck so that she could see past the patio roof.

“You can’t see it from here,” Vanda said.

Her mother stayed looking at the sky, and for a moment Vanda felt like she would turn around, and it would be her mother again, the one she had as a kid, the one who’d loved astronomy and climbed up onto the roof of the house with her and her brother to go stargazing.

“That ship,” her mother said. And Vanda waited, but nothing more was forthcoming.

“See you next week, Mum,” Vanda said, but her mother’s hand was straying toward her scissors again, and she did not answer.

Niu Yi

The daily walks became a habit, almost a ritual. I’m only here a fortnight, Niu Yi thought, how can this become such a set part of my day, so quickly, so naturally.

“Were you really in Danzhai already?” she asked Jing, wondering at how familiar it was already, his form sitting beside her, how easy it was to say anything at all to him now. “Was it really a coincidence?” She thought she knew the answer.

“I hadn’t been back in nearly a decade,” he said.

“You came here to find me.” Not something she would have dared say, not so very long ago. But she was leaving the whole Earth behind, and she had very little time to waste on pleasantries or shyness.

“I followed you up the mountain,” he said.

“Why?”

Jing bit his lip. Zia didn’t think she’d ever seen him look as uncertain as he did now.

“Do you know how I’ve felt since they chose me?” she said, rushing in, suddenly not wanting to wait for his answer.

“How?”

“Like an imposter. Like a fake.”

“How could you ever be fake? You are the most real person I know.” And his voice sounded like the gasp of summer.

“Why on earth was it me?” In her effort to have her voice not shake she came out sounding almost angry.

Jing paused. “Genetics.”

“Phylogenetic analysis showed significant genetic differentiation to make us a distinct minority ethnic group. I know. But that applies to all of us. They could have chosen you.”

“Yes.” There was something sad and distant in his eyes. “And instead they chose you. Half genetics. Half lottery. The biggest, best lottery in the history of everything.”

“That’s just it though.”

“What is?”

“The history of everything? There are eight thousand, one hundred and ninety-two of us, only that. Carefully chosen, deliberately chosen to be representative of the cultures and races and peoples of Earth. Of as many variations as they could anyway, as they could fit into that number. They looked at genetic variations. They drew lines around cultures and decided that if your language was classified as a distinct language, not dialect, then culturally you were considered diverse too. But how are those choices anybody can make? And how are we meant to carry all of that? The history of everything? How am I meant to represent a whole culture? It’s just me. One person is not enough. One person is not a culture.”

“No one said you had to carry everything with you.”

“But who else is going to?” Niu Yi said.

As Jing walked her back to her grandmother’s, she told him about the lack of pictures in her head. “And I can’t take anything with me,” she said “Only living matter can pass into Underlight. The VAST itself is one big living entity, although I don’t really understand it.”

“Nothing at all?” Jing said, and she could see the curiosity she’d remembered quicken in his eyes.

“No,” said Niu Yi, and then she blushed. “I’ll lose my hair, my eyebrows. The top layers of my skin. It’ll be just me.” Her chin trembled.

“You know ‘Song of the Ancient Sweet Gum’?” Jing said.

“Yes.”

“The rock was tired of being beaten to pound hemp into paper. And so it ate all the paper and all the books. And that is why we had no legacy of writing,” said Jing.

Niu Yi didn’t know why he was quoting the song, but there was comfort in it somehow, nonetheless.

“You don’t need to take writing, or pictures in your head, or anywhere else. You know the songs, and the poems,” Jing said, and his hand reached down and found hers. “You will carry them, and they will carry you.”

Vanda

“All of these structures remind me of a tonal language, where the same word can mean different things,” Liah sighed. Her dark hair had escaped its restraint and she looked more ruffled than Vanda was used to seeing her, both in terms of appearance and attitude. Despite the breakthroughs that had recently come in from teams working in Chengdu and Boston, they were all feeling haunted by all that they couldn’t understand. “Like ‘Ma’ in Mandarin; it can mean mother, hemp, horse, or scold. Or it can be a word put at the end of a sentence to make it a question.” Liah rubbed at her eyes.

“Except we can’t hear the tones,” said Vanda. “And the permutations just blow out exponentially.” The long days were getting to her too. And at night she was restless, her sleeping brain filled with long strands of triple helixes, infecting her, winding around her, and spinning her loose, into the universe, into the night sky. She couldn’t see the VAST at night, although she knew it was there.

Niu Yi

Niu Yi compared the roof tiles on the houses to pangolin scales, as they did in one of the epic poems. The beautifully pleated skirts all the women wore for the festivals she compared to mountain ridges. Jing came up to play his lusheng for her grandmother, and Niu Yi was reminded that it was the children of copper after the metals were born that became the tubes inside the bamboo instrument. She didn’t need pictures of them to know them.

“Thank you,” she said to Jing, as they lingered watching the mist over the rice terraces. It was like Jing had been a piece of her memory, come to find her when she needed it. A part of her past, to remind her and bring her home.

“Niu Yi,” he said, “take me with you.”

It was impossible, what was he saying that for, what was he-

“Part of me,” Jing said. “Take part of me with you.” He leaned in closer, his eyes locked on hers. Then paused.

It was a question made of the silence, the space between them.

She used to love him, a long time ago. She was not that girl, and she did not love him anymore.

But there were other reasons than love. Nostalgia. Connection. A thread, arcing back through time to the person she used to be, to an echo of herself. A way to mourn the life she would leave behind.

She closed the gap between them and answered the question.

Vanda

Vanda set up the parallel processors to run her latest tweak of the convolutional neural network, then brought up her most recent myriad-graphs and put them in front of her tired eyes. Her brain refused to focus though. A vague guilt battered the edge of her awareness—she had failed to get down to Perth last Sunday to visit her mother. Coupled with that was a curious reluctance to leave this site at all, even for twenty-four hours. These equations, these people, the way the VAST somehow rarefied the light; it was like her oxygen; she needed it.

Her mind kept casting disparate images together, clashing like the sea against the rocks. Her ex-husband and the way he’d never waited for her, never allowed her time to coax her own thoughts out. And her mother, her pauses, all the things that couldn’t escape. And Liah, and the space between them. The way if you left something empty, there was room for something else to come forward into the space. The space, the spaces.

“Liah,” she called. Her voice steady and soft, almost like she was in a dream. “Can we load up the raw files from section 11.2E again?”

“What is it?” said Liah, coming over and putting her hand on Vanda’s shoulder.

“I think we are missing the tones, like you said,” said Vanda. “Except they are not tones, they’re silences. The pauses, the sections where the message waits. Where it stops. I think our extra layer is there in the negative space. I think we need to include that in our weightings.”

There was a moment, and then Vanda heard Liah’s indrawn breath. “I know which protocol we need to adjust the weightings,” she said. Then her voice lowered, pitched just for Vanda. “It was one of my father’s. But he never got to publish that paper. It was just in his head.” Her voice hitched with wonder. “Oh, I see it. I see how we can apply it.”

Vanda turned around. When Liah was excited her eyes looked like they were full of stars.

“Let’s get the team together,” she said.

Niu Yi

Over their evening meal of sour and spicy fish soup, Niu Yi’s grandmother said that she would come down the mountain with her, to the main hospital in Guiyang.

“You’ll get your eyes done?” Niu Yi said, surprised, but pleased.

“No,” said her grandmother. “All my life I have lived in this village. I think I will catch a ride with you.”

Vanda

The message layers superimposed over each other, merging and blending. Then the intricacy of the data came flooding forward into the space they had left for it, falling suddenly into meaning. There was a beauty to it that made Vanda gasp.

She floated on a cloud of satisfaction and achievement and euphoria for several hours until the message cohered into a whole and came crashing down on her, bringing the world with it.

Niu Yi

A gift given with a whole heart.

Niu Yi’s grandmother had given her the memory-gift, although Niu Yi tried her hardest to refuse it. But her grandmother had been more determined than Niu Yi had ever seen her, and she was not someone Niu Yi knew how to disobey. She’d thought that the person had to be dying in order to give their memories, but apparently it was also done this way, although it was not common.

Niu Yi’s head felt crowded, like she was all stuffy from a cold. Her grandmother’s memories would catch and flare inside her mind like embers, but Niu Yi was too full of grief to pay attention to them properly.

Niu Yi was feeling nauseous and would have given anything for a hot bowl of her grandmother’s oil tea, but her grandmother did not make it anymore. Niu Yi wondered whether she was carrying Jing’s child. Whether it was even possible for something to grow in Underlight, or whether it would lie curled up within her, dormant and sleeping, until the end of time.

Her grandmother had gone to live with Niu Yi’s uncle. She was diminutive now—she had always been tiny, but she had never seemed so before. She would smile pleasantly and make polite conversation and sit for hours with the sunlight on her face, but she did not remember the mountain.

Vanda

You could want something all your life, at a fundamental level, your cells crying out for it, and not get it, Vanda knew this. Because it was not for you.

According to the VAST, in eighty-three years a gamma ray burst caused by the collapse of a supermassive star would reach Earth’s solar system. With Earth in its collimated narrow beam path.

Vanda would not be alive in eighty-three years. Nor was she capable of having any descendants who would be living on the Earth. Her whole family would be gone, already. Most of them already were. And yet.

In eleven years the VAST would depart, taking with it eight thousand, one hundred and ninety-two human beings, if they chose. It would travel into “Underlight.”

But Vanda would not be one of them. Not for you the chance to live forever. Not for you.

In Underlight the more than eight thousand people would live and think and interact, but time would not find them. It was an oddly poetic sentence structure from the VAST, but all of the models said it was accurate. The VAST was sitting there in the sky, waiting for them. Alive itself in a different way—a way that had not traded immortality for quick-use disposable bodies that needed offspring to hurtle their genes into the future. It was only itself over and over again and always. They would come out of Underlight, after millennia, to arrive at another world.

To know there were people alive today who would continue out there, somehow underneath and between normal space, for close enough to forever, past their natural span, past anything anyone had expected or deserved. Didn’t that help? Wasn’t that enough?

No.

It wasn’t.

When this had coalesced for Vanda, initially a rampaging jealousy had suffused her. It’s not fair, she shrieked silently somewhere deep within herself. Oh, it’s not fair.

But the emotion had blown through her like a tremendous gust of wind, into all of the smallest parts of her, through her, and away.

Don’t you mind? she had asked her mother, when she was four years old. Don’t you mind?

And of course she minded. But this was not for her.

She had what she had always had.

A life.

A singular unique and unremarkable and finite life. Here, on this planet.

“Poor dolphins,” said Liah. The sunlight was shining on the water, and they watched the dolphins take their fish and then come back to cheekily splash the people standing in the shallows.

“They deserve to go too. Everything does,” said Vanda, up to her knees in the sea, her rolled up jeans getting wetter and wetter.

“They’re not going to give up any of those tickets to the latest greatest last best show in the universe to animals.” Then Liah’s voice became serious. “How would we ask a dolphin what it would choose anyway?”

“What would you choose?” Vanda said, shading her eyes against the glare. The VAST was overhead, but she didn’t look up at it. She would stay here, she’d already decided, even once their work wrapped up. She would live up here with the ocean and the wind and the spaceship that would stay like a promise in the sky for eleven more years.

“What would you choose?” Liah countered, teasing lights in her eyes. “Would you go if you could?”

“Of course,” said Vanda simply. It was her central and unchanging truth. Of course. Of course. But it was not for her. Someone else would go. Eight thousand, one hundred and ninety-two someone elses. “Would you?”

“Would I want to live forever?” Liah said, and she looked out to the horizon, where it was all ocean as far as the eye could see, like it was the end of the world. “Only if I could take you with me.”

Niu Yi

Niu Yi would carry them all, as best she could. She would carry them past the stars, she would carry them to the end of the universe.

The official escorts would be arriving soon. To take her to the airport where she would board a private plane to Australia, where there would be over eight thousand people from around the globe. But she was in no hurry.

Niu Yi turned her attention to the white page in front of her. She pictured her mother’s face, clear in her mind; the curve of her cheek, the expression in her eyes as she stood in Niu Yi’s grandmother’s house, with her newborn daughter in her arms. Niu Yi picked up her charcoal. And she drew a line.

About the Author

Samantha Murray is a writer, mathematician, and mother. Not particularly in that order. Her work has appeared in Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Interzone, and Escape Pod, among others, and been collected in The Year’s Best Australian Fantasy & Horror, and The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Four. Samantha has won an Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction short story. You can follow her on twitter @SamanthaNMurray.

Samantha lives in Western Australia in a household of unruly boys.

I’m Feeling Lucky

Leonid Kaganov, translated by Alex Shvartsman

My sandwiches will soon appear on the kitchen shelf. Grandpa An doesn’t eat sandwiches because he has cancer. He has only a couple of months left to live. That’s what the doctor said in the corridor, and when I overheard it, I cried all evening long. This had been two winters ago, when I was really little and used to cry a lot. Grandpa has a gray mustache, the best mustache in the world. Also, his head is funny-looking; it’s bald and covered in dark spots. It’s warm and velvety to the touch. Grandpa smokes his pipe and watches TV. Grandpa’s eyes are always laughing. He’s with us for now, but at some point he will leave for a distant future, where scientists will have learned how to cure cancer. Mom said so.

“Grandpa!”

There are voices coming from the television as Grandpa An watches the news. This is a foolish thing to do because tomorrow and the day after tomorrow and next week there will definitely be newer news, much more recent ones. I pull on the sleeve of his robe.

“Grandpa, how soon will you leave forever, to go to the future where the scientists know how to cure cancer?”

“Not too soon,” Grandpa replies with a smile. “You’ll have time to grow up, go to school, graduate with honors, and go to college, and I’ll still be with you, though less and less frequently. And when my health deteriorates badly, then I will go to the distant future, forever.”

“This future—where is it?”

“The future comes every second. But the future where they can cure cancer, that will still take a long time. It’s far away.”

“Far?”

“Yes. In this future, people will be able to cure any disease, travel to the stars, and robots will do all the work. There will be no war, no one will get sick or die, people won’t grow old, and all grandpas will become young again.”

“Grandpa, will you take me with you to this future?”

Grandpa An smiles. He upturns his pipe and knocks it against the edge of the ashtray. Bits of ash land on the carpet, but Grandpa’s vision is bad, and he doesn’t notice.

“What do you need the future for? You have the present.”

“What present?”

“Everything around you. You need to live, grow, and study. Perhaps you will grow up to become a famous scientist and figure out how to cure cancer. And then the future will begin.”

“But what if I don’t grow up?”

“You will.” Grandpa laughs and his gray mustache hairs bristle.

“But what if I don’t figure out how to cure cancer?”

“Then you will learn to do something else. And other kids will figure out the cancer thing.”

“But what if the other kids don’t figure it out?”

“At some point, they will. The future is infinite.”

“But what if it isn’t infinite? What if the sun goes out?”

“Who told you such a foolish thing? Why don’t you go and check if your sandwiches are here yet?”

I run to the kitchen, climb onto a stool, and check the shelf. The sandwiches aren’t there. I have to wait. It’s boring to wait for sandwiches. Mom made them, and they’re flying in a bag fastened with a temporal clip. Mom sent them in the morning, but she didn’t say what time they’d arrive. We haven’t had a refrigerator in years; Mom said it wastes space in the kitchen. Everyone uses the bags.

I try to imagine the place where my sandwiches are at the moment, but I can’t. Grandpa An explained that the bag is like a boomerang—it travels from the kitchen shelf via a circular orbit, so it can return to the same spot. This orbit is created by the clip. Except it isn’t a simple orbit, but a temporal orbit. Which means in reality it doesn’t exist. And the bag doesn’t exist anywhere, until its time comes. And then it appears again.

My Grandpa is the best in the world, and he explains everything better than any schoolteacher, because he is the best schoolteacher himself, except he’s retired for now. When he leaves for the distant future, where the scientists live, he will become healthy and young, and will once again work in a school teaching history. He said so.

I haven’t started school yet, so I don’t know what an orbit is, or what a boomerang is. I don’t understand: if the bag doesn’t exist anywhere, then where will my sandwiches appear from? Where do my comforter, fur boots, and ice skates come from, when we send them away until autumn, to free up closet space? But I already know how to program the clip all on my own, and how to set the orbital angle. One time I sent our tea kettle one million years into the future, and Mom started locking the box where we keep the clips. She got very scared because I could’ve gone along with the kettle. Mom said that a million years from now the sun would go out, and I would die instantly. But if people die in the distant future, then in what future did Grandpa An expect to become cured?

There are a lot of things I want to ask Grandpa, but I always forget. He spends two days a month with us, and it’s like a holiday. Tonight, when Mom comes home from work, we will have a fancy dinner. Mom says we’re so lucky to have our closest people stay with us for our whole lives, yet she leaves for work every day. Tomorrow, Grandpa and I will go to the zoo if he feels well enough. I want him to feel well. I want him to be with us forever. But the doctor said he only has two months left, and he needs to make it to the future where they cure cancer. But Grandpa isn’t in a hurry—he wants to spend as much time with us during those two months as possible. There’s a temporal clip attached to his pajamas; on the morning after tomorrow he will press it and disappear for another whole month. Only his pipe and a leather bag filled with tobacco will remain, if Grandpa forgets to bring them in the pocket of his robe again.

Finally! There’s a pop and the bag of sandwiches appears on the shelf. I grab it, jump off the stool, and run to Grandpa’s room. Grandpa is watching TV and smoking his pipe. I unseal the bag and bite into a sandwich.

“Grandpa! What do you see in the place where you spend the whole month?”

“I see how quickly you’re growing up.” Grandpa smiles.

That’s how I remember Grandpa, and my childhood.

When I was in first grade, Grandpa suddenly took a turn for the worse; he lost consciousness, and Mom activated his clip, sending him one hundred years ahead. After that I had often sent letters to Grandpa. I drew pictures for him and, once I learned how, wrote notes for him: handwritten notes on regular paper, the way he liked. But it was difficult to keep writing without getting a response, and I have sent letters less frequently, usually to congratulate him on various holidays.

I wrote the last, longest letter when I graduated high school. I put the sheet of paper into his tobacco bag, attached a clip to it, and sent it from Grandpa’s old room.

Hi, Grandpa! You left us when I was still little, and we never got a chance to talk properly. I think you could’ve told me many interesting things. I really hope they cured you over there and that one day we will meet again. Honestly, I sometimes want to jump a hundred years ahead and see whether the scientists invented something to make life better. Because in our time everything sucks, and it is getting worse with each passing year. I remember how much you used to like the news, but I haven’t written to you much about our lives. Let me summarize the events of the past few years—who knows how history will remember them after a century? So, listen. There’s a worldwide crisis. It all started with the pension scandal, after you left. The pension fund managers were upset because the retirees grew obnoxious: they’d demand annual payment in full, spend it all at once, and jump ahead by a year. Seemingly they had the right to do so, this was their money. Except people in our time stopped dying, and it’s not like someone could say to their face that they should move on and make room for the young, that the pension fund is finite. At first they tried implementing a law about mobile check-ins, to identify those who were jumping ahead, but then the job crisis overtook us, they quit standing on ceremony and canceled pensions altogether. As in, if you don’t like it, here is a clip and piss off into the future, maybe someone will feed you there.

About the job crisis. There was a huge wave of emigration, people leaving for the future because of curiosity, because someone had wronged them, or to escape the law or their creditors. They left one by one, with families, in groups—whatever was their preference. There was no accounting for this; no one knew who’d left, and for how long. And whether they’d left of their own volition. In the news they say this is now commonplace: someone is robbed and killed, then the bad guys attach a clip to the body and send it a thousand years into the future—and that’s that. Clips have been in mass-production for twelve years and already some very unpleasant things are beginning to fall out from the past, including corpses. But the worst thing of all is the immigrants.

Not a day goes by without those who jumped five or ten years into the future crawling out of the woodwork. We’ve had it with them already. Someone is gone for ten years, legally presumed missing, new people live in his apartment now—an apartment he hasn’t made payments on for a decade—and suddenly he shows up and demands his rights! But the most annoying thing about them is that they wander the streets like tourists, gawk at everything, stick their noses into things, and bother everyone with questions about how life is now and what’s new. It makes you feel like some sort of a native in a fish tank, with tourists passing by all day long and glancing at you to see if you’re dead yet. They’re very easy to spot in the street: they’re the ones with sour expressions on their mugs, because they expected to find paradise here, ten years later. Instead, there’s a crisis, and no food. The good news is that they don’t stick around for long: they quarrel and complain, and then move on.

You get why there’s no food, right? Take a guy who used to plant potatoes or drive a truck for a living. It was a meager existence with simple pleasures—to watch TV and drink with his buddies. And when the going got rough, he suffered through it because he didn’t have a choice. And then the clips appeared, and that guy got to thinking the same sort of thing you used to tell me about when I was a kid—what if twenty years from now there will come a future where the scientists will have solved everything, and he won’t have to plant potatoes, get old, get sick, and suffer hangovers? Every person has moments when it seems like things can’t possibly get any worse. They want to drop everything and head out seeking happiness—on their own, or with their families. Maybe in the future the potatoes grow themselves, are self-peeling, and self-frying? And so that person reaches for the clip . . .

As a result there’s no one left to plant potatoes, to work construction, even to teach. I mean, not literally no one. It’s not like life fell apart and the famine came—no. There’s a scientific name for this: a human resources deficit crisis, and it is felt clearly on our own hides. They say in the past there were problems with unemployment and overpopulation. Now people joke about how in the distant future the scientists will invent a clip people will be able to use to go back in time, back to paradise.

They considered the idea of ceasing clip production and registering the existing clips, but—how? There are millions already made. There’s even a latest model, a clip with a button that says “I’m Feeling Lucky.” If you press it, you will jump who-knows-where—perhaps half an hour into the future, perhaps a hundred years, or perhaps a million. The chip randomly selects the destination.

The people who thrive in our time—they’re not the best people. They are—forgive me, Grandpa—utter scum. There are too many thieves and criminals around now. You won’t believe it—being a member of a gang is fashionable rather than shameful these days. And it’s dangerous to walk the streets. You know, Grandpa, there’s this sense of aggression in the air; everyone is tense, you can read in their eyes: “Be thankful I’m still here with you, when I could already be in the future.” The politics are tumultuous too, even though there isn’t any large-scale war yet.

Grandpa, I wanted to tell you; if anything happens, I’ll try to catch up to you. So if you suddenly see Mom and me, don’t be surprised.

Oh, and I almost forgot, I passed all my final exams with only two B’s! I’m getting ready to apply to college and study medicine.

That was the last letter I wrote to Grandpa. With the exams and going to college, there was no time. I went to college for two semesters.

Then, on the eve of my eighteenth birthday, Mom didn’t come home from work. Her coworkers said that she borrowed some money until the next paycheck and left early. They said she was probably very tired and jumped a couple of years ahead to see how I’d grow up. But I’m certain that she went to buy me a birthday present and was murdered over that damned money.

I spent a month living in our empty apartment until I decided to join Grandpa in the distant future, a hundred years ahead.

I’d made a few short jumps before. You don’t feel anything. You set the time so the chip could calculate the orbital angle, you crouch and hold the clip to your chest so that your entire body is definitely in the jump zone, and you press the button. That’s it. You’re still crouching, and your finger is pressing the button, but you’re already in a different time. Sometimes your ears pop, because of the difference in the atmospheric pressure.

I went to the living room, gathered my courage, and finally pressed the button. My ears got clogged up badly, and I shook a bit—it seemed the pressure differential was significant. I was surrounded by velvety darkness on all sides—I probably arrived at night. I knew that the margin of error for a hundred-year jump was plus or minus two months, but that was obviously theoretical. So perhaps it was even more—who knows?

It was pitch black and almost completely silent. I could hear only the breeze and the beating of my own heart. After a few seconds, my eyes adjusted, and I was able to make out shapes.

The living room window was broken, and the cloud-covered sky offered little illumination. The lampposts in the street were off. Everything around me was covered in dilapidated garbage. I reached for the light switch, which felt unusually rough. I pressed it, and the plastic crumbled under my fingers.

My heart was pounding. The night freaked me out. I set the clip for twelve hours, and pressed the button.

There was blinding daylight, and the view it revealed was terrible. The room was in total ruin, the remnants of clothes covered in a thick layer of dirt, sand, and dust. There was a huge hive that looked like a paper balloon under the ceiling, but it was also old and decaying—the insects having long since abandoned it.

I went to Grandpa’s room and saw him immediately. He was laid out on his couch in the same pose as when we’d sent him, a skeleton wrapped in strips of his robe. Envelopes with clips were strewn nearby—the letters I’d sent to him from his room. Some were fresh, others yellowed—I’d sent them to roughly the same time period, but the margin of error must’ve been fairly sizable. The bag of tobacco lay on the floor. I opened it and pulled out the letter I’d written two years before, after graduating high school. The paper was yellow, and the ink had bled, blurred on the damp page. I tossed it aside and ran.

The city appeared abandoned—weeds grew through the concrete and some buildings had collapsed under their own weight and were now in ruins. It seemed no human had set foot there in many decades. Where, then? This wasn’t the capital, but ours wasn’t a small town, either.

I forged ahead mindlessly, climbing over rocks, and navigating around piles of trash. For some reason I didn’t feel sorry for my grandfather—it had been a long time since I’d made peace with the fact that he’d been gone, after all. I didn’t even feel sorry for Mom, even though I held out the tiniest hope that I would find both her and Grandpa here, alive and healthy. I felt sorry for myself. Where was I? What was I to do? Where had all the people gone? They couldn’t have disappeared, died out after only a hundred years. They couldn’t have all jumped into the future, there must’ve been some communities left, some obstinate fanatics. And those who’d jumped—where had they jumped to? Perhaps there was a base in the future, a meeting point, where civilization had been rebuilt and was prospering again?

I walked to Radio Square, which was covered in chunks of concrete and asphalt. It appeared almost as though these stones had been brought over and dumped here on purpose. I looked closer and found an arrow formed out of rocks. I followed its path and realized that the rocks and stones in the square formed a message: People, let’s meet here in the year 3000!

To be honest, my first thought was to go back to the apartment, gather the letters attached to the clips with fresh batteries, and search the abandoned buildings for any stuff that people might find useful in the future. But I badly wanted to get away from this dusty hell and to see living human faces.

I figured out how much time was left until the year 3000 and then cheated a little: I added another fifty years, so that humanity would have time to clean up all the garbage, to fix up the city, and to rebuild civilization. Then I figured I probably wasn’t the only one clever enough to think this and added another fifty years—to make certain I arrived at the height of civilization.

When I pressed the button, for a moment I felt certain that I would arrive at that very place—the sunlit city where scientists had solved the mysteries of nature and people would be happy.

The world I found myself in was cold and monochrome. There was no city at all. Everything was covered in a thick layer of snow and ice. I stood at the bottom of a basin, surrounded by hills. Above me, the low-hanging sky was the color of ash. It was silent and cold. Although I didn’t feel the cold right away, I knew I wouldn’t last here in my summer jacket. The time I had jumped from had at least been livable; it might have been possible to find water there and people. Here, though . . .

I looked around. What I had first assumed were hills were the ruins of the city. The skeletons of buildings, sagging and collapsed inward, were covered with snow, dirt, and debris. The sharp edges of stone slabs protruded here and there from the snow.

I wrapped the jacket around me—the cold was quickly getting to me. I finally realized that this was it. The end. The year 3000 was really far away. There was no way back, and it would only get worse later on.

But I had no choice other than going further, because there was nothing for me here but death. What did you do, you bastards? You split up and ran in search of happiness, and every one of you hoped that someone would figure things out, solve, and organize everything for you? You believed your grandpas’ stories about the paradise that awaited ahead? Those who stayed had lived out their lives honestly. Meantime, we’d rushed into the distant future as if it were a resort, not bringing anything, not making a backup plan, or a way to communicate, convinced that the resort would have all the amenities.

That’s when I saw a string of footsteps in the snow. They were fresh and definitely human, though I couldn’t tell what sort of shoes the person was wearing. But someone had passed by here, recently! I waded forward, knee-deep in the snow. I walked around the nearest hill and saw a column of smoke in the distance. It was as narrow as a blade, rising over the ruins. I ran toward it, holding my jacket tight. Snow crammed into my boots, and my feet froze.

I was near the pile of rocks where the smoke originated when a face appeared among the ruins. I stopped abruptly. We were only twenty steps apart.

This was a person—a man in his forties. He wore something like a turban made of ash-gray rags. One of his cheeks drooped visibly, as though he had a toothache. There was a scar on his forehead, and his face was covered in a dirty, ragged beard. The man’s mouth was open, and he breathed out white steam. His thorny eyes looked at me with such wariness that I didn’t want to come any closer. He didn’t seem in a hurry to emerge from his hiding place behind the pile of rocks, either.

“Hi!” I said, raising my hands.

The bearded man was silent. His face expressed nothing.

“Hey!” I repeated uncertainly.

“What year are you from?” the bearded man barked in an accented voice with no intonation. Before I could reply, he added, “Do you have clips? How about clip batteries?”

I hesitated for several seconds, which was long enough for the bearded man. A pipe appeared from behind the rocks and emitted a burst of fire. Something rushed past my head, as though all the air in this basin was rolled into a needle that stabbed through my ears. Only then did I hear the booming sound of a gunshot.

I threw myself to the ground by pure reflex. I felt that I had to fall down in that moment. That saved me. The second shot thundered overhead, missing me again. There was no time to think. I felt for the clip and pressed the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button before he fired again.

I wasn’t lucky. It was probably a hundred degrees below zero here, and a hurricane wind blew. The black shroud of snow shoved me, lifted me up, and carried me across the snowdrifts so that I nearly dropped my clip. My fingers went numb right away, and I didn’t even feel whether or not they managed to press the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button.

This time, I was lucky. Even though I fainted from the change in pressure. But I was lucky in that I found myself in a humid, warm jungle. The heat immediately defrosted my limbs. When I looked at the clip, my heart nearly gave out. The tiny tableau didn’t have enough room to display the number of years I’d traveled this time. Based on the number of characters, tens of billions of years have passed. If Grandpa had been right and the mechanics of the clip were comparable to those of an orbit, then the orbital angle was as close as it could get to a maximum, as much as the battery charge in the clip could handle.

I didn’t know where I was, but there was a different sky, a different sun, and only one moon. The gravity was lower. But at least no one was hunting me here, to kill me and to take my clip. This place looked like it could sustain life.

I’ve never seen such plants, animals, or insects. The animals here were really strange, and all seemed made from the same mold. Someone who’s never seen real animals might think they were all different, but when I first saw them, I thought the jungle was populated with caricatures of human beings. All the animals here resembled people who’d grown wild, shape-shifted, and lowered themselves onto all fours. All of them had a single spine terminating in a head with a skull, and all had four paws—no more, no less.

Maybe Grandpa had been right, and the future was truly endless. Or maybe Mom had been right, and the sun had gone out, and the galaxy had had time to implode and then explode again, and a completely different planet with an oxygen atmosphere had formed in this area of space. The clip had brought me here—the clip always drops you onto the nearest surface. If this was the case, I’d been extremely lucky. It was terrifying to think what the nearest planet surface in a newborn universe billions of years later might have been like. How many people might have made it to this world? The chances were practically nil. Perhaps in time immemorial one of our people had landed on this lifeless planet and immediately died, but the microbes they’d hosted had survived and were the origin of new protein-based life? And then someone else had landed here? I realize that the chances of this are extremely slim, but how else could I explain the fact that people lived in this jungle? They were wild and spoke an incomprehensible language. I’d stumbled upon their camp on my second day of wandering the jungle. It was just in time; only a single young woman had still been alive. There was some sort of an epidemic, and she was the last survivor, also about to die. I probably would have also become sick and died, if not for the portable medicine kit in the pocket of my jacket.

I stayed in this world. I knew there was nowhere else to go, knew that the battery in my clip would run out in a matter of months, and maybe was already dead. But it was possible to live here. And it was a pretty world.

The sun hung over the hills, refusing to set. It looked like a sabertooth’s crimson eye. An eye that was neither evil nor kind, but indifferent. This eye had plenty of time to spare; it was in no hurry to descend into night, and instead kept peeking at what we were going to do next. The sky was already covered in clouds, and fog crept in from the lake. It seemed as if our hill stood in the center of the world, surrounded by clouds above and below.

A distant, melancholy howl came from somewhere in the thicket below the hill—the sabertooths were on a hunt. But here, in the cave at the top of a stone hill, they presented no danger. Especially not while the fire was burning.

“The clouds,” I said.

“Stars in the morning,” my woman replied, and pressed herself against me.

I didn’t argue—I was used to the fact that she always turned out to be right. She had been born and had grown up in this land of lakes, thickets, and ferns, whereas up until two years before I’d lived in the city among cars and electronics. I pulled the edge of the hide over her legs. We sat quietly and still. The sun got bored of this and decided to leave.

The woman fell asleep, and I kept looking outside, toward where the sun left an orange strip in its wake. Lately, I’ve noticed that I enjoyed simply sitting still and staring into the distance. Either my body attempted to rest after the daily treks across the taiga, or the view from our cave was truly spectacular. Or perhaps, out of habit, I was waiting for something to happen, something to change. For civilized people to appear, to light fires and bring forth tools . . .

There was a whistling sound and a shadow flickered. I shuddered, even though I realized no sabertooth could get up here. The shadow was small. It flew into the cave and landed on the rocks, neatly folding its wings behind its back. It was a small flying toad. One that was young, inexperienced, and easily startled. One that was tasty when roasted on a skewer—especially its crunchy wings. If someone had told me a few years ago that I would eat a toad, and a flying one to boot, I wouldn’t have believed it. If only I had a net of some kind, or a crossbow—

Before I realized what was happening, another shadow flew from behind me. Something whistled. A thump followed by the sound of rolling rocks reverberated through the cave. The little toad twitched in the corner, its wings broken.

My woman rose smoothly, grabbed the toad without looking, twisted its head, skewered it onto a twig, and lowered it onto the smoldering coals. Then she lay back down without saying a word. We didn’t speak much. She’d learned my language pretty well, and I learned a few of her guttural words, but we remained too different and had few topics for conversation.

I thought she had fallen asleep again when I heard, “Tell about childhood.”

“What?” I asked.

“Tell about childhood,” she repeated, turning the toad on the coals.

“Childhood . . . ” I lay down comfortably, my fist under my head, and stared into the dark cave ceiling covered in clumps of soot. “I’ve told you many times already. About my childhood, about Grandpa, about school and college, and how I got here. You already know my language well, why don’t you tell me a story instead?”

She was silent.

“Where is your tribe from?” I asked.

“We’ve always lived here.”

“Where did you come from?”

“From the gods.”

“The gods?” I leaned on my elbow and turned.

No, she wasn’t kidding—her dark eyes shone calmly in the darkness of the cave. An amulet glittered on her dark neck, a stone with a hole in it she wore everywhere and believed guarded her against danger. It was her tribe’s ancient tradition, but I knew that the stone resembled the clip I similarly wore around my neck.

“A long, long time ago the gods descended to the land and lived here. The ancient gods knew all and could do everything. Mountains and animals obeyed them. They could cure all diseases and wounds. They were mighty.”

“Where did they come from?”

“They appeared from nowhere. Probably from the sky, because where else could one appear from? They could do anything but didn’t know how to live in the taiga. They had to forget in order to survive. My tribe descends from them. And the other tribes. And the animals, the birds, the toads, the fish. They brought the insects with them.”

“There are other tribes?” I was surprised.

“Far, far away where the sun sets, live bad people. They look like us, but shorter. They speak a strange language and weave baskets. If you lay with them, you can bear children. Their backs are twisted, covered in black hair, with bulging spines.”

“You’ve never told me about them!”

“It’s bad to talk about them. They’re bad people.”

“Do they also have a legend about being descended from the gods?”

“Yes. All-powerful gods created everything in the world. Everyone knows this.”

“Are there more people?”

“Yes. Far, where the sun rises, where the forest ends, and the sky is blocked by rocks. Tall people live there. They have large heads, and long teeth stick out from their mouths. There are very many of them and they’re all covered in red fur. They know how to make stone axes, but don’t know how to speak. They often eat people. My grandmother said that it’s possible to lay with them, but there would be no children.”

“What other kinds of people are there?”

“A long time ago, gray people with hairy hands lived here, but in a hungry season the sabertooths ate them all.”

“Are there others?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do all of them wear stone amulets around their necks for protection?”

“Yes, especially when they hunt.”

“Did all of your tribe perish?”

“No. I’m alive. You’re alive.”

“Two people are hardly a tribe.” I chuckled and hugged her shoulders.

Silently and slowly, she took my palm and gently pressed it against her belly.

The hunt had been unsuccessful. In half a day I’d checked two dozen traps, but all of them were empty, and the bait was eaten. Searching for nests, I walked around the far edge of the swamp, where I hadn’t ventured in a long time. Not a single egg clutch! It was getting late, the sun had already reached the tops of the pines, and there was only enough time for a trek back to the cave. Empty-handed. As I climbed out of the bog, I noticed a little hoof track on the muddy bank of a brook. By then I had become good at tracking footprints and could tell that a small animal had passed by here recently; the hole hadn’t yet filled with water. The animal was limping. I couldn’t let such fortune pass by.

I got down on all fours and sniffed, the way my woman did. As usual, my nose refused to catch any scents beyond the stream and the peat. I would never develop my sense of smell sufficiently. But among the sedge stalks on the ground, the little hoof prints were clearly visible, and they led from the sedge into the thicket. I followed the trail, clutching my bow. The sun was setting, growing red and swollen, and bursting with fire among the tall pines. At some point, I lost the trail. I had to get on all fours again and crawl across the damp ground. My clip swung around my neck on its rawhide leather cord, catching on damp ferns. It hadn’t mattered in a long time, and I have long since made peace with the fact that the battery was exhausted, though I didn’t have the courage to test it, not even with a five-minute jump.

Suddenly I found the trail again; I was certain this was a deer. The tracks led to the side. The deer had passed through the bushes here, stumbling through the moss, leaving clumps of dark fur on the thorns.

The sun had set, and the forest was darkened and had grown cold. In the distance a bird cawed in alarm. But I could still see the tracks, and the deer seemed to be very close. There was no time to approach from upwind, no time to hunt properly. I simply readied a bone-tipped arrow and dashed through the thicket. I could already make out a dim shadow in the distance. Suddenly the trees parted, and a clearing opened in front of me.

I loosed my arrow in surprise, and it buried itself in the remains of what had recently been a deer. The shadow that hovered over it moved suddenly. A bright full moon shone overhead, and a heavy animal scent wafted in the air. The largest sabertooth I’d ever seen raised its blood-covered muzzle and stared at me.

A chill went up my spine as I backed away, drawing a second arrow from the quiver. The bowstring squeaked but the arrow went wide—I never had learned to shoot a bow well, especially in a stressful situation. The monster bristled and advanced toward me in an unhurried waddle. It wasn’t afraid of anything.

I drew the last arrow and heard the roar coming from behind me. I turned around and fired. Again, the arrow missed the sabertooth rushing at me from the thicket. New shadows were emerging from the darkness. It was a large pack, hungry and strong.

I knew this was the end, but I pulled a stone hatchet from my belt—a small one, made for butchering carcasses. I stepped forward, crouched, then shouted and rushed toward them. But I didn’t have time to strike. A clawed paw swiped at my stomach and threw me up in the air. I dropped the hatchet. A distant bird screamed hysterically, and I fell. My back hit against stone. My hands pressed against my lacerated stomach and chest, staunching the sticky blood. Suddenly, my hand felt the clip.

The beasts were in no hurry. They approached at leisure from all directions, sniffing noisily.

I had no choice, and almost no chance. But I still pressed the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button.

The jump threw me a hundred thousand years into the future. I couldn’t forgive myself for leaving my woman behind in that cave. The first thing I did was to destroy the clip. I crushed it into a powder with a piece of scrap metal I found underhand. I had been lucky—there was metal here! There were even computers here!

In this era, the planet is populated by several different races that are distinct by their skin color and facial features. They look the same to me. Our people were all so different that you could hardly find two alike, save for the number of limbs. Here, everyone is so similar they could all be twins, and I haven’t yet learned to tell them apart properly. All of them have somewhat flat faces—like my woman did. Their bodies are hairless except for a thick mane on their heads, just like mine. Their ancient legends tell about the gods who created them in their image. Those gods knew everything and created the world. Local scientists are convinced that nature is driven by never-ending evolution, rather than degradation. They’re certain that people evolved from apes, who began to use tools. Even though they agree that in terms of tissue structure, a human is closer to a pig. According to their legends, the apes gradually evolved from rats, lizards, and fish, and those in turn from the microbes. Biologists compare genes of different species, trying to find a connection, and they’re surprised by the fact that the genes are nearly identical. Local scientists simply do not know how different the genes could be, if they truly came from different species. They dig up the ancient bones of extinct mutations and try to build a clear diagram of evolution. It isn’t working well, but they believe. I love them for that. I love them for everything they do!

First I ended up at a police precinct, where I was given first aid and driven to the hospital. The hospitals are pretty good here; they even know a little about treating cancer. The hospital they took me to was a psychiatric institution. I pretended to have lost my memory. I spent a long time learning their language and customs but kept insisting that I didn’t remember my past. A year later they discharged me, having given me a name and a temporary ID.

Now I live outside the city, in a trailer by a vegetable warehouse. I work as a forklift driver. I go to church on Sundays and listen to the stories of divine miracles and a man who was crucified and then disappeared. I believe that’s how it happened. I have to work a lot, but I’m fine with that. I’m a traitor, who escaped one civilization and found his way to another because he got very lucky. I escaped death, and here I’m safe. I mulled it all over for a long time and understood everything, and I have matured. I won’t run any further even under the threat of death. I never once regretted destroying the clip, even if I could probably find a new battery for it. They’re very technologically advanced here, even more so than we were. And if one of them figured out how the clip works, they could probably manage to mass-produce them. I really want to believe that will never happen here. I’d like to believe that very much. I’m sure I’ll be lucky.

Originally published in Russian in Earth’s Last Song (Последняя песня Земли), 2006.

About the Author

Leonid Kaganov, from St. Petersburg, Russia, is a scriptwriter and multiple award-winning author of ten novels and short story collections. His fiction has been translated and published in France, Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, and Estonia. This is his first English language publication.

The Falling

M V Melcer

We are falling.

Two facts are contained in this statement:

The first: falling is a permanent condition, the truth of our past and present, and, for some time still, the future.

The second I will let you deduce for yourself.

“What’s the cube root of 12,326,391?”

My mother blinks, her eyes losing focus the way they always do when she’s working.

I count the seconds.

My sister squeals and puffs her cheeks, fighting the urge to reveal the answer. I give her a stern look and keep counting.

“231” my mother breathes the words out.

“Fifteen seconds,” I announce.

A shadow crosses her face even as she puts on a satisfied smile.

“That’s perfectly fine,” my father says, holding her gaze.

My mother nods. Three more years and she can shift to teaching. She’ll be safe there—until, of course, the time comes for both of my parents to move. But that won’t be for another twenty years, and for me, at seven, that could as well be forever.

“I got it at ten!” my sister cries.

“That’s my girl!” Father lifts her and spins her around. Her laughter bubbles, louder and louder, till they are both a spinning, giggling pile of joy.

I want to join them, but instead I go to hug mum. Maybe it’s because, at seven years of age, I’ve just put a name to the shadow that always hides under her smile, and I don’t want her to be scared alone.

My sister will be a calculator, like our parents. Calculators are always needed. And yet, as I hear the fear in my mother’s laughter, I know I must choose a different path.

We have only legends now for when our ancestors first saw the monster. They saw it shred light as it approached, then devoured whole worlds. They ran the calculations—they still used machines for that, used machines for everything—and they knew our rock world would not escape the hungry maw. They came up with a solution. It was insufficient, or too late, or both.

But we’re still here.

Still falling.

Over the holidays, we go to see a show. The community hall is packed with families picnicking on the metal floor, voices high in expectation. Everyone stares at us—two children in the family, and we don’t even look like twins. I’m used to the stares, but it’s harder today, maybe because there are so many people here, so many puzzled eyes.

Mother told me once that in the old days, a machine could look into a womb and tell if you were expecting twins. But machines are extraneous mass, so we use people instead, because people are here anyway, always needing jobs to be useful. But people can’t look into the womb, so they only listen, but they don’t always hear right. I’m not sure I understood what she meant, but I nodded along. Still, I’m glad that doctor didn’t hear right because I like being here, and I like my sister, too.

The lights dim, and the talker comes to the little stage in the center of the hall. She is a woman, I think, with skin so dark it’s almost black. She puts on hats and coats, and changes voices so she sounds like a child or an old man, or a whole group of people talking all at once. The show is a familiar one, about Noah, the first engineer, and how no one would believe his warnings about the monster in the sky. (We still lived on a rock world then, so the talker has to explain what “sky” means, but I’m eight now so I know all about it.) My mouth falls open as I watch and listen, enthralled by the tale of Noah’s struggle, his perseverance to build the ship and keep us safe.

Soon everyone in the audience is sobbing, as the talker acts out the plight of young couples, traveling far and long in search of Noah’s ship. We all laugh with the joy of finding their salvation, all our favorite couples boarding the ship one by one. They wave their last goodbyes, and the ship lifts off in the flurry of red flames. We clap, and the lights come on, and the talker is again just one woman standing on an empty stage with a red scarf in her hands.

The u-rating is the compromise we’ve come to accept. There was no choice really, after the dark years.

Every adult starts life with ten points.

For each child, you lose a point. For every five years of your life, you lose a point.

For every ten years on your job, you gain points following the usability and performance rating.

When you run out of points, you have to move.

Down a ten, down a five. The further down-ring you go, the more points you reclaim.

Arithmetic runs our lives.

Always toward the bottom rings.

At ten, I’m not yet a problem child; there are others still undecided, still searching for their path. But our time is running out. Teachers watch us with troubled faces, our class thinning as my friends shift to vocational classes.

“Why not?” my sister asks when an opening comes for a cook. She’s in her second year of calculator training, looking years older in the auxiliary’s dark clothes, even though as my twin she is also just ten. She folds her arms and leans against the wall in a pose that is so like our mother’s my eyes begin to sting.

Mum wants me to apply. Cook is a class one job, better than a calculator, an air-checker, or a doctor even. We’ll never not need cooks.

I shake my head, not quite meeting my sister’s eyes. “It’s just . . . Not what I want to do.”

I brace myself, waiting for the accusations of selfishness, of pride, of being a lump of extraneous matter—but it’s my sister I’m talking to. She understands, or at least she doesn’t judge.

“You’ve got to choose something. And this is as good as it gets.”

I remember her spinning with our father, crying with laughter. Only three years ago. She sounds like an adult now.

My father’s leaving now, going to visit my grandparents. They used to live three corridors down before they moved. I never see them anymore. I wanted to go with him, but mum won’t let me. She cries most nights worrying about father going, even if it’s just for two weeks.

I wonder how her calculations are going, and how long before she can move to teaching.

“You are right,” I say.

I do not apply.

That night, I dream of Noah.

Gravity.

That is all there is to it. But let’s make it even simpler, pare it down to things that we can control:

Mass and distance, that’s all that counts.

Distance especially. For every step we slip away from the monster, its hold on us weakens. For every step or fall behind, its claws dig deeper into us.

If we lose two steps, no mass loss may save us.

There’s an opening in engineering, the head teacher says, and my heart starts to beat faster. I’d never considered engineering but now I can’t get it out of my mind, even though I’m not sure I know what it means. All I know is that it’s in the first ring, and that they use machines and make our whole world run. They keep us from falling.

I want to do that, too. Like Noah.

The teachers make me take tests, then more tests. Each time they seem surprised by my results, then I hear the word “gifted” and “twins” and wonder if there was some other school, one I would have gone to if I didn’t have a sister. Still, they must be satisfied, because three days later I join nine other children for an assessment.

The first ring is both identical and nothing like all the other rings.

As we emerge from the elevator, the ten of us wide-eyed and unsure whether we are more curious or terrified, we find ourselves inside a corridor just like those we have crossed all our lives. People hurry up and down, smiling or busy, most of the uniforms comfortingly familiar. But there are the other ones, too, the gloss-silver jackets you won’t find anywhere else: engineering auxiliaries. The lights are brighter, too, and the floors softer, making our steps sound oddly muffled. Shiny squares glisten next to the doors we pass, but we move too fast to get a better look.

We follow the teachers in and out of rooms, trying to listen to their eager explanations. Even the teachers’ voices are muffled here, subdued by the soft floors or the awareness of where we are. I try to memorize every detail as I trudge behind the others. At eleven, I’m the oldest of the group, the one most teachers have given up hope for. I stand a head taller than the other kids, and they shy away from me as if I’d bite.

Finally, we enter a room unlike anything I have ever seen. Shining windows line all the walls; oddly-shaped tables fill the space within, each with one or two silver-clad engineers standing beside it. Everything beeps and hums, like the air ducts, only louder.

The children gasp; even our teachers fall into reverent silence. I want to gasp too, but there’s too much to see, too much to understand to waste time on idle wonder. Maybe it’s because I am older, or because I’ve paid more attention to the talkers’ tales of the old times, that I recognize the shining windows as computer screens and the tables as “consoles,” or “inter-heads,” or something like that. So while my peers gawk and giggle, I take the time to make sense of the light show in front of me.

It takes a moment before I recognize the schematics. The black abyss, that’s the monster. The white dot, that’s us, our fragile orbit marked with flashing figures. Further out, wispy golden lines show the shroud of gas that surrounds us: our old sun, unraveled and spun again, remade into a barrier that keeps us in the monster’s grasp. But there’s something new in the image, something I haven’t seen in my textbooks: lines of trajectories showing the monster’s next meal: an entire world, white and yellow and orange, deformed as it starts to break apart.

As it starts to fall.

I may be eleven, but I have had years of watching my parents and my sister in their calculator training. The numbers roll through my mind all on their own: mass and distance, distance and mass.

Before I know it, I am alone, having walked up to the main screen, my fists tight and my jaw clenched.

No, not alone: a man stands next to me, his hair white and his face ancient. “What do you see?”

I look into his face, realizing that he knows what I know.

“My father’s visiting my grandparents,” I whisper. “In . . . in the bottom ring.”

Something like a disappointment crosses the man’s face. “Is that all you see?”

I look at the picture again, forcing myself to think only of numbers. Mass and distance, but distance most of all.

On the screen, the mass of the other world flashes in large red figures. It’s far still, but already falling, the outer layers of its gaseous bulk joining the lines of our sun, and falling, falling, falling. Each gram of mass another line pulling us down.

We are balanced now, our speed just sufficient to turn the falling into orbiting—but not with the extra mass.

We must keep the balance. We’ll run the engines, of course. It won’t be enough—not unless we reduce our mass. And only if we do it soon enough.

I’m trembling as I look at the man. “We have a choice: one ring, if we do it now. Or we can wait a year and lose two rings.”

“What’s your recommendation?”

I try not to think about my grandparents, about my father, about the ten thousand people and the year of life they could enjoy. Ten thousand now, or twenty thousand later. It’s arithmetic.

“One ring,” I say. “No later than in five days.”

The man nods. There’s pain in his eyes, hiding just under the practiced determination. He reminds me of my mother. He is sad, too, I realize—and somehow I know that the pain is for the ten thousand, but the sorrow is just for me, for the line I’ve just crossed, my own event horizon from which there’s no return.

A word to the head teacher and a moment later we are ushered out, even before any of the other kids manage to ask a question.

My application is accepted.

My grandparents die the next day—they and ten thousand others ejected with the bottom ring. My father makes it out in time after the ringmaster warns him away. But he never looks at me the same way again. My parents cry themselves to sleep that night, for my grandparents, and for me.

Ten days later I am transferred to the school in the first ring. I don’t know it yet, but I will never see my parents again. But I can rest easy, knowing they will never have to move. A small perk for the engineers, lest anyone ever hesitate about killing their own.

Our world is a funnel.

We capture as much as we can, matter and energy. We use the minimum we must; the rest goes to propulsion. Never enough.

Our homes are rings on the side of the funnel, spinning and waiting, spinning and hoping.

We started with a hundred rings. We’re down to sixty-three now.

My sister comes to visit me once, after graduation. I’m twenty now, and a fully trained propulsion engineer.

“Why propulsion?” she asks.

I shrug. “We need better engines.”

What I really want to say is, So we never have to lose another ring, not on my watch, but she knows that—just as I know that what she’s really asking is, What makes you think you’ll succeed where all the others have failed?

I have no answer to give her, nothing beyond that I have to try, but she knows that, too.

Instead we busy ourselves with the walk through the first ring’s recreational promenade, stopping to admire corner artists or watch a talker put on a show. It’s odd with only adults in the audience, even though I’m used to it now. Few engineers choose to have a child. They say they’re too busy, but I’ve been here long enough to know the truth. Our families are protected—but only one generation. Our children would live to watch their own children move, or they’d give away their points to protect them. You wouldn’t wish that fate on anyone.

I buy two cups of sweet jelly, one green and one red, our old favorites. My sister smiles, but she can’t hide from me.

“What is it?”

She considers a lie, but she’s never been good at those. “It’s this place. It’s unnatural. The floors are too soft, you can’t even hear yourself walk.”

I want to ask if it’s me or seeing so many engineers. Everyone respects the engineers, but no one like the sight of us. We’re the reminder of things best left unseen, the falling and the monster’s maw waiting to devour yet another ring.

She reads right through me. “It’s not you, it’s me.” She laughs, but her voice breaks. “All the machines. I’m a grade one calculator, but I could never compete. No human can.”

I stop. “Don’t think that way. We need machines, here. The number of variables is too big, and the timing too critical. That’s why we’ve kept them here. Everywhere else, people are more than fine.”

She looks at her feet. I haven’t told her anything she doesn’t know, nothing that would erase the worry of not being needed, losing her utility ranking, having to move . . .

I put my hands on her shoulders. “You can’t think that way. This ring, all of us, we are here for you. For the people. This ship is nothing without you. Hey, remember Noah? How his ship was ready, but he wouldn’t leave? Not until every bench was filled? Because he didn’t build it for himself, but for them.”

“I know,” she whispers.

But from now on, it’s always I who goes down to visit.

We never talk about the dark years: the time when the reality settled in and we knew we’d never escape, that we’ll always be falling.

I know there were riots, and inter-ring wars, and forced sterilizations.

We lost fifteen rings in the space of a year.

Some say it was because those decks were empty.

I’m not sure this is true.

I make senior engineer at thirty. The job comes with a u-rating so high I’ll never run out of points.

I receive my first full briefing from that same old man who nineteen years ago asked what I saw on the screens. The one who gave the order to eject the ring with my grandparents. He was right though, both of us were—we outpaced the monster long enough to reach higher ground, a trajectory we have been able to maintain since. Nineteen years without loss of a single ring—the longest time in history.

Now he hands me a thick book with my name on it, one that will open only to my retinas.

“The full specs of the ships,” he says, his gray eyes buried in wrinkles but still as intense as on that first day.

“Ships?”

He nods. “We were not the only ones.”

“Were?”

The shape of his smile tells me he’s heard these same questions every time he’s gone through the briefing. “There were twelve—that we know of. More could have been launched later, though that’s not very likely.”

“What happened? I’ve seen no trace of them on the sensors.”

He looks away. “We cut contact, sometime in the dark years. Everybody was too busy with their own troubles. And . . . We didn’t really want to know, in case . . . ”

I piece the facts together: things were tough in the dark years, tough and rough. It would have been the same for them. And if they didn’t react in time, if the monster grabbed them—that could have sent the rest of us into anarchy.

“I understand,” I say, and he smiles in a way that tells me that I’m missing something important. I want to ask, but he pats my shoulder and walks away, and it’s the last time I ever see him. My colleagues tell me that he’s retired, but I have to look the word up to even know what it means. No one retires here; we only move.

You can escape. Of course you can. The answer lies in the same equation: mass and distance.

The only way to gain distance is to lose mass.

If you lose enough of it, you’ll be free.

The ship’s manual is more than just that—it’s a living history, filled in with comments and diary entries of generations of engineers, starting from Noah, who wasn’t even a Noah, but someone called Amira. I read every night, and even start adding my own notes, marking how things have changed since my predecessor.

I don’t know when the pieces fall into place and I realize what happened to the other ships.

They couldn’t take it. The falling. The constant struggle to keep just out of the monster’s claws. The anguish of giving the order, of watching ring after ring disappear into the darkness.

They ejected the rings and rushed away with just the top few.

They escaped.

This is why engineers don’t have to move. Why the ship’s specs are so tightly guarded. But now I know—and I know, too, that we still could escape. Burn our way right through the shroud. The numbers pop into my head unbidden, crying out in my mother’s voice and my sister’s. Ten rings. We could keep ten rings.

Eject fifty-two, and we’ll be free. A true escape, not just a delay. No more falling. No more scraping inches away from the edge. Not a single ring lost ever again.

I cry myself to sleep that night, crying for the freedom I can almost taste, and for all the rings that will die, sooner or later—but not by my hand.

Never by my hand.

We’ll always be losing rings, always offering our blood sacrifice. Because the monster keeps growing, sucking in matter from what remains of our sun and the planets in our system. And with each new meal it gets stronger, and its claws dig deeper into us.

And yet we are holding.

The dark years, for all their horrors, helped.

All the deaths, all the lost rings. That’s what allowed us to dig in and hold on.

Since then, only once did we have to lose five rings in a single sacrifice.

That particular meal was called Saturn, I think.

Sometimes the monster eats them out of order.

My sister lives on the forty-second ring, in a tiny room next to the apartment where we all used to live. She’s a senior calculator now and could afford much better, but she likes the old place, or so she tells me. I try to ask, but she just shakes her head, her lips pursing into a line that’s so painfully familiar my breath catches in my chest.

“How are they?” I ask after a moment.

“You should have gone to visit,” she says instead.

“They don’t want me to,” I start, but then I really hear what she said. “What do you mean?”

She looks away, her mouth pressed shut with the effort of holding words that want to burst out. Just like when she calculated the numbers faster than mum. The memory wants to make me smile, but my sister’s chin is trembling. Tears well in her eyes, then spill out, down her cheeks, on her hands, on my hands as I pull her close.

“Tell me. Please.”

“They’ve moved. They . . . They gave me their points.”

I stifle a gasp. Engineers’ families are protected—parents, spouses, children. Parents and spouses, really, as none of us have children. But not siblings. No one is supposed to have siblings, you see.

They chose for her life. I expected them to try—I thought I’d beat them to it.

“Why now?”

She looks away again, pain mixed with anger and guilt on her face. She hates me now, for not finding a way to stop them, hates our parents for making it, and hates herself most of all.

Pain I can’t fight. Anger I can take. But not her guilt.

“Why now?” I repeat.

“I’m pregnant,” she whispers. And then, after a moment, “With twins.”

Something erupts inside me. I lift her as high as I can and start to spin. She’s crying still, but then she’s laughing and we’re both crying and laughing, and the world is great again.

“Don’t worry about anything,” I tell her after we collapse on the floor of her tiny room, drunk with laughter. “The ship’s fine. We’re fine. We have plenty of time.”

Choose your monster—the one hiding in the darkness, or the one watching you from the mirror. It’s your choice. Your decision.

My parents die of old age, my father first, then mother only weeks later. They die in peace, having hugged their grandchildren goodbye.

I never saw them since the day I left home at eleven. I should have visited, no matter how much they hated my silver uniform. I waited too long, and after they moved it was no longer possible—engineers aren’t allowed on the bottom rings.

Still, we wrote letters and talked on the comms each year on our birthday, all four of us, then six, once the grandchildren arrived. We were a family again.

They even thanked me for my work, said life in the bottom rings was peaceful like never before. I promised I’d keep it that way.

And, for a brief moment, I believed it.

Ghosts haunt the bottom ring.

Living, but not quite.

Knowing their lives are over, and yet living. Sucking joy out of each moment. Laughing and dancing and telling tales.

Waiting, most of all.

Always waiting.

There’s three of us: a triumvirate of chief engineers, selected for our morals as much as our skills, tasked with watching the ship as much as each other. I see the truth in their eyes: they know, and they know that I know. We never speak of the facts, never mention the other ships, or our own chance of escape.

Until the day we get the news.

A thin, sharp-boned technician delivers the message, her face pale as ash. A leak in one system causing the next one to misfire, causing another one to short . . . A chain of malfunctions, each insignificant, stringing together into a disaster.

We’re about to lose an engine. One of the twelve that let us maintain our trajectory, keep us away from the monster.

We send her away with requests for more data, make it sound like we can imagine a solution. It’s a lie. There is no solution, or at least none we can realize in time.

We sit in silence, eyes half-closed as each of us runs our own calculations. One moves to the screen, then another. We check the assumptions, confirm the tolerances. Then we are back, three of us around the small table, faces set and fists clenched tight.

“Ten,” I say, part of me surprised I still have a voice.

“Two weeks,” the second one says.

“Agreed,” the third one finishes.

There’s nothing more to say. Not later than two weeks from now, we will eject ten rings. A hundred thousand people will die.

Half a million will live.

For how long?

One of us lifts their head, another opens their mouth. We all know the words: You can escape. Keep ten rings, eject fifty-two. Forty-two, because the other ten are as good as gone already. And then we’ll be free, all of those remaining, free from the monster and free from the pain, the anguish, the decisions. No engineer will have to make those choices, ever again.

“No,” I say. “Never.”

Nobody says anything anymore.

You can escape. Of course you can. The answer lies in the same equation: mass and distance.

The only way to gain distance is to lose mass.

If you lose enough of it, you’ll be free.

NEVER BY MY HAND

“What’s the cube root of 12,326,391?” the boy asks.

My sister blinks, her eyes losing focus the way they always do when she’s working.

I count the seconds.

The girl squeals and puffs her cheeks, fighting the urge to reveal the answer. The boy gives her a stern look.

“231” my sister breathes the words out.

“Fifteen seconds,” I announce. “Perfectly fine.”

“I got it in ten!” the girl cries.

“That’s my girl!” I lift her and spin her around. The boy rushes to join us, then my sister. Their laughter bubbles, louder and louder, till we are all a spinning, giggling pile of joy.

They are still only twelve. Much too young. Much, much too young.

They’ve lost their father already—four years ago, when we lost those ten rings. But they’ve had their mother, and me.

And we were happy.

And I thought we could always be. And that those ten rings would be the last in my lifetime.

“They’ll be loved,” I say as the children rush away to play and my sister’s smile fades into sorrow. “And they’ll be safe. Forever.”

She tries to nod. We’ve chosen the fosters ourselves, selected the best, all the way from the sixth ring. And the engineers swore to look after them.

We’ve given them our points, my sister and I. It’s only fitting: twins to twins, blood to blood. Only fitting.

Really, we couldn’t hope for anything better.

There’s a force stronger than gravity.

Alas, it only acts on humans.

If it acted on ships, the four of us would have flown away.

We’re back in the old apartment, our family home in the forty-second ring. My sister’s crying now, her hand in mine and mine in hers. My face is dry. Not because I’m strong, far from that. I’m not half as strong as she. She would have stayed, would have kept on working, would have kept on falling.

The warning siren blares, once. The walls shake as the clamps release. We slide down, weightless, free, falling.

I’ve done all I could. The children are safe.

I hold my sister tight. I couldn’t have wished for a better life.

We are falling.

Two facts are contained in this statement:

The first: falling is a permanent condition, the truth of our past and present, and, for a brief moment still, the future.

The second you’ll have to deduce for yourself.

About the Author

M V Melcer is a Polish-born fiction writer and a filmmaker currently residing in the United Kingdom. When not writing, she is working on supplementing her English MA with a degree in astronomy and planetary sciences, with special interest in black holes.

Last Nice Day

Rich Larson

It sun-showers while we’re scrubbing the carrots. The sky overhead is robin’s egg blue—all the gray stormy shit is off to the east—but the rain comes down anyways. We’re sitting on the edge of the old wooden porch, facing the garden, and the drops lick our bare feet. That is the setting.

“Again,” says Mom, because it sun-showered yesterday too.

I scrub sideways, working bristles into creases. It feels good to see the water slick the dirt away and leave the skin bright orange. I like cleaning things. I like it when it rains and all the colors punch more. That is a relatable personality trait.

“Weird weather,” says Mom. She goes from scrubbing to cutting, pulling the clean bright carrots out of the bucket and lopping the tops off. “Still warm, though. We have to enjoy it. Might be the last nice day.”

I should be talking. I know I should be talking. Nobody wants to read about a silent and emotionally numb character.

“Yeah,” I say.

Carrots go from tub, dirty, to bucket, clean, to Tupperware, cut. Warm rain splatters walkway, dark blotches on stone laid last summer while I was overseas. My work involves travel. The last trip didn’t go so great. That’s foreshadowing.

“Are you doing that thing again, Ned?” Mom looks uncomfortable. “You know the thing I mean? When you pretend like you’re a fictional character to get mental distance from shit?”

“Nah,” I say. “Nah. I’m not.”

Soon the tub’s got only stragglers, small and pale, hiding in the brown murk, and when those are done Mom dumps the water, refills it, and gets started on scrubbing the beets.

“I know it was a bad one,” she says, and I can tell she wants to ask about the therapy modules, if I’ve finally started them.

“It was okay,” I say.

The beet juice leaches into the water bright red, and my heart goes off like a bomb, and my throat welds shut, but at least I’m reacting to things now, which makes it more interesting, fuck fuck fuck—

This is the last gasp of August.

Here’s a flashback: a man and a woman are standing in a bathroom. She knows about the envelope. He knows that she knows about the envelope. She doesn’t know that he knows that she knows about the envelope, but she is on the verge. Things are in flux.

“Shitty party,” the woman says, trying out a smile. “Sorry. I thought it would be more fun. I needed some fun.”

She looked inside the envelope. He saw the tiny spots of body heat her fingers left on the photos, though she was smart enough to not leave fingerprints. They have been playing the information game for weeks, but now his hand is forced. The risk of exposure is too high.

So his subself emerges, creeping down the pathways micro-lesioned into his corpus callosum. He sees sparks, smells the loamy fall rot on the roads outside his mom’s acreage.

“We both need some fun,” he says, but now he is only a passenger, observing. “This week has been crazy, you know? I’m going to take you out tomorrow. Just the two of us. We’ll go dancing.”

He holds out his hand, wrist aligned for the featherlight salsa clasp. She smiles and puts her hand in his, completing the frame.

“I’m not in my shoes,” she says.

He gives her a clockwork spin, then another, then another. She whirls in place on the shiny bathroom tiles, her reflection a beautiful laughing blur.

“Ned, stop it,” she says. “I’m dizzy.”

“Yeah,” he says. He spins her again. Again.

“Ned!” She stumbles. “Hey!”

He wrenches her sideways and smashes her head into the sink. Once is not enough. His subself knows that incapacitating someone in real life is not like incapacitating someone in a film. He can only count the contacts between porcelain and bone. On three the scalp splits, on seven the skull cracks, on twelve the eyes roll back, and she’s gone, hurt too badly to stay conscious.

She might never wake up. If she does, there will be extensive brain damage.

Knowing this would paralyze Ned, but his subself is already cleaning, sliding the body into the bathtub, running the water. Bright red blood swirls toward the drain.

Our old soccer wall is still up. It’s not really a wall: just a couple square-cut lumber stays stacked together with a flexy sheet of plywood wedged between them. Pass low against the stays and the ball comes back at speed, shoot a bit higher and the plywood takes the edge off the rebound so it doesn’t wallop you in the face.

I built it for my little sister Suz, back when she was playing for Team Alberta, streaking up and down the wing and launching those beautiful looping crosses. I haven’t seen her since I got back. Mom says she doesn’t leave her room anymore, but I hear her moving around the house in the middle of the night sometimes, cooking or showering.

Suz should be more than a supporting character, but I can’t get inside her head anymore, and lately I’m not sure I ever did. She will have to stay on the periphery.

Since she’s not using the soccer wall, I do. I find the blue-and-orange husk of an old Nike ball in the garage and pump it a little too full, then take it out to the wall and start hammering away, left foot, right foot, sometimes popping it up for volleys against the plywood. My feet are automatic, even after years and years of not playing, and it makes me wonder again about the balance of things: how much I do, how much I do without me.

I’m hoping that the familiar sound of the ball hitting wood will bring Suz out of her room how my knocking on her door couldn’t. A big black dog shows up instead. His name is Trotsky. Mom introduced us the day I arrived from the airport. Behaviorists say the coyotes are getting more aggressive around here, more prone to pack-hunting, so she wanted a bodyguard for her morning run. Trotsky is already rib-high on me, and he’s not done growing.

Mom also said some drone caught footage of a pizzly bear, half-starved but still a biological tank with razor-tipped mitts, wandering south. If that thing ever shows up around here, Trotsky better hide.

Of course, now it’s obvious the pizzly bear will find the acreage. It’s Chekhov’s Pizzly Bear now.

Trotsky bum-rushes me and attacks the soccer ball, trying to get his slobbery jaws around it. He’s still a puppy. I pop it out of his mouth with the toe of my shoe and play keep-away with him, dribbling a tight circle while he butts my legs with his shaggy head. I was never as good as Suz; after a few seconds Trotsky manages to dive under my shins and steal it. He skips away and stares at me, ball in mouth.

“Are you puncturing it?” I ask. “Hey. You better not be puncturing it.”

I take a step forward. He retreats. He is so happy. I am so glad he doesn’t know about the trip to Ljubljana, where a dog spotted me climbing a fence and started barking so loudly that my subself did the math, put one parka-wrapped hand into its mouth, and beat it to death with the other.

“You big beautiful idiot,” I say. “Give me that.”

He refuses, so I chase him around the half-dirt half-grass field behind the garden until I’m exhausted, and I have to flop down to breathe. Trotsky taunts me from a distance. It feels like it should feel good. The sun is still shining, limning red and gold leaves in the elm trees, which are insubstantial enough to sway, back and forth, back and forth, in the wind.

“This might be the last nice day,” I tell Trotsky. “Those leaves will start falling soon.”

Trotsky doesn’t care.

Here’s an infodump. The first thing you should know is that field operatives aren’t recruited or trained the way they used to be. Lives are too documented now. Identities are too concrete. Gaits and faces and thumbprints and retinas get stamped into the fabric of cyberspace a hundred times a day. Anonymity is a relic that even the best ghoster algorithms can’t bring back.

In the years it normally takes to be trained as an effective operative, enemy machine intelligence can dredge a dozen red flags out of movement and communication patterns. They make you before you ever set foot in the field. That’s why the whole thing had to be condensed. Candidates are still screened for physical fitness, of course, but the first priority is now mental malleability.

They test for the neural structures that lend themselves to psychosurgery, deep learning, training by dream machine. We’ve come a long way since the lobotomy. Now a decade of study and repetition can be brute forced into instinct and muscle memory in a matter of days, bypassing the higher brain functions, turning a civil servant into a fire-and-forget munition.

You only get three jobs, four maximum, before they pull you out of the field and thank you for your service and tell you the rest of your life will be beautifully boring. But the subself stays, lurking. The memories stay, lurking.

Mom has to go to the capital for a few days, to attend to business she can’t just be a laggy digital face for. She thinks her being gone might lure Suz out of her room, which she says would be an added bonus. The car takes her to the airport early Thursday morning and comes back empty.

I have nothing to do, so I do childhood things. Trotsky comes with me for wanders in the yellow sea of canola, where he can bark at the massive bug-like harvester as it trundles along. Sometimes we go to the woods out back of the house. I find the runoff trench where Suz used to race branches against each other, back when summers weren’t so dry. It’s all crusted mud now.

I crawl under the stairs and come out with a big plastic tub full of books. Protagonists shouldn’t be bookish. It’s cliché. But sometimes people just like books. I unstack a pile of paperbacks, flimsy covers with ancient CGI artwork and painfully shiny lettering, all metallic or holographic. The smell of them makes me forget about my subself.

There’s no sign of Suz until the third day. I come back from a walk and see dishes in the dishwasher. I remember she used to like tortellini with canned tomato soup as the sauce. The pantry has a full flat of canned soups, but when I ask the freezer about tortellini it says no.

I go out to the garage and check the old deepfreeze that used to belong to my grandparents. The top has imbibed saskatoon stains and the rubber seal is yellowing with age, and it doesn’t keep track of its contents. It opens up with a gush of frost. I shuffle through the frozen slabs of ziplocked berries, some moose meat from the neighbor. No tortellini.

There’s another virus going around, so I take my mask with me to get groceries. I put it on in the car while we’re gliding down the range road toward town. This stretch of blacktop, a few kilometers with no lights and no radar traps, used to be my own private adrenaline machine. I remember driving manual on it back in high school, coming home from late summer nights.

Windows down, but no music—no need for it with the wind blistering my eyes and my heart pounding and my foot lurching lower and lower on the gas. It was more personal without music, less like a movie and more like life.

Now I let the car drive, and we stay at the speed limit. The prairie sky is huge. The last sunlight of the day filters through the trees, lights up the canola fields, glints off an old train carcass rusting on the tracks. I try to enjoy it. I have to enjoy it. It’ll be dusk by the time I get back from the superstore.

It’s dusk by the time I get back from the superstore. The sky is dark, and the gravel road is shrouded in white fog. The car slows down for the railroad track, slumping over its rusty teeth. The grass is overgrown on either side, hip high. No trains run through here anymore.

The car’s headlights catch a reflective Adidas stripe. Someone is walking along the edge of the gravel road. They look back over their shoulder. Suz’s face is a patchwork of shadows. I see gaps where her eyes ought to be. She used to remind me of a whippet, but she moves slower now, too stiff for twenty-one.

I put the window down and tell the car to stop beside her. “Do you want a ride?” I ask.

She taps one earbud, gives a tight shrug.

“Do you want a ride?” I repeat.

“I’m good.” Her voice sounds like smoked glass. She stares at me for a second. “You can walk if you want.”

I climb out and tell the car to go home. We’re only ten minutes from the house. The groceries should be alright. Suz eyes me again, then keeps walking. I fall into step beside her. Her knee is clicking. I can just barely hear it.

“Still warm,” I say, because it feels like we’re strangers. “Might be the last nice day.”

“What did you do?” Suz asks.

“I bought groceries.”

“I mean, what did you do.”

Mom knows better than to ever ask this question. I did nothing, according to current law—she wrote some of the legislation herself. But Suz never liked bullshit, even when she was a little kid. I don’t know what to say to her.

“Or, you know, the other you.” She has an ugly rift in her voice. “What did the other you do?”

My subself twitches, like somebody’s eyes fluttering open for a split second before they roll over. “You know I can’t tell you that kind of thing,” I say.

“I got a vested interest,” she says. “I’m home alone with a professional murderer.” She reaches down into the ditch and plucks the head off a cattail. She grinds it up between her fingers, scatters the fragments behind us as we walk. “I got into her files a while back. Not the encrypted shit, obviously. But I saw some stuff about the killswitch.”

The killswitch. Some people call it that; some people call it the backseat. I always call it the subself, because that’s what it’s called in the briefing.

“What’s it like?” Suz asks. “Having someone else take over for the hard parts?”

It’s like watching your hands wash the blood off a woman’s face and then use that face to unlock her phone before rigor mortis sets in, to get the address to what used to be a school.

“It’s like being a fictional character,” I say.

“Oh.” Suz makes a face. “You still do that, huh.” She pauses. “Mom’s trying to set me up for psychosurgery. Since I didn’t like the meds. One little tweak, and all the neurotransmitters get in line. Dopamine for days.”

“Gets you to baseline,” I say. “Sure.”

“Fuck that,” Suz says flatly.

“Why?”

Suz moves her mouth. I think she is tonguing the backs of her teeth. “Same reason you won’t do your therapy modules,” she says. “I should be sad, because the world is a fucked-up place. And I’m fucked up, too.”

My throat swells almost shut. I have just enough air to ruin her perception of me forever. I confess.

“I entered into a relationship with a specific person, then killed them, then used their biometric data to gain access to a specific facility,” I say. “The facility housed children who had been grown in exosomatic wombs and undergone genetic modifications.”

Suz stops walking. This is something she wanted to know, but no longer wants to know, and it’s wrong of me to tell her, but I can’t stop.

“They were grown with the killswitch in them,” I say. “As a permanent part of them. They were zombies, in the philosophical sense. No consciousness.”

“You killed a bunch of kids,” Suz says, because it’s not much of a twist. She looks sick and pale.

I see the red of the beets leeching into the water again. I see the monofil garrote passing through small neck after small neck, down the line of dormitory beds. The dusk air is cool and smells like loam, all the fall-blazed leaves starting to rot.

“The subself did,” I say. “We had to discourage them. Destroying the facility wouldn’t have been enough. So fucked up is relative, Suz.”

“Stay away from me,” she says.

I got closer than I meant to, so the toes of my shoes almost touch her battered runners. The subself knows I shouldn’t be saying this.

In the distance, Trotsky howls alarm. For a moment I imagine the pizzly bear lumbering out of the bush, then I hear other howls, high-pitched, yelping. The coyotes are pack-hunting.

Suz takes off at a sprint, maybe to save Trotsky, or maybe so Trotsky can save her from me, and I sprint after her. I can feel the subself emerging, triggered by the adrenal dump. But that’s not right—it’s not the subself that emerges, it’s me that peels away. I’m a veneer. All my thinking and feeling and agonizing is an overgrown troubleshooting system.

I watch my subself hurtle along the dark road, somehow avoiding every pit and pothole, placing each step on level ground. He overtakes Suz and keeps going, toward the noise that my subself has zeroed in on better than I ever could. He skids, leaps the ditch in a spray of gravel, crunches into the brush. Trotsky is snarling and whimpering up ahead.

I see the hump of his shoulder in the tall grass. He dwarfs the coyotes, makes them seem insubstantial, small skinny shadows darting through the field. But there are eight of them, and they are desperation hungry. The bushes are spackled in blood. My subself takes off his sweater and wraps his fist and forearm in it.

It’s over by the time Suz catches up. Seven coyotes are slinking back into the aspen trees; one is dying with its head cracked open and its hind leg snapped. Trotsky is trying to lick a sticky red gash on his neck. I am sitting with him, unwrapping my dirt and blood-smeared sweater, evaluating what is probably a boxer’s fracture underneath.

Suz looks at me, and instead of looking relieved she looks more like a stranger than ever. “Trotsky,” she mumbles. “Here, boy.”

His ears flutter, but he stays with me. In books, in movies, the dog knows who the bad people are. I want to tell Suz that. I want to tell her that the subself is some implanted alien that has nothing to do with me, but the truth is that he’s more me than I ever was, and that’s why I don’t deserve the therapy modules.

“There’s tortellini,” I say.

I don’t think Suz hears me, and a moment later she leaves, tramping back to the gravel road. I sit there with Trotsky, rubbing gently behind his ear, little circles with my thumb the way I think I would want if I were a dog. I find a veterinarian on my phone.

“It’s going to be okay,” I say. “All of it.”

He believes me, the way Suz never will now. The sky overhead is endless, star-scattered, deep purple turning to black. The air is electric with petrichor.

I know the last nice day was a long time ago.

About the Author

Rich Larson (Annex, Tomorrow Factory) was born in Galmi, Niger, has lived in Spain and Czech Republic, and is currently based in Grande Prairie, Canada. His fiction has been translated into over a dozen languages, among them Polish, French, Romanian and Japanese, and adapted to screen for Netflix’s Love Death + Robots.

Destination Mercury

Andrew Liptak

There is no better example of how science fiction’s tendency to try and imagine a plausible future is like throwing a dart at a moving target than Larry Niven’s 1964 short story “The Coldest Place.” Up to that point, astronomers widely believed that the planet Mercury was tidally locked to the Sun: its rotation matched that of its orbit and as a result, only one side ever faced the Sun, meaning that its dark side would have been much cooler. Niven took that bit of knowledge and incorporated it into his story—his first—and sent it off to Frederik Pohl’s If, where it appeared in the December 1964 issue.

It was during the 1960s that the space race hit its stride, and while the Apollo missions to the Moon took up much of the attention of the general public and scientific community, there were plenty of scientists who were keenly interested in researching the nature of the solar system’s other bodies, including Mercury. In 1962, astronomers from the University of Michigan first observed our solar system’s smallest planet with a radio telescope and discovered something unexpected: the side facing away from the Sun was warmer, indicating that the planet wasn’t tidally locked. Further studies a couple of years later confirmed the finding: for every two Mercurian years (one year being the equivalent of eighty-eight Earth days), it experienced three Mercurian days (each rotation on its axis a bit under fifty-nine Earth days).

Niven’s story was no longer scientifically accurate.

Messenger to the Gods

Ancient astronomers from all over the world have long been able to detect our solar system’s rocky bodies, and through centuries of observations, have incorporated them into their respective cosmologies. As these various ancient cultures charted the movements of our solar system’s most prominent astrological feature—the Sun—they took notice of another object that was closely associated with it: Mercury. According to NASA, Mercury popped up in Babylonian star catalogs, and that they named it Nebo/Nabu—a god of writing and records, and who served as a messenger to the gods. Mercury was often to be seen during the morning and evening hours, when the Sun’s glare wouldn’t overtake it. Greek astronomers also assigned Mercury with the role of messenger for its apparent speed. They called it Hermes, a quick-moving messenger to the gods who served as a conduit between the mortal and divine worlds who moved on winged sandals. Roman theology echoed that of Greece’s and named the god Mercury.

Over time, ancient astronomers shifted their understanding of the cosmos. Writing in The Human Cosmos: Civilization and the Stars, Jo Marchant writes that astronomer Ptolemy wrote an influential text on the nature of the cosmos, seeking to organize it into a rational system. But more importantly, he “differed from the Babylonians in that rather than seeing celestial signs as divine warnings, he believed powers emanating from the stars and planets, such as ‘humoral shifts’ could trigger effects on Earth, influencing everything from the weather to personality and health.” It was a line of thinking that still persists to this day, an idea that links our everyday lives with that of the cosmos above us. He believed that Mercury danced just beyond the orbit of the Moon. Chinese scholars associated the planet with water, while Northern Europeans claimed it for Odin.

That thinking would again shift with time as new philosophers and thinkers like Copernicus and Galileo reset our thinking on the nature of the solar system: that the Sun was the center of our system, rather than the Earth, and that our home planet and its neighbors orbited it.

A Rational Cosmos

The development of the telescope brought the cosmos closer to early astronomers, and with it, a seismic shift in our understanding of our stellar neighborhood. The 1500s brought with it a series of early scientists who began to develop a heliocentric view of the solar system. Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe made several critical observations of supernovae and comets that revealed that the universe was much larger than previously thought and began to think that while maybe the Sun and Moon might revolve around Earth, the other planets might not. His protégé, Johannes Kepler, built upon his work and devised his three laws of planetary motion, which provided a model for how the objects in the solar system operated.

The scientists who followed were able to directly observe Mercury. Using his calculations of planetary motion, Kepler predicted in 1627 that both Mercury and Venus would transit the Sun in 1631. Unfortunately, Kepler died in 1630 and wasn’t able to make the observation himself. But others did: a French astronomer and priest named Pierre Gassendi projected an image of the Sun through his telescope in a dark room and was able to see the tiny dot of Mercury cross the face of the Sun, and a couple of weeks later, viewed Venus doing the same. He recognized that the planets were much smaller than expected: Mercury was tiny, the smallest of the rocky planets. At least two other astronomers witnessed the transit, and others would follow. Italian astronomer Giovanni Zupi recorded Mercury’s phases (proving that the planet was indeed orbiting the Sun), and in 1676, English astronomer Edmond Halley traveled to the island of Saint Helena in the Atlantic Ocean, where he recorded a Mercurian transit.

This new understanding of the solar system provided astronomers with the ability to better understand the true nature of the universe—a rational, understandable, and observable world. Scientists weren’t the only ones drawing inspiration and insight from this mindset: the forerunners to the modern science fiction genre were also interested in the developments and changes of the world. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction notes that the first work to feature Mercury was likely Athanasius Kircher’s 1656 work Itinerarium Exstaticum, in which a man named Theodidactus is carried along on a journey through the solar system by an angel, Cosmiel.

Mercury was also “generally included in other round tours of the planets,” writes Brian M. Stableford and David Langford in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Those works appeared in the coming decades, such as Emanuel Swedenborg’s The Earths in Our Solar System, George Griffith’s A Honeymoon in Space, and John Munro’s A Trip to Venus, while Le Chevalier de Béthune’s Relation du Monde de Mercure (translated as The World of Mercury) appears to be the first novel in which Mercury was the main setting.

With the help of telescopes and new orbital models, astronomers were able to get a better look at the nature of the planet throughout the 1800s. In the 1840s, French astronomer Urbain Le Verrier noted that there was a tiny discrepancy in Mercury’s orbits around the Sun: it seemed to be a little slower than could be accounted for. He theorized that there could be another, smaller body orbiting even closer to the Sun—something small enough to mess with Mercury’s orbit just enough to account for the slight delay. He attempted to track the theoretical planet down (he was good at this: he was the one who calculated the existence of Neptune before it was directly observed), working off of potential sightings from other astronomers, but in the years that followed, no such planet turned up. It wasn’t until 1915 when the discrepancies in the calculations were solved with Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. Since then, scientists have theorized the possibility of an asteroid belt or planetoid orbiting between Mercury and the Sun—Vulcanoids—although none have been discovered as of yet.

But while Venus and Mars sparked the imagination of authors and storytellers throughout history, Mercury was largely overlooked. Part of this seems to have come down to size, location, and disposition. Venus provides a brilliant presence in the night sky; Mars shows up in grim red tones. Venus is nearly the same size as Earth, and its thick atmosphere shrouds its surface in mystery, while astronomers and the general public were mesmerized by Mars’ features, such as its channels, which were sensationally mistranslated as “Canals.” That intrigue led to both Mars and Venus as central destinations for the minds of early science fiction authors, such as H. G. Wells or Edgar Rice Burroughs, who told sensational stories about alien civilizations and lost ruins, and the adventurers who encountered them.

World of Extremes

Mercury, given the more limited opportunities to view it, seems to have avoided that treatment, although The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction points out that the early pulp magazines included stories set on the planet by Homer Eon Flint, Ray Cummings, and Clark Ashton Smith during the modern genre’s formative years.

Scientists were discovering that Mercury’s nature likely led it to be an inhospitable location for life: over the course of his career, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli used telescopes to map the surfaces of Mars and Mercury (he’s the one who named Mars’ surface features “canali”—leading to the idea that they were artificial channels, and thus life was there), and while mapping the surface of Mercury, he theorized that the planet was tidally-locked to the Sun: a day and a year were one and the same, and thus, only one of Mercury’s sides was exposed to the Sun’s intense light and radiation, while the other was left inhospitably cold. It’s an idea that stuck within the scientific community for decades, and the planet’s harsh extremes provided plenty of material for authors to play with as science fiction began to form as a distinct genre.

As the world entered the twentieth century The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction notes stories with real scientific and realistic rigor were rare—but not unheard of—prior to World War II.

One early example is Clifford D. Simak’s story “Masquerade” (published in Astounding Science Fiction’s March 1941 issue), which featured a group of astronauts using the planet as a base for collecting solar energy and running afoul of some of the planet’s native inhabitants. Isaac Asimov’s early Robot story “Runaround” (published in Astounding Science Fiction’s March 1942 issue) put Mercury’s hostile environment front and center. “The photocell banks that alone stood between the full power of Mercury’s monstrous Sun and themselves were shot to hell,” Asimov wrote, introducing a ticking clock story as the two astronauts figure out how to fix a malfunctioning robot before they were cooked to death by the Sun’s heat.

Other stories that followed often set Mercury as a destination for stories of endurance, such as Alan E. Nourse’s “Brightside Crossing” (published in Galaxy magazine’s January 1956 issue), in which an adventurer named James Baron planned a daring four thousand-mile trek across the planet’s bright side. “I want to make a Crossing at perihelion and I want to cross on the surface,” says Major Armstrong, “If a man can do that, he’s got Mercury. Until then, nobody’s got Mercury. I want Mercury—but I’ll need help getting it.” Nourse explicitly highlights Mercury’s rotational spin and describes the adventure as a “hellish trek.”

Hugh Walters set his short novel Mission to Mercury on the planet in the same year and draws on that dual hot-and-cold nature as an expedition runs into trouble and is forced to touch down on the far side—where they risk freezing to death. Other authors, such as David Brin (Sundiver), Arthur C. Clarke (Islands in the Sky, Rendezvous with Rama), Hal Clement (Iceworld), Gordon R. Dickson (Necromancer), and Kurt Vonnegut (The Sirens of Titan), utilized the planet as a location over the years.

Niven’s “The Coldest Place” follows a character who’s searching for alien life on the planet, and ultimately captures one that’s composed of a type of helium. But the story is best known for the abrupt shift as the reality underpinning the story is changed by new discoveries.

In this case, astronomers using radar and radio telescopes discovered that the long-held assumptions about the nature of Mercury weren’t accurate: the planet did rotate, but slowly. These discoveries were later confirmed as NASA dispatched a probe, the Mariner 10, in 1973. The spacecraft performed a trio of flybys of the planet between 1974 and 1975, taking photographs of half the planet’s surface and utilizing an array of sensors, including a charged particle telescope, an infrared radiometer, magnetometers, plasma detectors, ultraviolet spectrometers, and others to measure the planet’s radiation, magnetosphere, and other characteristics, giving scientists and science fiction authors their best look yet at the planet.

What it found was a hellish world, pockmarked with craters, and surprisingly, a strong magnetic field, and that it was home to a thin atmosphere composed of helium.

As was the case before, science fiction largely ignored Mercury. Its proximity to the Sun meant that it was too difficult to terraform like Mars or Venus, and as The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction points out, “recent SF employs Mercury as merely a convenient place to site bases for studying the Sun.” In 2005, Ben Bova set one of his Grand Tournovels, Mercury, about an entrepreneur named Saito Yamagata, who plans to set up a solar-harvesting operation to power deep space starships, on the planet. In 2008 and 2012, Charles Stross and Kim Stanley Robinson respectively imagined massive, tracked cities that traveled around Mercury in tune with its rotation, keeping their inhabitants out of the harsh Sunlight, demonstrating that humanity could adapt to even the most inhospitable regions of the solar system. It’s also been fleetingly seen in film and television—Danny Boyle’s 2007 film Sunshine saw an expedition to restart the Sun and stop by the planet to meet up with a sister ship, hiding behind it from the Sun’s energy, as well as the occasional visit in shows like Star Trek, Futurama, Invader Zim, and a handful of others, with varying degrees of realism.

The most recent visitor to the planet was MESSENGER (Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry, and Ranging), a NASA probe that was launched in 2004, and which arrived in 2011 to further study the planet after Mariner 10. Unlike its predecessor, it was able to map Mercury’s entire surface, sending back stunning pictures of the planet’s pockmarked surface, and gathering information about the planet’s composition, the nature of its magnetic field, that the planet appeared to be tectonically active, and something surprising: that the planet was home to water ice and organic compounds, hidden in shaded craters at the planet’s north pole. The mission came to an end in 2014 when the probe ran out of fuel and crashed onto the surface in 2015.

While Niven’s story has been reduced to a handy demonstration about the changing nature of our understanding of space and the universe, Mercury itself offers up plenty of examples of the same: observations of the planet helped to better firm up our understanding of the nature of our solar system, and more recent scientific missions have demonstrated that we should be careful with any firm assumptions that we might have for the little planet: MESSENGER’s discovery of water and ice hidden deep in craters shows that there are plenty of surprises waiting for us, and which could provide plenty of inspiration for future authors who want to stop by the world for visits in the future.

About the Author

Andrew Liptak is a writer and historian from Vermont. He is the author of the forthcoming book Cosplay: A History (Saga Press, 2021), and his work has appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, io9, Kirkus Reviews, Lightspeed Magazine, Tor.com, VentureBeat, The Verge, and other publications.

Perpetual Training:
An Interview with Tommy Arnold

Arley Sorg

Tommy Arnold’s memorable illustrations grace Fran Wilde’s Updraft books, the Subterranean Press edition of Martha Wells’ The Murderbot Diaries, C. L. Clark’s The Unbroken, Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth, and many more. Among other accolades, he was a Jack Gaughan Award winner in 2016, has been a Chesley Award nominee every year since 2017, has been a Spectrum Award finalist twice, received Hugo nominations for Best Professional Artist for 2020 and 2021, and was a World Fantasy Award finalist in 2020 for Best Artist.

Arnold was born in Atlanta, Georgia and grew up in a small town nearby. He interned at a software company to make money before figuring out what he wanted to do. He took an art class at LaGrange College and realized that art was absolutely for him. He then signed up for a two-year illustration program at Portfolio Center in Atlanta. In 2012 he dropped the program to take a job illustrating for Bento Box Entertainment, which lasted roughly a year, then worked for Floyd County Productions’ Archer series for nine months. After this, he went full-time as a freelancer.

In 2014 Arnold went to the Illustration Masterclass workshop, then did a two-and-a-half-month online study with SmArt School, working with Gregory Manchess. Later that year, Irene Gallo hired Arnold for his first piece with Tor. “I actually made a game of trying to adopt her taste early on—she had folders on Facebook with curated images, and I’d try to understand if I didn’t like one, why; and if we did agree, that was good feedback. I tried to use her as a touchstone for elevating my own taste and understanding more about how buyers of images selected them.”

Arnold lived in North Carolina for a little while, outside of Charlotte, then West Lafayette, Indiana, returning to Atlanta for college before moving out to Seattle, Bellingham, only to return again to Atlanta in 2018. “I had infrastructure here in Atlanta. Good art friends and community. We had a figure-drawing group that was really strong. I injured my wrists, and we just didn’t have a lot of support out where we had been; I needed camaraderie and friendship and sunshine. You know, things that help you heal, basically. I think I’ve finally learned the lesson—it seems like I’m going to be here awhile.”

Do you feel like you got anything out of your experiences at LaGrange and Portfolio Center, in terms of your art?

Definitely. Although it’s taken time to understand what I got out of each place. Expertise is an interest of mine. On my own time I read nonfiction. I read a lot about the growing field of expertise. Research says that it’s helpful, if you’re going to try to create someone who’s an expert at something, to start them off in a small pond, because confidence is so important to progression. The confidence game is a big part of it, and LaGrange wasn’t an art school. This had two major advantages: there was no one who was really, really good, so I could blossom and feel like I was good, which I think is especially helpful, since I was dreadful; and second, they didn’t discourage you at all. The head of the program, Marcia Brown, basically let me do independent study after independent study, making up my own curriculum. I was the only person working digitally. They were like, yeah, if you wanna paint Magic cards, just keep doing quality work. I’ve heard from people who went to fine art institutions that they learned good fundamentals, but they were discouraged from going into fantasy and science fiction. Not having that, always having the feeling that it could happen, those were important things. At Portfolio Center I had something equally great, which was finding a teacher who was a world-class comic book artist, who just happened to be teaching there for a little while, Brian Stelfreeze. He took me under his wing and taught me the basis of everything that I know now. So, they both contributed in different and important ways.

Have you met many illustrators in the science fiction and fantasy field? Are people helpful, is there a sense of community?

I’ve met a lot of the people in the field, most of them go to Spectrum Fantastic Art Live to go to the award show, show their work, and meet each other. Or they show up at other events, like IlluXcon in Pennsylvania, or there’s a new show that Bobby Chiu and crew started in California called Lightbox Expo. You can meet people pretty easily if you just go up and say hi. Your work is always a better introduction than anything you might say. But you bump into people and they’re all really nice. Art’s just naturally a humbling discipline, because you’re never as good as it, and the further you go, the more you realize that. You don’t start catching up to how good you can be, you start realizing how awful you were, and you can’t believe anyone ever hired you.

There’s a fine line to hit. You want to be part of some community, and you want to look at art, especially art that’s better than yours, and interesting, newer, if you can find it. But there’s a lot of random junk on the Internet. I have slowly cut off channels of communication and gotten more isolated over time. I still put information out there, like me and my buddy, fellow illustrator Micah Epstein, do a podcast where we talk about issues we face as illustrators, and we interview other artists. We use that as a vehicle to talk to the people that we’re really interested in. The politics of art in the field are that if you want to talk about cool ideas and art with other artists that you respect, that you’re kind of peers with, they mostly are down for that, and I think most of them are more interested to talk about art than anything else. I find the community really engaging in that vein.

You’re up for a Hugo Award this year and last year you were a World Fantasy finalist. Have you attended genre conventions?

Last year I would have gone, since I was nominated, but it was all virtual. So, I was at the virtual ceremony. I went to Boskone, people said I should be there. It was cool, Wesley Chu was there, and I worked on one of his books the month after that, so we got to meet. And Richard Anderson was there—he’s an amazing cover artist and lives in London, so it’s rare that I get to bump into him. It was very concentrated, but interesting.

How did you initially become interested in science fiction and fantasy? What were some of your earliest memories of being drawn into genre?

Genre doesn’t feel like a separate thing. It goes as far back as I can remember. If you really think about it, most Disney movies are fantasy: it’s some kind of secondary world, or there’s some other element to it. I was the first child, so my parents were a little overprotective. I had all Disney movies until I was like eleven, and then my dad was like “we’re gonna watch The Matrix,” so that was my introduction to the medium—it was The Little Mermaid, which is like, transforming fish women and such, that’s basically fantasy, and then hard sci-fi with a bunch of violence and cursing; and it went on from there. The Lord of the Rings came to theaters and that seemed very normal, because it was so popular. My favorite movies before that had been Star Wars—they just blew my mind. I was also a big Magic the Gathering player, or Pokémon, all that stuff. Fantasy and sci-fi comprises so much of pop culture: TMNT, X-Men. I loved all of it.

Are there specific artists or illustrators who have influenced or inspired you?

So many, it changes as you as an artist change. I didn’t really know the names of artists when I was getting started, so then you’re interested in anyone who’s giving away education for free. There’s an artist by the name of Mike Lim, he goes by the handle Daarken, and he had educational tutorials that were easy to find on the Internet, so of course I just loved him and loved his stuff. I learned a lot from watching his videos. Brian knew a bunch of people and introduced me to all kinds of different art. He really expanded my scope. He was the first person to show me Craig Mullins, probably the most influential and famous concept artist of all time, widely accredited, basically invented digital painting. I saw his work through Brian. There’s an illustrator named David Grove whose work I was just obsessed with when I first started to work with Irene. She knew Dave Grove and her and Greg were buddies with him, he did some work for her.

Separately from my hobby and study of expertise, I am kind of an art history buff. It’s fun to try and track back family trees of illustrators. There’s usually an obscure teacher who had a couple of really strong progeny but was never as famous themselves. There’s the Brandywine School in Pennsylvania where Howard Pyle taught N. C. Wyeth and Harvey Dunn and all these other famous illustrators. As you explore, you are influenced by everyone. In some ways, you can’t progress as a creative individual in total isolation, because then what you make doesn’t have bridges back to where other people are mentally, so they can’t quite understand what you’re doing. It’s a shame to be polluted, in some ways, by seeing so much art. But if you don’t study other peoples’ pictures in the history of illustration and learn what can be done and what has been done, you kind of lack the grounding to take the next step.

These days I would say there are only a few digital painters that I really look at. Piotr Jabłoński, Jamie Jones, Craig Mullins, Theo Prins, Wesley Burt, Jeff Simpson, Ruan Jia. People who all work digitally way better than me, so I look up to their stuff.

When you think of your work, and the pieces that you really like, what are the things that you are looking at?

I can’t abide any piece of art if it’s not well drawn. If I’ve done something and it has a nice design but the drawing is bad, I’m not happy with it. After that, I’d say design; and they’re both important: if something doesn’t have a good design or it’s not well drawn, I basically feel like, “I’ll do better next time.” Honestly, there are maybe ten pieces in my whole career that I still see as okay drawing and okay design. The rest, you’re working toward something, and you didn’t quite get there, yet you’re learning.

Recently I’ve been learning a lot about color, and for a while my value designs would suffer, so that pieces were better in terms of color, but I still didn’t really like them—they didn’t have everything, not everything you want. There are artists who have a very specific idea of what they want to say. Some people seem to have found a combination of things that work so well for saying what they want to say that they can throw out most of the rest. They’re like, “I don’t need perspective,” and they really don’t, and the work is better without it. I’m a sucker for learning. There’s no fundamental I want to throw away. Each new thing that I try to learn, after I learn it, if any of my art doesn’t have it, I hate it.

I’ve been doing covers for about six years. A cover has to just slam you in the head, it has to grab the person to make them buy the book before they blink, before they even realize what they’re looking at. They have to already love it before they know what it is. Covers are kind of the loudest form of art you can do. This year I got to do some illustrated books and interiors, which don’t pay as much as covers, but you have chances to do things in images you might really want to do, there’s usually more freedom; there’s not as much pressure on each image to sell the book. When an image can have a striking design, good drawing, good color, and multiple layers of read, that is what I really value. For example, you look at a piece for a few seconds, you’re not sure what it is, you think it’s one thing, and then you realize it’s something else, and maybe there’s one more detail to appreciate in there.

Illustration is a very immediate art form, so when you can make it ever so slightly temporal it really adds dimension to the work that I like. But sometimes, it’s cool to just punch them in the face (laughs)! I can be cool with both!

Are there things that that you struggle with, things you feel you’re not really good at? Are there things that you avoid, or just haven’t figured out how to do yet?

I’m a big believer in progress. There’s always been lots of things I can’t do, and those instantly become to-do items. Up until recently colors had been a weakness of mine. When I got started, I couldn’t draw a horse worth anything. I was going to all kinds of lengths to take really tight photographic references that I could trace because I still loved well drawn work, but I didn’t know how to make it. I knew how to design and get people’s attention, but I didn’t really know how to draw.

There’s a sort of skill-slash-psychological evaluation that you can take online—a lot of businesses use this for evaluating employees when they onboard them—called the Clifton StrengthsFinder. It has about thirty-four different core human strengths you can have, and it ranks you, it determines your strengths, what you are terrible at, and what’s in the middle. They encourage you to use your strengths, avoid weaknesses, and work on mitigating middle stuff. But I have this thing in my top five, which is that I thrive by working on my weaknesses. For some people, they thrive by working on what they’re already really good at—they called that maximizing—but I’m apparently better suited to working on whatever I’m terrible at.

Early on, I couldn’t draw faces, and I spent about a year where every night, when I went to figure drawing, I would only draw the face. Then, I couldn’t draw legs, so same thing. I couldn’t do perspective, so same thing. I tried to put in a lot of training to make sure that I can do whatever I’m afraid of, and to not be afraid of it. Within the last two years I felt like I started to get a grip on how to do some things, finally, so right now I’m feeling pretty good. There’s not a lot that I’m scared of, and I’m relishing it. Just yesterday they released a cover I did for Tordotcom, a Kate Elliott book called Servant Mage. If you had asked me to paint a dragon three years ago, I’d probably want to shit my pants. I can’t take a photograph of that, so no, I can’t do it. But I did the whole cover with no real reference, just with what I have in my head. That’s where my obsession with expertise and training comes in. When I don’t have to finish a project, I train and work on my weaknesses, because nothing feels worse as an artist than being afraid to do what you really want to do.

Do you draw from life or from photo reference or both? Do you start with sketches on paper, do you work digitally—what is your workflow like from concept to realization?

I do all of that. I draw from life as much as I can. It’s been tough during COVID because of safety concerns, but we’ve got a small group of artists here in Atlanta that are vaccinated, and models that are vaccinated. I moved into a bigger house so we’re going to be starting some life drawing again here within the next couple of months, I’m really looking forward to that. I think life drawing is a really important pillar that many people abandon once they go more professional. It’s hard to make time for things that don’t pay, or that you are paying for instead of getting paid. Brian instilled in me a love of the process, and of getting better, as the most interesting thing about illustration, and then doing finished pieces as the byproduct of that.

The process is always changing, I’m constantly trying to remove scaffolding and make more with less. When I started my career, I would do a pencil thumbnail, and once I liked that I would take it to the computer and refine it, and then once it got approved or if they had changes I’d change it, and then once it was approved, I would hire models that looked like the characters I wanted to draw, rent costumes or armor or whatever, dress everybody up, put lights on, just like a film set, and take the stills I wanted. And then you work from that. At first, I was tied to the reference; over time, as I learned to draw, I was collaborating with the reference.

These days I’ve been training in a way that lets me draw without reference, so I don’t do thumbnails outside the computer anymore. Usually the ideas are there; as you practice it just gets more automatic, so a lot of times, by the time I sit down to draw, there are two or three scenes that are clear in my head. Not only clear in terms of what you want them to feel like, but how you will achieve that feeling. Then you sit down and see if you were right. When it doesn’t work, you learn a lot.

I did an illustrated edition of Network Effect by Martha Wells that was recently released, and I did the entire book with no reference, just to see if I could after a few years of training on drawing human anatomy. It was challenging, but it was pretty darn fun. When you start as an artist it’s all fear, so I’ve just been on a quest to try and get rid of that. If I’m afraid to not use reference, alright, I won’t use reference. I’m afraid to use color? I’ll use more color.

It’s hard to say what the process will be like on any given image—whatever the image demands is what you do sometimes. Whatever I need is what I do.

There are strong contrasts between dark and light in your overall portfolio. Talk a little bit about color choices, and the use of dark and light in your work.

You always think about the next thing, so I periodically look at the old stuff, but it’s not where my mind is. You never know what someone else thinks about your work. The strong contrast, yeah, that’s there, I think. As an artist you evolve by going too far one way, then too far the other, and then you find a way to combine those things. When I started out, I only knew how to make pieces successful if I had a clear silhouette, so I would have a clear silhouette, and that would give an impression of strong foreground against background, of figure against background. The Red Rising cover is just that dark red blob of him against the white, porcelain background. That’s one way to create strong contrast, but you can also do it through lighting, like the Servant Mage cover: anywhere that there’s light you get contrast, but it’s not a silhouette exactly, and parts of the dragon, they merge with the background.

You’re always trying to do more with less in art because you only have so much time. Your pieces are an ode to how much time you sat there. After I got injured from overworking, I thought, I just can’t keep doing this, so it was a nice kick in the ass to actually learn new stuff. If you want to get somewhere new, you can’t do what you did, what got you to where you are. It’s not going to get you to the next place. You have to keep changing what you do.

The Gifting Fire cover was during the early part of my exploration of using color more in finished images. As I introduced more color, I realized I need more color to achieve certain effects of depth that value can’t offer me, but I can’t just put it wherever, there still has to be a system. Over time, value and color became more like one idea. You only introduce a new element in art when the elements you’re using can’t do it, so if I’m doing the piece in value, if it’s mostly a value piece, and I get a little bit of separation where I need one element to be separate from another, but there are no more values left to use, well then, I’ll do it with color. Sometimes you start with color and then you only introduce value changes when you have to. The dragon piece is more like that—it started more in color, and then I was able to flatten a lot of the values because the red wings separate themselves from the background, even though they are the exact same value. You don’t need a value change there, and that frees up a value change that you can use to put lighting on top of the dragon, so that it has depth, and there’s also a distance between it and the background.

As you pack in new fundamentals, they merge intuitively over time. It does take pieces that maybe aren’t what you would normally make, or they don’t feel like you to other people. At first, that’s a big source of anxiety for a lot of artists, they want to always be recognized, they want to feel like, “this art is me.” Eventually you realize, this art’s not “me,” this is just, like, whatever I burped up after eating. “Me” is this group of skills that you’re cultivating, the work is the byproduct of that. One of the reasons we do the podcast is so I can interview artists who are better than me, and find out how they got this way, what their secrets are. The people that I think are really amazing have that mindset. They’re not concerned about posterity, they just like playing and learning and trying to make cool stuff. You can’t fret over every piece. You’re gonna make some good ones and you’re gonna make some bad ones.

Which pieces are you most proud of, or which do you feel were most successful?

Mostly, they’re not out yet. It’s always the newest work. If it’s on my website, I like it. I’m not a big believer in sharing anything that you don’t want to do more of. If you show that you paint dragons, people might hire you to paint dragons. You have to know that you’d do it again before you share it.

There’s some stuff that’s not on my site yet, but which has been released. On Timandra Whitecastle’s site you can see the cover for Queens of the Wyrd, and that came out really well. It has more color, but what I think of as my colors, colors that I like: warmer, darker palettes.

I really like some of the pictures I did for the Grim Oak edition of Wizard of the Pigeons, by Robin Hobb (writing as Megan Lindholm). I’m pretty happy with the covers for the Locked Tomb series, especially Harrow. If it’s on the front page of my site, I like it the most; if it’s on the “more work” page, some of it I like, but it’s not very good portfolio fodder.

One of the other impressions I had is that many of your pieces center or almost center people.

I do some images where the people aren’t in the middle, but to be honest, they don’t get chosen by clients. I always provide alternate types of sketches, but the cover industry has things that it likes, things that sell better. Sometimes you work with someone that lets you get away with different kinds of stuff, but again, it’s one of the reasons I like doing illustrated books. The cover for Network Effect was a robot in the middle but all the interiors are other kinds of images, like the dude at the very top of the composition just rock climbing.

In fact, when my career started, it was mostly those kinds of images. They weren’t book covers, they were interiors, or they were for stories. So, they could be all kinds of things.

Where are you hoping to take your art? Do you have goals for your career, are there types of projects that you haven’t done that you want to do?

Where my goals really lie are what I could do with my skills. I always want to be able to produce a better image today than I’ve ever produced before, I always want to be getting better and less afraid of making imagery. It sounds kind of bad, probably, if you don’t have that little bit of precursor, but wherever I can get paid the most for the least amount of time is always a good place, because you’re buying yourself more time to train and get better.

Covers are going to be hard to step away from because I keep upping my cover rate, and people keep paying. As long as that can happen, I can spend more time working on getting better. It should be a cycle that fuels itself. There’s going to be a limit. Publishing is (compared to something like video games or movies) not a terribly rich industry, but it’s got a lot of amazing people in it, and I love working in it. I love reading books. I’m not someone that’s really looking to move on from what I’m doing: I really like what I’m doing.

I am starting to work on a few projects as a concept artist and that’s pretty fun because, when you’re doing a cover, you have to worry about the design of the image at large. Each individual element is really important. But when you’re designing a character standing there, you have to worry about a different kind of design. How big does it look? How cool does it look? What if some part is bigger; if the helmet is smaller; if the suit is red—but what if it has a strike through it? You have to match that with all this functional stuff. When I do a cover, I’ll concept out some elements and then paint it, but it’s just pure sandbox play. When you’re doing character and creature designs and pieces like that, they’re going to be used in other ways later, so that’s pretty fun too. And it’s another thing that a few years ago I don’t think I would have been qualified for, but now, when I get those jobs, I think it sounds really fun and interesting. So maybe more stuff like that.

I don’t know, wherever lets me exercise my skills, that’s where I’ll go. But I expect to be doing covers as long as they’ll have me.

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.

Connected to Culture:
A Conversation with Sheree Renée Thomas

Arley Sorg

Sheree Renée Thomas was born in Memphis, TN. The eldest child of an air force vet, she grew up on various military bases. She eventually moved to New York, where she lived for twenty years before returning to live in Memphis. She worked at genre bookstore Forbidden Planet, as well as working full-time in publishing while freelancing on the side, doing everything from writing jacket copy to proofreading and copyediting to editing.

In 2000, Time Warner published Thomas’ groundbreaking anthology Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora under its Aspect imprint, followed by 2004’s Dark Matter: Reading the Bones. The first was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and both titles won World Fantasy Awards, making Thomas the first Black World Fantasy Award winner. She is associate editor of Illinois State University journal Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, and guest edited special issue “Speculating Futures: Black Imagination & the Arts,” and is again guest editing special issue “Heirloom: Preserving HBCU Futures.” She has also edited Apex and Strange Horizons magazines, and more recently, became the editor for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Thomas was long listed for the Otherwise Award in 2016, in 2017 she was given BLERD City’s inaugural LA Banks Award, and in 2020 she was a World Fantasy Award finalist in the special award, professional category. But her accolades extend far beyond genre. Her work has been supported by numerous fellowships and residencies from organizations such as the Tennessee Arts Commission, the Cave Canem Foundation, and Smith College. As a writer, her nonfiction contributions include The Washington Post and The New York Times. Her fiction and poetry are widely published and anthologized. She has three collections: Shotgun Lullabies and Sleeping Under the Tree of Life, both published by Aqueduct Press in 2011 and 2016, respectively; and Nine Bar Blues, published in 2020 by musician Jack White’s Third Man Records imprint, Third Man Books.

Besides these, Thomas gives historical tours in Memphis, organizes events such as the Black to the Future Revival on the River, and remains actively involved in various artistic communities. She is on the Curatorial Council for Carnegie Hall’s upcoming citywide Afrofuturism event, and her current projects include coediting the Africa Risen anthology with Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki and Zelda Knight for Tordotcom Publishing.

You are a special guest of honor at the upcoming Worldcon (DisCon III in Washington, DC), and you were scheduled to be guest of honor at WisCon, among other appearances. What were your first convention experiences like?

My first SFF con experiences were back when Warner Aspect was publishing the first Dark Matter anthology in 2000. I had never gone to a science fiction one before working with Betsy Mitchell. Before the anthology, I didn’t have the budget to be able to fly out to cons, spend a thousand dollars or more on the hotel, food, etc. while wearing blinders so I don’t weep and try to buy all the good books and cool things in the dealers’ rooms. And I wasn’t a con goer anyway, as it wasn’t a tradition in my family. We didn’t really go to many people’s book signings or what have you. I did more of that in college and can still remember Gwendolyn Brooks’ visit to Memphis. Just an exhilarating experience! But like so many other fans, we were part of our favorite writers’ invisible bottom line. I’m sure in some small way we helped fund at least one Stephen King, Toni Morrison, or Alice Walker family vacation, and maybe contributed to some other small joy, because we had so many different editions of their books.

Keep in mind that later, I was living in NYC, the mother of two children, so that meant any family traveling would be to my hometown, Memphis, (or Florida) so we could spend time with our loved ones. It was so expensive, so I wasn’t a regular at cons; however, I did attend WisCon as much as I could because it was the only time and place I’d get to see some of my friends. I had some good memories of Readercon, especially when my Clarion West class met up to help celebrate Octavia E. Butler and Gwyneth Jones. Linda D. Addison and Harlan Ellison made my NY Horror con experience memorable, and I think that may be where I first met Dallas Mayr (Jack Ketchum), who was wonderful. I had no intention of making the trip to Montreal in 2001, but Dark Matter had been nominated for a World Fantasy Award and Betsy encouraged me to go. My family drove up from NY, and we stayed with relatives in Repentigny. At the World Fantasy Awards ceremony, I remember our Uncle Henri was more astonished than anyone when it was announced that the anthology had won. He made the most beautiful sound!

You are doing a lot of work with Illinois State University journal Obsidian. Besides holding the associate editor position, you also edited “Radiant Youth: Stories of Light & Darkness,” a folio for issue 46.2 and guest edited the “Heirloom: Preserving HBCU Futures” special issue. What has been the best thing about working on these projects?

Obsidian is a wonderful literary journal and digital publishing platform led by poet and professor Duriel E. Harris. It holds a special place in my heart. I saw old volumes of the journal in Memphis when I was a teen, along with Callaloo, The Black Scholar, and others. I knew when I read the iconic writers in its pages that I wanted to be published by them someday. Obsidian was one of the first places that published my work, and more importantly, supported me as an emerging writer. The founder, the late Alvin Aubert, initially rejected my work multiple times, but he also took the time to send me personal notes and feedback at a time that was important to my development.

Being published in Obsidian felt like I’d reached a milestone that had personal and professional value that I am so grateful for. He helped me feel seen in a way that remains a part of my journey. Working on special folios and volumes like “Speculating Futures: The Black Imagination,”which won the 2016 Parnassus Award, “Radiant Youth” on childhood, and the upcoming HBCU issue is a joy, work that keeps me connected and grounded in Black art and cultures from around the world. Editor Harris has taken a journal with a forty-five-year history, founded during the Black Arts Movement, and continued it on to a new time that is so different, in terms of technological and cultural reach. Working with veteran and emerging artists—fiction writers, poets, playwrights, visual artists, scholars, and musicians is a challenge on its own, because you are building a community with people who are coming from so many different mindscapes and continuums. You must stay hydrated to make all those temporal shifts!

Are there important ways in which your approach to editing for the Obsidian issues differs from your approach to editing The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction?

Certainly. Obsidian does not receive the same volume of daily submissions as F&SF, which was founded in 1949 and has its own special legacy and cultural reach. But new writers are new writers, so that remains the same, and at the end of the day, the goals are quite similar. I want to support and publish work that excites, engages, and impacts our world. What that looks like in Obsidian and F&SF may be different. One is specifically and unapologetically dedicated to showcasing the brilliance of African writers and Black writers of the diaspora, while the other is speculative fiction and poetry from around the world. Interesting though, that there is more of an expectation of myriad genres and experimental and hybrid structures in the former than, traditionally, in the latter, but both audiences of readers open the pages with a sense and hope for new discoveries. Obsidian is also based at a state university that has its own Publishing Unit, while F&SF is privately owned and operated. I am fortunate that both have wonderfully capable and hardworking staff and volunteers.

Even before taking over as editor for F&SF, you had considerable experience as an editor. Are there one or two stories from your various projects as an editor that stand out in your mind as particularly important or special?

Oh! You’re asking me to choose favorite stories out of all the amazing writers I’ve been lucky to work with—that is extremely hard, especially because I am focused on the future, the new works coming on down the line. I will tell you of a few stories that I do think of more often and remember and smile. Nalo Hopkinson’s “Greedy Choke Puppy” and her “The Glass Bottle Trick” are favorites. Ama Patterson’s “Hussy Strutt” because I miss her voice so, and grieve that she isn’t here to grace us with more of her wonderful stories and imagination. “Venus Witch’s Ring” by Inda Lauryn and two awesome stories by Eden Royce from Apex Magazine’s Zodiac issue and the special Southeastern USA issue of Strange Horizons. Right now my mind is full of the new stories from Trouble the Waters: Tales of the Deep Blue forthcoming this fall from Third Man Books, Africa Risen, forthcoming next year from Tordotcom, and F&SF.

I could do a multi-tonal praise-song for every single story that the magazine has published this year, so yeah, I’ve been doing this work a while, but I still have that new editor joy. It’s reading the good, unforgettable stories that makes it worth the time and the brain cells!

Does being a fiction writer and a poet give you a different editorial perspective, does it change the way you do things as an editor?

It makes me more mindful perhaps of what it is I am asking writers to do. But I don’t know most of the writers I am reading, so I have no idea what they can or cannot do, in terms of revisions or what have you, and I don’t yet know some of the things that are vital to them and what are their pet peeves. Having a sense of a writer’s voice does help inform the editing, but with short fiction, writers often have a very wide range. As a poet, I do read for clear, strong sentences, clarity, vivid imagery, interesting prose. Not just characterization but the moods and ideas expressed. What story are you telling me beyond the plot, beyond the lines on the page? Dry bone writing might make me bounce harder on some tales than others; it all depends on how the writer chooses to begin and reveal their story. What makes me want to read on to the story’s end could be your voice, your rich characterization, wonderful setting, intriguing action, etc. It’s about getting your readers invested in the story you want to tell.

Many people don’t realize that F&SF is in fact also a horror market. What is great horror for you, and do you feel like what you like about horror is similar or different to other horror folks?

Anyone who knows me personally knows that I love horror. I am the kind of fan that watches obscure international films with subtitles right along with the blockbusters, and I cannot wait to see Nia DaCosta’s Candyman. With that said, I’ve been listening to and reading scary tales since I was a child. My grandparents and their friends, neighbors and such, would tell the scariest haint tales and true-life historical tales that would leave me awake and “peep-eyed” until I finally fell asleep. I loved it! And their storytelling, which is something I think Memphians are particularly gifted at, had a big influence on me falling in love with words and writing.

So yes, I do enjoy receiving horror submissions and have bought some stories that I hope readers will enjoy, too. I am not the biggest reader of body horror, but I do rock with it when I can. Psychological and supernatural are my faves, and I am always interested in folk horror and stories that explore what frightens people in other parts of the world. What makes a good horror story is one that fills you, the reader, with creeping dread. It’s a work that makes you uncomfortable in your skin and has you looking around, dreading what may come next.

F&SF is also a poetry market, so I hope writers and readers don’t sleep on that. I’m still getting a rhythm and a sense of what it is I am seeking from poets, because there is a kind of ambiguity in speculative poetry that is not always easy to express to the others, since the genre can include science-based poems, which shouldn’t be interpreted as traditional nature poems, as well as science fictional, fantasy, and horror works. The horror stories and poems I mostly pass on are overly graphic, while some of the other poetry’s speculative elements are too slight. But I am enjoying reading the poems and hope to publish more in the issues. As a poet I don’t want to see our poems treated as fillers for remnant space. The works speak and stand on their own. And it’s been lovely to see poets receive reviews, which seems to me to be an uncommon gift of focus and attention, well deserved.

Tell us about a few of your science fiction and fantasy picks for F&SF—what are some of the stories you’re excited for people to read?

Oh, so you are slick and goin’ to ask me again, lol! What jumps out for me now are Stephanie Kraner’s “A Father’s Hand,” “Dontay’s Bones” by Danian Darrell Jerry, and new stories by Rob Costello and Viktor Pseftakis, which are coming out soon, because these works had a visceral effect on me when I first read them. Rich Larson’s “The World, A Carcass” made me worry so much for the protagonist and Michael Swanwick’s new story kept me intrigued right on to the end. There are others that resonated in other ways, and that’s the fun part of editing, finding the works that really stand out for you and readers. I’m excited about the stories readers will discover soon, and it’s a special privilege to work with some excellent international writers and translators.

You have also been working on the Africa Risen anthology with Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki and Zelda Knight. What excites you most about this project?

The response to the African Risen call for submissions was exciting. We received works from throughout Africa and her diaspora, so the sheer sensory experience of entering worlds that aren’t traditionally Western-based or -centered was fun. We’re so looking forward to sharing this work with readers and seeing what other new stories some of these writers, especially the newer or less well-known voices, will create and publish in the time ahead.

You recently announced on Twitter that you are cocurating a citywide festival on Afrofuturism, organized by Carnegie Hall. How did you get involved in this project, and what is important for people to know about it?

I was invited and am honored to collaborate with such an energetic, talented, and dedicated team. This is a project that Adriaan Fuchs has been dreaming up for some time, and thank goodness, we are getting on the other side of the pandemic, allowing Carnegie Hall to welcome performers and patrons back, live and in person, in the fall. The festival kicks off next February 2022 and will continue through March. As a former New Yorker who lived in Harlem and UWS for over two decades, I’m thrilled that the city will come alive with Afrofuturism celebrations in the various boroughs. We’re working with community partners to create musical, literary, and artistic experiences throughout the city, and between the Carnegie Hall team, me, Reynaldo Anderson, King James Britt, Louis Chude-Sokei, and Ytasha Womack, the festival is going to be a lot of fun, covering good ground.

What else are you working on, what do you have coming up that you want readers to know about?

As usual, wonderful new things are happening that I can’t yet announce. Between Marvel’s Black Panther: Tales of Wakanda anthology that was edited by Jesse J. Holland, Carnegie Hall’s Afrofuturism festival, and Africa Risen, I’ve had to hold down the lid on a lot of good, hopeful news. But I can share that Imagine a Future, the wonderful new video game I consulted on with three futurists for Mercedes-Benz AG and PlayStation, will be available on July eighth! It’s on the Dreams platform and features a lovely character, Eshe, and her AI companion in a completely customizable future world that gamers can create and collaborate with together to explore. We started in 2019 at the Luma Foundation in beautiful Arles, France, launched an interactive experience in Frankfurt, Germany, and later the awesome team did their magic. This really made me appreciate all the hard work and the many hands that help create video games. Very cool.

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:
An In-House Holiday

Neil Clarke

In October, Clarkesworld will celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of its very first issue, but for those of us behind-the-scenes, July (the seventh, to be precise) is where it all began. I was set on this path after a late-night conversation about the state of online fiction with Sean Wallace at Readercon. If you know your history, the state of things at that time could be best summarized as “in disarray.” There was very little respect for the medium and even less stability as markets came and went with high frequency. The closest thing to a success story, SciFiction (edited by Ellen Datlow), had recently announced that it was ending.

It’s on that backdrop that a publisher (Sean) and a bookseller/academic technologist (me) thought they could make something work. Naturally, people thought we were fools and told us we’d be out of business in a year. Honestly, I think that only encouraged me. We shocked everyone (including ourselves) by breaking even in our first year. We passed our second year and restructured. One issue at a time. Every month. Every month. We breathed for a moment and realized ten years had passed. We were stunned. Now it’s fifteen and I almost didn’t notice. I’m serious. I just realized a couple of hours ago that it was almost July and what that meant. Damn. We weren’t really supposed to make it this far. We didn’t even think we would.

I’m clearly not prepared for the big anniversary editorial, but I was planning on doing that in October anyway. I would, however, like to acknowledge the moment by thanking everyone that has ever been a part of the staff here: Paul Abbamondi, Betsy Aoki, Kate Baker, Cynthia Bermudez, Halsted M. Bernard, Cherae Clark, Jessica Silbaugh-Cowdin, John Emery DeLong, Gardner Dozois, Deidre Dykes, Fabio Fernandes, Jason Heller, Justin Howe, Storm Humbert, Jeremy L. C. Jones, Kathy Karch, Kehkashan Khalid, Jamie Lackey, Ann LeBlanc, Terra LeMay, Nick Mamatas, Sean Markey, Nayad Monroe, Cheryl Morgan, Carolyn O’Connor, Emma Osborne, HR Owen, Aimee Picchi, Achintya Prakash, Daniel Robichaud, Emily Schneider, Ekaterina Sedia, Arley Sorg, Jason Strawsburg, Chris Urie, Marie Vibbert, Sean Wallace, Cheryl Warner, Leslianne Wilder, Rebecca Adams Wright, and a few that have chosen to be less visible, but nonetheless important.

While you’ve seen or heard the work by our artists, authors, translators, narrators, and perhaps some of these people over the years, most of what goes on at a magazine remains unseen by our readers, so this is the staffs’ month to celebrate. They’ve all played a part in keeping the wheels turning, one day at a time and against the odds, towards this big milestone. Thank you!

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.

Cover Art: Garden

Alejandro Burdisio

About the Artist

Alejandro Miguel Burdisio, artistically known as Burda, was born in the city of Córdoba. A self-taught artist, he’s been drawing, painting, and illustrating professionally since he was nineteen years old. With more than thirty years of experience as an illustrator, he works for local and foreign companies through the graphics studio that bares his name.

His longtime dedication to fantasy art currently allows him to participate in animation productions, short films, video games, and motion pictures as a concept artist for production companies around the world. In his travels, he gives training talks and dissertations at different universities in his country and throughout Latin America.