The Cold Calculations

Aimee Ogden

Once upon a time, a little girl had to die. It’s just math. Wrong place, wrong time. Bad luck; too bad, so sad.

We’ve all heard such stories, told them, shared them, collected them. Not in the way that we collect trinkets; more like how a sock collects holes. We’re submerged in such stories, we breathe them in like carbon dioxide—poisonous, in the long term, but a fact of life, nonetheless.

But stories have authors, from the gauziest fantasy to grim autobiography. And when once upon a time becomes so many, many times, surely someone must think to ask: had to die? On whose authority?

It’s simple physics, of course. Natural law.

Unless, of course, someone’s been fudging the numbers.

Álvarez is standing beside the airlock as it cycles, pretending not to hear the girl cry.

If he acts like he can’t see her, can’t hear her, then at least he’s leaving her some dignity. Right?

As if there’s any dignity to be had in this godforsaken mess. As if it’s dignified to jump out of an airlock in nothing but a jumpsuit and your stockinged feet. As if anyone could have a reason to hold her head up high after she’s been told her dumbass little stowaway life is worth less than the razor-thin fuel margin that will safely decelerate this dropship when it reaches its destination.

The math is nauseatingly simple. There’s no other ship with a possible intercept course. There’s no other drop ship that can get the dying colonists at August Minor the nanotherapy antivirals they need. There’s no give in the physics of it all—only in the squishy human parts of the equation.

There’s still something wrong, here. Or, if not wrong, then at least not right. Álvarez just can’t put his finger on what, yet.

The airlock clanks; it’s fully dilated on this side, now. The kid blows her nose on her sleeve. Sharra. Her name is Sharra. She deserves the dignity of a name, at least. “Thank you,” she says. Her voice doesn’t break. God, how does her voice not break? “For trying.”

She’s walking to her death to save him, a man twice her age, and a bunch of colonists she’ll never meet, and she’s thanking him? This isn’t the big wrongness, the one that’s underlined every moment since he pulled her out of the nanotherapy storage capsule, but it’s a damned big one anyway. When she lets go of the loop and floats up toward the airlock, he grabs her by the sleeve—too hard—so that she bounces lightly against the inside hull of the drop ship. “No,” he says, into her too-close face. “No, fuck this. We’ll figure something out. We will.”

That’s when she starts crying for real: not when she thinks she’s about to die, but when God sends something down the mountain and there’s still a chance it might be a ram. When the tears get too big, they float up from her face and pelt him, like rain in reverse. He grabs her and crushes her against him, and she cries like he thinks babies must cry before they get taught that pain is something to hide.

“It’s not right,” he says, into the top of her head. He never had kids—a drop ship pilot’s life is not exactly conducive to parenthood—but for a moment, this one, little dumbass stowaway that she is, is his kid, is every kid. “We never should have had to make the—”

“—choice.” Mollie Maggia’s sisters talk in whispers. In the back room of the little tenement apartment, Mollie is sleeping; Mollie is dying. “Money or health. Money or your life. The bastards. What else were we supposed to do?”

Their mother is at the stove, stirring the sauce for supper. Every now and then, she puts a hand in her pocket and fingers the pitted black tooth that lies at the bottom, the latest one collected from Mollie’s mouth. When she closes her eyes, she remembers the first time Mollie came home from the watch factory with a gleaming greenish smile. How they’d all exclaimed, how they’d laughed. My pretty girl, she’d said. So proud. Such a good living, such a good girl. My beauty.

She would take this pain away from her daughter and make it her own, if she could. She digs harder with her wooden spoon, scraping the bottom of the pot, and doesn’t wipe away the sweat that rolls into her eyes. This is her daughter—and even if she wasn’t, even if she were someone else’s, good God, she’s only twenty-four, still a child. The spoon clatters to the floor and Mrs. Maggia leans against the kitchen wall. Who are they, the factory owners and foremen and faceless scientists in their white coats, to put this on her? Some man at a desk, totting up columns in his ledger: profit on this side, little girls’ lives on the other. Who gave them the right?

No one gave them the right. It’s something that they took. And it’s not something one woman can snatch back all on her own, not even when the little girl who had to die upon that time was her very own.

Armed only with the cheap-ass screwdrivers from the ship’s repair kit, Álvarez and the kid do their best to tear the drop ship apart. The ship wasn’t outfitted with the proper tools to be strip-mined from the inside out; hindsight is, as ever, a bitch. Together they chuck anything they can get out the airlock: cleaning supplies, every last scrap of food, Álvarez’s spare uniform and all of his bedding that can be torn loose from the wall. They even manage to rip up one of the metal panels lining the ship’s interior, one that hadn’t been screwed in squarely. The rest are flush and refuse to budge. The lone panel goes out the airlock anyway, one more piece of space junk. Hopefully it doesn’t become another drop ship’s urgent problem someday—but space is big, and the inside of the drop ship is small.

They do the math, with each piece of mass that goes flying off on a new career as interstellar jetsam. They crunch the numbers—and the numbers crunch back. It’s not enough. Not enough to add up to a single scrawny kid with her whole damn life ahead of her.

If he could flush the whole water system and run dry all the way into August Minor, that would be more than enough. But he can’t find a manual release, not on the hardware itself and not in the emergency handbook in his handheld, and there’s an emergency rationing shutoff if he tries to draw too much at once. Water water everywhere, and not a drop to sink.

“I’ll do it,” Sharra says, as he curses out the plumbing. Her tone is leaden; too bad he can’t throw that out the airlock. “It’s my fault anyway. I wanted to see my mom and dad. They’ll die along with everyone else, if these supplies don’t get there in time. It’s fine.”

“It’s not fine!” He punches the water filtration unit, which does no harm other than sending him rebounding across the ship. “Just let me think. There’s something I’m missing, I know it.” There must be a way out. No one had to—

“—die.” Russayev mops his brow with a handkerchief as he and Yuri trudge together up the cement-block stairwell. They keep moving, their voices buried beneath the echo of their footfalls. It’s not safe to stop; every ear is always listening. It’s not safe to return to Russayev’s apartment; if the Party hasn’t bugged it yet, that’s due only to incompetence, not will.

“No one had to die.” Yuri Gagarin is only thirty-four, and he moves heavily, like an old man. Guilt lays extra weight across his shoulders. When a man lays down his life for yours, that’s a weight you’ll carry the rest of your days. Vladimir Komarov knew what he was doing, who he was saving, when he stepped aboard the Soyuz-1. “But he did anyway. We all knew the flight was doomed. They knew it too.”

His lips barely move around the word they. Best not to say aloud who they are, to name a thing gives it power, and Yuri holds too little power already to surrender more. He keeps folders full of well-creased papers inscribed with pleas for his help: dear Comrade Gagarin, Esteemed Hero of the USSR; can he not pull the strings to secure an officer’s commission for this excellent young man, can he not see that this good daughter of the Fatherland be admitted to university despite her father’s Jewish heritage? Can he not snap his fingers and make medicine, food, housing rain down upon the comrades who esteem him so?

He cannot. He cannot, could not even when he had friends in the Politburo, and he has only enemies there now. Komarov died to save a hero of the Soviet Union who has never really existed.

He fumbles for a cigarette, but his pocket is empty. Russayev produces a pair, and they smoke in silence, finally still, as the air grays around them.

“I should have done something else to keep him grounded,” Yuri says, the words floating out of him on his smoky breath. Dangerous words, and the smoke does nothing to obscure the truth of them.

Russayev shakes his head, holding the smoke in. “They had already made up their minds.” The nebulous they again, an all-hearing hobgoblin invoked if his name is spoken thrice. “No evidence could have changed that. There was nothing to be done.” He claps Yuri’s shoulder firmly, briefly. Yuri has forgotten his jacket and Russayev’s hand is cold through his shirt. “I should go.”

He should. Yuri stays, sitting alone on the stairs, smoking until only ash remains. Ash, and doubt. Like guilt, doubt is a cruel master to bear for the rest of one’s life. But, Yuri knows, even then, he has not so much life left ahead of him that he cannot bear it, for a little while. His knuckles tap restlessly against the battered aluminum tread on the step.

Guilt is often all that’s left when what we should be feeling—anger—is an inconvenience to the people with blood on their hands and fingers on the scale.

The data refuse to make sense. Fucking rude, if you ask Álvarez.

He queries and re-queries his interface station, poring over the numbers, until his anxiously firing neurons finally strike a connection. The naughty data resolves into one vicious big picture. He knows what it is he’s been missing. Oh god, does he know what it is.

His jolt of hysterical laughter brings the kid’s head up. “What?” she demands. She bobs over his shoulder, almost hitting her head on the bulkhead, to peer at the interface. As if she can make heads or tails of the techno-jumble on the screen. “What is it?”

“The launch,” he says. “Christ. The launch.” He highlights one particular figure in red. “It’s not just the deceleration. There was extra mass on board when we were accelerating, too.” Her blank, frightened face wakes an obscure anger in him. He swipes one arm hard, wiping away the calculation display. “Even if I did push you out the airlock—fuck, I’m not going to do that, I said ‘even if I did’—there’s still not enough fuel left for me all on my own.” The margin was razor-thin; the kind of margin you could cut yourself open on. He rides another wave of hysterical laughter into dissociation, into the euphoria of perfect understanding. “We’ve been fucked since the get-go.”

She stares at him. Her eyes are huge and dark in the big gray moon of her stupid sixteen-year-old face. “I killed you,” she says. “I killed you. I killed you I killed you I—”

She’s beating her own head and chest and shoulders with her fists, and Christ, Álvarez has never done zero-g wrestling before, let alone with somebody half his size whose dumbass head he would just as soon not split on the bulkhead, because if they’re both going to die out here, and they are, why the fuck should they have to do it alone?

When she’s calmer (which is certainly not to say calm), he produces a small plastic pouch from inside his flight suit. Her lips curls at the sight of it. “That’s extra mass.” It sounds like a curse word, the way she says it.

“I know. I was planning to piss it out the airlock pretty soon here.” He opens the outside lid and squeezes some of the liquid inside into his mouth, then offers it to her. She takes a tiny sip and gags, sending tiny spheres of whiskey into orbit around Álvarez. She shoves the flask back at him; he takes it with a shrug. Plastic-flavored liquor is better than none. It’s not really enough to take the edge off. It was meant to be a victory toast upon a successful touchdown, not an opportunity for self-medication. But it seems a damn shame to waste it.

“I hate physics,” she says as he takes another pull.

He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. Gone already. The caramel flavor lingers on the back of his tongue. “No, you don’t.”

“I’m allowed to hate the thing that’s killing me.”

“It’s not physics that’s killing us.” He throws the empty pouch at the inside of the airlock door. It bounces off and spins lazily across the inside of the drop ship. “It’s some accountant in Winnipeg who fucked us over to save the company some cash.” Whose cold calculation was it? How much did it save? Twenty, thirty thousand bucks. A single externality: one small human life. Cheap as hell, all things considered. “Money’s all that counts. Who cares what happens to the likes of—”

“—us?” Ha Wan shouts into the railroad foreman’s face, so that his spittle flecks the man’s brown beard. Perhaps he would take a swing at the foreman, too; but with what? One of his arms terminates just below the elbow, the other at the narrow point of a wrist. Sweat crowns his forehead, and the sour stench of sickness clings to him, to the stained bandages on the stumps of his arms. There is a list, on the foreman’s table, of employees to be paid for their time. Ha Wan’s name is not on it. “My family depends on me!”

The foreman doesn’t speak Cantonese, and the fever has curtained off whatever part of Ha Wan the English words occupy. Would it matter, if the foreman understood him? What would that change? His countrymen pull him away from the table, before the foreman’s bully boys can intervene. They try to lead him back to his cot, but he pulls away before they can stuff him back inside the hot, half-dark tent. They do not follow as he stumbles out into the scrubby highlands. Each of them is exhausted, too, spirits hammered flat with every blow of their iron mallets, every blast of dynamite. And how far can he go, they ask themselves, alone, on foot?

Not far. Dizziness catches him first, then exhaustion, and he crashes knees-first into the side of a boxcar laden with lumber for the new line. Bright new lines of pain crawl up through the dull, enveloping ache, and the morphine haze; he has scraped his back on the rough metal. Two drops of blood strike the sandy soil. In the dust-scratched sunlight, they already look faded and brown. Ha Wan is only surprised that he has blood left to lose.

Alone, what difference can one human being make? More than you think. Change comes incrementally. This is a symphony—not a solo.

Álvarez is supposed to be sleeping. Instead, he and the girl drift in silence, separately. Less than sixteen hours out from August Minor now.

He thinks the kid’s asleep, her breathing uninterrupted by hitches and starts. A polyp of snot hangs by a thread from her upper lip, and her face looks sunken, dehydrated.

Grief is exhausting. But Álvarez isn’t tired. There’s an artery beating a staccato fringecore rhythm in his neck and an acid burn at the back of his throat. Periodically, he reminds himself that he absolutely cannot throw up right now.

He and the kid have fallen into opposing patterns, her spinning in place roughly clockwise, him counterclockwise. They’ve only known each other a little while, but there’s a strange sense of belonging here, this person inextricably tied to him over the course of hours in a way that feels like DNA, or more than that, like she’s sprung fully formed from the bulkhead of his own ship. A fractal spiderweb of veins spreads at her temples, maps to places that have never existed and never will.

For another few rotations, Álvarez studies these subtle geometries, seeking the kind of organic understanding that doesn’t come from math anyway. Then he uses one hand to quietly push himself toward the computer. One more set of numbers to crunch, between her and oblivion.

The math doesn’t cooperate willingly. But Álvarez doesn’t ask nicely. He smashes the physics wide open like his own personal piñata, bashing it with calculations on fuel reserves and trajectories and human gravitational tolerance. There should have been fail-safes and backups, extra reserves. There should have been possibilities—possibilities other than the company literally nickel-and-diming two people to their deaths. There should have been a world where this story has a happy ending.

No, fuck that: there should be a world where this story has an ending at all. Because as Álvarez sees it, staring down the sawed-off barrel of the ugly math, staring down the long line of failures and accidents and miscalculations just like this one, it’s never actually gotten around to ending before. It’s the same goddamn story, told over and over in a Moebius loop of tragedy. Once upon a time, the people in charge told some peons they had to die, so they did. Rinse and repeat.

He pauses, eyes unfocused, staring into his screen until the numbers blur and run. How much pain has he already poured into this job? The backaches, the solitude, the exoskeleton he has to cram himself into whenever he gets to spend a hot minute on the ground somewhere. Pain is the only truly renewable resource, and it’s the only asset the corporation has never stinted with.

He swipes away his calculation and keys in a simple message. Then he pushes off and glides silently across the capsule, to the airlock control. His hands aren’t shaking. He thought he’d be more nervous, but his neurological system can’t work up to a proper panic: dulled by the booze or short-circuited by the recent excess of adrenaline.

The cover flips up. He flexes his hands; he’ll have to move fast, before the kid realizes what’s happening. He keys in the control sequence.

The first door cycles open. He moves.

A wiry hand latches onto the back of his suit. “No!” the girl screams, as they flip end over end away from the airlock, a graceless ballet. “No! No! Don’t!”

“Let go! Shit—” He struggles to free himself, but her grip is strong, and she clings to his back like a strangling vine. “I wasn’t going to push you!”

“I know what you were going to do!” Her shriek in his ear makes him wince and they rebound together off the far bulkhead. “You can’t!”

“I can.” He doesn’t want to hurt her, is the problem. It’s like wrestling a lizard, one of those tiny little wall-climbers that were always all over the house where he grew up in Iowa, fast and sneaky but so small and fragile. He tries to pull her up and over his head. “Let go!”

She’s less concerned about hurting him. Her fingers snag tight in his jumpsuit, and she draws blood through the cheap fabric. “Dammit!” he hisses, but the jolt of pain is enough for him to tear her loose. He pushes her away and the momentum sends him flying toward the airlock, her away from it.

She scrambles to reorient herself—too slow. He keys the code on the other side and the airlock seals itself shut between them. “It’s okay!” he shouts, through the metal door. She bangs on the other side, swearing viciously. “The ground crew at August Minor will talk you through deceleration. You don’t have to land a ship; they’ll be able to send a local shuttle up for you.”

“This isn’t fair!” she screams, which is a stupid-ass thing to say, but she’s young, so he lets it go. “Stop it! Stop it! You can’t do this!”

“Again, I think you’ll find I can.” He grins crookedly, then remembers she can’t see him. “I’ve made my decision. It’s okay. In fact, I’ve never been more sure in—”

“—my life!” Humasha’s fingernails have splintered against the brown-stained stone of the garment factory wall. It’s already ninety degrees in Savar Upazila, and the dust and humidity make her feel as if she’s breathing mud. “Child, there are still people alive under there, I swear it. Help me dig!”

She doesn’t know the young woman standing beside her; she doesn’t work on Humasha’s line. A cut in her forehead has masked half her face in dust-caked blood; a careless hand has painted bruising all around the wound too. “Auntie, no!” Either she’s younger than Humasha guessed, or fear throws her voice high and small. “Come away from there. It’s not stable!”

Humasha does not come away. The building wasn’t stable when they walked in to work that morning, either, or any other day that week. Some accountant, perhaps on the other side of the world, had decided that a sturdier factory wasn’t worth cutting into the profit margin on cheap T-shirts. “Didn’t you hear me, girl?” One lump of rubble comes away, under her weight; there are so many, many more that remain, and the voices of the trapped are small and far and frightened. Lost in a man-made underworld. Somewhere, above ground or below, someone is weeping. “They are still alive down there.”

The girl shuffles back. Blood drips from the point of her chin onto her pink shari: one spot, two, three. A constellation in miniature. “And I don’t want to join them, auntie!”

Humasha is not young, but age has not made her weak. Her ankles and knees pop as she forces herself upright and grabs the girl by the wrist. “You think you’re better than them?” she snaps. “You are spared? Special?” She shakes the girl by the arm. “It’s luck that we’re up here and they aren’t. That’s all. You hear? It could always be you, next time. You know that? You want someone else to dig—when it’s you at the bottom of the heap?”

The girl yanks her arm, twisting it out of Humasha’s grasp. They both stumble; the girl catches herself first and sets her feet. She does not look at Humasha’s face, but she kneels and forces her fingers into the crack between two broken fragments of what used to be a wall. “There shouldn’t be a next time,” she mutters and winces as she leans back against the rock’s recalcitrant mass.

“Shouldn’t,” says Humasha, leaving ten tracks of her own blood on the opposite side of the stone. She pushes, the girl pulls, the rock tumbles free. “Fill your belly with shouldn’t and see how long ’til you’re hungry again.”

There is another stone, beneath the first, and they set their strength against that too. There is always another stone.

Have you been following along closely? We’re coming to the hands-on portion of the exercise.

Don’t feel guilty. Find your anger.

You’re going to need it.

The girl pounds on the closed airlock; she smashes the keypad, but she doesn’t know the magical password to reveal the secret passage.

The astronaut reaches for the internal keypad. It’s cold in the airlock, and his fingers shake; he mistypes the code the first time. He puts his hands in his armpits to snatch a last moment’s warmth. Perhaps he should have recorded a message, for his sister and her family. Too late now. Too late. But this is the only thing left for him. This is the right thing, because all the other options that remain are too ugly to choose.

The girl hasn’t stopped screaming. She’s so loud they must be able to hear her on August Minor, he thinks, and his lips fail to fit themselves into a smile. Loud enough to wake the dead.

“It’s not fair!” she howls again. “Someone do something!”

But there isn’t anyone left who could, or would.

Is there?

Somewhere, sometime, a man sits behind his desk, killing a girl with the stroke of his pen. Not because he hates her; he feels nothing for her at all. To him she is a simple tool, an externality. An inconvenient hunk of mass. It’s never his fault that she dies, of course, even as he damns her over and over again. He’s just doing his job. We must, the men at desks insist, chalk her death up to the cold uncaring universe in which we live.

That’s the point, of course. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Physics are impersonal, the fabric of reality, the canvas onto which we paint our lives. Physics existed before us. Math was created by human beings; and that is why math knows how to be cruel.

Other things than cruelty can still be taught, given time. Given opportunity.

If one man can kill a girl with the stroke of a pen, what can the rest of us do?

It’s easy to decry his callousness, to raise our voices and shout over him. But this girl is not Tinkerbell, and a show of hands and a little noise will not be enough to bring her back. It’s not enough, it never was, just to point at the evil and name it for what it is (though that is the starting place).

Feel your feet on the floor, or the line where your back meets your chair. You’re stronger than you think. There are some desks that need to be flipped, and they need you to flip them.

Some of them are heavy, but don’t worry: you won’t be expected to set your shoulder to them alone. Some of those desks will have men behind them, clutching pens and indignation. Some people will be very upset at the very notion of a desk that’s the wrong side up.

But there’s a girl out there whose life is hanging in the balance. She’s going to need you to get out in front and push.

Yes, you.

All of you.

So push already.

It’s not fair!

Mollie Maggia’s mother pounds her fists against the kitchen wall: one, then the other. Then both. Again. It’s not fair, it’s not fair, her little girl, her angel, rotting alive in her own bed. She leans into the wall with all her weight, driving her grief into the cheap plaster, and when her other daughters run into the kitchen to see what’s wrong, she slaps them away and slams her whole body against the wall so that the little apartment trembles in its foundations. “Not one more girl,” she sobs, and she shouldn’t be crying, not in front of her daughters, grown women themselves, but there is a blackened tooth in her pocket, and it weighs a thousand pounds, and she pushes her whole being into the door under that terrible weight. “Not someone else’s baby.”

Someone do something!

Yuri’s knuckles twist harder into the aluminum strip on the stair. He grinds his fist down, though the rough pattern scrapes off a layer of skin and the blood squeezes between his clenched fingers. He could have stepped in. It could have been him instead. It should never have to be anyone else, not again. He pushes his hand into the stair until the bones in his wrists grind together.

It’s not fair!

There can be, under the weight of injustice, a certain terrible strength, and it weaves itself into Ha Wan’s muscle and bone. His legs flex and the air drives out of his body as he puts his back against the boxcar. His foot almost slips on the gravel, but he centers his weight and pushes again. There is a soft wail, like the call of a far-off locomotive, and it is coming from his throat. One more great thrust, the scrapes in his back tearing anew, and the front wheel of the boxcar squeals its dismay. It does not tip over, though he would like it to, for the railroad runs on suffering as much as coal. But he pushes anyway.

Someone do something!

Humasha and the girl aren’t alone. The emergency responders, the neighborhood, they dig together. They keep digging. There are people in the rubble. There are lives that might yet be saved, rock by rock, pebble by pebble, every last one worth the price in blood and toil to bring it into the light of the sun. “Push!” a medic yells, and six men and women set their shoulders against a fallen-in wall. They strain, someone curses, another groans. The wall shifts, and the wall moves. Daylight crawls over the cracked table that had been hidden underneath. A hand emerges, stretching, trembling. More hands reach down to meet it.

You, too. It might not feel like much, your little body fighting the terrible gravity of that cold arithmetic.

But it is so much. It’s everything. It’s all there is.

So push!

“It’s not—”

The entire drop ship decelerates as if slapped by the careless hand of God. Álvarez is thrown against the side of the airlock under the unexpected arrival of G-forces; the girl’s cry is cut off as she too is flung aside.

Shit. Shit. What the shit was that? He mashes in the code to open up the internal airlock again, even though it’s going to be a hundred times harder to get past the kid this time, he has to make sure she’s not concussed or hemorrhaging or otherwise a waste of a goddamn sacrifice.

She’s got a bloody nose, which has made a nightmarish three-dimensional abstract painting of the drop ship’s interior, but seems otherwise mostly unharmed. “What was that?” she asks, voice thick with blood and confusion. “Did we hit something?”

“Couldn’t have. We wouldn’t be here to have this conversation at all.” He nudges her aside to check his screens. Nothing out of the ordinary, all systems green. Except—

If a man at a desk can kill a girl with a little bit of ink, then we can save her in exactly the same way. There are more of us than there are of him. Break his pen, throw it out the window, and send the desk after it.

“This can’t be right.” He checks the readout again, double-checks it; does a quick-and-dirty visual verification against the star field visible through the porthole over his head. It can’t be right. And yet, it is.

“What’s wrong?”

Too much for him to sum up, too much to explain away, except in one little word: “Nothing.” He bobs aside and shows her the screen that projects their trajectory toward August Minor. Everything is, impossibly, green. “We’ll make planetfall just ahead of schedule. Six hundred twelve, local planetary time.”

She doesn’t blink, as if closing her eyes on the display will wipe it from existence. “That’s impossible.”

“Yup.”

“How could that have happened?”

“Couldn’t have.”

She clings to the pilot’s seat, adrift, still fixed on the readout. The glow of the screen paints her over with a pale green glow, and when she smiles slowly, her teeth shine in the dark drop ship. “Now what?”

Álvarez doesn’t have an easy answer for her. When a miracle hands your life back to you, what do you do with that? How can you ever pay it back?

“I guess . . . I guess now I’ll go home. Back to Earth, I mean.” Home can mean a lot of different things to a drop ship pilot. The ship hums gently around them, anthropomorphically innocent, as if it didn’t nearly become their mutual coffin.

“Home.” She’s staring at the screens, as if not blinking for a solid minute will make the readouts comprehensible to her. For her, home is the people waiting on August Minor. “Why Earth?”

“Well, that’s where Company HQ is. Thought I’d pay them a visit.” He keys in the deceleration sequence and smiles, his lips pulling tight over his dry teeth. Miracles are hungry things. He’ll feed this one by living long enough to be a pain in the company’s ass. “There’s a few desks there that I’d like to flip.”

Pain is a renewable resource.

Time to see how well it burns.

About the Author

Aimee Ogden is a former science teacher and software tester; now she writes stories about sad astronauts and angry princesses. Her novellas Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters and Local Star debuted in 2021 from Tor.com and Interstellar Flight Press respectively, and her short fiction has also appeared in Analog, Escape Pod, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. With Bennett North, she edits Translunar Travelers Lounge, a magazine of fun and optimistic speculative fiction.

Beneath the Earth Where the Nymphs Sleep

Meghan Feldman

Rana supposed she should feel flattered that the Council of Ages chose her to outlive all the gene techs who called the Enclave home. Some brainless techs would feel grateful. Especially if they had half-hacked implants and a price on their head like she did. But Rana had no intention of being trapped again, so she dismissed the Council’s summons with a twitch of her fingers. She couldn’t focus with the notification floating across the comm-implants in her eyes. With her mind stretched across the thousands of minuscule nano-bees that flitted across the landscape, any distraction would ruin her delicate equilibrium.

The bots moved from field to field in clouds of silver, ebbing and flowing beyond the Enclave’s walls. Rana nudged them along when they lingered; they wouldn’t be truly autonomous anytime soon. Normally her headaches didn’t start until she had been syncing with the swarm for hours, but her head was already aching after only one. And the Council’s incessant messages only made it worse. Rana commanded the bots to return. As they streamed back into their silvery hives along the outskirts of the Enclave, she pulled herself out of the tenuous trance that allowed her to sync with the swarm. She unstuck the control interface’s microneedles from her temples, and her self came flooding back all at once. A flash of pain burst behind her eyes. Just a few more days. Then the storms would flood the valley, and all the boroughs would be locked down for months. That’s when she’d leave. No one would be able to track her in those conditions, not even EdiTech with their drones that roamed the interborough plains. And by the time the storms passed, Rana would be long gone.

As the sun neared the horizon, it dipped the clouds in gold and sent bright ripples gilding the tops of the photobioreactors strewn across the landscape. They glowed green and red and brown, each filled with one of the algae strains designed specifically for biofuel, wastewater filtration, or to be bound into polymers. The Enclave was almost beautiful, but in the right light, so was EdiTech.

Invisible in the shadows, Rana slipped through the maze of hills that made up the Enclave. Looming overhead, bridges spiderwebbed between buildings and traced dark silhouettes against the deepening sky. She remembered the night she and Josalin had tried to escape EdiTech’s debts. They had crept through the compound, Josie clutching the key card she had stolen off of a distracted guard. They had just made it out of the compound when—pain spiked in the back of Rana’s head, and she forced away the memory with gritted teeth.

Now was not the time to wallow. She was going to leave the Enclave and never think about EdiTech again. She’d just reject the Council’s summons and give Elzibek her thanks. The Councilwoman had treated her injuries and bypassed the EdiTech lockouts and tracking controls in her implants, letting her heal in peace. She had given Rana her functionality back. Elzibek deserved a goodbye, at the very least.

Darkness cloaked the rise of the crypt hall where the husks of fallen satellite habitats twisted into the Council’s mausoleum. At the crest of the hill, a faint glow spilled out from the garden behind the hall. Rana followed its beckoning flicker.

Instar Elzibek crouched in the garden, her face hidden by her long gray hair that spilled over her shoulder. If the rumors were true, Elzibek’s hair had been white for so long that no one nor their grandparents remembered its original color. Another person reclined on the ground beside her, and a small brazier next to them sent glowing motes up to meet the heavens.

“Rana?” Elzibek turned as she approached. Hundreds of years had left their mark across her face. “I didn’t think you’d show up.”

“I didn’t think so either.” Rana hoped her voice sounded polite; conversation didn’t come easy after years of EdiTech’s isolation. A small part of her didn’t care.

Elzibek nodded and patted the ground next to her. “Sit.” She turned back to the reclining figure. His breath came in ragged gasps, thin like wisps of smoke, and dirt stained his Council robes. As Rana crept around him to sit on the opposite side of the fire, she studied his face. Surely she had seen him before. The Enclave was one of the smallest boroughs, and she was the only stranger in it.

“Is he alright?” He had the not-quite-alive look of someone decades deep into an EdiTech indenture.

“He needs some work, doesn’t he?” Elzibek muttered. With gentle fingers, she pushed up his sleeve. Beneath his robe, chitinous skin cracked under the slightest touch. “He just wanted one last look.” The man’s eyes stared up at the stars with all the luster of a fogged mirror.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“Instar Alizar’s gene mods are failing.” Rana looked closer at him; Alizar hadn’t looked that bad a week ago. Elzibek passed a mortar and pestle over the fire to Rana. Chunks of red ochre nestled in the bottom. “Make yourself useful.”

“Is he going to die?” Rana asked as she crushed the rocks into dust, grateful that Elzibek hadn’t asked why she was ignoring the Council’s messages.

“We’ll put Alizar back in chthonostasis and let the mod repair what it can, but it might not be enough. He may never reemerge. But even so, he won’t be dead.” Elzibek reached into a jar in front of her and scooped out a thick red paste with her fingers. The heavy smell of dirt and metal clogged Rana’s nose as Elzibek painted red streaks onto Alizar’s damaged skin.

“I thought the cicadidae mod kept you from dying.” That’s what all the gene techs had told Rana when her nomination went public, their eyes glittering with jealousy.

“Even perfect mods break down eventually. All Instars on the Council are born of the same batch of mods. When someone’s mods start failing, it’s a sign for all of us. We need more Instars. We need fresh blood.” Elzibek applied the paste around Alizar’s neck and temples, and it glistened in the firelight.

Rana shivered. Though she had only ever seen Elzibek and Alizar, she had been in the Enclave long enough to know that the Council of Ages had more than two Instars, but it had been decades since anyone had seen the others. She imagined herself in the crypts where the others slept, down in the gritty darkness with dirt pressing down on her nose and mouth and being unable to move or scream or take a breath. It’d be no different from EdiTech and everything she had sacrificed so much to escape from.

But EdiTech was behind her, and the Enclave had nothing to offer her. No one here could change what she’d done in order to escape; no one could absolve her of that. She gripped the pestle in her fist and avoided Elzibek’s gaze across the fire. Elzibek wouldn’t understand. And Rana didn’t want her to.

A man trudged up the hill. As he approached the fire, his features sharpened; Kevrik worked in the gene labs and often bothered Rana for help analyzing the mods they got from EdiTech for their algae. He knelt next to Elzibek.

“The techs have called a summit about the latest mods from EdiTech. None of the other boroughs got the mods we did, even though we all use the same algae strains. They’d like to hear from you before they make their decision.”

“Now?” Elzibek asked. “Surely this can wait until tomorrow?”

Kevrik shook his head. “Noon tomorrow’s the payment deadline for the mods. We’re already barely keeping up with the Enclave’s resource demand as it is. If we forgo these mods and our strains run into issues, then we’ll have to wait months for EdiTech to release a new batch of mods. It could take years for us to recover.”

“That’s assuming EdiTech’s mods are going to help the strains at all,” Rana muttered under her breath.

“We’ve never gotten a mod this different before.” Kevrik said, ignoring her.

“And there’s nothing our techs can do to reverse engineer it, to figure out what it does?” Elzibek asked.

“No. Our hardware isn’t good enough. We’ve been at it for weeks.” Kevrik’s eyes slid to Rana. “I don’t suppose you—”

“No.” She took a steadying breath. “No, I’ve already told you before. I can’t do anything without EdiTech’s gene interface.” And even if the Enclave did have a sophisticated gene interface like EdiTech’s, Rana wouldn’t have anything more to do with engineering gene mods. At EdiTech, she had spent her waking hours plugged into their massive supercomputer network, and it had used her mind and everyone else’s to churn through new gene variations. Her memories had slipped away with the hours until she remembered nothing before EdiTech except Josie. They had taken everything from her and left her drowning in fog.

Kevrik’s eyes narrowed. “Fine. Elzibek, EdiTech said they’d be sending a representative tomorrow to encourage negotiations.”

“Then I will be there to hear what they have to say.”

Kevrik nodded, but remained crouching next to Elzibek, fidgeting.

“Yes?” Elzibek fixed him with her piercing stare.

“If you had wanted an Instar who would devote their life to protecting the interests of the Enclave, there were plenty of other options,” Kevrik said.

Rana’s head snapped toward him. “Like I wanted them to—”

Elzibek held up a hand. “The Council always has its reasons, and the safety of the Enclave is always our first concern. We would not choose someone who would do our people harm.”

“But you would choose an outsider who doesn’t even want this responsibility? I know what my choice would be,” Kevrik said. “Do you know what I could accomplish with an extra few hundred years? We could have a colony—colonies—of pollinators. Real ones, not the bots. Resilient and efficient algae strains that wouldn’t require gene updates from EdiTech to meet the Enclave’s demands. Infrastructure powered by the flood cycles. We could be truly self-sufficient.”

“You could do all that watching your wife outlive you and die?” Rana asked, her voice low. “Watching your daughters grow old, start their own families, and die? You could save the Enclave and live with all that death following you?” Josie’s face flashed before Rana’s eyes, and her scream echoed in her ears.

“If it would help them too, then yes.”

“Then maybe the Council should choose you.”

“The Council has chosen Rana.” Elzibek said. “If she declines, they will choose another. Kevrik, I will join the summit shortly.”

Kevrik shook his head and stalked back into the gloom.

The fire dimmed to a ruby glow before either of the women spoke again.

“Why did the Council choose me?” Rana finally whispered. If the Council of Ages deemed her worthy, then maybe she could ignore the guilt that ached at the back of her skull. The mortar and pestle lay forgotten in her lap, the stone cup dusted with red.

Elzibek rubbed her finger against her lip as she thought, smearing it with the ochre. “You know EdiTech in ways the Enclave does not; your insight and experience would be invaluable for our survival.”

“You want to use me as a weapon against EdiTech.” The idea of being bound to EdiTech in such a permanent way made Rana’s stomach twist in knots.

Elzibek ignored her. “We rely on EdiTech for the algae mods that sustain our borough. We cannot produce these ourselves. And for decades, EdiTech—and their president in particular—has made it clear that they want access to our cicadidae mod. You can see how this puts us in a precarious situation.”

“Anvar Caladon wants the mod? Does he know about the side effects?” Rana asked, eying Alizar.

“He thinks he can improve it in ways we can’t. He wants the power with none of the sacrifice.” Elzibek turned to Rana, her eyes as bright and piercing as the fire between them. “What do you want, Rana?”

Rana leaned back and tipped her head toward the night sky. It glittered with stars, ships, and habs the size of small cities drifting in orbit. If she could just get there, she’d be out of EdiTech’s reach. People could disappear among the stars. She’d never have to think about Josalin again.

“I guess—” She almost admitted everything. How she had gotten the two of them tangled up with EdiTech. And how her plan to untangle them had gotten Josie killed. The words quavered at the tip of her tongue, ready to leap out of her mouth and condemn her. But Elzibek could not know the whole truth. Elzibek could not absolve her of what she’d done, and Rana would not let her try. The Enclave wanted her for itself, and she would not let it sink its claws into her. “I just want to be safe.” It wasn’t a total lie, but she knew she’d never be truly safe.

Elzibek’s eyes lingered on the horizon where the EdiTech facility glowed like the setting sun. “We all want to be safe. Even Caladon in his fortress.”

Rana laughed bitterly. “He’s nothing like the rest of us.”

“Alizar and I and the rest of the Instars are nothing like everyone else,” Elzibek said. “If you accept the mod, you won’t be either.”

Rana’s curiosity got the best of her. “What’s it like?”

“It changes you, just like any mod. You don’t notice the effects for a while, but eventually you see people change around yourself, faster than you’re changing. You blink and those people are gone, replaced by new faces. And after many years, many decades, you start to notice that your own mods aren’t as fresh as they once were.” Elzibek wasn’t looking at Rana anymore; she stared into the fire and the flames burned in her eyes. “The mod is a dam holding back time. And eventually time starts leaking through the cracks.”

“What made you do it?” Maybe Elzibek really was as selfless as she pretended to be. Or perhaps she was running from something too.

Elzibek turned her attention back to Alizar. “When I was seven, the storms came weeks earlier than the forecasts predicted. They hit hard and fast, and within a day, they had wiped the Enclave out to the plains. My family was gone.” Elzibek scrubbed her red hands on her threadbare cloak, and her voice faltered. “Everyone rebuilt. I begged them to move the Enclave out of the valley, but they said the Enclave had always been here, and here it would stay. And look around, Rana. We’re still in this valley. People carried on with their lives, but how could I? I asked to join the Council. I am the reason the Enclave has been rebuilt to withstand the storms. I am the reason the Enclave thrives even as the floods worsen. But my family is still gone. And so it is my burden to remember the past. My family was a sacrifice—the catalyst for transformation. I was a sacrifice of a different sort. We all make sacrifices, Rana.”

Rana knew plenty about sacrifice. She didn’t want any more. EdiTech had smothered her in a silk cocoon, and she would not stay in the Enclave and let them transform her into a different sort of unnatural creature. Just a few more days, and then the storms would come. And if she were lucky, the rain would wash away the Enclave and all of EdiTech with it.

Rana started awake when a blue mote lit up the corner of her vision—a comms message. Hopefully it was the Council rescinding their offer.

“Anvar Caladon is coming for you tomorrow.”

The message sent a shock through her body. No sender listed. Her implants didn’t even seem to recognize the sender’s system. It couldn’t be real.

She closed her eyes, focusing fully on the message. Calling up all accessible metadata, she melted into the message’s code, just like syncing with her swarm.

A string of data twisted in front of her, and she latched on, following it until she arrived at the sender’s identification code.

“Rana, run.”

Rana’s heart fluttered. It was impossible—

“Josalin?” Rana whispered. “Josie?” It couldn’t be her sister. She sent a pulse through the line to the sender, just a questioning ping.

“Delivery error: recipient not found,” flashed across her vision. Rana searched through the metadata again, but the sender and the messages were gone. Her heart hammered in her chest.

It couldn’t be Josalin. She’d seen the flash that had knocked her to the ground. No one got up after those pulses.

But Rana had seen the sender’s ID code. Josie’s genes were stitched into that ID and only death would render it inactive. EdiTech had gotten her sister, and now Anvar Caladon was coming to the Enclave to get her too.

Rana made it to the hive console just after midnight. She couldn’t leave the Enclave if the messages were genuine. She had to find Josie.

Settling down at the main console, Rana fitted the hive interface to her temples. When she opened her eyes, the swarm opened theirs. With a mental nudge, the bots burst into life with whirring wings and swirled out into the Enclave.

She sent the nano-bees out across the valley in waves and kept a handful buzzing around her head. If a convoy came from EdiTech to the Enclave, she would see it.

The dark landscape sped past as the swarm dispersed. Soon, the sleek, curving form of the EdiTech facility filled her vision a hundred times as her bots approached the compound. Her pulse raced. There, just outside the walls, she had lost Josalin. But maybe Josie wasn’t lost forever.

As Rana monitored the valley through the other nano-bees in her swarm, she noticed an armored EdiTech vehicle headed toward the Enclave. It would be there by morning. If she left the Enclave now, she could disappear before the convoy arrived.

But she couldn’t leave Josie. Not again. Rana drew close the cluster of bots around her head until she could feel their needle-sharp appendages pricking her scalp. Closer still she drew them, until their feelers found the remnants of the EdiTech implants still woven through her flesh. There were hardly any cracks in EdiTech’s façade. But Rana had thousands of bots and all night to look. Her swarm buried deeper—into the facility and into herself—as she searched for Josie’s signal.

A fine mist of bots swirled through EdiTech all night. Accessing an air handler here, sneaking under doors there. Her head throbbed, but she pushed the bots farther, searching for anything left of the signal she remembered.

There.

As the sun stretched over the horizon, the bots detected Josie—not from smell, and not from the message signature, but from something that was both and neither at the same time—just ahead.

Her swarm raged.

Rana tore the hive interface from her face. Her mind buzzed with anger and the nano-bees that still clung to her old implants.

Josie had been there all along.

The daylight burned her eyes, but she could still see through her swarm even with the interface removed. She could still guide them.

She had abandoned Josie.

Rana strode through the Enclave, half-seeing, half-sensing through her swarm, while the bots deep inside EdiTech surged forward to find her sister. At the west gate, the EdiTech convoy had parked just outside the borough. Guards flanked the vans.

Anvar Caladon stood at the Enclave’s walls. With his dark hair slicked back to a sheen and his clothes fitting him perfectly—tailored for him alone with no signs of mends or tears—Anvar Caladon looked like he had stepped out of the ads that flooded the refugee comm channels. Deep in an argument with Kevrik and Elzibek, he hadn’t seen Rana yet.

“Enough, Caladon.” Kevrik’s harsh voice broke through the buzzing that echoed in Rana’s ears. “We’ve made our decision.”

“Are you sure? The other boroughs know your Instar mods are failing. The Enclave’s prestige is slipping through your fingers. Don’t you want me to fix it? Don’t you want to truly live forever, like gods?”

“We are not gods, Caladon.” Elzibek joined Kevrik at the gate.

“But we could be. With the minds I could apply to the mod, it’d be perfect in no time.”

Rana knew the minds he was talking about. She had been one of those minds. And Josie was still one of those minds, if not something even worse.

Rana pushed past Kevrik and Elzibek and spoke as recognition crystallized across Caladon’s face. “I know about Josalin.”

Caladon’s eyes darted from the rips in Rana’s clothes to the silver bots that circled her head and lingered on the tufts of hair that Elzibek had hacked short to get at her implants. He smiled. “Ah, the other reason for my visit. Instar Elzibek, it seems you are harboring a known criminal.”

Elzibek barely glanced at Rana before she spoke. “She isn’t a criminal by our laws.”

“No? She is by EdiTech’s. Don’t you remember, Rana? A life for a life?”

“I didn’t kill anyone,” Rana said.

“Not the way EdiTech sees it. Our gene mods are life. It’s not a technicality to us. And you thought you could destroy a whole batch of them, years of work—”

“—your mods are dirty—”

“—and then abscond with EdiTech property—”

“—Josalin,” Rana shouted, squeezing her eyes shut tight. “Her name is Josalin. She wasn’t your property.”

“Enough of her was.”

Rana sent the swarm forward toward Josie. Except—something was wrong. Josie wasn’t here. There was nothing here. The swarm explored the space deep within EdiTech’s walls, their thrumming building into a roar. They weren’t in a room; they were in a locker full of wires and bloodied tubes. It smelled of flesh. Searching for Josie’s signal, Rana commanded the bots deeper into her skull, maximizing their connection with her implants.

But there was nothing else.

All that was left of Josalin sat there before her swarming eyes, an unrecognizable knot of metal and oozing tissue, blinking, and stuck with wires.

This couldn’t be right. Rana couldn’t make sense of it, not with her head aching and her mind split among all her swarm’s silvery minds. The swarm around her head whirled in a frenzy.

Josie had been dead, then alive, and now something else. Rana was powerless to re-form her or make her whole again. EdiTech had done this to her. And Rana couldn’t undo it, but she could end it.

“I know what you did to her. I found her.” Trembling, Rana sent her bots tearing through the space in a buzzing cloud of silver and gore. The cold, hard taste of metal filled her mouth as blood oozed from her scalp and smeared with her tears. She sank to her knees.

Josie was gone.

Caladon’s eyes darted, dismissing a notification. Then they glinted, hard and cold like a knife. “There was once EdiTech in you, too.” He crouched in front of Rana and, in an instant, grasped her skull between his hands. Bots trapped beneath his fingers wriggled as they wormed deeper into her implants, sending lances of pain through her head. “Perhaps we should crack you open and see how much is left.”

The buzzing grew to deafening levels, drowning out Elzibek’s and Kevrik’s shouts as the EdiTech guards closed in around them. Images from the nano-bees ghosted atop the Enclave—herself surrounded by her swarm, Josalin dead again and again, Anvar Caladon looming in front of her.

Rana took a breath, pulling the air deep into her lungs and holding it there. She wished she could stay like this—forever on the precipice, never jumping.

Hidden between moments.

Safe.

Caladon had told her she’d be safe if she stayed at EdiTech. If she ran, they would find her. She would end up like Josie. He had told her with a smile that bared all his teeth that she could stay at EdiTech even after everything she had done. They’d halve her debt. His teeth had gleamed like ivory in the moonlight, and his fingers, red with Josie’s blood, had reached toward her. EdiTech would help her. EdiTech was family. Bile rose in her throat.

Rana squeezed her eyes shut and exhaled. Though her head ached to the point she thought it would split, she sank into her swarm once more and threw them toward Caladon. The bots danced as they covered him from crown to shoulders, humming and vibrating and stinging in a single mass. As he howled and clawed at them, Rana staggered to her feet. Adrenaline pounded through her veins, and her hands left bloody smears on the earth.

“You showed Josie no mercy.”

She stopped. Wondered if this was the right thing to do. Anguish flooded all parts of her fractured mind, even the parts inside the silver bots that attacked Caladon as if it would make a difference. As if it would bring Josie back.

But the smallest part of Rana, the part left inside her head when the rest of her fled to the swarm, knew that it wouldn’t.

“Anvar Caladon, I will show you mercy. A life for a life. My debt is repaid.”

She couldn’t have done that a month ago. She couldn’t do it again. She wasn’t sure if she could live with her choice at all.

The nano-bees retreated to swirl around her head in lazy orbits, leaving Caladon gasping for breath. Under the morning sun, her swarm glinted like stars.

Rana followed Elzibek down the stone steps that spiraled into the earth beneath the crypt hall. A cool, damp breeze fluttered up as they descended, and in the dim light from Elzibek’s lantern, the stairs could have gone down forever. A dull pain throbbed in her head, and her stomach churned with nausea.

Josie was gone.

The steps opened into a cave with walls pocked like honeycomb. Some cells were filled, and others gaped with hungry maws. Red handprints reached out of the cells and climbed to the ceiling. Elzibek guided Rana onto a bench that ran along the wall. She removed a small canister from her pocket, and when she opened it, Rana recognized the smell.

“Don’t move.” Her voice had lost its usual sternness. Elzibek dipped her fingers into the canister and daubed the red paste along Rana’s temples where her wounds had clotted and scabbed. Warmth spread across her scalp.

Rana ached. She couldn’t leave the Enclave. EdiTech would never let her escape across the plains, no matter how high the floods rose. After what she had done, Caladon would snatch her up if she so much as stretched a finger outside the Enclave’s protective walls. She had nowhere to run. And it didn’t matter. Home had died with her memories and again with Josalin. She would never be home again. Josie was gone. And still Elzibek only worried about the cicadidae mod.

“Why did you bring me here?”

“To help you.”

“You think this is going to help me? You think this is going to bring my sister back or keep me safe from EdiTech?” Rana’s voice echoed in the cave, shouting back at her.

“No.” Elzibek looked away from Rana. The lantern splashed gold in the creases that bloomed across her face. She gestured at an empty cell on the opposite wall. “When my gene mods falter, this is where they’ll pack me into the dirt and let the mycelium keep me alive until my mods stabilize. If I’m lucky.”

The red paste’s earthy smell wafted down from Rana’s forehead, and she shivered. “Caladon really thinks being a god is worth this?”

“Those with power have always wanted to become gods no matter the cost. They forget that a god’s duty is to serve. Caladon will never understand that. We are nothing more than hostages from the past, representing the interests of those who have yet to come.”

“And you think the mod is worth all this too?”

“The earth has given us the mod as it is. We have changed her,” Elzibek said as she closed the canister and tucked it away. “And so we must change in return.”

Rana swallowed against the lump in her throat. Josie whispered in her ear, telling her to run. Josie’s voice always had sounded just like hers. “I want to leave. I—I don’t want this.”

“It’s not something that you should want,” Elzibek said, shaking her head. “To accept this mod is to give up yourself. To become something no longer—” she paused. Rolled a strand of gray hair between her fingertips. “—human.” Her whisper echoed in the cavern. “But everything changes. Stone transforms. Even the true void stretches and yields with time. To be stagnant is to be unnatural. Sacrifice is transformation, and transformation is life. Come,” Elzibek said, leading Rana from the crypt.

They continued down the stone steps in silence, deeper and deeper, until the stairs opened into a cavern. Twisting formations covered the walls and reached down toward Rana from above. In front of them, a pool, inky and flat, yawned into the distance past the reaches of Elzibek’s lamp.

“This is why the Enclave remains in the valley,” Elzibek whispered. She flicked off her lamp and darkness swallowed the cavern. As Rana’s eyes adjusted, the dark yielded to pinpricks of silver that wandered on the pool’s surface. An Elzibek-shaped shadow knelt at the pool, and a gentle ripple sent the glimmers dancing. The shadow stood.

“You’ll own nothing. Have no family. You won’t rule. You won’t be a hero.” Elzibek approached Rana and pressed a cold vial into her hand. “We are at the mercy of those who live and die faster than the briefest flash of lightning. If you do not act in their best interest, they will bury you and never dig you up.” Elzibek was invisible in the darkness, but sorrow dripped from every word. “You will live with the consequences of your choices for centuries. With the blame. The guilt. But this is how we transcend. This is how we transform. This is what the cicadidae mod can offer you.”

Rana couldn’t speak. She couldn’t live like that. She already had too much guilt inside raging like a blinding storm.

“Take it, or do not. It is your choice. It did not bring my family back, and it will not bring your sister back. But sacrifice can bring purpose. It can bring relief. But like all true sacrifices, it cannot be undone.”

Rana pocketed the vial and followed Elzibek out of the cavern. They climbed up and up and out of the earth. The vial tapped at Rana with every step.

The setting sun painted the horizon pink, and clouds threaded the sky like gossamer. Rana sat at the hive console at the edge of the Enclave, facing out toward the plains with the lights of EdiTech at her back. Her head throbbed even though her swarm slept soundly in their hives. Frogs called out to the rains, sensing them just beyond the curve of the horizon. Rana wormed her fingers into the dirt.

She’d never be free of her guilt. Even if she slogged to the neighboring borough through months of the heaviest storms. Even if she lost herself in a hab thousands of miles beyond EdiTech’s reach. She turned the vial end over end. The guilt would seep into her bones and haunt her for the rest of her life. Exhaustion settled over her like shroud, and a sob scratched its way out of her throat.

Maybe Elzibek was right, and the mod would bring relief. Rana had already sacrificed so much, but she could endure one more. A sacrifice to atone for all she’d done. One final sacrifice to fill the void that Josie’s absence left in her chest.

She’d sleep down in her crypt, breathing the dirt, while the heavens wheeled around her. She’d face Anvar Caladon again and again. It wouldn’t matter how deep he buried her. She’d claw her way out of the earth and challenge him as long as he lived.

For hundreds of years.

Elzibek would get the weapon she wanted after all.

Rana lifted the vial’s cap to reveal the injector and placed the thin, silvery needle against her skin.

She let it sting.

About the Author

Meghan Feldman grew up in rural southern Maryland. After studying Physics and Astronomy in Washington state, she moved to Texas to work for a NASA contractor. In her free time, she can be found dabbling in watercolor, playing violin, and bouldering. Meghan has been previously published in Analog.

Vegvísir

David Goodman

That’s the thing you have to remember about Kobayashi drivetrains. They work until they don’t. Not like a Selenex or a Rostov unit. Those things tell you all the time how they’re feeling. Grumble grumble. You’re out there in your suit, putting on the spray lube, picking bits of regolith out of the intakes, every day it feels like. But the Kobayashis, they work flawlessly. Very fine engineering. But no warning at all when they fail. Just . . . bang. No more coupling.

That’s fine if you’re coming off shift, if you’re a tank or two away from a lock and some breathable. And the Kobayashi is a good unit—well made, affordable even with the lift premium, lots of spare parts in every depot from here to Gale Crater. I’d say we replace one of them every six months or so. The vehicle pool techs are pretty fast at it now.

But none of that helps me. Gunnar Kristjánsson, thermal drilling technician class 2, third generation Martian, and officially fucked. Because I’m a helvítis hálfviti, in the words of my grandfather, who is probably watching from his perch among the gods on the literal Mount Olympus and laughing through the cracked face shield that killed the old bastard.

No. Instead of being a quick bounce to a lock and a hot meal while the Jimmies jack up my rover and make it work again, I’m two hundred and nineteen kilometers out on a survey line, on my own, with only standard day rations, nine hours of breathable, and a drivetrain that’s popped every shackle.

Great.

It’s not like I wasn’t aware this might happen. I did a visual inspection with the Head Jimmy two days ago. Everything looked fine. A little stress around some of the retainer bands, maybe, but you get that on every unit, Kobayashi or not. I packed extra water. Fresh power cells for the SAR beacon. All of that stuff.

But it’s useless. Why? Damn swirls, that’s why.

Before humanity started grubbing around every little corner of Mars, we thought it was a quiet, cold, dusty place. Barely any pressure in the air. No surface water. Obviously no plant life. But it turns out there’s a lot going on under the surface in some places. Geothermal spikes. Magnetic anomalies. Subsurface ice that melted very fast once we really got going on the atmospheric processing. Hence the swirls.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s still drier than my grandmother’s harðfiskurmost of the time out here. But the activity under the ground, all the crater landforms, they create these persistent storms. Lots of trace metals in the dust. You get stuck in a swirl, you can be incommunicado for hours. Sometimes days. Especially if you have a busted drivetrain.

When I hear that horrible flat ping through the hull, I pull on the wheel locks and swear in every language I have access to. Suit on, depressurize, then clump outside to confirm. I needn’t have bothered. The sound of a drivetrain going is unmistakable. I waste a few minutes of my air supply standing in the swirling dust, cursing every moment and decision that led me here.

I retreat back inside, repressurize, and take off the suit. As always, the cleaning jets in the rear of my rover don’t quite get all the regolith off, so I sneeze a couple of times. It has a metallic tang, like growmeat seared on an open grill at a yearpass celebration. Permits for an open flame were so rare when I was a child, that particular smell has stayed with me. It’s a little strange, now I think about it, that the whole planet is made of dust and rock that smells like that. Something to do with the carbon, I guess.

My rover is pretty comfortable; it’s a long-range survey model, designed for several nights out, with consumable replenishment from cache stores. Bunk and personal gear on one side, survey table and seating in the center, then the entire right-hand side is all survey gear lockers and crates. Seismic monitors, wind speed capture kits, atmosphere samplers, scan drones, sub-mil lidar units, you name it, I’ve got it. What I don’t have is a spare drivetrain.

It’s not normally an issue. Even on a long survey run, I could pop up a satellite ping, even a handheld flare. I’d have a SAR unit or a diverted transport with me in an hour or two at most, and I’d get a lift back to the Valley. They’d send out a heavy lift bird or a tow team for the rover and everything would be airtight.

I’ve got nine hours of air in here, which was a great margin to get to the next cache, thirty kilometers ahead. And another four hours in the suit. More than enough for a survey line run, replacing busted sensors, taking measurements from the hard-line units down in this old crater, refilling from caches. But not enough to ride out a swirl if I can’t move.

I pull up my survey maps. My job is to investigate the areas closer to the Valley to help supply the growing population. And by investigating, I mean they’re sending surveyors like me out in one-man rovers to pre-dropped caches, mainly to update the subsurface mapping of the area. It’s been fifty years or more since anyone was out here regularly. I forget what that is in Earth terms. A lot. This part of the plains south of the Chasmus is studded with old lines. Most of them are long-since decommissioned, but there’s a few active ones still, reaching out from the Valley like the spokes on a wheel. We use them to monitor geothermal activity, weather patterns, the damn swirls. Most of the heavy-duty survey work is a long, long way from here. This part of Mars is well settled. I could probably walk six to eight hours in any direction and hit a transit line or a settlement power grid. Something to follow back to a hab of some kind. But my suit wouldn’t even get me out of the crater. And if you’re walking hard and fast to get out of trouble, cut all your consumable estimates by a third. It would be a race to see if dehydration or asphyxiation killed me first.

The map glows on the survey table, showing the curved walls of the crater, the distant glyphs of the closest active survey lines, the cluster of icons around the Wall Gates to the Valley. All too far.

I dip and swirl my fingers, rotating the map, looking for something I might have missed, something within my suit’s distance. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Just sand, dead cabling, test bore wells and rocks.

Something catches my eye. It’s a glyph I don’t recognize, a rounded three-dimensional rectangle, bobbing gently about three kilometers off the main route. It’s tiny and dim, indicating a decommissioned site. The icon is a sort of triangle shape with circles inside it. I look it up in my map legend.

Wow. It’s an old orbital transfer drop point. A hundred years ago or more, the big drop pods coming in from the Mars-Earth cyclers had designated landing spots along the rim of the Valley. But they also had backup points, out here, in case their primary landing site wasn’t clear. So there’s a ring of these places around the first few Wall Gates. Not much more than regolith melted into hard, round pads, a blockhouse for telemetry gear, hard links, a connecting road to the nearest survey line so the passengers could be picked up, sorry for the delay sir and ma’am. In the end, I heard they were hardly used; so many redundant and backup systems in the first cyclers they hardly ever needed them.

But I also remember they were uplinked. They had to be. If a dropship was going to land on basically hard-packed dust, it needed to be accurate. There was a chance, a small chance, that I might be able to power up that uplink, cut through the swirl and call in a SAR team.

I squint at the old drop point glyph, then run some calcs on the distance. It’s three klicks away, give or take a few hundred meters for the rolling terrain, rocks, all the little things that slow you down when you’re not in a rover. Going at a steady pace to conserve oxygen, I could walk there in a little over an hour. Hit the uplink, then an hour back. No problem.

Just a six kilometer walk without navigational aids in the middle of a magnetic sandstorm. Totally fine.

About five hundred meters out, I decide I’ve made a huge mistake. My suit is running a simple gyro monitor, so it will tell me if I change direction by more than a degree. If I don’t stick to the glowing arrow projected in my helmet display, I might be half a kilometer or more off target by the time I got near the old drop station. And that might as well be the other side of Mars, in a swirl as thick as this one.

Black, green, and brown chunks of rego smack against my faceplate. It’s the new, chunkier surface layer, now accumulating over the really fine dust we have around here. The ‘formers are doing their work, changing the whole planet. The red dust granulates into these light, crumbly chunks, full of cyanobacteria. It looks like dirty polystyrene balls, the kind you might use for insulation in a dome shelter.

But there’s still a lot of superfine regolith under that top layer and the swirls sure throw it about. I can see about three meters ahead. It’s mostly rocky underfoot and the arrow on my visor keeps changing color as I stumble forward, amber to red, back to green, red, amber, green, amber. I think it’s still staying green more than the other colors, meaning I’m mostly on course, but I’m tripping over my own feet so much I can’t really tell.

I wipe my faceplate and look down at the chronometer strapped to the arm of my suit. It has a big, chunky face with a glow dial, so I can see the time and my oxygen total even if the suit is on power conservation or the controller module is dead. Good old physical gauges. Our predecessors learned the hard way that you don’t want to have suits whose failure modes include “can’t get air to person inside.” The early settlers lost quite a few surveyors to solar storms. I’m beginning to understand how it must have felt to be one of those old-timers, in their heavy suits, clumping through the fine red dust, knowing all they had to breathe was what was in the suit already, tasting their own sweat, feeling the air grow more stale with every step. They’d have passed out eventually, crumpling to their knees out in the Red, suits coated with dust, to be found days or weeks or in some cases years later. A few of them were never found; they just . . . disappeared into the dust storms.

Shit. Focus, Gunnar. The arrow is blaring red again. I twist my body around left and right until I have green, then set off. I was a half degree off, maybe, not a lot. But these little errors add up. I check the chrono again. I’ve been walking for sixteen minutes, but it feels like a whole day. There’s sweat dripping down my back inside the suit. The coolant unit is struggling with the dust outside, puffing intermittently to keep its heat exchanger vents clear. I turn down the frequency. It only uses a little of my air each time, but I’d rather be a little cool or warm in the suit than run out of air.

For a little while, I try just watching my own feet and the arrow. I make it a game. Can I avoid the big rocks and cracks in the surface while keeping my arrow green? It feels like a virch, balance and speed and doing things in the right order. There’s a boulder, step over it. Okay, went to amber there, not great. Back to green though. This gulley in the desert surface is three meters wide. If I go straight down, I’ll break my leg. So I sidestep, turning my body to keep the arrow green. I slip and windmill my arms for a second, but then I’m down in the bottom of the gulley and the arrow is green again. I pick a spot on the other side and clamber out. Amber, red, green, amber, green.

Eventually, my suit chimes at me, and I check the chrono. I’ve been walking for fifty-six minutes. I’ve used a little over a quarter of my oxygen supply; that must be the extra puffs to keep my heat exchanger clear, plus the terrain being a little more rugged than I expected. I’m breathing a little hard, so I stop and do a full three sixty to calibrate everything.

The arrow thinks I’m fifty meters out, give or take. Visibility is five to ten meters max, so I set off slowly, eyes scanning for the shape of the drop point. I’ve seen a few of these places on survey runs. If you’re up high, you can see the wide circle of the sintered landing pad, but down at this level I’ll feel that under my boots before I see it.

Instead, I need to look for the blockhouse at the edge of the pad, a low, angular shelter with comms, maybe even rations and air. It might not have been stocked recently. But with any luck, the comms might work, if I can power them up.

I’m scanning, left and right, looking for any shapes emerging out of the swirl. It’s the middle of the Martian day, but in the swirl it seems like the middle of the night. There’s so much shit in the air from the granulated regolith and the magnetic flux that it feels like I might walk smack into the blockhouse wall.

There. A dark shape just off to my left. A low trapezoid, large enough for twenty or thirty people. I grin inside my helmet and turn toward it.

Then I trip over a rock because I’m too busy looking at my target. I’m already swearing as I crash forward into the dust, granules scattering everywhere. My gloved fingers punch through the top layer into the fine dust underneath and a cloud of it engulfs my helmet. I’m covered in the damn stuff, flat on my belly, the weight of my suit pack pushing me down. I struggle back onto my knees, still swearing.

Someone is watching me.

From this angle, knees sunk in the bacterial crust of the regolith, I can’t see the blockhouse anymore. But there is a person, half hidden by the billowing dust, in a suit, maybe ten meters away. They are roughly between me and the drop point, I think. The arrow blinks green as I tilt my body back, trying to get a clear view. I wipe sticky granules off my visor.

The suit power blinks out.

My orientation arrow is gone. All my readouts flicker and disappear. The whir of the suit pumps winds down to silence, so now all I can hear is the quiet hiss of the fail-safe regulator bleeding air into my suit and the hollow moan of the wind outside. The heating elements in my gloves turn off, and I can feel the creeping cold beginning to cut through the thick material a few seconds later. I struggle to my feet, heart hammering in my chest, eyes flicking down to my wrist gauge.

I stop, lower my arms, take a deep breath. In through the nose, out through the mouth. I have to get my heart rate down. Panic absolutely won’t help right now.

After a moment, I’m as calm as I think I’m going to get. I guess that I’m only a step or two away from where I saw the blockhouse. I see my own footprints in the crusty desert surface, so I walk back in them two or three steps, then stop and do a full three hundred and sixty degree turn, slow as I can, eyes scanning for a shape in the darkness.

While I’m turning, I’m wondering what shut off my suit. I’m guessing it was an overheat, the cooling system vents getting clogged with dust when I fell, maybe? No big deal, usually. But I can’t clear the vents from inside the suit without power. And I can’t clean them from the outside without being back in the rover.

Maybe I could follow my footprints all the way back to the rover. But then I’d be right back to square one, only with two hours less oxygen. I know that I’m within a stone’s throw of the blockhouse. If I can find it, maybe I can pressurize it, clean out the vents. Or maybe my locked-open oxygen supply will keep me alive long enough to get the comms working.

I turn again, slowly. No sign of the figure in the suit. Did I really see someone? Or was it just a momentary illusion, a Martian djinn of dust and wind? The early settlers were convinced they saw things, out where no people should be, figures and forms in the dark, lights bobbing on the plains kilometers from any settlement.

And, of course, you don’t import five thousand Icelandic geothermal engineers without bringing a few sagas and myths along at the same time.

I wipe some more of the clinging, superfine dust from my visor. It leaves dark smears of cyanobacteria behind. The little bugs are everywhere in the surface soil, churning away, doing the slow, slow work of making this a world we can live in without suits like this. But for now they’re mostly black, sticky slime that is a massive pain to get off your visor.

Which direction was the blockhouse? I look to my left and right, looking for any indication of which way I was facing before I fell over. There’s the trail of footprints coming in. Here’s the two holes my knees made when I tripped, and the powdery depression where I fell on my face.

I work back, until I’m pretty sure I’m standing exactly where I was when I saw the low angles of the blockhouse.

I’m torn. If I move from here, I might lose my own footprints. But if I don’t move, I might be standing thirty meters from the blockhouse for another hour and then set off in the wrong direction.

I swear again, this time dropping a few choice phrases from my grandmother. She was a farmer-turned-vulcanologist-turned-astro thermal-specialist from Seyðisfjörður, way out on the fringe, nestled down in one of the wider Eastfjords. She was twenty-six when she took the cycler to Mars. When I was growing up, she was one of the last Earthborn in our community, a half-meter shorter than most of us, still going out every morning in her patched-up old suit to wipe the solars and see the sunrise. She told me she never got tired of living so close to the Martian equator, no months of darkness like back home. She would show me photos of the Eastfjords. Her on a boat, pulling in nets with her father, or out on a rough-maned Icelandic horse, grinning, rosy cheeks above a chunky knitted jumper, hair in braids. Sometimes I would point out of the hab glass at the black-crusted hills and cliffs around the Valley, running with the effluent of our ‘forming. I’d ask her if one day it might look like where she had grown up, with rough grasses, black sand, ice, and snow. She would laugh and ruffle my hair. “Not in my lifetime, Væni minn, or yours. But your children’s children, perhaps, perhaps.”

Goddamn it. What am I doing? Thinking about my damn grandmother, fifteen years dead. I’m likely to join her if I don’t screw my head back on.

I blink a few times inside my helmet, take some more slow breaths. Why was my mind wandering like that? Are my CO2 levels rising? The scrubbers should work even without power, at least for a while. But if I keep standing here, I’m going to pass out or stagger off in a random direction when I get delirious from lack of oxygen.

I look down at the footprints. Pretty sure I’m facing the right direction. There’s where I turned, stepped forward, and fell. Right before that, I was looking at the blockhouse.

I take five steps forward, then I stop, make a mark right in front of me with my boot, and do another full three sixty. No sign yet. Another five steps, another mark. Where the hell is it?

My heart rate is increasing again, the skin prickling inside my suit. My breath is coming shorter and sharper, and I’m fighting the absolute certainty that I can taste the carbon dioxide building up in my helmet. I can’t, of course. It’s colorless, odorless, and flavorless. But I’m sure there’s a tang to the air that wasn’t there before.

Inside, I know that tang is my own fear. It’s sweat and pheromones, alarm bells ringing in my nervous system, telling me I’m in danger. That I’m alone, without help.

That I’m being hunted.

There. In the darkness and rippling clouds of dust ahead. A shape. But not the comforting bulk of the blockhouse. It’s the same figure as before.

They’re closer this time. I think they’re walking just ahead of me. The suit doesn’t look right, though. From the glimpses I catch through the dust, it’s too bulky, patched and frayed, one of the old multi-laminate models. The kind of thing no surveyor or ‘former or miner on Mars has used in decades. An antique.

Just like my grandmother’s suit.

“Hey!” I shout, then realize immediately that my suit’s radio is dead.

“Hey!” I shout again anyway. I forget about the careful turning, the marks. I go tumbling forward, boots scuffing through the black crust, breathing hard.

The figure keeps walking. It’s tall and thin, even inside the suit. Most Martians are, but the old-timers that wore those things were Earthborn usually, squat and muscular compared to us. Who the hell could it be? Why are they out here?

I trip, the toe of my boot catching in a crusty piece of hardened regolith. Sprawled forward again, this time onto something firm. There’s a light coating of the crumbly granules that’s on everything, but underneath that is a hard surface, not the usual dust. I stare down at my gloves and push experimentally with my fingers.

It’s aluminized regolith. These old pads were sinter-finished around the edges by later waves of colonists, but the pads were initially formed by the first landers, plumes of alum fired into the landing rockets. They flared out and coated the soft regolith for a dozen meters, creating instant, semisolid landing pads. It was an amazing technology, for the time, well proven in the lunar colonization of a century earlier.

I’m on the landing pad.

I crane my neck up, trying to see past the bulk of my own helmet. The figure is gone. I clamber to my feet again and look around. The swirl seems like it might be easing a little, because I can clearly see the artificial flatness of the pad, the edge curving away from me.

And there, right in front of me, barely a dozen meters away, is the blockhouse.

I gulp air and whoop inside my suit, relief coursing through me. I stagger toward it, glancing down at my chrono as I go. The momentary joy collapses back into stomach-twisting dread. Somehow, the oxygen indicator has dipped into the red. Then I remember that the power is out. Constant bleed from the cylinder in my pack combined with unpowered filtering means I’m burning air supply twice as fast as I normally would. I have to get inside.

The blockhouse is sealed down tight. It’s dense, locally-mixed regocrete, Martian dust and sand mixed with cement and water. Tough stuff. The early buildings and structural supports around the Wall Gates all look like this. Hugely overbuilt, before we had learned what you actually needed to live on Mars. Our buildings now are light, tall, and curved, taking advantage of the lower gravity and the reduced force of the Martian weather. This is an Earth structure, squatting here, brute, and ugly, built by Earth minds on a planet they saw as unrelenting and purely hostile.

Which means I have no way of getting in.

The viewports are cemented closed. And there’s a solid steel airlock, ribbed with cross-struts. Probably a pressure door salvaged from one of the first cyclers. Like a bank vault from one of Grandma’s old Earth movies, dumped here in the middle of the desert. I couldn’t get through this damn thing if I had thirty hours of air and a cutting torch. I’m screwed.

I walk around the blockhouse twice, just in case I’ve missed something. There’s a secondary lock, but it’s sealed as tightly as the first. Eventually I’m back at the main door, and I slump down into the black grit, my head swimming.

The chrono says I have maybe six minutes of air remaining. Ten if I breathe slowly. No way back to the rover now. It might as well be five hundred kilometers away, not three. I could try to run it, but that would just burn the air faster. At least if I stay here, the SAR team they eventually send might have a better chance of finding my body.

I stare into the swirl, smelling my own sweat and stale breath. My visor is fogging up with each breath, without temperature regulation. And now that I’ve stopped moving, the cold is cutting through. I shiver a little.

I think I get up then. It’s hazy. I hammer on the door. I shout and scream and feel the tears coursing down my cheeks, my beard damp inside my helmet. I don’t want to die, alone, out on some damn survey line. I hear the dull thuds of my gloved hands against the steel, the rattle of my own breathing. The edges of my vision are darkening. I see the Valley, my family’s dome, the pale sun rising, my grandmother standing out there looking at the covered vegetable frames, the greenhouse rows, waving as she came back in for skyr and coffee.

I scream, the last of my body heat fogging my visor. I feel my gloves pressed hard against the uncaring steel. Then there’s nothing.

The first thing I’m aware of is how much my throat hurts.

I cough, cough again, groan. My eyes feel like they’re cemented together. I try to blink them open but that’s not in the cards yet.

“Hey, he’s waking up,” I hear and goddamn that’s Sigrún from North Curve. SAR we call her, Sigrún And Rescue. She’s amazing. Pulled five miners out of a bad swirl last full turn.

Wait, how the fuck am I alive?

The surge of adrenaline is enough to pull my eyelids apart, and I blink. They’re crusty with dust and sand. The light is incredibly bright. I’m inside, somewhere. Is it a rover? A SAR spinner? No, the surface under me isn’t moving, and I’m still in my suit. Sigrún is kneeling beside me, her helmet open, a hydration pack in her hand. She puts her hand behind my head and offers me a sip.

“You’re very dehydrated, Gunnar. Small sips.”

The water is so clean and clear and cold that I groan as I take a sip. Now that I’m drinking, I can feel how cracked and dry my lips are.

“Where . . . ” I start, but my voice comes out as a dry, husky cough, only just above a whisper. I take another sip and try again. “Where am I?”

Sigrún smiles. “Old blockhouse out on the fourth line. Good job with the repressure.”

I blink, and I see that she’s right. We’re inside the blockhouse. It’s mostly empty, long-since stripped bare of everything but the absolute basics, a single large space. When it was built it would have had padded benches down either side and along the middle, a small kitchen area, racks for spare suits and ration packs, everything that a diverted crew and passenger complement might need for a few hours or even a day or two of waiting.

Now, it’s empty. Just a dusty comms console and a backup set of oxygen tanks and scrubbers. Enough to pressurize the space for a day or two, for a few people.

The lights overhead are ancient LEDs behind milky white plastic, so they’re not very bright really. My eyes are adjusting now. I sit up a little and Sigrún places a gentle but firm hand on my chest.

“Woah, Gunnar. Take it easy. You’re not—”

“How . . . ” I start to say. This place has been sealed up tight for decades, but there’s still dust in here. Brought in by the teams that change the filters and restock the oxygen once a year, or just the regocrete slowly degrading, flexing, and shifting as swirls come and go and marsquakes occasionally shake the ground, stirred by the return of moisture and heat to the planet. Either way, there’s a layer of it, perhaps a millimeter or two.

Enough to see the footprints.

I can see where Sigrún and her team came in, via the secondary, smaller airlock. That’s because the main airlock, where I apparently came in, has been hard-locked from the inside. The footprints lead, clear as day, from the main airlock over to the comms panel. There’s even a smear in the dust where a gloved hand slid down the console, mashing at buttons. More smears as the same gloved hand fumbled for the manual release valves on the emergency oxygen. Then a couple of stumbling footsteps, then my own feet.

How did I get inside?

“But, the airlock, it was—” I start, but Sigrún shushes me.

“Hard-locked. Yes, we know. Not sure why you did that. I suppose you wanted to ensure it wouldn’t leak when you repressed. But we got in the secondary with an override code once we realized.”

I manage to struggle my way into a sitting position. Sigrún shuffles back and stands up. The rest of her team are spread around the space, leaning against the old regocrete walls, all looking at me. Their helmets are open, so I can see how their eyes dart away from me, not quite lingering.

“How long since I . . . got in here?” I ask.

Kristján Magnússon, a giant bear of a man in a custom suit who is Sigrún’s right-hand man on the SAR team, steps forward. His beard looks dusty inside his helmet.

“About nine hours. We checked the logs on the distress beacon you activated. It was only an hour ago that the storm settled enough to get the message through. We got here as soon as we could.”

I cough. “That explains my headache. I . . . I don’t remember getting in here.”

“We did find footprints all the way around the blockhouse,” said Sigrún. “I think . . . maybe you were confused. Lack of oxygen perhaps? Did you forget about the primary door release?”

Suddenly I feel like a very small, very stupid child. Of course. I had been hammering on the door, scrabbling at the blank metal facings as though some benevolent creature inside might crack it open for me. Completely forgetting that all I had to do was reach up, flip open the panel above, and pull the large red handle that would pop the airlock. Starved of oxygen, vision tunneling, my training and experience had deserted me.

Except it hadn’t. Because I was inside.

“I’m not sure what happened,” I say. “I don’t . . . I don’t remember popping the airlock. I must have just managed it.”

Kristján frowns. “No, Gunnar. You must have been in here for a while. You had time to do that before you passed out.”

My neck prickles as he lifts one big bear paw and points, his gloved finger indicating the wall behind me. I clamber to my feet and turn around. When I lift my head to look, I feel my breath shorten.

Scratched into the reddish, crumbling surface of the century-old regocrete, there’s a symbol, perhaps half a meter across. It’s a simple drawing, an eight-pointed star made from intersecting lines, like a compass rose. The ends of each line are decorated with crosshatches, little forks, and short curves, like a child’s drawing of a bowl or a fork. But that’s not what they are. I would know this symbol anywhere.

“What is it?” asked Ralston. He’s dark-haired, with a thin, narrow face, shorter than the rest of us. He’s from the other side of the Valley, an Anglo, descended from the third or fourth wave, after the geothermal power was laid and the greenhouses were running. The original first-wave landnámsmenn of my grandparent’s generation call them the nýjir, the “new ones.” But they’ve been here forty years already. Not long enough to begin developing the different muscle tone and height of the rest of us, but he’s as Martian as we are.

The rest of the crew are all first wave descended. None of them need it to be explained.

I swallow. “It’s Vegvísir. It’s the wayfinding rune. It’s . . . supposed to help you find your way in storms and bad conditions.” My voice cracks. I hold my hand out and Sigrún hands me the hydration pack. I take another sip, feeling the cool water restoring me.

Sigrún steps closer and lowers her voice. “Did you . . . see anything? Before you got through the door?”

I swallow, then nod slowly. “I thought—I thought I saw somebody ahead of me in the storm. Then I remember being here and circling the blockhouse. Then I woke up with you here. I don’t remember doing that,” I say, pointing at the rune.

Sigrún looks at Kristján and the other first-wavers, her braided hair flipping out of her suit collar as she turns her head to look at each of them. Ralston is frowning.

“Someone gonna tell me why this is a big deal? Gunnar gets bored during a nine hour wait for SAR and carves some old-time symbol? So what?”

I swallow again. My mouth is full of red dust, the deep chill of Mars in my bones, the slow changes that are waking deep things, like the ice and volcanoes of the land I have never seen, but feel deep in every cell. We have come to Mars, and we have brought our stories with us. And with the stories come other things.

I cough and recite a verse from the Hávamál, in the Poetic Edda. I start in Icelandic, speaking softly.

“Ungur var ek forðum, fór ek einn saman, þá varð ek villur vega; auðigur þóttumst, er ek annan fann, maður er manns gaman.”

Ralston frowns again. “What does that mean?”

I smile, certain now. They’re here, with us. They came in the ships. They are out in the dust storms, in the hidden canyons, down in the deep cracks where the ice and water and heat waits. They’re guiding us, protecting. As long as we remember this planet is their home too, give it the care we should have given to Earth, they will help us.

“Seriously, what does it mean?” says Ralston. He’s young, and I can see he’s spooked, surrounded by the tall, taciturn first-wavers. I see the dusty old blockhouse from his viewpoint, the crew looming over him, lights flickering, a strange symbol on the wall.

I smile at him. “It’s a giving of thanks.”

“For what?” he says, smiling back, uncertain.

I recite the verse again, this time in English. “Young was I once, I walked alone, and bewildered seemed in the way; then I found me another and rich I thought me, for man is the joy of man.”

About the Author

David Goodman is a writer of speculative and thriller fiction, based in East Lothian, Scotland. He is a member of the Edinburgh SFF writing group and is currently querying his first novel, a near future thriller set in the aftermath of severe climate change.

This is his first published short story.

You Are Born Exploding

Rich Larson

When Elisabeth takes the baby to the beach on Thursday afternoon, another shambler has got through the fence.

“Stay ten meters back,” the guard says, his translucent face mask fogged with the heat.

“Yes, yes,” Elisabeth says.

“And the child. Ten meters.”

“We’re fully inoculated,” Elisabeth says, annoyed.

“Of course, ma’am.” He seems to be dissolving in the condensation, only his dark eyes visible. “This distance is so our staff can remove him efficiently and with good technicality.”

“Him?” Elisabeth echoes faintly. She hates it when people anthropomorphize shamblers—it sets a bad precedent.

The guard doesn’t correct his error, so she punishes him by not smiling her beautiful laser-scoured smile as she pushes Jack’s pram through the biofilter. Jack barely squirms under the static tongue. He is accustomed. Elisabeth’s skin pebbles when she follows him through.

The guard cups a hand to the screen, to cut the glare. Results show clean blue. The gate sags on its pneumatics, then lurches open.

“Ten meters,” he says again.

Elisabeth gives a curt nod, pretending to be distracted by Jack’s slipping-off nylon shoe.

The wind is strong today. It comes in plucking and slicing, Atlantic cold, and counteracts the bright pounding sunshine. The waves are like nesting dolls: massive glassy walls out past the buoys, chest-high in the vast sloped shallows, child-size by the time they throw themselves onto the surf. Jack’s pram lumbers along just out of their reach.

The flour-soft sand is shifty under Elisabeth’s feet; the pram is unbothered. Its treads are military grade—Benny showed her the same serial number on a still of a dusty Pakistani war drone. She sometimes wishes it had smart-bombs, too, for when the Rose-Kellermans’ big drooling dog comes bounding up to inspect it.

Speak of the devil, or rather of its owner: Alea Rose-Kellerman is posed on a black-and-white striped towel just ahead, the straps of her swimming costume slipped down off her perfect shoulders, her face half-swallowed by vaguely insectoid sunshades. Her human nanny is herding little Nils through the surf, maintaining herself between the toddler and the sea.

Alea always rubs everyone’s nose in the fact that they rehired their nanny. Always urges everyone to do the same, even though the cost of keeping a nanny’s vaccines updated—especially since hired help hardly ever have base immunomods—is astronomical.

Naturally, she looks up just as a particularly vicious gust of wind wraps Elisabeth’s hair around her face.

“Hello, Liz,” she says. “How are you?”

“Hello, Alea.” Elisabeth peels the hair from her mouth with great dignity. “Lovely day.”

“Won’t you join us?” Alea asks. “This particular square of sand is really something.”

Alea always has to be airy and clever like that, likely due to some buried insecurity that is owed in turn to a dark, loathsome secret.

Elisabeth smiles her laser-scoured smile. “It’s a pleasure.”

She has the pram hunker down and unfold its parasol, which struggles embarrassingly against the wind. The sea air has stirred Jack fully awake. His small sunbrowned face is alight with curiosity. She hefts him out and sets him in the quivering shade.

He points a fat finger down the beach. “Shambla, mumma? Is it? Shambla?”

Alea coos and chirps. “They’re speaking now! Such fun.”

“He’s speaking,” Elisabeth says, bristling. “Jack’s a boy unless he eventually decides otherwise.” She adjusts Jack’s hat. “He’s two now. Yes, Jack, it’s a shambler.”

Alea settles back on her towel, with a curve to her lips that looks more amused than chastened. “I suppose you show him those government cartoons,” she says. “The safety cartoons.”

“We do, yes.”

“I try to explain both sides of it to Nils,” Alea says. “Even though it’s upsetting. They’re very empathetic, Nils.”

A ways down the beach, a small knot of spectators has gathered about ten meters back from a distinctive shape. It’s crawling for the surf, red-and-blue flukes rippling from its bent back. A guard is busy zipping into a hazard suit, white with what looks like a gasoline stain across one knee.

The shambler seems to sense its time is limited; it scoots a bit faster now, dragging a wet furrow behind itself. The whole thing is quite macabre.

“Is hubby back from his little trip?” Alea asks.

“What?”

The ejection is more forceful than she intended it. She was distracted by the shambler, and by the sputter and whine of the buzzsaw the guard will use to dismember it.

“Benjamin,” Alea clarifies. “Is he back from Australia?”

“Not yet.” Elisabeth shifts her gaze to Jack, who is meticulously pouring fistfuls of sand onto his tiny knees. “My brother is coming to visit, though. He’s an artist.”

Alea smiles dryly. “Here to freeload while he seeks inspiration, I suppose? Every family has one.”

“He’s quite successful, actually.”

“Oh.” Alea gives a pensive moue. “I think we’re all artists, in our own way.”

Elisabeth imagines gouging out her eyes and filling the holes with sand. “What a lovely thought,” she says.

They promise each other a grand succession of wine tastings and lunch outings, then Nils begins puling in a way the nanny cannot stopper, and Alea recalls her brow appointment. Elisabeth puppeteers Jack’s arm to wave the trio a cheery goodbye, then lets him go back to his rearranging of sediment. The pram has printed him a lime green spade.

She takes in his cherubic concentration, the blonde curls plastered to his forehead. She coos his name, so he’ll look up.

“I digging away,” he says, with a squinty grin.

“You’re digging away,” Elisabeth concedes. “Yes.”

“Is it digging away?”

“Yes, my baby.”

“Is it mumma digging away?”

Elisabeth observes her shiny white nails. She feels, as she often does, that she is being surveilled. She imagines a semi-organic satellite prowling through low orbit, all its sensors and innocent blue eyes fixed on her, categorizing every action she takes: Good Mother or Bad Mother, the eternal exhausting ledger. It can be so hard to tell which is which.

“Mumma’s digging away,” she agrees.

She plunges her immaculate hand into the wet sand. She scoops some of the trickly mud onto Jack’s bare knee. He giggles. That used to be the only sound she cared about, that small, delightful burble, but these days it’s a decaying isotope. It should mean more than it ever did, but instead it has diminishing returns.

“I love you so much, little baby Jack,” she says, to make it truer. “Little bubba.”

Jack keeps digging, and his focus reminds her fleetingly of Benny. She is glad that he pays no attention to the sea, where a wobbling bridge of light now stretches from the scurrying foam all the way to a blue horizon. Looking at it gives Elisabeth a headache. She is glad that he pays no attention to the guards hauling the dead shambler past in a membranous bag.

The car carries them home, climbing the winding slope toward Elsie’s Peak until they reach the sleek ziggurat embedded halfway up. Elisabeth reads up and down the conversation thread with her brother, who has stopped responding, so might have already dropped his plan to come visit. Jack watches a cartoon in the smartglass window, a woman baking a cake.

The crusty metal gate slides open; the car parks itself and switches off. Elisabeth carries her son into the house, past the many bristling security systems that recognize them and turn away, suddenly embarrassed by their excessive zeal. The house is a bit of a fortress, in Benny’s words. The graceful warp of its architecture was calculated to create ideal angles for its hidden sensors, its nonlethal, but only recently legal, howlers.

Elisabeth knows that companies like her husband’s have had an absolute fucking field day since the shamblers started. She also knows that most of it is based in misdirection. Shamblers have no interest in outdoor pools or rain reservoirs, not here, where the saline ocean is near enough to smell. Shamblers have no interest in people or their habitations.

But security companies have always capitalized on fear, and at least it’s not paired with blatant racism this time around—she was planning to tell her brother that, to sound like she’s thought it all through. She sniffs Jack’s soft blonde head, trying for memory traces of his original baby scent, from back when his skull was hairless and oddly puckered, that scent she couldn’t stand to wash away for a whole week.

She sets him down on the playroom tiles; the nanny comes rolling out of its corner. Its belly screen is displaying the end of the cartoon from the car, the cake coming out of the oven with a big waft of steam. It does as good a job as a human nanny would. Perhaps better. Elisabeth adjusted its speech settings to throw in some Afrikaans and local idioms, so that’s the cultural bit taken care of. If Jack goes to school, he’ll fit right in.

She clears the smartglass window and looks out into the back garden. Most of it is gray cement swatched with carbon moss, but there’s also a square of bright green grass, lush and springy and barely big enough for two people to sit on. Beside that, the pool.

It’s been covered over for weeks now, ever since a stretch of cold misty mornings made her think the weather was finally turning. The heat overstayed, but the long summer daylight has gone. Even now, barely scraping four o’clock, the sky is darkening. A pale craterous moon hangs over the dusky sea.

She observes a dark blue insect stalking along the edge of the pool. Its opalescent wings flicker and retract. She thinks of a shambler’s colorful flukes, its branchia, and ringent pores. She recalls the whine of the buzzsaw and the dirt beneath her nails.

“House,” she says. “Run me a bath, please.”

Cold water, as cold as she can stand it. She remembers a boyfriend in uni who swore by icy showers in the morning, something about activating the mammalian diving reflex, doubling oxygen intake to the brain. Back then she privately thought he was a lunatic. She preferred scalding showers, letting the jet beat a little tattoo at the top of her spine. She only varied her routine when a red semicircle of skin started to peel away.

Now she slips into a tub that shocks the breath out of her and mottles her fingers purple. It shrinks her skin around her, knobbles it. She imagines the freezing bottom of the ocean, too deep for sunlight to touch. She shuts her eyes and holds her lungs and plunges her head under the surface. Her hair billows like anemone around her face.

For a moment, she pretends she is a shambler. Stripped of consciousness, purely limbic, a creature that drowns itself once and then disappears forever. It’s a dark heaven.

Jack’s warbling voice brings her back up. “Mumma? Where is you?”

He knows where she is; she told him and sat him outside the door with the nanny. “I’m right here, Jack,” she calls. “In the bathroom.”

She eye-traces her gleaming sanctuary: the polished vantablack floors, the prehensile jets of the shower, the small coves where harm-free towels and shampoo bars nest, each one lit from below with a soothing purple-blue light.

“Mumma?” Jack’s voice is edged with a sob. “Is you inna bathroom?”

“Yes, Jack,” she says. “I’m in the bathroom.”

Elisabeth values her privacy when she is bathing or shitting, and a mol of her relishes Jack’s predictable bouts of panic. His bafflement, when the center of his universe shifts out of sight. That makes her a Bad Mother.

“Mumma is in the bathroom,” the nanny adds, a soft synthesized voice with a singsong Western Cape accent. “Okay, Jack?”

“Is it inna bathroom?” Jack demands, seeking clarity, always.

“Yes, Jack.” Elisabeth shuts her eyes. “Mumma inna bathroom.”

“Come in?” Jack pleads. “Mumma?”

“Of course,” she says, because she is a Good Mother. “Come in, my baby.”

The door unchokes and slides open. Jack toddles inside, his blue eyes bright, distress forgotten. “Wash you!” he orders. “Wash you, Mumma.”

“Wash you, too, Jack,” she says.

She keeps her head above the water but makes herself stay in the tub until she feels pins and needles in her feet. Jack pushes a toy crocodile along the floor; its molded plastic feet click softly in the notches between the tiles. She shivers. Her teeth start to chatter.

Nights with Jack are long, fractured things. He rarely sleeps well, and when his dada is away it’s even rarer. Elisabeth marvels at this occasionally, the brutal mutation that Jack undergoes every evening, turning from a quiet angelic thing to a wailing monster. Sometimes it feels as though he is balancing his own ledger. Good Jack, Bad Jack.

More likely it’s the two-year sleep regression the nanny has warned her about. So she resigns herself to the dance:

Endure the crying for a minute, two minutes, pad into Jack’s room, comfort, nurse, rock, leave, climb into bed, drift, startle awake at his screams, back to Jack’s room, comfort, rock, leave, wait, wait, climb into bed, drift, startle awake at his call, wait, wait, back to Jack’s room, comfort, nurse, no, not yet, rock, leave, wait, climb into bed, drift, half-sleep, half-dream, startle awake at nothing—

It would be easier to let the nanny handle it. It can soothe him just as well as she can, and it could nurse him, too, if she equipped it properly. There’s a little gene lab in District Six that does custom wet nurses, hairless cat-sized things grown from your own helices, sprayed down with your own sweat and gut flora to ensure full oxytocin release.

Elisabeth envisions Jack suckling at a pale disembodied breast, a lactating tumor. It still makes her shudder, so she’ll press on, even though his teeth can turn razorous when she shifts him. She lays him down in his seesaw crib for the fourth, maybe fifth time. His face is still flushed from exertion, but his eyes are shut. She creeps back to her bed.

It would be easier to stay in his room, to fall asleep on the chair with him on her chest, but children have to learn to be alone in the dark. It’s normal now, even if it was a death sentence ten thousand years ago. Elisabeth suspects this is why night terror calcified in the genome. All the babies who didn’t scream were carried off by leopards.

She rubs her face into her soft cool pillow and entertains the image, a serene little baby smiling up at a puzzled predator, who then shrugs its bony shoulders and swallows it whole. She thinks in cartoons lately, from watching the nanny’s screen so often. She is a Bad Mother for her sleepy giggle. Even animated violence against children should probably de-clench a deep maternal horror in her soul.

Jack is quiet for a long time, so long she is compelled to roll over and observe the undulating monitor that tracks his breathing. He is breathing. She drifts.

Someone is in the back garden. She hears it in her dream first—the scuffle of feet; a soft grunt—then the neural glacier calves and splashes into reality. She wakes up with every square inch of her skin prickling cold. She pictures a fully kitted-out technothief scaling the trellis, slamming some vicious new malware through the house security system, rendering all the sensors and howlers useless at once.

She gropes under the bed for a biolocked box. It tastes her fingers and slides open. The gun inside is an Amazon Shootist, supposedly small and easy to carry. The weight drags at the tendons in her wrist. She carries it in both hands as she slips toward the bedroom door.

She replays the sim in her mind’s eye, remembering the cheery ex-soldier who emphasized the importance of breathing, said the lungs are part of the mechanism, same as the muzzle and the trigger and the finger. Her lungs seem to have stopped working. That’s unlucky.

The smartglass in the hall shows no intruder detected. Her heart clubs her ribs. She vacillates between options: barricade herself in Jack’s room and call emergency services—will the call go through, if the house is hacked? Or go to the back garden, to increase the space between Jack and the intruder, and scare them away. Or shoot them. Either way, the decision has to hinge on Jack’s safety, in order for her to be a Good—

“You’re fucking joking,” she mutters. The cam feed from the back garden shows a slender barefoot man with a gray duffel bag on one shoulder. He’s licking his thumb and rubbing it impatiently against the door to the detached guest room.

Elisabeth looks at the top right corner of the smartglass, and sees no intruder detected, but one guest logged. She is trembling. Her whole body is slick with sweat, enough to coat a dozen artificial wet nurses, though she doubts Jack would like this particular smell. She returns to her bedroom and puts the gun back in its biolocked box. Pries at the hinges, makes sure it’s sealed.

She goes to the garden door to let her brother in.

“Oh,” Will says when he sees her through the window. His voice is muffled. “Hey, Eli.”

She slides open the metal grate and unlocks the door with her slimed thumb. She steps out into the garden. The carbon moss is cool and damp under her bare feet. Will must have taken his shoes off to wriggle his toes in it.

“Here I was, trying so hard not to wake you and Jack,” he says. “Whoops.”

“Whoopsie,” Elisabeth agrees, but she’s barely annoyed anymore. It feels good to see Will, gives her a rush of relief and familial chemicals.

He’s skinny and sunbrowned, how he usually was when they were kids, which means he is drinking less. He’s wearing lime green trousers with a baroque print and an unbuttoned gray shirt that matches his Swiss travel bag. He still corrects his crooked face by holding one brow up slightly, which in turn deepens the familiar crease on his forehead. His eyelashes are still long and dark.

The older he gets, the more he looks like their dead dad.

“I took an earlier flight,” he says. “From Timisuara.”

“You didn’t message me.”

“I didn’t bring any tech,” he says. “I’m on a cleanse. But your gate remembered me, so I figured I could sneak straight to the guest bed.” He holds out his arms. “I’m fully inoculated. If you’d like a hug.”

Their family has never been much for physical contact. She wonders if the offer is related to his tech cleanse, and to the fact that his shoes are nowhere in sight, or if he’s microdosing MDMA again. She leans forward and hugs him badly, both arms overtop of his. He doesn’t cling back the way Jack does. He mostly just stands, while one trapped hand pats awkwardly at her hip bone.

It feels good anyway. She hasn’t touched anyone but Jack in ages.

“Glad you could come,” she says, and pulls back.

“Me too.”

She puts her thumb against the guest room door, then teaches it to remember Will’s as well. From inside the house, Jack starts to wail. The nanny’s alert skitters inverse across the window.

“Good luck,” her brother says, rubbing at his bristly cheek. “Love you, Eli.”

“Love you, Will,” she says back, on instinct.

He goes into the guest room and shuts it behind him. She stays in the garden a moment longer, relishing the cool breeze blowing in off the ocean, the scattered stars overhead. It’s important to crystallize these small moments where everything is going to be okay.

She wakes up the next morning when Will bounces into her room with a very nervous Jack stuck to his hip. Jack is still wearing the penguin onesie she bought in Simon’s Town; small animated rockhoppers waddle across the fleece fabric. Will is still wearing yesterday’s clothes.

“All work and no Jack makes me a dull boy,” he sings. “Look how big he is!”

Jack squirms toward her, wriggling through the air, his anxious smile on the verge of breaking.

“Last time he was just a little pupa,” Will says, with his chin-jutting grin. He dumps Jack onto her blanketed legs and steps back. “All he did was sleep and shit. Now he’s a little person, isn’t he? Aren’t you, Jack?”

“No,” Jack says, and cling-wraps himself to her. She hauls him up her body, to her chest. He relaxes but doesn’t take his eyes off the interloper.

“He recognized me,” Will says. “Knows me from pictures, I think.”

“He knows all his animals,” Elisabeth says, rubbing Jack’s small hot back. “Don’t you, bubba? You know Uncle Willy?”

Jack gnaws softly at her shoulder, one of his ways of displacing nerves. “Unka Weedy,” he mumbles, then, emboldened: “Mumma? Is it Unka Weedy?”

“Yes, my baby,” she says. “It’s Unka Weedy. He’s going to stay for a little bit.” She rearranges the blonde nimbus of Jack’s hair. “How long, do you think?” she asks.

Will blinks. “However long you want,” he says. “I’m happy to work from here. Get a little sea, a little sun.”

Elisabeth hears Alea Rose-Kellerman’s small knowing sigh. She tries not to let it taint things. Nobody does anything altruistically. There is always some benefit, some Goldberg mechanism shuttling dopamine to the receptor.

“This place is actually perfect,” Will says, folding his bony arms. “I saw cases are up here. And that’s what I’m into, lately.” He smiles down at Jack, but his eyes are elsewhere. “The shamblers.”

The word plunges Elisabeth into freezing saltwater. Her breath catches. She barely manages to come back up. “Oh,” she says. “Well. Plenty of them.”

It feels strange to have another person in the house, one who takes up roughly the same cubed air as Benny but in a radically different way. She doesn’t host often. Nobody does, these days. It adds another slick layer to her usual feeling of being monitored, scrutinized, as if her brother is a spy sent to evaluate her mothering in person even though he doesn’t know a fucking thing about it.

She packs away the paranoia and focuses on her schedule. Friday means doing Monday’s grocery order, rotating Jack’s toys, putting out the glass milk jars for the afternoon drone to pick up, working through another half of a therapy module, deep cleaning the guest bathroom, experimenting again with implementing an early quiet time for Jack, to counteract his bad nights, and exercising in the living room with a bubbly plyometrics instructor.

That, and a dozen other small things that have accumulated on the smartglass. Now that Will is here she feels more impetus to do them, the way she might feel on a stage with an audience. She has to keep reminding herself that Will doesn’t care if she is the Good Mother or Bad Mother, that Will is more concerned with his own ledger.

For instance: he has deduced his nephew’s favorite animal, and is now tracing beautiful purple pachyderms all across the playroom floor. Jack watches from a safe distance, one hand resting on the nanny’s puffy pneumatic arm, but he is no longer nervous. Will was always good with children.

Will looks up. “Thought he was saying air vent, at first. Not elephant.”

“They’re homonyms for him,” Elisabeth says, arranging the clanking milk jars in their box. “And he likes both.”

“What else should we color, Jack?” Will asks.

Jack lurches forward, still holding onto the nanny. “Effen again,” he says, peering down at the playroom tiles.

“You’re stifling my creativity,” Will says. “One more elephant, then something else. Okay?”

Elisabeth lugs the box outside, and when she returns there are silhouettes with rippling flukes and tendrils making their way across the floor.

The day evaporates and she barely thinks about Benny. Will slips away while she’s putting Jack to sleep for the first stretch of night—she hears the gate scrape. By the time Jack flicks out, and she emerges into the dim-lit hall, her brother is back with a bottle of wine clutched in each fist. She recognizes a Fat Bastard label. The other is a biodynamic imported from Greenland.

“It’s not just a novelty anymore,” Will preempts. “These northern wineries, they grow good shit.”

Elisabeth puts a finger to her lips, then directs him into the kitchen. The nanny is cleaning crusted oatmeal off the floor. There is a drop zone beneath Jack’s highchair; its circumference has widened and shrunk as he adjusts to feeding himself. Will stows one of the bottles in the gelfridge and uncaps the Bastard.

“There are proper glasses in the corner cupboard,” Elisabeth says, spotting the tumblers he’s grabbed for them. “Second shelf.”

“We’re not proper,” Will says.

The chardonnay sloshes and swirls into the tumblers. Elisabeth has tried so hard not to drink around Jack, for fear of embedding some deep tragic memory of his mother as a stumbling lush, but now that doesn’t matter. And she needs to drink, so she can tell her brother why.

“Cheers,” he says, and manages to clink glass before she raises it to her lips. She gulps the pale wine down. One swallow. Two. It feels like pouring water on parched soil; she imagines a dark bloom spreading then imploding on dry sand. Then the tumbler is empty, and she needs more. Will only looks startled for an instant before he refills her.

She isn’t tipsy yet; nothing’s been absorbed, but the act of drinking gives her permission on a symbolic level. Permission to be open and truthful. She stares hard at the space over Will’s narrow shoulder. She takes a deep breath.

“I don’t think Benny is coming back,” she says. “We’ve been fighting and fighting. He was meant to come back last week.”

“Fuck.” Will takes a deep drink. Some trickles off the corner of his mouth. “Is he sleeping around again? He went with Cora, right? Clara? Whatever her name is.” He grimaces. “That’s the only reason people do business trips in the flesh these days, isn’t it.”

“It’s not that,” Elisabeth says. “Jack was misdiagnosed.”

And hearing it in the air, in her own voice, opens a trapdoor in her stomach and puts her guts in freefall.

“How?” Will asks, at an unusual pitch. “The meds were working, I thought. I thought that he’s been—hasn’t he been—”

“They were working on one thing, but not on the underlying genetic condition,” Elisabeth says. “The labs have been busy. For obvious reasons. So we only just got the new diagnosis.” She drains her tumbler, swills it around her mouth for the faint sting. “One more good year, maybe, then his body starts in on itself,” she says. “Don’t ask about options. Please.”

Will knuckles furiously at one eye. Gives a shaky laugh. “And Benjamin fucked off to Perth?”

“Adelaide,” she says. “But it doesn’t matter, Will. He doesn’t matter. I just need to figure out what’s best for Jack.”

She takes the wine bottle by the neck and heads out to the garden.

They drink.

She shows Will the fig tree, squat and arachnoid, that deposits lumpy green spheres all across the cement. She tells him how Jack likes to pick them up and carry them to the rain gutter, and say that he’s making guava soup, because she thought it was a guava tree when it was first transplanted, and called it that, and Jack absorbed the wrong word into his spongey little brain.

“He’s really clever, isn’t he?” Will asks, stepping over the death-shaped gap. He tips the dregs of the chardonnay into his mouth, emptying the bottle. “Verbal for his age. I think.”

Elisabeth pauses and listens for a thirsty cry, because speaking about Jack often seems to conjure him, but hears nothing. “Yes,” she says, stepping over the same gap. “Really clever, really verbal. Something something percentile.”

Will nods, then points his chin at the pool. “Is it filled?”

“It’s not heated.”

He rubs his feet against each other. “Filled, though?”

“Yeah.”

She unlocks it for him, pushing her thumb to the sun-bleached screen. The cover folds up into itself, worming backward to reveal the turquoise water. The scent of chlorine wafts off the top. Will rolls his pant legs up his hairy shins and perches himself on the edge, slaps the spot beside him. She remembers they once snuck over a neighbor’s fence as children, to swirl their feet in a similar pool and whisper about their transgressions.

She joins him, but angled so she can see the smartglass window, where the nanny will send its notification if Jack wakes up. They talk about school days and swim meets, and then the conversation collapses inward, as all conversations do these days, toward the omnipresent black hole. It’s still better than talking about Jack, who will die, or Benny, who is a coward.

“I saw them putting in new barriers in Muizenberg, all along the strand,” Will says. “Trying to plug up the whole coastline.”

“There was one at the beach yesterday,” Elisabeth confesses. “It nearly made it to the water, right there with everybody watching. Which makes you wonder, doesn’t it.” She slurps from her tumbler. “How many of them do make it, where nobody’s watching.”

“Many,” Will says. “But once they’re in, they’re hard to count, because they dive so fucking deep. They grow those—cavities.” He punches tiny holes in the air with his finger. “Lets them handle pressures that would burst us. Burst our organs.”

Elisabeth feels a delicious shiver up her spine, chining through her back. “What do you think they’re doing down there?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” Will says, because no one does. “It’s possible they get eaten by colossal squid.” He kicks one foot out of the water, spraying drops toward the other end of the pool. They plink and ripple. “I like to think they’re building a city.”

“They don’t have brains, though. That’s the first bit to go.”

“They have something,” Will says. “They have big nerve bundles, at least.”

The pool becomes a temptation. She closes it, telling her brother that it will attract mosquitoes, then goes into the house to retrieve the other bottle of wine. She lingers at the smartglass for a moment, watches Jack’s small body breathing. When she returns to the garden, Will is dragging the two mesh folding chairs from behind the rain tank.

She wipes the spiderwebs off them, and they sit in the middle of the garden under a cloud-cloaked nebula. She feels drunk.

“It was rude of them, wasn’t it?” She points one finger upward to indicate whatever species or mechanism or individual is to blame. “Dropping a tailored gene-virus on our heads, right when we were finally getting used to the homegrown sort.”

“Could’ve been an accident,” Will mutters, and she realizes with mild distaste that he shares one of Alea Rose-Kellerman’s pet opinions. “Could’ve been them trying to say hello.”

“Suppose,” Elisabeth says. “Do you know what some people are doing, though?”

“Yes, I know,” Will says, eyes fixed to the dark sky.

They drink.

Between her usual bouts with Bad Jack, during which she feels she is more tender and loving than usual, which might mean she should drink more often, Elisabeth has wild and joyous dreams:

In one of them she attends a party at a baroque hotel whose occupants have been under quarantine for years. She attends arm in arm with Alea Rose-Kellerman, both of them attired in striped swimming costumes, their fictional enmity dimmed to a fictional annoyance.

The maître d’, who tries his best to keep everyone’s spirits up with these nightly parties, appears in triplicate. It is unclear whether he is an identical triplet, and shares his managerial responsibilities with his two brothers, or if he has somehow distributed his consciousness across three perfect vat-grown copies of his own body.

The party is a tired affair, as it’s been going for years, and Elisabeth plans her egress. She observes the festivities from a lofted gallery. She creeps toward the doors, which still project a hazard-yellow warning holo but have been thrown open to tempt the velvet breeze inside. A clearly underage girl looks up from her metallic wine glass.

Elisabeth darts for the exit. The maître d’ calls on his bumbling nephew to stop her; the boy hacks at the air with a knife but she feels no terror, only exhilaration, as she ducks around him and bursts out into the wet and windy night. The city is an architectural mishmash of Zaragoza and Luxembourg, wide cosmopolitan avenues and winding cobblestone alleys, all of it impaled by a diagonal canal.

Her swimming costume needlessly becomes a wet suit as she dives in. The canal is shallow; she scrapes the silty bottom and her activity stirs microorganisms in the mud to glow a radioactive green. She prowls along the bottom, moving against a soft artificial current, and feels no tightness in her lungs. She revels in the escape, in the thrill of civil disobedience.

The canal is deep. She swims down, down, into the crushing cold. The microorganisms light her way, floating in orbit around her. She has no need to breathe. She swims through an ancient sea that teems with trilobites and stalk-eyed protofish, and then finds herself in another city altogether. Slantwise streets and crooked ziggurats, all hewn from the rocky seabed, arrayed around a volcanic vent.

The underwater city is empty, but she knows the shamblers have only just ducked out to get a few things, and intend to be back shortly, so—

They take a day trip out to Cape Point, since it was shut down the last time Will was here. The nanny plays Jack his shows while Elisabeth packs the diaper bag and fills two shiny red thermoses with Zimbabwean coffee. Will volunteers to make sandwiches. He lays two columns of puffy white bread on the countertop, alternates swoops of smooth peanut butter with smears of grape jelly, then slaps and stacks them.

The systematic motions make his bony hands look exactly like their mother’s. Elisabeth thinks they will probably talk about her the next time they drink.

For now, she bags the sandwiches and supplements them with hummus and sliced fresh cucumbers and a wedge of crumbling goat cheese. She fills a lidded cup with animal-shaped crackers, which include elephants, but no shamblers, to hold Jack over on the drive. She checks and rechecks the diaper bag.

“You are born exploding,” Will says, triumphant.

Elisabeth hunts for the infant sunblock. “Pardon?”

“By JJ Manks,” Will says. “That poem you were trying to remember the name of, the other night. ‘You Are Born Exploding,’ by JJ Manks.”

“I don’t recall.”

“You don’t recall trying to recall.”

She finds the infant sunblock stranded inexplicably on top of the fridge and adds it to the bag. “I don’t recall trying to recall,” she says, hoping she was not thinking of Jack when she asked about the poem. “Are you ready?”

She swoops Jack off the floor, and they load into the car, which is already switched on and purring. The bright white chassis lances early morning sun in all directions. She has a gnawing feeling as they pull away. She tries to guess, from its inchoate shape, which important task or object she has forgotten. There is always one.

The house seals up behind them. The armored gate rasps shut. Cams swivel on stalks. Hidden howlers prime for intrusion. It always feels as though the house is relieved by their departure and doesn’t want them back.

The drive is hemagogic, a beautiful winding pilgrimage around the mountain’s curve, a vantage point from which the waves seem like foaming munitions launched from across the world, streaking inexorably toward their targets through a blue-green sea. From above the beach barriers are plastic toys, barely worth noticing. No shamblers are visible.

Then south, through Glencairn and Simon’s Town, south, plunging down the coast, sliding inland, outland. Lush wind-whipped grass gives way to an endless plain of scrub, purple-red punctured with tufts of acid green. The sky swells with no mountain to stop it. Elisabeth wonders why she doesn’t do this often, why she spends so much time immured.

“Is it monkey?” Jack queries.

They are passing a sign that once warned of the presence of baboons, and now assures visitors that all baboons have been chipped. The diagram depicts an angular skull in black silhouette, a small radiation-yellow square inside it, even though Benny told her the actual chip is too small to see.

The cerebral modification that binds their behavior is a matter of nanosurgery: a little drone injects them with a little biobot, which nestles in the prefrontal cortex and inhibits aggression toward any human-shaped bipeds. Similar tech is now being trialed on prisoners of war and climate refugees.

“Yes, clever Jack,” she says. “It is monkey.”

“Fucking beautiful out here,” Will says. “So much sky.”

The car parks on a stretch of sand lined with empty cooking pits and picnic tables. She pulls Jack from his seat in a shower of crumbs, all the animal crackers pestled by his chubby fist and clumsy mouth. Will grabs the diaper bag and the cooler bag. Beyond the sand, there is a field of sea-slimed rocks. Beyond the rocks, there is a bobbing black carpet of seaweed. Beyond the seaweed, there is gray ocean marked by a single fishing boat.

“Is that Lion’s Head?” Will asks, pointing his chin beyond the ocean, to a mountain half-digested by cloud.

“Yes, clever Will,” she says. “That is Lion’s Head.”

He swings the cooler bag so it collides with her non-Jack hip. It feels good to amuse herself, to amuse someone else, to say things carelessly. Her ongoing conversation with Benny, which twines ambiguous texts with strained voice messages, feels like dissecting a thermonuclear bomb. She showed part of it to her brother when they were drunk. He called Benny a self-obsessed cunt, then apologized and changed it to self-obsessed anal polyp.

They sit at the splintery wooden picnic table and eat. Jack is more interested by the rocks. He points at them over and over, his insistent finger smeared with peanut butter, until Will volunteers to spot him so she can finish her meal for once. She allows it. When the cucumbers crack and gush between her laser-scoured teeth, she tries not to picture Jack’s small skull crumpling against wet stone.

But he’s a cautious baby, picking his way slowly and methodically across the convex obstacles, and Will is hovering behind him, ready to swoop the prongs of his hands beneath Jack’s armpits and lever him to safety. Elisabeth observes them from a distance while she eats two sandwiches.

Their exploration triggers an exodus of silverfish, swarming and scuttling. Jack gives a gleeful shout. He fears dogs and cats and often humans, but not insects. Her brother is less gleeful; his spine stiffens, and he scoops Jack into the air.

“Eli!” he hollers, but now there is a hint of grin in his voice. “Come look at this!”

She pins the empty sandwich bag to the table with her thermos, so no sudden gust of sea breeze will send it dancing out of reach and add another atmosphere of pressure to her crushing enviroguilt, then she joins them on the rocks. It’s not so slippery as it looked. The tops are mostly dry, crusted bone-white by the sun.

Silverfish scurry away from her every step, which means it is not the silverfish Will wants her to see. When she reaches the spot, the sea-stink is joined by something stronger, oilier, that crawls into her mouth and nose. Will and Jack look up. They share a single face: childish, delighted, fascinated.

A beautiful carcass is strewn over the rocks. The half-shattered exoskeleton still holds its deep rich hues, indigo bleeding to crimson bleeding to violet. Fleshy tendrils trail from sundered sockets, connective tissue a familiar anatomy-book red. The dead flukes, reminiscent of an overgrown yam she once found in the back of the cupboard, sway and shiver in the salt air.

Jack points with his smeary finger. “Shambla, mumma,” he says.

She remembers that the baboons were updated to hunt them.

In the week that follows, the dead shambler intrudes upon her dreams. It becomes her companion on odd adventures, scenes spliced from Jack’s cartoons and older neural clutter.

They journey across a brilliant white super-surface inhabited by naked nomads. They go to the beach, but remain inside a striped canvas bathing machine so as not to alarm the other swimmers. They visit a carnival where the carousel mounts are real horses, dead and impaled, their bloated tawny corpses tacked to the mirrored floor like insect specimens.

Most of the dreams dissolve and leave no trace, punctured either by Jack’s cries in the night or by spears of sunlight in the morning, but she feels the shape of their absence as she goes about her day, puts her fingers in the small private perforations. She starts to follow the news more closely. She observes the waves and wakes of the xenovirus, how she did in the early days, before the terror sluiced away, and the inoculation wetware shipped.

Emergency measures have tightened again, which means the border is shut and Benny can’t come back even if he wanted to. She stops responding to his messages and rejects two of his calls. The third she answers by muscle memory, distracted, and only remembers their relationship has imploded when his flushed-red face appears. His nose hairs are snowcapped with coke.

He demands to see Jack, seeming surprised he has not thought of it before, so Elisabeth mutes him and takes him to Jack’s bedroom and shows him Jack, who is sleeping with a plastic orange sippie-cup of water clutched in his hand like a talisman. She shows him, not sarcastically, the regular pattern of Jack’s breathing on the smartglass. The digital undulation is always comforting.

Tears start streaming down Benny’s cheeks. He ends the call without saying goodbye.

Just as Benny can’t reenter the country, Will can’t exit it, but her brother doesn’t seem to mind. He orders materials—vat-grown vellum canvas, turpentine, brushes—from a specialty shop in Constantia, then tracks their progress for a long afternoon, eyes fixed to the map, one bony hand wringing the neck of his shirt. The flock of delivery drones arrives intact, having successfully skirted a bushfire and two riots.

Will is not precious or secretive about his painting, which Elisabeth has come to believe might be its own sort of affectation, but she has been exposed to the process enough times that the slow layering of color and shadow no longer interests her much. She goes for days without glancing at his canvas, which he usually establishes in the back garden but sometimes packs away for a climb up Elsie’s Peak.

She has her own concerns: adjusting the grocery order to account for an additional adult, replacing the air filters in Jack’s bedroom, researching and cataloguing superior therapy options to the gratingly algorithmic modules she abandoned, disposing of any bath toys with internal spaces that might harbor stagnant water and dangerous bacteria, writing at least one sentence each day in order to anchor herself in time. She often finds herself transcribing the news.

“There are more and more of them,” she says one night, singing her finger along the edge of her wine glass. “These anthrocide cults.”

Will stares at her. His swollen pupils strike her as magnetic seeds, pushed by thumb into yielding soil. “It’s a way of resuming control,” he says, setting his vapor pipe down, “of an uncontrollable situation.”

“It’s mass suicide,” she says. “If they would just wait a bit longer, for the market cycle to bring wetware costs down—things will normalize. You know? They always normalize.”

“Sure, Eli,” Will says. “But some of these people, they’ve lost it all already. Their whole family’s wandered off into the ocean. They’re angry, and they’re desperate, and nobody knows, really, what it’s like to be a shambler—”

“Looks awful,” she says. “The way they crawl and gasp.”

“Only until they get to the sea.” Will repacks his pipe, hands soft and methodical. “When they dive, it’s quite fucking beautiful, actually. There’s a spot—” He peers at his work. “Oh. These cartridges, they slot the other way.”

“A spot?” Elisabeth echoes.

Will blinks. “Yeah,” he says, suddenly secretive. “Yeah, you know how I’ve been hiking a bit? Just up that little mountain?”

“Elsie’s Peak.”

“Yeah.” He chews his inner cheek. “Well, there’s this overhang, up near the lighthouse. Stretches right out over the sea. And yesterday, I saw something.”

“Shamblers,” Elisabeth guesses, with her heart pittering, palpitating.

“A pair of them. Yes.” Will sucks at his pipe. Coughs. “They dropped off the end, and when I got closer, I saw them down below. In the waves. Swimming a little circle around each other. Then they dove down, and I lost sight of them.”

“You should tell someone,” Elisabeth says. “Get that spot flagged and blocked.”

Will wiggles his jaw. “I don’t think I should,” he says. “In fact, I sort of wish that we’d leave well enough alone. Let them get to the water. Let them dive. Let them do whatever it is they do in peace. If they’re gone, they’re gone, right?”

She pictures the aquatic metropolis.

Jack wails.

Thursday arrives and Elisabeth goes to the beach instinctively, in the way of migratory birds. The streets along the strand are dead empty. Menacing nanocarbon jellyfish drift overhead, security drones recommissioned from guarding empty warehouses in order to patrol the waterline. She coaxes the pram out of the back of the car and places Jack inside, even though lately Jack prefers to walk whenever possible.

The man at the gate is not pleased to see them. “Recreational use of the beach is not recommended,” he says, eyes over her shoulder, “for purposes of safety.”

“But it’s permitted,” Elisabeth says, icily, “as we are fully inoculated.”

The biofilter shows uncontaminated blue. The gate staggers open to let them through. There are only two other people on the sand: Alea Rose-Kellerman and Nils, their human nanny conspicuously absent. Elisabeth is full of regret, but the gate has already wheezed shut behind her. She guides the pram forward and gives a jaunty wave.

Alea flowers a smile. “Hello, Liz,” she says. “Awfully crowded today.”

“Nightmarish,” Elisabeth says back.

“How’s baby Jack?” Alea asks.

Jack hears and wriggles upright in the pram. “Hello?”

Alea laughs, claps her hands together in delight like some sort of seal. “Hello, Jack,” she says. “Come play with Nils! They’re building a mud castle.”

Elisabeth lifts Jack out of the pram and deposits him beside Nils, whose new swimming costume is made to look like a starfish. The two stare for a moment, then ignore each other, each of them retreating to their own privately contracted mud projects. Elisabeth attempts something similar by unfolding her reader and fussing with the screen settings.

“So poor Benjamin is still stuck in Perth,” Alea says. “Shame.”

Her heart gives an adrenal jolt and stammer because there is no way for the Kellerman-Roses to know whether Benny is back or not. Then she recognizes the incorrect city, and realizes what has happened.

“I met your brother,” Alea says, unnecessarily. “We chatted for a moment. He’s actually quite grounded, for a creative, isn’t he?”

Will is always fucking meeting people. He has already met a depressed fashion model, while picking up coffee from one of Main Road’s last surviving cafés, and a retired sommelier, while hiking up to the derelict lighthouse. Now he has met Alea Rose-Kellerman, too.

“I thought he would have a more interesting perspective on the world,” Alea expounds. “Maybe it all goes into his work and none is left over.”

“Very possible,” Elisabeth says. “Where is your nanny?”

Alea’s perfect face crumples. “Oh,” she says. “Oh, oh.”

Elisabeth wants to say did you only just notice or immunomods seem to be getting pricier and pricier, don’t they, but then she sees a wet gleam in Alea’s eyes, nearly as incongruous there as it was in Benny’s.

“She was visiting family in Cape Flats,” Alea says, “and was infected. I honestly don’t know how to feel.”

It seems obvious to Elisabeth—she has always known how she ought to feel, even when the feelings do not arrive—but she waits. Jack reaches over and cautiously smears mud across Nils’ chest. Nils is amenable. Alea collects herself.

“It was voluntary,” she says. “She was one of that crowd who stole boats and went out to sea and infected themselves with syringes. Which I suppose is horrible.” She pauses. “Can you keep a secret, Liz?”

For a moment Elisabeth inhabits a malformed quantum branch where she is Liz, Alea’s drab but dependable friend whose silences are due to lack of material, whose limited social circle makes her an ideal confidante. It’s unnerving.

“I can,” she says. “Yes.”

Alea takes a trembly breath. “Sometimes I wish I could do that. That I could be a shambler.” She snuffs out a laugh. “Mad, isn’t it?”

A tenuous filament stretches between them, connecting them for the very first time. Alea Rose-Kellerman has said the words that make the rounds so often inside Elisabeth’s skull. This feels momentous. It might trigger a montage of friendship, romance, even criminality.

“I know you’re quite happy where you are,” Alea says, wiping at her eyes. “With the hubby and the baby and whatnot. Which is lovely, Liz. Lovely. But me, I’ve always wanted something—grander.”

You fucking cartoon, Elisabeth says in her head.

“That is mad,” she says in the air, making her voice kind and mild. “Wanting to be a shambler. And you ought to seek help, Alea.”

Alea nods sadly. Elisabeth feels exhausted on a cellular level.

Will posits it to her, and she agrees to invite the retired sommelier over the following evening. He is sunbaked and silver-haired and wears a daring romper open-chested. His puppy has a brief discussion with the Rose-Kellermans’ dog, then falls silent, content to chew at his graceful hand. They are drinking ciders in the back garden—Will refused to select a wine, saying it could only be a trap—while Jack collects fallen figs.

The air is fresh and electric, and it seems impossible that the world is ending, but that is where the conversation invariably leads.

“You see, this is not like the other plagues and pandemics,” says the ex-sommelier, in a faint Romanian accent. “This is their photo negative. Their chiral opposite.”

“Well, it came by artificial meteor,” Will says, with a buttery smile. “That’s quite unique.”

“It came with purpose,” their guest says. “In my opinion, it’s a gift.”

“How do you figure?” Elisabeth asks, more bluntly than usual.

“In my opinion,” the man repeats, “humanity has been offered a way to save itself.” This prompts her to verify, again, that the front gate’s biofilter reported him clean. “To save itself from itself,” he continues, stroking the small bones of his dog’s head, “and this time, the downtrodden lead the way.”

Will gives an alarmed smile. “That’s quite the idea.”

“First shall be last, last shall be first, et cetera.” Their guest places the dog in his lap. “We left the poor behind, over and over, but now they finally get to leave us behind.”

“By becoming monstrous eldritch crayfish things,” Elisabeth says. “Such luck.”

“By growing iridescent armor and returning to our primeval birthplace,” the ex-sommelier says. “They are safe in the ocean while the old world burns. Or they would be, if we stopped senselessly hunting them down.”

“Agreed on that count,” Will says. “It’s barbaric. The containment programs are barbaric.”

The dog whines. The ex-sommelier nods. “And who’s to say, what is monstrous or not monstrous? We only see their exteriors.”

“Nobody knows what it’s like to be a shambler,” Will choruses.

“Or perhaps they do know,” their guest says. His wrinkled eyes twinkle. “Perhaps they do know, those scientists who chop the metamorphized to pieces and run electrodes though their limbs, and they are madly jealous. Why else would we try so hard to halt this exodus?”

“It’s not an exodus,” Elisabeth says flatly. “It’s a virus.” She scoops Jack into her arms. “The people who turn shambler are dead. Their bodies just get repurposed.”

“Impossible to know!” the ex-sommelier crows. “The shamblers do not communicate with the unchanged, but they have been seen to act in cooperation, to move in groups—”

“It’s Jack’s bedtime,” Elisabeth interjects. “It was lovely to meet you.”

“And equally lovely to meet you, Elisabeth,” their guest says, beaming. “Goodnight, little Jack.” He swigs from his cider and turns to Will. “So, this painting. You will show me?”

Elisabeth imagines the scenario in which she putters away, puts Jack down, reemerges an hour later to hear drunken giggling, to see a silver head leaning close to Will’s dark one. She feels no obligation to help her brother get his cock in. She dislikes the idea of them discussing shamblers without her, maybe discussing her without her.

“He won’t,” she says. “I need his help with Jack, you see.” She gives the ex-sommelier an eyeless smile. “You can leave through the garden gate.”

Their guest looks affronted for only a moment, then looks sad and wise instead, burdened by his own enlightenment. “Of course,” he says, gathering the dog in his arms, but before he reaches the garden gate, he performs an elegant turn and speaks over his shoulder. “We should not fear the metamorphosis,” he says. “Best of luck in the new world.”

He departs, and Elisabeth waits for Will to apologize for befriending a lunatic and bringing him over for ciders. Instead, her brother stares at the fig tree and wipes the moisture from the bottom of his bottle with one bunch-sleeved fist.

“He makes some good points,” Will says mildly. “There is a certain allure. The unearthliness of it, I suppose. The mystery.” He gledges at her. “There has to be, or there wouldn’t be so many voluntary infections. All these people pouring into the sea.”

“Goodnight, Will,” Elisabeth says in monotone. “Love you.”

Before she begins her nightly joust with Jack, who is one day closer to death, she detours to her brother’s room. His canvas is on the bed, and when she flicks on the light, she is hardly surprised to see the silhouette of a shambler, painted in meaty reds and purples, emerging through moon-slashed waters. It’s so beautiful her traitorous throat aches.

A spike in the infection rate, accompanied by a spike in violent unrest, returns them to a full lockdown. Benny’s bristling house becomes a fortress becomes a prison, and Elisabeth fears it will become an asylum next. Her dreams are more vivid than ever. Sometimes they arrive in daylight, dorsal fins rising from her subconscious, circling. Brief flashes of something razorous beneath.

Will is acting strangely. He stalks all around the house, a gaunt tiger in a menagerie, and gnaws at childhood memories Elisabeth has already forgotten. It gets worse when he drinks, and he drinks often now.

“The game with the box,” he says, with febrile eyes. “The game we played in the basement. You don’t remember? We called it the change-you box.”

Jack is asleep. They are in the kitchen again, with a chilled bottle of pinot grigio erupting from the tabletop between them, turned symbolic by the fact that Elisabeth has decided not to drink with him anymore. An impassable landmark.

“There was a saucer we would take down there with us,” he says. “We would sneak it out of the china cabinet. It had blue anemones on it. We would drink water out of that, say it was potions, then go underneath the change-you box.”

Her brother’s words trigger neural sheet lightning, and she sees it: they are children, playing on a cold concrete floor in an unfinished basement with plywood ribs for a ceiling and bare bulbs tugged to life by string. They take turns going underneath a big cardboard box, and sometimes Will wants the both of them to go under together, but she doesn’t want to do that.

“Blue flowers,” she says. “Not anemones.”

Something is wrong with Jack. His temperature is not elevated; his oximeter readings are normal, but he is pale, tetchy, easily upset, and when he throws his fits, he refuses to be comforted. A dozen digital consults tell her it is too early for his condition to be rearing its head. They assure her, over and over, that this is only a blip and not the beginning of the end.

Today, instead of wailing his distress into her shoulder and trying to burrow inside her chest, he staggers to the corner behind the modular couch and huddles there.

“Come here, little bubba.” She wedges herself behind the couch with him, holding out her arms. “Come here, my love. Is you thirsty?”

Jack shakes his golden head.

“Mumma munk?” Elisabeth suggests, even though it is the afternoon.

Jack is briefly conflicted but shakes his head again.

It hits her in the gut. She knows that Jack is likely sponging up all her fear, observing it in the subtleties of her body language, tasting it in her milk. She knows dwelling on that will only make her more anxious, birthing an unstoppable feedback loop, and the prospect of entering that loop also makes her anxious.

The whole thing is fucked, and it’s because she is weak. Unstable. She is the Bad Mother.

Unless it’s something else.

The suspicion is so horrible and enormous that she can’t look at it directly. She has to feel her way around the barbed edges, replaying every interaction between Will and Jack, replaying the half-forgotten games in the basement. The possibility numbs her. Dizzies her. Then it flenses her open, a raw scarlet pain in every part of her.

She backs away from Jack, her hands and knees trembling in tandem. She tells the smartglass to pull up every instance of Will and Jack together without her. She watches without breathing. Slowly, slowly, with each innocent interaction that passes, her suspicion is exchanged for guilt. She has done another bad thing.

But then, two weeks ago, Jack toddles inside Will’s room. Her brother is holding something in a bag. He notices the intrusion, laughs. The chuckle comes crunchy with static. No telling mumma, he says, and puts the bag under his pillow. Elisabeth feels a jolt of fear, another of fury. She told Will her secret, but her brother is keeping one from her.

She goes to the guest room, carried along on a crackling wave. Will is painting in the garden, so she can search in peace for—what? For what? She flips his sweat-stained pillow, finds nothing. She tears open drawers and unrolls his stacked shirts. Then she sees it, nestled in the crack between bedpost and wall.

The bag is dark blue plastic. She unseals it and smells the pungent oily smell of a shambler dismembered.

Elisabeth detours to her room first, to the biolocked box. Then she slips Jack’s lime green FrogFones over his ears, gives him a cupful of animal crackers, and goes to the garden to confront her brother. It’s a gray day. Fog has wafted in off the sea and swallowed the sky. Will is using a solar lamp to simulate a bit of sunshine. His canvas is a beautiful tangle of blood-bright vermeil and deepest blue.

“The bag behind your bed,” she says. “Why the fuck would you do that?”

Will blinks. His cheeks flush. “We’re all fully inoculated.”

“Is it the one from Cape Point?” she demands.

Her brother nods.

“So it’s been in the house for weeks.” She feels the rage in her throat like an acid. “Weeks. Why would you even think to—”

“The pigments,” Will pleads. He gesticulates with his blue-dipped brush. “I wanted the pigments, for the painting, same way I used to crush up seashells. That’s all, Eli.”

“No.” Elisabeth sets the biolocked box on the concrete, crouches in front of it. Her voice is trembling. “No, this is something else. You’re as crazy as the sommelier. You’re trying to infect yourself, trying to infect us—”

“No!” Will yelps the word. “No, Eli, never, I don’t—”

“Why was it a secret?” she demands.

Will’s mouth twists, how their mother’s used to twist, and it makes her even angrier. “Didn’t want to worry you,” he says. “Didn’t want to add stress.”

Elisabeth lets the box taste her thumb. Its catches click open. “I booked you a place on Main Road,” she says. Her dry mouth seems to rasp against itself. “You have to leave. Take the bag with you. Do whatever you want with it, but not here.”

“Eli, come on.” Will has finally caught her anger, fed his own furnace. He looms over her, brows knit, teeth bared. “I want to infect myself? That’s fucking ridiculous. Fucking ridiculous. You’re the one who wants to turn shambler.”

Elisabeth feels something serrated pierce her chest.

“The way you keep bringing up that game,” Will rails. “That game we played in the basement. The change-you box. You think I don’t know what you’re getting at?”

“Fuck you,” Elisabeth says, and for the first time she means it.

“I don’t blame you,” Will says. “Nobody would blame you for wanting that, with Jack—” He stops when he sees the Shootist pointed at his face. His voice tremors. “Eli, what the fuck is that? Is that Benny’s?”

“Go, Will.”

His eyes dart from the gun to the window, where Jack is directing a digital train. “Can I say goodbye to Jack?” he asks, and she can hear the tears coming, thickening his sinuses. The tears everybody gets but her.

“Later,” she says. “You can call later. Right now, you leave.”

“Okay,” Will says, hollow, still staring at the window. “Okay.” He starts packing the canvas away. “Love you, Eli.”

The response becomes a ghost on her tongue.

Will is gone, and so is the bag, but the scent of the dead shambler lingers. She changes the guest room bedding and sets the nanny to scrubbing the wall where the bag was once wedged between plaster and post. Antiseptic foam spills onto the floor, reminds her of cresting waves. Jack thinks the same. He slashes his hands through it and crows we atta beach, mumma, until she distracts him with one of his shows.

He asks after his uncle for the first few days, how he used to ask after his dada, but then Will’s departure seems to slip from his mind. They return to their most common configuration: a binary sun, just the pair of them winging through the dark. She puts all her energy into being the Good Mother, into constructing the pointless, perfect environment for growth and learning.

Outside, entire countries are disappearing. China has been a digital black hole for months, but now despots in other places are following suit—Hungary and Poland have amputated themselves from the net and militarized their borders. The poorest coastal nations have begun to buckle and collapse in the face of rising numbers, overrun ports.

Here, the president’s soothing gravel-throated addresses have become a nightly farce. Disturbed supply lines empty the supermarkets. Load shedding becomes even more erratic; for three days Elisabeth uses the house generator only. She dreams about a shambler emerging from beneath a cardboard box in a dim-lit basement.

Jack is gnawing at her shoulder again.

“No eating mumma,” Elisabeth says. She says it by reflex; she is almost happy to feel his teeth, to feel him cling to her. They are sitting in the living room, windows opaqued and displaying a field of rustling sunflowers. A cartoon is playing on the nanny’s belly screen. The world is calm. Intact.

Jack’s blue eyes are suddenly mischievous. “No eating car,” he says.

“No eating helicopters,” Elisabeth says, singsong.

“No eating airplane!” Jack yelps.

“No eating boats.”

“No eating . . . ” Jack blinks. “Chair.”

“You’re just looking at objects in the living room, now,” Elisabeth says. “You little stink.”

“No eating chair,” Jack insists.

She lifts his chubby wrist to her mouth. “Yes eating Jack,” she says, and when he squeals and gasps with laughter she feels how she felt post-hospital, the same warm fizzing oxytocin rush, the assurance that nothing else matters. His small body shakes against her, particularly his left arm. Even when he stops laughing, it spasms, flops.

Something is wrong. They watch as his tiny hand curls into a trembling hook. Jack looks up at her, only slightly alarmed. “Mumma fix,” he says, as if his rebelling limb is a malfunctioning toy.

Elisabeth stares. Her lungs are full of barbed wire.

“Mumma, is you crying?” Jack asks, incredulous, delighted.

It’s the beginning of the end.

Six hours speaking in circles to medical AIs earns her twelve minutes speaking to a haggard specialist in Brno, who tells her the same thing more bluntly: Jack’s symptoms have appeared earlier than anticipated, and the descent will likely be swift. Elisabeth thanks her and ends the call, then uses the smartglass to order a swing set in bright primary colors, identical to the one Jack loved so much at the seawall playground in Cape Town.

She orders a cavalcade of action dolls, dinosaurs, building bricks. She scrolls in a fugue state. Some things she suspects she has already purchased, already stepped on, but she orders them again to be certain. She no longer has any fear of instilling materialism in her baby. Her only goal is endorphins. Every day until the end will be a holiday.

A warning message blinks across the glass. Due to the ongoing xenovirus crisis, delivery may be delayed. They offer no time estimate.

She has Jack’s crib scuttle from his room to hers, installing itself beside her bed. The new arrangement is too exciting; he refuses to lie down, instead stands clinging to the bars, peering at her through the gap. Elisabeth hovers on the other side, in case his grip suddenly fails, and he slips forward and thuds his forehead against the reclaimed sea wood. She has to keep discomfort to an absolute minimum. She has to subtract tears.

When Jack succumbs to sleep, she sends a two-word message to Benny: it’s started. There is no reply or notification of receipt. There has been no activity on any of his feeds for a week now. It might be due to mass grid failures in Australia. It might be due to suicide—she remembers him telling her, once, how when he drives manually, he feels a strong urge to swerve into the oncoming.

Or maybe he’s a shambler now, one of the shining mass who spilled off Sydney’s piers and vanished into the ocean. When they dive, Will says in her head, it’s quite fucking beautiful, actually. She has an unclassifiable thought, one that vacillates between the poles of Good Mother and Bad Mother. She’s had it before, but only briefly and only in the coldest water.

She sleeps poorly.

The next day it takes her a while to notice Jack’s legs have stopped working. He’s played with his crocodile all afternoon, sliding it along the floor, singing a jumbled version of some Korean cartoon’s opening theme, and even though Elisabeth has been watching him the entire time, she only now realizes why he is so content to sit, only now realizes he is scooting around propelled by just his arms.

Bad Mother, Bad Mother, Bad Mother.

“Is it owie?” she asks, smearing the question with artificial cheer. “Is Jack’s legs owie?”

“Is it owie?” Jack echoes, confused.

“Your legs, bubba.” She touches his knee with a trembly finger. “Do they hurt?”

Jack looks down at them.

“Dead,” he says, and she knows that he knows that word in reference to toys and tablets only, to things with lithium that need charging, but it still feels accusatory. She is halfway into the pantry, groping for a dusty bottle of cream liqueur, before she can stop herself.

She pours a full mug of it, drinks it in sickly sweet gulps. She looks at the message she sent to Benny, then forwards it to Will, because she has somehow constructed an existence in which she has nobody else to suffer with her. His call is immediate. He’s already crying.

“I’m so fucking sorry, Eli,” he says. “So fucking sorry.”

“It’s okay,” she says, nonsensically.

Jack’s blonde head turns. “Is it Unka Widdy?” he demands, and she realizes his pronunciation has improved again, because he is so smart, so verbal for his age. All the people he will never be hurtle through her, a rush of pale gray ghosts. She has to sit down, before the foaming dark at the edges of her vision does it for her.

“I’m still in town,” Will says. “I never left. No flights and all the roads are blockaded anyway. Anything you need—I know that’s a fucking cliché, Eli, but anything you need. Anything.”

It feels like months ago, their midnight conversation in the garden. Elisabeth braces herself for the unclassifiable. “The sommelier,” she says. “Do you still have his contact information?”

“Haven’t been hanging around with him, I swear,” Will says.

“His contact information, though.”

“Yes.”

“And that spot that you told me about, up on Elsie’s Peak.” She breathes in, out, makes her lungs part of the mechanism of the gun that is her mouth. “I need you to send me the geopin.”

For a long time, Will is silent.

The government collapses that weekend. Elisabeth sees in her feed that suburbs are sealing themselves off, placing spikes on the road, attaching scopes to guns and guns to drones as they act out some atavistic fantasy. But the baying horde of thieves and looters never arrives, and they only manage to murder an old man searching for garden work at the end of the world.

On Monday, she decides to take Jack to all of his favorite places. She loads him into his car seat while his pram climbs into the boot. He does not play with the straps; today both his hands fold awkwardly into themselves, which makes him whine and whimper. The medical AI has assured her, over and over, that there is no pain, only numbing nerves.

They drive down the hill to Main Road and walk from there. The sidewalks are overgrown and pitted in places, but the pram is a rough beast and slouches easily along them, keeping Jack level in its cushioned embrace. The morning air is finally chill enough to redden Elisabeth’s fingertips. She makes sure the pram’s heating pad is on.

The town that was never quite hers is now nobody’s. The streets are dead empty. The storefronts are locked behind their metal grilles. She passes only shuttered windows, man-made eyelids squeezed tight to block out disaster. Occasionally a security drone drifts up, takes a bioscan, and assesses their inoculation, then drifts away.

Jack’s favorite smoke shop is closed, but its main draw was always the bright yellow door and signage. He sits higher in the pram when he spots it. Tries to point to it with an uncooperative finger. Elisabeth wishes the shop were open, so she could get stoned enough to remove her bones and put her prone on the couch, unable to think a single sad thought. She has not done that in nearly a year.

But now is not the time. She guides the pram around the bend, past a small mountain of rotting garbage that reminds her the service was disrupted two weeks prior.

It takes Jack only a minute to recognize their route. “Is it go a fire trucks, mumma?” he hollers.

“Yes, little bubba,” she says. “We’re going to see the fire trucks. What color is a fire truck?”

She regrets asking that, because she recalls complaining drunkenly to Will about the way adults are always asking children the stupidest questions, which is likely why children grow up mistrusting adults. Now she is a hypocrite, and also has to think about Will, who is likely holed up in one of the automated apartments nearby.

By the time they reach the redbrick fire station, it’s a beautiful day. The sun has scoured the sky to a clear blue in all directions, not a wisp of cloud, and the breeze carries salt smells off the ocean. Elisabeth has not walked much lately. Her lungs feel good and tight. Her calf muscles smolder pleasantly. When they round the final corner, giving Jack a view of two fire-rescue vehicles hunkered in their charging stations, he howls.

“Fire truck, mumma! I see it? I see it?”

She has the pram trundle as close as it can to the gate, so Jack can peer through into the yard. They are only there for a moment before a human security drone—security guard, rather—appears. He is the sort of man Benny used to work with, lined and grizzled but still hauling steroid-swollen muscle about under an overly tight shirt.

“Ma’am, you shouldn’t be out, ma’am,” he says, with an Afrikaner accent. “What are you doing out? We put it on all the town feeds: best to stay indoors.”

“We’re fully inoculated,” Elisabeth says, by rote.

“Not for bullets. Man was shot yesterday, did you not see? It was on all the town feeds.”

“Yes,” Elisabeth says. “The man who used to do the Rose-Kellermans’ garden was shot by a drone. It was tragic.” She points to Jack, who is staring at the stranger with slightly horrified eyes. “May we come inside and touch a fire truck?”

The guard squints. “That’s not as I heard it,” he says. “I heard he was sneaking about with a list of houses. List of names, too.”

“This is Jack,” Elisabeth says. “Could he possibly touch that nearest fire truck?”

“No,” the guard says. “Best go home straight away.”

“Go fuck yourself,” Elisabeth says mildly.

The man makes a noise in his throat, somewhere between a laugh and a gasp. But he doesn’t rail at her, or threaten her, which is a shame, because the pram would drown his eyeballs in capsaicin at her request. He only goes back inside the station, shaking his grizzled head. Elisabeth lets Jack observe the fire trucks a while longer. They leave.

There are ways of disabling immunomods, and she researches them in the bath. She crawls from one thread to another to another, observes the digital war, now waged mostly by bots, between those who call the xenovirus humanity’s final chance at salvation and those who call it a fire-and-forget colonization method. Who say the anthrocidists are suffering an undetectable secondary infection that alters the brain, like parasite-infested mice with no fear of cat piss.

Exodus or extinction. Gift or weapon. Elisabeth suspects she knows which, but she is not here to add her voice to the algorithmic chorus. She trawls for specifics, for bootstrap methods of disbanding her virophage army. She is not the first. People from all corners of the collapsing net have sought the very same escape, likely from their own small tragedies, and she follows now in their footprints.

She briefly imagines Alea Rose-Kellerman, in a much larger tub in the house farther up the hill, mirroring her every motion, and wonders what she needs to escape. Maybe boredom. Maybe Nils. Maybe herself.

“Wash you knees,” Jack suggests.

He is sitting on the heated tile beside the tub. She can’t deny him, not so close to the end, not when his little limbs might give out at any moment. He’s playing with a bright red fire truck that used to be his favorite. The fact feels disproportionately important now. She feels the need to recall everything about Jack, every habit and preference. He has only been briefly alive, so it shouldn’t be difficult.

“Wash you knees, mumma,” Jack says again.

Elisabeth rubs at her kneecap, feeling the gooseflesh around the bone. “Wash, wash, wash,” she sings. “Wash, wash, wash.”

“Good washing,” Jack decrees, in an uncanny imitation of the nanny’s synthetic lilt. “Good job.”

“Thank you, Jack. I thought so, too.”

Jack returns to his toy. Elisabeth reaches forward and drains the bath a bit, listening to the gasp and gurgle of exorbitant water waste, then adds a shot of hot water. She stirs with her hand until it’s tepid throughout. Climbs out dripping.

“Jack,” she says. “Do you want to come inna bath, bubba? With your fire truck?”

He is momentarily suspicious, but the novelty wins out. He lets her peel off his clothes, hold him fruitlessly over the toilet, carry him back to the tub. He gives a squealing giggle when she skims his feet through the water, holding him under the armpits. She sets him down carefully and clambers in after him.

“Lots of animals live in the water, Jack,” she says. “Should we play pretend?”

She thought the tub was warm enough, but Jack is shivering, clenching his tiny teeth.

Elisabeth writes messages to the following people:

Her father, who is dead. He once told her that there are only ever two moves that can be made, the strong move or the weak move, but they can look like each other and so all of life is spent deciphering which is which.

Her mother, who is a lush, or more accurately an addict. Elisabeth excised her nearly a decade ago, but she sometimes appears in dreams. She and Will never did end up discussing her.

Benny, who she did love, if symbolically, for several years.

Three friends, one acquaintance, one aunt—the last splinters of a social circle, people who she once felt connected or indebted to.

Alea Rose-Kellerman, who may have the pram for Nils if she wants it, though she will likely find it too militaristic in appearance.

Her brother, who she will be seeing soon.

The beach is still shut when Thursday morning arrives, but there are other ways to the water. Elisabeth has not slept in days. She puts caffeine in her bloodstream at five past five in the morning, then wakes Jack. He is limp while she dresses him. His head wobbles slightly. She holds him in her lap and feeds him the sugary cereal normally reserved for weekends. Milk dribbles out of his grin and streaks his small chin.

They drive to the head of the trail, the serpentine path that leads up Elsie’s Peak, and Elisabeth slides Jack into the carrier, a little fabric cocoon that snugs to her chest. They start to climb. Jack narrates for her, babbling about the grasshoppers darting past, the windiness of the day. She’s glad his tongue and mouth still work.

When they crest the first plateau the rocks turn to sand, the same pale gray sand they walk on by the beach. It seems incongruous up here, transplanted, but Elisabeth doesn’t know enough about the natural processes of erosion and mountain-forming to be certain. The wind is stark, roaring past her ears and rippling the red-and-yellow gorse that stubbles the stone.

“Is it windy day, mumma,” Jack says, not a question.

“Yes, my baby,” she says. “It’s a very blustery day.”

She follows the splintery wooden sign for the lighthouse ridge, sticking to the path for now. She tries to savor the crunch of its sand under her shoes, tries to savor everything: the warm weight of Jack’s body against her thudding rib cage, the slow pulse of the Atlantic down below.

Sunshine is finally fraying the clouds, tattooing her neck. She pauses to adjust Jack’s hat, a pointless and vestigial act, protecting skin that will not exist much longer. He barely protests, too taken with the novelty of their surroundings. The multicolor clumps of vegetation seethe in the wind, as if trying to free themselves from the mountainside. Stone formations rise up here and there like massive cairns or crenellations; she remembers Will drunkenly detailing a perilous climb to the top of one.

She verifies the geotag he sent her and leaves the path. She moves carefully, double-tapping each placement of foot to ensure no shifting stone unbalances her. The geotag leads her along a smaller ridge, concealed by the larger, with a view of the sea. She can see the division where disparate currents meet, deep blue bruising itself against sun-dappled turquoise. The waves move slowly from up here, a wrinkle that can never quite be smoothed.

“Beach,” Jack announces, in response to the sight of the ocean.

“Yes, my love,” Elisabeth says. “Today’s a beach day. Yes.”

Will is waiting for them at the overhang. He wears a dark windbreaker and carries a duffel bag. She can see from his puffy red eyes that he’s been crying again. She twists, so Jack can see his uncle; he is baffled but delighted. He shouts his name into the wind. Elisabeth hates her brother so badly for that, for sectioning Jack’s affections in this final critical moment. She also loves him more than she ever has.

“I know you’re sure,” Will says, when she’s close enough to hear him. “So I won’t ask.”

He takes a small black canister out of the duffel bag, attaches it to a medical injector. They kill their immunomods first, a microneedle kiss. Jack is accustomed to medical evaluations. He barely flinches. Then comes the second canister, identical, but Elisabeth pictures a miasma of beautiful reds and blues and purples inside it.

“Remember the bath game, little bubba?” Elisabeth asks, even as her throat winches shut. “When we pretended to be shamblers? Mumma shambla, baby shambla?”

“What?” Jack is distracted, fascinated by the injector. “What, mumma?”

“We are going to have a nap,” she says. “We are going to have a mountain nap. While we are napping, we are going to turn into a mumma shambler and a baby shambler. And then we are going to dive down, down, down into the ocean.”

“Oh!” Jack blinks. “We going inna ocean.”

“It’ll take a few hours,” Will croaks. “I’ll stay for it. Of course. I’ll stay until you go over the edge. It stretches right out over the water, well-clear of the rocks, and all the ones I saw, they all made it, so—” He breaks off. “Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck, Eli.”

Elisabeth can’t explain it to her brother, can’t explain the carousel she’s been on for so long, up and then down, questioning her questioning of her questioning of herself. Maybe she is succumbing to a brain-altering secondary infection, and selfishly taking Jack with her. Maybe she is succumbing to a biological drive, and pointlessly sacrificing herself with her child.

Maybe she is escaping the end of one world to join another.

“Here,” Will says, handing her the injector.

“Thanks.”

She can’t tell if she is being the Good Mother or the Bad Mother, the Good Person or the Bad Person. She has never been able to tell. Either way, it will all be over soon. She puts the injector to her arm, and then to Jack’s chubby leg.

“Love you, Will,” she says. “Love you, Jack. Little bubba.”

“You a little bubba,” Jack says, because lately the name annoys him.

She tastes salt on her lips that is not from the sea. She sits down on a flat sunbaked rock, still cradling Jack to her chest. She waits for the end of a world.

Two iridescent shapes topple off the stone outcropping, plummet through a shrieking wind, plunge into the belly of the Atlantic with twin plumes of white foam. The shamblers are of disparate size, one so small its flukes are barely visible, but both of them carve through the water with eerie grace, circling each other, angling upward, downward.

Something draws them outward, away from the fortified coastline. They skim beneath the waves, under the wary electric eyes of the drones, moving deeper and deeper as they go. It is impossible to know if they are driven by thought or by instinct, if neural pathways have been converted into alien language or discarded entirely.

But when they are far from any shore, the smaller hooks itself to the larger. They dive together, toward a city that might exist.

About the Author

Rich Larson (Ymir, 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 his Clarkesworld story “Ice” was adapted into an Emmy-winning episode of LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS.

Other Stories

Wang Yuan, translated by Andy Dudak

This story is sincerely dedicated to my Mother.

1

Tom called Adriana Honey-Bunny, and she called him Pumpkin.

A moment by a window. An orange California morning.

Tom snapped his fingers, the waiter understood and came and refilled his cup with fragrant coffee. The sun shone on their table and the street outside was crowded. Adriana didn’t know what kind of romance might transpire. The future was difficult to predict.

Tom talked to her about army life, who had the sweatiest feet in the platoon, a chemical weapons-grade stench; who was the best marksman, a regular deadeye; the guy who used a lighter to illuminate a stealthy, nocturnal letter-writing session and ended up igniting his army blanket.

And then Adriana saw it hovering outside the window: a drone, with a small flower basket hanging from it. It seemed to confirm its target with facial recognition, then dodged nimbly through the crowd, took advantage of the partially open door, and entered the restaurant. Adriana stared, wide-eyed, not daring to believe as the drone landed before her. Tom stood and took a sapphire blue box from the basket. Inside was a diamond ring, seemingly alive with accumulated power, awaiting deployment.

“Will you marry me?” Tom asked, getting down on one knee.

—Excerpt from Future War

1A

Lately I’ve been thinking of how you were at six or seven years old: howling every time you got a haircut, the unruly face freckles. In the early years of the Qing government, the imperial court compelled commoners of the former dynasty to shave their heads. People wept, wailed at Heaven, beat their heads on the ground, and wanted to die.

(If you had read that General Summary of World History I sent you, you would know this story happened in China, not India. This has nothing to do with Buddhism.)

Anyway, the ancient Chinese followed a mysterious ideology. They believed your body, and skin, and hair, all of you, was bestowed by your parents. To harm any of it was unfilial. And you abhorred haircuts more than them! This continued until your sophomore year in college, when you finally settled on your ideal hairstyle, a cut and color that caused me to fly into a rage. Everyone is agitated by trifles to some extent. You for instance have been more sensitive than most, since childhood. Don’t try to refute this, honey. No one knows you better than me, including yourself.

I am one of your two creators, after all.

When you were eight or nine—you couldn’t have been older, I remember buying a birthday cake around then, and the complementary candles weren’t yet double-digits—strange that I always recall these irrelevant details. Anyway, that day you took the school bus home. Your cheek was bruised, tears still glistening on your face. I was carefully following a dinner recipe, dicing carrots and onions, a dash of salt and pepper.

“What’s the matter honey?” I ran to you as fast as a middle-aged woman could.

“Mom . . . ” you began, then asked that question, the Big One, officially and for the first time.

I’d known it was coming sooner or later. Unavoidable, a game I was destined to lose. All I could do was be vigilant and wait for you to find a weakness and break through the defensive line.

“Where’s my dad anyway?”

I knew how to console a boy not yet ten years old. I had a methodology, easy and on hand, tried and tested, but in the end, you’d grow up. And I never thought of an answer to this question that seemed right. I could only procrastinate, delay, obfuscate, evade. This was my final and ultimate tactic.

Nowadays my time is limited.

The caregiver does her rounds after dinner. She gets my temperature from my healthcare ring, and my blood pressure and other parameters.

“Remember to drink a glass of Manuka honey water before bed,” she exhorts, “and for all that’s good and holy, don’t forget to use warm water, not boiling water.” She always makes a point of this, as if I’m suffering from Alzheimer’s rather than breast cancer.

After she leaves, Rothman in the neighboring bed observes: “Easy on the eyes, that little vixen.” He wistfully adds: “If I were twenty years younger . . . ”

He’s recovering from a stroke. Many in his condition become less articulate, but since his treatment he’s been quite loquacious. To be honest, I often think of applying for a room change, though much of the time his chatter is amusing. I’m a writer. Dialogue keeps me clearheaded and stimulated. Stimulated to write, just to be clear. People imagine writers to be well-spoken and glib, but I’m not much of a talker. I need someone to take the lead in conversation.

Moreover, and quite coincidentally, he has the same name as a supporting character in one of my novels.

“If I were twenty years younger,” I say, “you wouldn’t even notice her.”

“Your husband was a lucky man, obviously, but let’s face it . . . you’re old. And if he were still kicking around, he’d be ogling the Little Vixen, not you.”

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

I don’t bother elaborating because I’m pissed. A line from a novel once left a deep impression on me: “Time cannot remember, time can only forget.” But time doesn’t forget everything. Of this I’m sure. I’m not just weaving dazzling prose here—I mean it. It’s been a guiding principle throughout my life.

I decide to go out for a stroll. The hospital has a small park for patient R&R. When the weather’s good I like to putter about after dinner. Reckoning dusk will supply a breeze and a nice glow, I pick up my shawl, turn, and find you at the door.

I’m surprised at first. I know I should be moved, but I’m not. I don’t want to lie to you. Apart from our Great Matter, which I don’t yet know how to put into words, I wish to be totally forthcoming.

Why have you come?

1B

“Why have you come?”

You can’t know how much it hurts to hear you say that.

The surprise on your face stabs deep, and then comes the familiar guilt. How long has it been since I last visited? I even feel presumptuous, just showing up like this, but unfortunately, I couldn’t phone ahead of time.

Besides, I don’t think a son should need a reservation to visit his elderly mother.

I remember that from the time I consigned you to this facility, all the way to your death—about five years—I can count the number of times I visited on one hand. Less than once a year, on average. I hope you can forgive me. These years have been very important to me—vital in fact. If not for them, I wouldn’t be standing before you now.

“I came to see you,” I say.

“Just in time then. Come on a walk with me.” You drape that shawl over your shoulders, the one with the peony pattern, and take me by the hand. Your hand is emaciated and bony. I’m careful not to apply much force, gently harboring it in my palm. When did you start growing old? Why didn’t I notice? Is it the constant insomnia? The lack of appetite? Or did you wake up one morning and suddenly lose your last bit of patience for this horror-show world?

“Daisy doing okay?” You bring me to the little park, and we sit on a bench. There’s already a trace of autumn in the air. A few dead leaves adorn the bench. You pick one up and fiddle with it. It’s a Chinese Ash leaf, its vascular network clearly visible.

I think about your question.

Daisy should be on a business trip to China at the moment. I can’t recall which city, though I know she’s been there before. Everything I know of China comes from the news and from that hardcover you once gave me. Beijing, Shanghai, and Taiwan are often mentioned in the news. As for your book, all I remember is the Qing dynasty and something about braids or queues. So I tell it like it is: part of the reason for my visit is because of Daisy. To avoid her, really. She’ll be back from China soon, and she’ll put that unwelcome proposal to me, and we’ll have a big fight about it and trigger another six-month cold war. During that time, I’ll be on intimate terms with the cot at the laboratory. We’ll be together on Christmas day, and together we’ll quarrel. You’ll call, and I won’t be in the mood to answer. I’ll guess you called merely to ask how I am, and regardless of how I am, I would just give the polite answer: “I’m fine.” It would be you engaging in motherly self-deception, a psychological comfort; and me, as a son, attempting to conceal yet being exposed, a kind of self-hypnosis.

“Daisy’s a good girl,” you say, gaze locked on the dead leaf. I don’t know what’s so fascinating about a dead leaf. You should be looking at me. Look at me. Your son is back.

I know she’s a “good girl,” of course. I knew it long before you did, and better. In our university poetry club, I was keen on her the first time she recited:

“She walks in beauty like the night

Of cloudless climes and starry skies;”

We fell in love, went through breakups and reunions, and eventually got married. We enjoyed the same hobbies and points of view. We both hated nihilism and supported the Boston Red Sox. We reunited once at Fenway Park, the oldest venue in the league still in use, able to accommodate ten thousand people. She couldn’t believe it when I told her that. But she understood me. She got me—that’s the most important thing. When I told her my precondition for marriage, she didn’t immediately veto it, like my previous two girlfriends had. She said she’d think it over.

Half a month later she said: “Let’s get married.”

I was pleasantly surprised, and also doubtful. “Are you sure you can stick to the DINK lifestyle? It’s easy to say so, but maybe harder to put into practice.”

She kissed my forehead. “‘One shade more, one ray less, had half impaired the nameless grace’ . . . why not enjoy a romantic world of two?”

So yes, Daisy is a “good girl,” and a good wife, but now, unfortunately, she wants to be a good mother too.

“By the way . . . ” you say, suddenly breaking the silence. “I received an email from Bill yesterday. Guess what.”

“Bill?” For a moment I can’t recall who that is, but obviously I should know him. Dammit. Memory linkage dislocation. At the lab, we call this phenomenon “space-time fall early stage oscillative disorder.” It’s something like high-altitude de-acclimatization syndrome, or HADAS.

“Bill, my agent? Wears Tommy Bahama shirts all year ’round? Bald, eats like a bear and could probably wrestle one, meticulous in his work? You know fiction writing is all I’m good for. When it comes to contracts and copyrights, I’m hopeless, so thank God for Bill.”

Now I remember: the man who can eat three Big Macs as an appetizer. Uncle Bill.

“How is he?”

“Fine. He contacted a publishing house for me.”

“They finally want to publish your complete works?”

You laugh, your voice clear and bright. “I’m no Asimov, just lucky to have written two bestsellers. Publishing the complete works of a third-rate sci-fi author like me requires great courage and clever vision. Bill negotiated an autobiography for me, royalties and print run, both very impressive.”

An autobiography? But I don’t have this book. Could it be you never finished writing it? When I return I’ll have to investigate online.

“Not too shabby,” I say.

“I said no. My life’s story is already written into my fiction. Read my fiction and you can see my life.”

Ah, so that’s it.

The sky is slowly darkening. I’ve always had this strange feeling that spring and summer nights rise from the earth, while fall and winter nights descend from the sky. The park’s path lights come on.

You turn to look at me. With deep feeling you say: “How long has it been since you stopped reading my fiction?”

2

Nobody knows what happened.

The staff sergeant conveyed the sergeant major’s orders. The sergeant major relayed the captain’s orders. The captain passed on the lieutenant general’s orders:

Assemble.

The staff sergeant roused Tom and his roommate from deep sleep. Tom had been lost in a beautiful dream. Adriana had been pregnant. He’d been dreaming of this for years and pining for it day and night. It was his refuge.

The staff sergeant gripped a list of names. Roll-called soldiers fell out.

“Private Tom Richards!”

He stepped forward, hands still thrust behind his waist.

The chosen got on a military bus. Tom quietly speculated with the man seated beside him. No one really knew the purpose of this trip. Tom had never been selected for such mysterious field training in his three years of service. They theorized they were headed to the border to hunt cartel soldiers.

The bus stopped on an airport tarmac. The gruff staff sergeant herded them onto an aircraft, and Tom began to realize the situation was far more complicated than he’d imagined.

The plane landed three hours later. Tom had no idea where he was.

Stupefied, he found himself among myriad parked aircraft, and soldiers from various branches of the armed forces, all in formation. He spotted a man with a vividly scarred face. Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket came to mind. Sure enough, a torrent of foul language spewed forth from the scarred face, mocking, ridiculing, sparing no one and no race.

“All you maggots listen up, because next time I choose to enlighten you I can’t guarantee you’ll still have your fucking ears!”

It wasn’t the least bit funny. No one so much as snorted.

“We’ve got ourselves a war!”

So that was it. Off to Afghanistan, the only war going at the moment—but Tom soon realized he was mistaken. When Scarface was through with his rant, they were packed into some kind of massive battleship, the biggest Tom had ever seen. In fact, he thought, perhaps it ought to be called a spaceship. They weren’t going to Afghanistan. They were going to Proxima Centauri b.

Of course, at that Time, Tom wasn’t familiar with Proxima Centauri b. He didn’t even know the Centaurus constellation.

He couldn’t decide if it was hilarious or not.

It was like he’d stumbled into a third-rate sci-fi novel, bound for the front lines, for a fight to the death with Bugs or Na’vi. It was four point three lightyears from Earth to Proxima Centauri b, Sol’s closest neighbor, yet at the ship’s speed this gulf was unfathomably long. Hibernation berths? Subspace jumps? The two familiar yet strange terms flashed through Tom’s mind. It was 2006. These pedestrian, tacky technologies from sci-fi novels were still fantasies in real life. This distracted Tom more than the enemy they were about to face. Of course, he missed his Honey Bunny more than ever. It occurred to Tom that they were perhaps, at this moment, the most separated lovers in the universe.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

Tom recalled the night he left, recalled Adriana wrapped around him, the aftermath, dripping with sweat, when she said to him: “Let’s have a baby, soldier. It can keep me company when you’re not around.”

—Excerpt from Future War

2A

I used to think getting old was a prolonged affair, but it’s actually a moment. Before that moment, you’re in your prime—afterward you’re withering away. I think of death as a remote thing, and when it comes, it catches people off guard.

Yes, I’m thinking of what happened to your father.

Everyone has their fatal weakness. You’ve always been a confident person, but afraid to make speeches, and I have my own foibles. I won’t even try to enumerate your father’s quirks. Now that I’m preparing to meet death, I can finally remember things with a calm heart.

We were in senior high school together, and superficially, you couldn’t have found two people more ill-suited to each other. Believe it or not, I debuted in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in my sophomore year, a fantasy story, a wizard, and a dragon in an enchanted forest; whereas your father was a jock, a track-and-field-er. I never saw him sit still for more than a minute, apart from attending class. Upon graduation, he enlisted in the army, and I followed my businessman father to New Jersey. We later met at a party. He was taller and sturdier, and a more entertaining conversationalist. He had everyone rapt with his military stories, transfers, ribbons, and medals, among these tales a purple heart and how he got it.

I thought he’d long since forgotten me, but he said, “Anna, are you still writing?”

I was actually flattered—not to mention embarrassed—by his attention. In a limping manner I said, “Writing . . . well, basically, you could call me a freelancer these days?”

“Very cool! When I return to base, I can brag to all those uncultured grunts that one of my classmates is a bona fide author. Still writing fantasy?”

“Sci-fi nowadays.”

“Awesome.” It was blind and awkward flattery, since he probably couldn’t have told me the difference between fantasy and science fiction.

We traded emails and I soon got my first message from him. They’d joined forces with Mexican police in a cross-border operation against the cartels. His brother-in-arms, who had slept in the bunk above him, had been killed in action.

Your father had been standing just behind and to the left of him. He’d watched him go down. He described the hideous face of death, how it had been within reach at that moment. I didn’t know how to console him. I’d just turned twenty. I had only a literal, or literary, understanding of death. I sat at the computer all night mulling it over. That email was harder to draft and develop than any novel.

Seeing the sent notification, I suddenly realized I might fall in love with him.

Just last month my agent Bill asked if I’d be interested in writing an autobiography. I declined. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to write it—it was that I already had. If you ever start reading my fiction again, you will come to understand me. But I know that since senior high, you’ve avoided my fiction like unwelcome schoolwork.

Rothman comes in, seemingly in high spirits.

“Did your daughter come see you?” I say.

“No, I’ve given up on that, just like you’ve given up on your son.”

Fair enough.

Since you sent me to this nursing home, we’ve vanished from each other’s lives. I know you’re busy, of course. I haven’t experienced lab work, but many people like you have come to life beneath my pen. Workaholics on the tech frontier are science fiction’s eternal plug-and-play protagonists. So, I get it, in a sense. From a kind of “experienced” point of view, I understand, and I can forgive you. You’re making history. Compared with history, any individual’s feelings are trivial. I understand, and I can forgive, but I can’t help complaining. When you reach my age, you’ll understand I’m not just causing drama for drama’s sake.

When did it become unreasonable and dramatic to miss one’s child?

“I just went on a date,” Rothman says. “A movie with a certain someone. Guess who!” Unable to wait for my guess, he says, “The Little Vixen!”

“Gimmee a break. You’re sixty years old.”

“Yeah, sixty . . . half my life still ahead of me!”

“You’ve got to be older than her father.”

“If the day ever comes, he’ll be my father-in-law, and he can call me big bro.”

“Are you serious?”

“Worth a shot, and if I’m in the market for a partner, why not a young knockout?”

“Your daughter will be thrilled, I’m sure.”

“Sorry, but she has no right to veto my happiness. A once-a-year visitor doesn’t get to tell me what kind of woman I should pursue. I won’t allow it. Anyway, why not find a young hunk for yourself? Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it. Look at which finger your ring’s on.”

“My son—”

“Doesn’t give a shit about you. How long has it been?”

And that’s when you enter, the sun on your face. “Talking about people behind their backs, Rothman? Not a good look.”

2B

Hangzhou.

Daisy went there on a business trip once. That peony shawl is a specialty local product she got you there. She bought two—the other embroidered with a phoenix—and let me choose. I chose the peony for you, thinking it more suited to your personality. When you unwrapped the gift, the gentle smile on your face proved I’d chosen right. I’ve always admired that in you but failed to inherit it: your completely open self-expression. People might think such frank emoting lacks subtlety and sophistication, but in my opinion it’s rare sincerity.

“Maybe you should take that opportunity Bill got for you.”

I sit with you in the nursing home cafeteria. This time I’ve chanced upon dinner. You ordered a pasta and salad. I went for chicken curry and whole wheat bread.

“What?”

“The autobiography.”

“How do you know about that?”

Oh, right: in your world, our meeting last month never happened.

“You told me on the phone. Remember?” A white lie. You nod suspiciously. In the end you have no choice but to take my word for it. Time is merciless, and it’s normal to forget things.

“I can’t seem to write these days,” you say. “How are you and Daisy?”

Not good.

She’ll be just back from Hangzhou. I’ll be driving her home from the airport, she’ll demand I pull over onto the freeway shoulder. She’ll crawl over from shotgun, kissing me, gasping for breath, saying she wants me so bad she can’t wait until we get home. Her teasing will get me going. My heart will race. We’ve never done it in the car before and the strange locale will be exciting. But I’ve always maintained a certain clearheadedness in these matters. I’m not one of those dating app fuckboys. I don’t keep a spare condom in the car. What kind of serious, decent person does that? If I want to continue enjoying this romantic interlude, I’ll have to get out and buy a condom.

And we’ll be on that hazardous high-speed freeway shoulder.

“Don’t go,” she’ll say. “I want you now.”

“But you could get pregnant.”

“Not likely.” Kissing my ear, she’ll say, “I’ve counted . . . this is the safe part of my cycle.”

“But we can reduce the probability to zero, so why take the risk?”

“I want you now.”

She’ll grow wilder as I calm down. Daisy rarely does this sort of thing. I mean, it will be quite spontaneous and bold for her. This won’t be her first return from a long business trip, and it won’t have been the longest. Something else will be going on. I’ll refuse the sex. I’ll ask her what it’s all about. She’ll light a cigarette and say:

“I want a child.”

“We’re fine,” I say.

I don’t want to disturb you with life’s exigencies. If I tell you I have a toothache, it will not relieve the pain. It’ll just worry you.

“Okay, what happened?” Just like Daisy won’t lie to me, I can’t lie to you; Daisy and I have lived together seven years, but I spent seventeen years with you, day and night.

“Come on honey,” you press. “What happened?”

I don’t know what to say. I couldn’t have imagined dealing with something like this. Technically speaking, I have no “experience” to draw on here.

The incident in question hasn’t occurred yet.

“Marriage crisis?” you conjecture. “Seven-year itch I’m guessing? Actually, from what friends have told me, cheating tends to come around year five or so. I’ll just say this . . . anyone can make a mistake, honey. But if you act in a timely manner to make amends, the marriage can be saved. I’m guessing the problem started at work. Was it one of those grad students at your lab?”

“Mom, where are you going with this? I’m your son.”

“And what does that have to do with you cheating?”

“It’s nothing to do with cheating, okay? She wants children.”

And I lay it all out for you. Maybe you’ll help me come up with a game plan. Even if you can’t, you’ll soon forget the whole thing. There’s nothing wrong with your memory, but you’ll forget. This visit will never have happened.

“Kids? Why? I mean, what happened?”

“I don’t know. She started making demands when she came back from China. At this point she’s a lot like you. You’re both experts in keeping secrets.”

But no matter what happens, DINK is the cornerstone of our marriage. Violate this premise and the structure of the marriage is endangered. Children are a variable, an unknown. We who conduct experiments hate variables and unknowns more than anything.

I watch you, waiting for your reply.

“Rothman pursuing the Little Vixen,” you say, clumsily changing the subject. “Who’d have thunk it?”

Seeing my blank look, you explain: “The Little Vixen is a nurse and caregiver here. Rothman gave her the nickname.”

“Who’s Rothman?”

Your expression changes. You want to say something but hesitate. We’re completely out of touch with each other’s lives. You don’t know much about my research, though I’ve wanted to tell you from the beginning. It would blow your mind, I know. You’ve written time travel sci-fi for so long, and now I’ve helped make it a reality—at the cost of visiting you more often, of course.

But who is this Rothman? Why is his pursuit of the Little Vixen so funny to you? You’ve obviously lost the urge to explain. You seem content to allow the rift between us to persist and expand.

I bow my head and finish the chicken nuggets wordlessly, then wipe the dish with the bread. You escort me to the door. We hug and kiss, like when I was a kid, the daily pre-bus-boarding routine.

I turn to go, but you stop me.

“What is it Mom?”

“Thanks for coming to see me, really.”

“I’ll come more often, for sure.”

You’ll forget this promise in the blink of an eye. You’ll return to that twilight I have yet to disturb, but I promise all the same. I’m like a stone tossed in the heart of a lake. You are the lake, and after a brief ripple, you’re as calm as ever.

3

It didn’t take so long. The spacecraft reached Proxima Centauri b in about half a year. Tom didn’t know at the time what their means of propulsion was. He was sure Scarface wouldn’t disclose the specific mechanism of flight. If Tom ventured to ask, the result must be punishment. The only question was would it be a ten nautical mile run or two hundred push-ups nonstop. By the distance units Scarface employed, Tom reckoned he’d been a Navy man.

They didn’t practice using exoskeletons or any sophisticated sci-fi weapons during their six-month journey. Every day it was just PT. Like they weren’t headed for battle with aliens. Like they were Earth’s delegation to some cosmic Olympics.

En route, Tom and his comrades prognosticated wildly. No matter what the enemy turned out to be, no matter what sort of teeth it bared, the men reckoned they were mentally prepared.

But when they finally saw the legion confronting them, they were stunned. The enemy was human. They had the same five senses and four limbs as Tom and his brethren.

Human.

The war started like this: a thousand soldiers on our side, a thousand on theirs. A month later (reckoned according to Earth Time) the side with more alive would win. There could be no simpler, more primitive war. It was to be a large-scale gang brawl, each side representing its respective civilization. The victor would have permanent and perpetual habitation rights on Earth.

—Excerpt from Future War

3A

Do you know what gives a mother the most satisfaction and pride? It’s simple. It is her child’s dependence upon her: the child coming home and calling out for Mom; the child unable to find something and calling out for Mom; the child not knowing what to do and calling out for Mom.

For me, it was your strident demands for a bedtime story. You soon tired of routine fairy tales. I’d say, “Long, long ago,” and you immediately knew a happy ending was coming. You begged me to read my own works aloud. You became a mad, obsessed fan, my number one fan, in fact. Every time I finished a story, you were my first reader.

As time passed you started pointing out style deficiencies, structural problems, unrefined metaphorical language. You put the nitpickiest industry editors to shame. Of course, that all stopped when you reached high school. You studied physics and chemistry, math, and biology, even cosmology and history. You were fascinated by formulae, axioms, experiments.

When I tried to read to you, you would say: “Come on, Mom. Really? It’s not scientific.”

“Is that so? But I’m a fiction writer, not a science popularizer.”

“And what about the ‘sci’ in sci-fi? I suggest you read some Carl Sagan or Arthur C. Clarke.”

“I appreciate your kind intentions, but I have my own selection criteria for what I read.”

You didn’t even try to argue with me. You just shrugged with a look of, “Suit yourself.”

Do you know what a mother most fears? Her child no longer needing her.

This really is the saddest theorem in the world, but there’s no avoiding it. You must grow, leave infancy behind, venture out of the nest, experience the cold and real world, navigate a complicated society. You must have your own life. You must create your own world, get married, be needed by another woman. Start a family and be a parent yourself. Oh, I almost forgot. You subscribe to the DINK lifestyle. Honey, I know the matter of your father still haunts you. That’s life. There are always fetters of one kind or another, like common accidents and diseases.

Seven years ago, when I learned that I was suffering from breast cancer, I didn’t panic. On the contrary, I was relieved. For many years I didn’t tell anyone.

I think of your father every night, his radiant beauty, his perseverance and bravery. I think of our high school years, how he charged around violently through life, his apparent dimness of wit. At the time I really thought he was dumb. The muscle-bound twit, the jock: the simplest words and most convenient definitions. But then I got to know him. I discovered, or uncovered, his gentle side. He liked motorcycles. He was afraid of dogs. Such a big lug, yet a Chihuahua could get him cowering behind me. When his fourth transfer came—he was a Marine Corps sergeant by then—we traveled the Pacific Coast Highway on his motorcycle. At one point he pulled over and we got off to take in the view. “I’m going to ask you to marry me,” he said. “Say yes and we’ll go to a church right now. Otherwise I’ll leave you here. Friendly reminder . . . it’s not easy to hitch a ride hereabouts.”

I smiled and extended my left hand. He got on one knee. Look, I admit it wasn’t too romantic. The salty sea breeze nearly gave me a cold. But at the time, I mean, as one of the two concerned parties, I felt like the world was spinning. I couldn’t imagine life getting any better.

I extend my left hand. The skin is loose, almost translucent in places. Because of my weight loss, I had to move my wedding ring from ring finger to index.

That’s why Rothman teases me, saying: “Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it. Look at which finger your ring’s on.”

“My son—”

“Doesn’t give a shit about you. How long has it been?”

“He has his career.”

“And still has his mother. To be blunt, he still has decades to work. But how much longer will you live?”

“What do you mean by that? What do you know?”

“My Little Vixen told me your cancer cells have spread. You should’ve told us, or your son at least. I bet he knows nothing about it. Do you want the nursing home to inform him when it’s time to collect your body? Don’t get mad at me for saying these things. I know it’s ugly. Hey, my situation’s not much better. I’ve drafted my will. I may seem all full of vim and vigor, but I could die at any moment.” He taps his temple. “There’s a time bomb in here.”

“So you two really are an item?” I ask, hoping to lighten the mood. You know me. If I want to escape a situation, I just change the subject.

“Well, no. She rejected me. Said she’s not ready to settle just yet, but when she gets tired of the struggle, she might consider me. Hey, I’ll take it! At least I tried, you know? And by the way, don’t say I didn’t warn you . . . a ring on your index finger means you’re unmarried and looking.”

Rothman puts on his coat. I ask him where he’s going.

“To a bar,” he says.

Today is Christmas. The nursing home is decorated. How many Christmases have we spent apart? I really want to call you, so I do. You don’t pick up. I assume you’re busy with an experiment and will call back later, but you don’t. Like I’m harassing you. Like my call is a nuisance, not worthy of your attention.

I’m angry and sad again. I think of you constantly, but you never seem to think of me. Maybe Rothman is right. Maybe I should tell you.

My dear boy, your mother is dying.

3B

Last time I left, I promised to visit more often. But I broke that promise. Some problems have emerged with the experiment:

According to Novikov’s self-consistency principle, people can go back in time, but they cannot change history. A time traveler would be forced to act in such a way that a paradox couldn’t occur. Ultimately, our world is a final ending that has been revised countless times, like one of your novels endlessly reworked before publication. DINK is the cornerstone of my marriage, and this principle is the governing standard of time travel. In fact, all our experiments have cleaved to this principle. Crossing over isn’t as simple as you have it in your novels, or your favorite film About Time. To comply with Novikov’s self-consistency principle, time travel must observe numerous restrictions. First of all, it’s not a person that time travels, but a brain-state. I never traveled to the past—my present self reacted, on a quantum level, with myself at a certain point in the past. I think you must know about quantum entanglement, spooky action-at-a-distance. Even at opposite ends of the universe, one particle may affect the state of another. This happens almost instantaneously. The transmission speed of quantum entanglement is at least four orders of magnitude higher than c. It turns out such entanglement may transmit across time as well as space. When my present self establishes a connection with my past self, my mind or self enters that past body. This is equivalent to going back in time. Think of it this way: my present self takes the helm of my past self. I can manipulate that past self, do things, but I cannot exceed a certain threshold. If I do, the connection is broken, as governed by Novikov’s self-consistency principle.

Over the years, via countless experiments, we’ve assigned a value to the threshold that we call the Time Constant.

If a time traveler’s behavior exceeds the Time Constant, Novikov’s principle comes into play and interrupts the entanglement. For instance, if I contemplate going back and buying a winning lottery ticket, that’s just an idea. It doesn’t matter. But if I tried to do it, the action would be banned. It’s almost like blunt-force law enforcement from God. Then again, Arthur C. Clarke said a sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic. And all of this is just a drop in the bucket. There are many other parameters and restrictions. We can’t go back to the end of the Cretaceous and see why the dinosaurs perished. We can’t go back to ancient Egypt and see how the pyramids were built.

We can go back a year at most.

We call history that has already happened “original history.” It’s supposed to be immutable. Even if a pauper goes back a year and manages to buy a winning lottery ticket, he’ll still be poor after the connection terminates. We were always sure “original history” cannot be changed, but now there seem to be exceptions.

There is a threshold governing disconnection, but there is wiggle room.

We’re going to be busy again. We must delineate the numerical range of this newfound wiggle room. Maybe we can find a stable channel between past and future, something that would convey information at least. Imagine the tragedies we might prevent. If you knew you were going to die in a car accident in three months. If you knew a certain life choice led to rock bottom.

If I knew you were going to die in a year . . .

4

A future energy crisis. Our high-tech descendants worried about living space. Lacking a wider perspective, forgoing a search for so-called Earth Twins, in their opinion the most suitable world for human existence is Earth itself, in the past. Their current Earth is ruined, but past Earth is a worthy goal. They travel to the past to compete with their ancestors (us) for Earth habitation rights.

They reach an agreement with representatives of past Earth. Each side selects one thousand fighters to compete at Proxima Centauri b. The winner gets sovereignty of Earth. If the interlopers from the future win, they will be quietly integrated into management of Earth. The general public won’t be aware of it. Future generations will have the tech to build spacecrafts. (Question: Could such high-tech future generations directly rule the past Earth? Need to find a balance. Logic. Self-consistency.)

Our male protagonist, Tom (Pumpkin), participates in this war. He survives the tragic conflict. The Earth government of the past finally wins. They return in triumph on their spaceship, but the ship crashes and everyone is killed. There is a conspiracy to keep this secret.

Tom’s body is found in the ocean, somewhat preserved by the cold seawater, and is then put into cryofreeze. (Under what circumstances? Can seawater be cold enough to preserve sperm and make it dormant? Option B, a glacier. How can this be achieved? Follow up with relevant research.) The body was only sent to Adriana the following year, to inform her that Tom was killed during the mission.

Adriana (neurosurgeon, a scene of her in action, performing surgery), when she gets Tom’s body, learns he froze to death, then was quickly found and refrigerated, giving her a crazy idea.

Rothman, the supporting male character, a surgeon, Adriana’s colleague, secretly has a crush on her.

—From Anna’s notes, some ideas for Future War.

Late at night.

Operating theater.

Rothman carefully washed his hands and arms with soap and put on rubber gloves. His assistant, Adriana, put the disinfectant and the container full of liquid on the stainless-steel table. The air smelled of disinfectant. The atmosphere was cold and solemn.

Rothman still couldn’t believe he’d agreed to this. He’d known that once he agreed, his doom was sealed. But if he refused—well, he didn’t know how to refuse Adriana.

“Can you do me a favor?” she had asked.

“Of course. Always happy to help.”

“I need to perform an operation.”

“A friend? I’ll arrange it ASAP.”

“Tonight.”

“Tonight? That’s impossible. The hospital . . . it can’t be scheduled. Even if I could find an operating theater, I’d need an assistant.”

“You won’t need an assistant.”

And now here they were. It was nuts.

Rothman sat next to the patient, preparing for the operation. As usual, he opened a panoramic view of the operation in his mind. He would cut the skin around the organ in question, peel it back until the outer layer could be seen. This organ would be gleaming, milky white, marbled with veins. Rothman would carefully cut off a piece of corpus cavernosum. He would put it in a test tube prepared in advance. Adriana would take it away. Technically speaking, there was no difficulty.

The difficulty was psychological.

The operation was slow and successful. Rothman had already started stitching up the wound, although this was superfluous. The patient remained motionless throughout. The room was silent. There was no beeping monitor, no intravenous machine. No one monitored the patient’s vital signs.

No painkillers were given to the patient.

“You won’t need an assistant,” Adriana had said, “because the patient is already dead.”

“Very funny.”

“It’s Tom.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I know it’s possible. His body has been kept cold. His sperm could still be alive. I need you to help me extract it.”

“Look, I’m a surgeon. I’ve had many strange requests, but if you think I’m giving a hand job to a dead man, you’re certifiable.”

“I’m serious. If you help me with this, I’ll marry you.”

Rothman had taken his time considering this. “I’ll help,” he’d finally said, “but I won’t marry you. Not like this.”

He was a surgeon. He knew that excising Tom from Adriana’s heart was an operation beyond his skill.

“I love you Pumpkin.”

“I love you Honey Bunny.”

—Excerpt from Future War

4A

I’ve finally decided to tell you. Forgive me for not knowing how to put it into direct words. It will be cleverly integrated into my fiction. If you read that, you’ll have the answer you’ve been seeking for so long.

Spinal and shoulder fractures nearly killed me, but I survived. Survival: good luck amid misfortune, but also misfortune amid good luck.

It was your father’s fifth transfer. He was being sent overseas for his outstanding service. We had been planning to have a child. No, that wasn’t you. You came later, after a few twists and turns. Your father and I decided to take a trip before he left, another motorcycle odyssey along the PCH. We seemed to be hurtling into the past. We were happy, excited. Life was beautiful. But on the way back, he lost control of the motorcycle.

We went over a cliff. I survived, your father died.

Some doctor friends told me that after death, a man’s sperm may remain viable.

After many setbacks, I finally found a doctor willing to perform sperm extraction on the deceased. I hired a hearse to transport your father’s body to a hospital in San Diego. I didn’t cry along the way. This wasn’t a show of fortitude. I had already forgotten my grief.

The operation was successful, and I had a glimmer of hope, like he wasn’t gone forever. I could keep a part of him alive. Your father was an excellent partner, an outstanding Marine, and I believe he would have been an amazing father.

Perhaps it is a power beyond biology (we sci-fi writers are superstitious, we believe in miracles). It’s like I can see my fast-approaching death. I’m not afraid. I made my peace with it long ago. I’ve been prepared since I got those test results, way back when. I was ready then, and I’m ready now. My most extravagant wish is to see you again before I die. But I can’t just summon you here. I’m not on my deathbed just yet, relying on a ventilator.

I bet myself that you’ll take the initiative to visit. Such thoughts support me these days. But I’m worried I’ll lose this bet. My luck has never been great.

Summer has come. The sunlight grows diligent and bright, and I’m withering away.

I get up from bed and it’s exercise, leaves me panting. Rothman is better. He’s preparing to leave the nursing home in the next few days.

“Old man,” I say, “I’ll miss you.”

“I’m not dead just yet.”

“I mean I’ll miss you after you go.”

“I haven’t left yet!”

“Soon enough anyway.”

“Want me to call your son for you? I mean, how long are you gonna wait before doing it yourself? You don’t have much time.”

“Gee, thanks for the well-wishing.”

“That’s our generation through and through, all of us about to die of pride.”

“He’ll come. He’s my son. I believe in him.”

I get in the wheelchair that’s been allocated to me for the last couple months. I roll myself out to the little garden-park. The Chinese Ash leaves grow luxuriantly. The decay of last winter gradually fades, giving way to a new, radiant aspect.

Enviable, really.

I’m still not used to the wheelchair. The caregiver told me to break on down slopes to curtail my speed, but I can’t recall where the break is. It seems her daily nagging isn’t useless after all. I should’ve paid more attention. Now I’m embarrassed and vexed by a mild slope, mild enough to be insignificant to a normally-abled person—a major obstacle in my life, like a medieval fortification.

“Need my help?” you say.

4B

This is the last time I’ll see you.

I guide your wheelchair down the slope, toward a sea of flowers glowing with life.

I’m sorry I haven’t visited lately. Determining that numerical range has been more complicated than we expected. We’ve been unable to clarify what sort of changes may affect the already-established future, and which will be insignificant. For instance, my assistant Jane didn’t buy the birthday gift her son asked for last year. We sent her back and she tried to rectify this. She returned to the present and sure enough the gift appeared, but not in her son’s bedroom. It was in the basement. So, “post-history” may overlay aspects of “original history.” Clearly this toy has been preserved in history, but it didn’t have much impact on the future. Her son had a favorite toy for a while, then tired of it. The toy changed nothing else.

I fervently hope I can leave you with something on this visit, but I don’t know how to discern the possibilities. I’ll just have to go with the flow, let things take their course.

In fact, I’m not doing much—just keeping you company. It’s quite low-key. From noon until evening, we reminisce: the first time I skipped class and the principal scolded me, you helping me write a love letter to my first crush, me as the guest of honor at one of your book launches.

Strange that I never realized just how colorful our past really was.

“Don’t you need to be getting back?” you say.

“No, I’m good. This is nice.”

“Wonderful,” you say, clasping my hand.

This is the last time I’ll see you.

At two a.m. you will pass out. You’ll be taken to the hospital and admitted to the ICU. The call notifying me will ring mercilessly the next morning. Daisy will answer. With a pained expression she’ll tell me: “It’s Anna.”

We’ll reconcile temporarily, rush to the hospital. I’ll run three red lights. When I pay the ticket the following month, I’ll think of you and weep, bitterly and helplessly, in the middle of the clerk’s office. People will think I’m crying over a thousand-buck fine. I won’t be able to explain my grief to a bunch of strangers. I’ll just stand there crying, thinking of how Daisy and I stood in the hospital corridor.

The doctor coming out and expressing his condolences.

I can return to the eve of your death, but I can’t change the fact of it.

“Will you read my books?”

“I do miss being your number-one fan.”

“It’s like when you were growing up. You had to throw yourself into another woman’s arms. But that’s okay, Daisy’s a good girl.”

This is as far as I can go with you.

When it’s time to say goodbye, you ask me to push you back inside. You take a book from your bedside table and hand it to me. “This is for you.”

It’s your novel Future War. You sent me a copy when it first came out. I shelved it with your other works left unread. I don’t tell you this, I just take the book.

“Mom, I love you.” I lean down and hug you, like when I was a kid, and you would lean down to hug me.

“I love you too,” you say.

“No, I mean it,” I say. “I’m not just going through the motions here.”

I can’t tell you everything that’s about to happen. The principle is limiting. Any behavior that might reveal time travel will trigger disconnection.

“I know,” you say, smiling.

I watch you fall asleep. There will be no more ripples in the lake of your life.

And now I’m home.

I haven’t been here for a while. The cold war between Daisy and I is ongoing. She will not budge from her position, and neither will I.

I find the book on the shelf. I wish this was the one from your bedside table, still wrapped in plastic like an unsealed thought, and not the one you mailed me back in the day, the one I ignored. I wipe the dust from the jacket.

I peruse it and find a Chinese Ash leaf pressed between pages. I’m stunned.

Some things and feelings are so secret, but their vitality is preserved across time, permeating history.

I sit down and start reading. I witness Tom’s death and Adriana’s subsequent choice. I’m struck, as if experiencing the accident myself. I knew through certain channels that my father died in a motorcycle accident, but I didn’t really know—not until now.

You never told me, worrying it would hurt me too much.

Something nags at me.

I get on my iPad and hastily search the keywords “China,” “Hangzhou,” “foreigners,” but of course come up wanting. I change “foreigner” to “American,” then “American beauty.” An apt description, after all, and a common headline ploy. Still nothing. Thinking of Daisy’s sudden one-eighty, I add the keyword “child.”

The first link reads: “Two-year-old child falls into deepest part of West Lake, is rescued by American beauty.”

I click on the link:

“The famous West Lake of Hangzhou was anything but tranquil yesterday afternoon. A brisk wind swept across the water, stirring up sizeable swells. According to data from the Hangzhou Meteorological Observatory, the temperature in Hangzhou was around 6°C from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m . . . ”

“ . . . Two-year-old Xianxian (pseudonym) came to West Lake with her mother to play. There is a railing near the ‘Three Pools Mirroring the Moon’ pagodas. She was climbing the railing and fell into the lake. A West Lake Cruise tour guide says the ‘Three Pools Mirroring the Moon’ area is the deepest in West Lake, with an average depth of nearly five meters . . . ”

“ . . . the mother cried out for help . . . ”

“ . . . no one offered a helping hand . . . ”

“ . . . the situation was critical . . . ”

“ . . . a beautiful foreign woman jumped in the water . . . ”

“ . . . about five minutes later, the guard on duty also jumped in, and the two joined forces. They got the little girl out of the water. She was soaked through, her long hair dripping, her small lips purple with cold . . . ”

“ . . . the foreign beauty gave the little girl first aid, attempting cardiac resuscitation and artificial respiration, but it was too late. A two-year-old flower withered while still budding. The foreign beauty is reportedly an American tourist and Chinese expert who studied Chinese history and culture. She cried during the interview, blaming herself for the child’s death.”

I sit on the sofa, dumbfounded.

It dawns on me what a bastard I really am. If someone who really loves you keeps a secret from you, it must be to spare you pain. How did I never understand this simple, self-evident truth? Why did it cost two human lives to make me see?

It gets dark, but I don’t turn on the lights. I don’t know how long it’s been. A century? I hear the door open, her heels clicking on the floor. The light comes on. Daisy stands there looking exhausted, then shocked to see me.

“You were just sitting here in the dark?”

I don’t know what to say.

“What’s wrong?”

I get up, walk over to her, hug her tight, and say, “Let’s have a baby!”

0

I think every author writes her own experiences and thoughts into her fiction, in some fashion. I’m no different. I write science fiction, but some characters are based on people I know, especially in this novel.

Science fiction as a genre of literature has always been event-oriented. In its development, and now more than ever, it relies on endless imagination to draw in readers, but in my new novel, I wanted to spark a particular discussion, a rather large kernel for the story: I wanted to explore the parent-child relationship. We’ve ignored this issue for a long time. It’s still a sci-fi novel, so I didn’t want to frame things in a sort of mundane present. Precisely because it’s sci-fi, I wanted to develop this issue more absolutely. That’s how the story came about. When it was finished, the reader I wanted most was my son. It contains the answers he’s been searching for, as well as some of my problems with him. I don’t quite know how he would react, but I know for sure he won’t read it. He’s a dyed-in-the-wool scientist. He sneers at the conjectures in my novels. I consider this my biggest failure as a science fiction writer, and a mother.

—Excerpt from the preface to Future War

0A

With a heavy expression, the doctor asked me: “Where is your family?”

“I came by myself.”

“We usually tell family members the results, so they can decide if you should be informed. I’m sorry, but the cancer has spread. But if you opt for chemotherapy—”

“If I don’t, how long do I have?”

“Anywhere from half a month to two years, maybe longer. There have been such cases. One patient who decided to forgo treatment lived ten years.”

“Thanks for the comforting words, and the truth.”

It was the coldest news I heard that summer.

I didn’t want to cause trouble for anyone, so naturally I didn’t tell you. I returned to the nursing home and lived as before, but the caregiver stumbled upon my news, somehow. I suppose she was bound to keep an eye on someone constantly fainting and having nosebleeds. She’s a nice person. I don’t know where she heard honey is effective against cancer, but she makes me drink a cup every night. By sheer luck, this cured the constipation that plagued me for years.

I hate summer. I hate humid air, moldy food, and sticky skin after a sweat. I hate the accident that happened on a hot summer day—but I don’t hate memories. Some things fix him forever in the folds of time.

0B

The experiment is a success.

We will make history, but we cannot change it.

What has passed will always bear its original aspect. I yearn to share this news with you, but you’re no longer with me. You often said science fiction filled your writing with possibilities. You loved absolute, extreme perspectives that made hot hotter and cold colder. I want you to know you successfully influenced your son. You made me a scientist. When you were writing time travel novels, I was making time travel a reality. From now on, people will have to debate whether the subject of time travel can still be considered science fiction.

The only thing that gives me a headache is Daisy. She must be upset about something, but like you, she won’t tell me what happened. I can’t have children. Absolutely not. People don’t understand, but you should sympathize. Life is so precarious, a gauntlet of disease and accident. What if something happened to me and I missed my child’s life, like my father missed mine? A unique sadness, that, a child’s sadness: no one understands it better than me. People think my fear irrational, but if they experienced what I have, they’d understand. Someone tells you something and it’s just a story. Only through personal experience can you truly understand. There is no so-called empathy in this world—not really.

I know the subtle sorrow of wanting to care for a parent who has already passed. I know what I’m talking about. When you were alive, I didn’t feel this way. When you were gone, it was too late. Regret was pointless. Like I said, it’s one thing to speak reasonably, quite another to practice what you preach.

But I’m lucky. Providence has given me the opportunity to make amends.

“Have you decided where to go?” Jane asks me.

I give the answer that was clear to me long before now: “Yes, I’m going to visit my mother.”

Author’s Note:

Writing this story, I emulated the structure of Ted Chiang’s “Division by Zero.” Anna and her husband’s storyline (including his identity, experience, and surgical details) was inspired by the article “Giving Birth After Death,” published on August 26, 2016 by the Science Squirrel Society website.

Originally published in Chinese in Tadpole Stave, June 16, 2020.

Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

About the Author

Wang Yuan has had nearly two million Chinese characters worth of fiction published, on platforms like Clarkesworld, Science Fiction World, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Tadpole Stave, and elsewhere. He popularizes science in works such as Worlds Hidden in Science Fiction: The Book of N-Dimensional Space. His short stories are collected in the volume Painter of Stars.

Just One Step, and Then the Next

E. N. Díaz

Doña Chuy was sitting in her living room, the heavy smell of the summer rains wafting in through the open door. She hated that smell, but the house was too warm, and her air conditioner no longer worked, so she had to leave windows and doors open to keep it cool. She didn’t worry about anyone coming in, not anymore. She wasn’t fearless, just tired. She didn’t have anything else to lose, so anyone was welcome to the crumbs.

Doña Chuy placed her needle and cloth napkin next to her on the cream-colored sofa. The room was illuminated by a single lamp right next to her, casting the rectangular room half in warm yellow light and the other half in long, flickering shadows. No, the shadows didn’t flicker; her pounding head made everything look as if she were underwater.

Usually, she could embroider for hours, her long nimble fingers moved like a spider’s legs on her spinning web. Now, though, she got tired just walking to the living room, her hands perpetually shaking. Plus, it wasn’t easy to do the job with just one eye.

Absentmindedly, she brushed her fingertips over the edge of the medical tape. The hit had burst her eye like an overripe guava fruit slamming against concrete. She didn’t remember much of what happened afterward, having blacked out almost instantly. At near seventy, Doña Chuy didn’t know if her bad memory was the result of old age or State violence.

She had been helped home from the medical unit by some of her few remaining neighbors, mostly elderly people like herself. One of them waited on a chair next to her bed, embroidering a cloth napkin with steady hands. A lot of people had left the city, or tried to, at least. They headed to the border, which was only a couple of hours drive north.

Later, we’d discover that our people were being detained by US authorities and simply handed back to our military. Some civilians on the other side even made a sport out of hunting refugees, like animals. How many can you catch in a week, a month. Bonus if you caught a complete family. Better if there’s only children.

Doña Chuy didn’t understand a lot about politics. She had no formal education and felt rather dizzied by the way in which the world just rushed forward without caring about the backlash. All she knew is what she saw and what she could grasp from what her family told her. Two of her children had gone to university, and some of her grandchildren even went to study in the capital, Antigua. They are smart, smart people.

When all the commotion started on Independence Day, the younger ones immediately wanted to flee. The president had been shot while he gave el grito in an homage to the Catholic priest who supposedly started the whole independence movement. He had collapsed on the balcony of the national palace, his wife and guards rushing to him before the broadcast cut to black. Doña Chuy had watched on the State-gifted screen, transfixed by that impossible and incongruous moment.

She had lived a long life, and she was no stranger to acts of senseless violence. But this, this was different. She couldn’t make sense of it, the moment eluding her comprehension as if she were trying to trap air between her hands.

All through her neighborhood, there was silence. Then, as if coming from very far away, voices began raising. At last, the shouting and commotion broke out. People came out of their houses and rushed to their neighbors’ doors, some of their faces sporting red smudges of paint, Ixtec’s flag now erased.

Nobody knew what to do, how to act. Doña Chuy felt her wrist phone vibrating madly, all her children trying to reach her at the same time. Estación Samoa was still a relatively small city in northern Ixtec. It was the third largest in the whole state, but that didn’t mean much if you compared it to other cities in the country. Northern states had a reputation of being very large, but not a lot of people lived there. Not everyone was a fan of the extreme weather. Most of her children had moved to the central states, near the capital.

After the assassination, the next few days vibrated with a sort of unhinged energy. Politicians argued and posted frantically on their social media, engaging with the general public in an attempt to throw blame at each other. Several mourned the president and several more said he had it coming. Peasants die the same way, was the general opinion of the largest conservative party, Partido Esperanza de México. They despised the president due to fact that he came from one of the poor coastal cities of Ixtec, and his accent seemed to reflect his modest upbringing at that.

Doña Chuy remembered them from a few months back, when members of PEM protested his presidency by setting up tents outside of the National Palace, and then went away and ordered their staff to keep their place. Now they were calling for change, for true change. They were saying that leaving the vice-president in charge was unfair and unconstitutional, even though it was quite the opposite. It wasn’t surprising watching vultures picking at a corpse, but it was surprising watching so many people clap for them.

Doña Chuy woke up one day feeling tired from all the shit going around, so she decided to enjoy an audiobook instead of obsessing over politics online and on the phone with her children.

She was a huge fan of audiobooks, listening to them on her wrist phone. Reading physical books had always tired her, making her fall asleep after just a few paragraphs. But she had loved them ever since she was a child. She loved stories, yes, in every shape and form, but there was something particularly magical to her about the weight of a book in her hands. A world waiting and whispering, its weight a promise of things to come.

But Doña Chuy had never had any money to buy them. The books she had were the ones someone else threw away, and they weren’t many. So, the habit of reading, of dreaming on paper, never really took hold.

It was her son Ramón who showed her the wonderful world of audiobooks. They reminded her of those times when her grandmother would listen to novelas on the radio while she cooked. She thought she could use some of that, that feeling of being back in her village, in her grandmother’s tiny, printed house, sneaking around to sip mamá Pancha’s coffee.

Doña Chuy tried playing an audiobook, but something was wrong. It marked error every time she tried to open it. She tried calling her son Ramón to ask for help, but a pop-up screen said loud and clear: please enter the permit code to proceed with the call.

Doña Chuy frowned and tried again, sure that her bill was covered. She had just paid it. Please enter the permit code to proceed with the call.

She tried the screen next, but every channel was blank. She went outside to her neighbors.

“You need a permit code, now,” her neighbor la Cuata told her. She was trying to comfort her screaming toddler, bouncing it against her hip, itsfat little face covered in snot and tears. The circles under la Cuata’s eyes looked purple, more like bruises, against her pale brown flesh. “It will be sent to you when they’ve looked through all your history, and you are deemed compliant.”

“Compliant?” Doña Chuy asked, beginning to worry. Some of the audiobooks she listened to were very violent indeed. La Cuata shook her head when she told her about her worries. Usually, she would have laughed and mocked the old woman and her inability to understand technology. This time, she looked barely there, her mind fixed somewhere far away.

“It means you don’t have conversations or materials that go against them,” she said, swatting mosquitoes half-heartedly.

Doña Chuy nodded and went back to her house, wanting to ask who they were,but she thought it best to leave la Cuata alone, let her come back from that faraway place in her eyes. That was the last time Doña Chuy ever saw her. She still dreamed of her little girl, with her fat, snot-covered face. They took the whole family.

That same day, her permit code appeared on her wrist phone. She immediately called her son, Ramón, who lived the closest to her, just a couple hours away in the State capital.

“I’m coming to get you,” he had said, as soon as she’d picked up. He sounded winded, things clashing in the background. “Didn’t you watch the official statement, vieja? It’s the military, they’ve organized a temporary military junta until elections can be called. Said the country is a mess and too biased, said we needed impartial eyes. Bullshit, utter fucking bullshit. I’m coming to get you. I might take longer since they are running checkpoints now. I’ll be there by tonight. Wait for me,” he said, and she felt a cold fear spread through her. She might not know a lot about politics, but the military involved in anything had her blood running cold.

Doña Chuy hung up and went straight to packing, trying to be as efficient as she could, but allowing sentimentality to lead her some. She didn’t know how long until she’d be back, so she wanted to know she would be set. She took yarn and needle, her bible and glasses, and some comfortable clothes. She really didn’t know what to expect.

She got her bag and her yarn, planning to finish a cloth napkin she’d been working on as she waited, and sat in her living room. The hours ticked away, the audiobooks she still had access to played, one after the other—they were short or already half finished. She was done with the bowl fruit pattern on the cloth napkin and was wondering if she should start another one. Her son should be almost home.

She looked out her window, the gauzy curtains drawn, and saw through the white metal bars it was already pitch-black outside. The city lights hadn’t been turned on. She dialed her son’s number and dialed it and dialed it. At last, it didn’t even go through.

By dawn, she had alerted every single member of the family. Pero cómo se le ocurre, he is probably just stuck at one of the retenes, there is nothing to worry about, qué irresponsable. Listening to her children distracted her some, but she felt the ground slipping from under her. She sat alone in her living room and did the only thing she could: she hoped.

She hoped her son would show up, running to the window every time she heard a car and feeling a knife to her gut when they passed her house. Later, when she felt particularly tired or had just woken up from a night of restless sleep, she would still rush to the window, her imagination playing cruel tricks on her. She wished she could live inside those moments, those brief and joyous moments of delusion, lunacy. But then the seconds would turn, and she would be struck coldly out of that delusion by reality.

Her son never came home.

Now, looking down at her cloth napkin with her one good eye, she couldn’t help but think of him. He had been the youngest and most rebellious, and sometimes the most distant. He hadn’t cared much about respect just for the sake of respect, so he had challenged her every time he felt it was just. She had tried to teach him silence when it was for his own good, but she ended up just making him angry, resentful. He wanted to speak out more.

Doña Chuy wondered, time without number, if it was all her fault. She could imagine Ramón saying exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong moment and then . . . She chastised herself, telling herself that she should have been stricter, tried harder to teach him to be quiet and obey, and then . . . I would have killed him sooner. That thought jolted her and then froze her, making her wish she could escape her body and mind for a second, just one second.

In the days following Ramón’s disappearance, things in the city became worse. People started going missing, pulled out of their homes, jobs, taken right in the middle of the street in plain daylight. If anybody tried to look for their missing ones—as Doña Chuy did several times—they were told there was no record of anyone being taken. Military men and women could now be found everywhere, giving this information in their clipped, icy tones.

Doña Chuy’s other children wanted to come and get her, but she refused them without discussion. Even if they didn’t say it, they were planning to attempt leaving Ixtec, and she wasn’t going anywhere without Ramón.

At some point, time ceased having any meaning for her, and Doña Chuy simply crashed. The momentum that had been carrying her forward let up. All the blatantly false noes and the cruel abuse and threats hurled at her by the military when she insisted didn’t make her feel scared, it made her feel hopeless. Again and again, things were being taken from them, because the people at the top could, and now they didn’t even pretend they wouldn’t. She felt bone-tired.

For days, she didn’t even look out the window when she heard their vans approaching. They mostly came during the night, dressed as civilians, stealing away another struggling, bloodied body. She couldn’t get out of bed. She was stuck inside this thick fog of confusion, denial, and fear, so much fear, that made simple movements a challenge. She couldn’t move without feeling her whole body cramping up, her belly tingling as if she might throw up, her forehead being stabbed by icy blades. She barely ate, didn’t see the point in washing.

Doña Chuy felt the whole world closing in and, soon, it was going to choke her. She had to do something, do something or perish under that colossal weight.

It wasn’t bravery, not really. It was just one step, and then the next.

She printed the photos at home and took a basket full of her embroidered cloth napkins. The market near her home looked empty, the smell of cooking oil and spices wafting heavy in the warm summer breeze. The park at the center of the square, where traveling merchants usually placed their carts and tables, sported not even half the people that would usually be there. The shops and restaurants on the first floor of the brightly colored houses were also sparsely filled. It was a beautiful, clear summer day.

Doña Chuy walked down to the park, already a fine film of sweat coating her wrinkled face. She picked a spot under a tree near the center and waited. It was still early morning, so she was not expecting a lot of people to show up until later.

Slowly, like a rising tide, people began showing up. She sold them the embroidered cloth napkins and gave them a photo of her son, asking them if they had seen him and if by any chance they did, her address would be on the back. More and more people began to show up. That day, she left with her basket completely empty.

She visited other markets, other little plazas and parks. She couldn’t go too far because she wouldn’t make it home before curfew. And she didn’t go to the big central plazas or markets, fearing she’d be caught sooner. Everywhere she went, she began receiving photos from strangers that told her, begged her, if she could help them share the photo of their son, daughter, mother, father, aunt, uncle, friend, lover. Everyone was disappearing. Everyone was being taken. She accepted every single photograph.

Wrist phones and the Internet were no longer reliable, so using social media was out of the question. She didn’t realize people, young brave people, were filming her. They had found a way, as the young always do, to be able to upload material and share it internationally, trying to let the world hear what was going on. And maybe, just maybe, the world would care this time.

It was nearly impossible for locals to get into any social media without consequences, but some still managed. Better technology could mean more freedom, or sometimes a better-equipped prison.

They were there filming her when it happened. By that point people knew of the old woman with her basket selling her embroidered cloth napkins. Several other such ladies also were beginning to pop around the whole city. She was in one of her usual venues, a small park of squalid trees, when they approached her.

The sun was blazing in the sky. The strong breeze blowing was just a cruel blast of heat in the face on that suffocating day. They were dressed in uniforms this time. Two women. Their uniforms were navy blue and sharp, newly issued along with their slick equipment. The weapons and all their equipment came from our neighbors up north, but that everybody knew, even before.

People remained around Doña Chuy, because they knew it would be worse if they tried to run. You couldn’t outrun them, you couldn’t escape them, they owned everything. The only thing you could do was face them, for the last thing that they owned was your body, your fear for your body. One must never allow them that.

The two women took Doña Chuy’s basket and emptied the contents on the floor, black and white photos spilling out on the grass. Several embroidered cloth napkins weighted the papers down, preventing them from blowing away. Proof, there on the floor was proof.

The women screamed at Doña Chuy, yelling something about a permit while they kicked the photos and the napkins around. Not a single photo was blown away by the wind.

Doña Chuy did not feel fearless, as a lot of people would call her afterward. People thought moments like that made you fearless because they wished for such a thing to be possible, attainable. They wished to believe that at some point, one lets go of fear and overcomes it, surpasses it. That was not true for Doña Chuy. She was completely and profoundly afraid, standing right at the center of her fear, not a single step beyond it. But she was also standing right at the center of her rage.

Doña Chuy stood her ground while one of the two women yelled again right in her face about some bullshit permit, spit hitting her face.

“I do not need a permit to look for my son.”

She spoke the words in her usual even tone, something barely above a whisper. But the graveyard silence around her carried the words loud and clear across the whole park. For a few seconds, nothing happened. The two women were used to fear, to people cowering back, or to violence, people rushing forward and attacking. They were not used to this calm statement of truth, unshaken, loud and clear. They recovered fast, though.

Doña Chuy heard the wind whistling and suddenly there was burst of searing white light that seemed to precede the butt of the gun slamming against her face. Everything went dark. She didn’t know what happened afterward, just faintly remembered someone, several someones, screaming.

She woke up inside a gray room illuminated with artificial white light, her head pounding viciously from the inside, and something thick slushing through her veins.

Doña Chuy was alone in that small gray room, the smell of alcohol and blood strong in her nostrils. She was alone in that small gray room, alone. And for the first time in a while, Doña Chuy allowed herself to cry, very quietly.

A soft rain had begun to fall, the wind blowing it inside Doña Chuy’s house. She needed to get up and close the damn door, swipe the floor. She couldn’t add a fall to her current state. This time, she wasn’t sure she would make it. Plus, lying in bed immobilized when there were so many things to do—she couldn’t afford that.

Now, she knew of the other women walking the streets, sharing photos, and selling embroidered cloth napkins. They were like her, looking for someone loved, someone lost, stolen. Violence could always steal the physical, do away with everything that was, but memory remained. And memory, no matter how much time passed, was always a promise.

Doña Chuy got up and closed the door, listening to the rain knocking on the metal door like tiny pebbles, asking to be let in. She sat back down and picked up her needle and cloth napkin. She was embroidering poppies, the red an easy color to see with her one good eye. There were others right now helping, organizing. She needed to do her part, too.

About the Author

E. N. Díaz is a Mexican non-binary author of speculative fiction. Their short story “Mamá Chayo’s Magic Lesson” can be found in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Their work focuses on people not often center spot in this type of fiction. They are often inspired by the members of their family and the stories told by them of fantastic occurrences in everyday life. It is just a family fact that one of their great-aunts used to box with a bear in a family circus. They write in both English and Spanish.

A Series of Endings

Amal Singh

This is the story of Roopchand Rathore, time traveler, fighter, poet, cancer-survivor, inventor. While his story has many endings, there’s only one true beginning, and it takes place in the humid but pristine backwaters of sun-drenched Kerala.

A scene from a movie, but a true-to-roots, hand on heart, scene of value, scene of promise, scene of a birth. A child’s cry from inside a thatched hut. Outside the hut, a muddy trail that disappears amid a canopy of palm trees. A silent rush of water from a nearby canal. A rickety boat tied to the thick stem of a drooping coconut tree that looks like a sullen traveler whose hair is in disarray.

The child is born to parents who aren’t true Keralites by birth, but by heart. His face is like the moon. His mother insists on naming him Chandru, but his father calls him Roop. By consensus, he is named Roopchand.

“He will be a painter like his grandfather,” says Roopchand’s father, Karamchand, upon seeing his eyes, bright and black and full of promise. Roopchand coos at this, clutching his father’s pudgy finger. His father mumbles a song’s mukhda under his breath but is rudely interrupted by the mother, Poornakala.

“No,” says Poornakala. “He will be a healer.” Roopchand lets out a wail at this, making his dissatisfaction known.

“Maybe, one day, he will become a boat racer like his father.” Roopchand’s wail turns into a steady baby hum. He will be none of those things his parents just spoke about.

This is his one true beginning.

Roopchand Rathore hurtles toward Europa. Inside the BreathPod, disconnected from the Marionette-V ship, Jupiter-bound, but wrecked after crossing Mars, the only thing to keep him company is the constant drone of his pod’s AI unit, whose two tasks are reminding him of his rapidly depleting oxygen, and reciting him poems. Its Urdu is heavily accented, but workable. RR can’t complain. The vastness of space is its own poetry.

“Hazaaron khwaishein aisi ki har khwaish pe dum nikle.” says the AI, in a broken, un-Ghalib like manner. This is RR’s ending. An ending of a life lived in the service of science, but a life incomplete yet. As the globe of Europa approaches him, he dreams about its silicate surface, hiding a deep, icy ocean of water, and an invertebrate lifeform he had termed as jal-jaadugar. Water magicians. The probe he’d sent had disappeared beneath the crust following a storm and an earthquake, but still managed to send and receive signals. The probe couldn’t have survived the intense pressure of the icy waters, yet, miraculously, the signal coming back was a series of clicks, a response.

It was a miracle. Almost like magic. From a jaadugar inside water.

But we’re not concerned about the hows and the whys of his discovery. The discovery happened, that’s the point. And despite the discovery, despite the near-miss launches, and a final success, and Marionette-V’s course across space, his mission was not on its way to Europa, but on its way to failure.

But death is not a failure. Death is certain, failure is not. Death is an ending, failure is not.

“Rumi,” said Roopchand Rathore, closing his eyes. “Recite Rumi to me.”

“Your oxygen is close to ten percent, and all my facilities are spent in keeping this pod operational. Searching for Rumi would deplete it faster . . . ” the AI’s voice breaks off. Close to failure.

Fifteen minutes later, an ending comes.

When Roop goes to the beginning, he finds himself gathering consciousness near the coconut tree and the boat. Not at the moment of his birth, but at an uncertain point, because all early life is an uncertain haze, a miasma of memories cobbled together. It always happens like this for him, after an ending.

One never truly remembers their birth, or their first birthday, the first time they got sick. There’s always a cloud. That’s why beginnings are overrated.

He is tugging the boat, his fists clenched, as a coconut falls from above and neatly breaks into two as it hits the ground in front of Roop. His heart leaps in terror of an almost-death, then sinks at seeing the coconut water and muddying the ground, making it mulch.

He remembers he needs to be at a boat race, cheering his babuji. Screaming babuji amidst screams of achan and anna seems odd to him, but he gathers courage to do so. And he runs toward the narrow main road where blue scooters speed like spaceships, driven by lungi-clad men with cigarettes dangling from their blackened lips. The road snakes toward the site of the race. Roop runs after a scooter. The rider stops the scooter and gestures to Roop to hop along, which he happily does.

“Are you also going to watch the race?” Roopchand asks the driver.

“No, I loathe boat races. They’re for adrenaline junkies. I’m a man of letters.”

To Roopchand, the answer doesn’t make a lot of sense. He is young, still, and doesn’t understand why someone would hate boat races.

“My father is racing,” says Roopchand. “He’s going to win.”

“How are you sure?”

“He always wins.” RR speaks, but his voice gets lost in the rush of the hot, wet, afternoon air. He tries to speak a bit louder, to make the driver know that he is the son of a boating champion, but the wind doesn’t relent. With the wind comes the intoxicating, spicy-charred-sweet smell of pothu roast. His stomach rumbles like thunder, but pothu—beef—is sacrilege for Roop. Would it still hurt to have a taste? God won’t be angry at him for yielding to this temptation? After all, there are gods here as well. The gods who like people who eat pothu. What’s the difference?

But there is also the matter of the race.

The man stops his scooter near a stall that sells beef roast and parotta. RR doesn’t rebel. At that moment, the race is a distant possibility in his mind. Whether his father, Karamchand, wins it or not doesn’t concern him. What concerns him is the taste of a forbidden animal. Looking at the charred brown chunks dripping with oil, swimming in a coconut onion gravy with snippings of curry leaves sprinkled on them, RR couldn’t imagine that the chunks would have once belonged to a full-grown beast. He can’t tell which part those brown bits came from.

“Two plates.” RR hears the voice of the man. In this miasmic moment, where the world ceases to exist at the corners of his eyes, he is handed a plate full of forbidden food. RR tears off the parotta like he would a roti and picks up a healthy chunk of the roast beef like he would do with a cube of paneer. He takes a bite.

RR would have said, later in his life, that tasting the beef was the closest he had felt, ever, to being in the presence of divinity. But then the man had taken the shape of the death-god his father had told him stories of, with horns on his head, and fiery eyes.

Roopchand opens his eyes again, near the coconut tree, and the boat, intimately aware of his previous end, at the bloody hands of a stranger he had met on the roads. This time around he goes straight to the race and reminds himself not to give in to temptations of a certain food.

But he reaches the site of the boat race too late, still. Two boats cruise toward the finish with gusto, and his father is in neither of them. He finds his champion father painfully slicing the waters, his tired eyes searching for the finish line, somewhere far behind, maybe the tenth, maybe the eleventh. At the moment, RR forgets all counting as he watches the disappointed, sorry figure of his father.

Roopchand Rathore is drinking aversan with Xlarin-Midan-Wa, a blue-veined, Ganymedian, whose body absorbs all sounds and all light. In that moment, Roopchand is sitting in the darkness of a cave, taking warmth from the generosity of the aliens who found his pod rammed into ice, surrounded by the vapory entrails of chemicals. With memories cobbled together from nested memories, hazy events, calculations, quotes, languages, and wisdoms of lifetimes spent earlier, RR managed to helm Marionette-V again and again, sped toward Europa, but this time missed it, and landed in Ganymede instead, finding his jal-jadoogar. Had Xlarin-Midan-wa not come up to the surface for xir biweekly trip, xe would not have found Roopchand. And yet again, this would have been a fruitless ending. But now Roopchand sits inside the cave, reciting a nazm to an alien whom he only knows as jaadugar.

“Hazaaron khwahishein aaisi ki har khwahish pe dam nikle . . . ” says Roopchand. The nazm reaches the Ganymedian through the thin air, an air unsuited for Roopchand’s survival. Xlarin-Midan-Wa stays silent for the next two minutes, and then he speaks. His voice is all clicks and high-pitched notes, inaudible to Roopchand.

“You keep repeating that phrase.” the Ganymedian says. The sounds make a shape in Roopchand’s brain. A shape that screams condescension. Apathy. The jal-jadoogar don’t like him at all.

“I have lived a lot of lives and at least four of them were dedicated to finding Ganymedians.”

“We only live one life and all of that goes into finding a way to live forever.”

RR laughs. His body rattles like the wet sack of bones it is. Then he stops, fearing his laughter will take his life away. That a final hitch would snatch his soul from somewhere deep inside him and transfer it back across the multifolds of space and time and drop him inside the body of a teenager, clutching a frayed rope, waiting for his father to come back from a race.

“Take it from me. Living forever is not the joyride you think it is.”

“Will you tell it to my brethren? These exact words. Not one blemish. Because I have been trying to convince them, and they reject my words each time. Perhaps if the same words come from a different being, they might see reason.”

The jal-jadoogar’s words are a razor slice to RR’s brain. Even if they’re a request, the Ganymedian’s language takes an ugly shape inside RR, and it takes him a long time to form a cohesive thought from those clicks. The end result is a low din, then an absence of sound, like just after a blast. In that absence, RR understands that he has to meet other Ganymedians.

Cloaked in a brown rag, carrying a bone white staff that emits a sapphire glow from its tip, RR walks inside a domed vault. A cavernous space, where the sound of his footsteps ricochet off the walls and come back to him amplified, the vault is not a traditional space that houses riches like gold and silver. It is instead a space that reminds RR of a church he had been inside, in a previous life, a previous beginning. The walls of the vault have tubes attached to it, and through the tubes RR can make out letters wafting upward, coiled in a cloudy embrace. Yes, letters, runes, images, signs, all swirling inside glass tubes moving upward, where they meet further tubes, crisscrossed, which lead to a glowing apparatus near the back of the vault.

RR walks toward the center of the room where, behind a large mahogany desk, crouches a creature half-horse, half-bat, reading an ancient book. The leathery cover with gleaming scales like crocodile hide seems to groan with each turn of the page, as if denying to impart its various secrets to the reader. RR clears his throat. The creature looks up and flaps its black, shadowy wings. It smiles and shows its entirely too-white horse teeth.

“I’m here to return this,” says RR, pointing to his staff.

“Place it on the table,” says the creature. “Has the staff completed its final duel?”

“Slayed the demon of Varhansa, yes.”

“Your text will be with you any moment now. I request you to be patient.”

RR stands straight, clutching the frayed edges of his cloak, feeling its rough fabric on his calloused palms. The creature uses its bat claws to turn the page of the ancient text, and grunts in amusement at a line. An inordinately long moment passes. Groans of words all around, swiveling in pipes, poetry in vapor. RR scratches his chin and admires the domed ceiling above.

“What sort of answers do you seek from the text?” the creature says finally, without looking up.

“Whatever the text gives me, I’ll take that as an answer.”

“Even if it’s meaningless?”

“I have lived many lives, lives vastly different from the one I am living now, and I have learned that there’s no meaning to anything in this world.”

“Why wait for the text so patiently, then?”

“Curiosity.”

The creature shrugs as only it can, waves appearing on its wings, its horsehead freckling. Then, it closes the book it’s reading, reaching for something in the air above. RR’s eyes follow its movements, and it’s only here he notices an opening of a brass tube six feet above the creature. To the ordinary eye, the tube would seem fit for ventilation, but not in this place. Smoke curls in a halo at the circular opening and forms concentric rings. The creature picks the rings one by one, and they solidify in its grip, fusing into each other, becoming one thick crown, emblazoned with glowing letters. RR takes the crown and brings it closer to his eyes.

“What does it say?”

“My text is meant only for me,” says RR. “Thank you for your service.”

The creature goes back to reading its book as RR turns around on his feet and walks out of the vault.

Outside, it’s an eternal winter. Dead things covered in age-old frost in corniches of trees find another frost blanket. RR’s boots crunch against hard snow as he walks toward the edge of the forest. He can’t feel his fingers, but the crown that holds his answers grows colder at every step. Snowflakes form a white crust on the engravings, which RR painstakingly removes to read as he walks. His fingertips have gone from pink to violet in a span of minutes, but he persists. He blinks away snow from his eyes to read his text. It’s an old language, older than time, but he knows all languages, even the ones not discovered yet in this time.

He reads the words, but his mind is elsewhere.

He is standing at the tip of a volcano holding the staff, as the magma roils into a monster-shape. Flame hands, flame torso, a red-jewel heart, and eyes two suns. But RR stands unfazed, gripping the staff, remembering the promise of Guru Raj. “Kill the demon and get your answers.” Guru Raj had spoken those words in his mind when RR had brought to him ten containers of milk, balancing them on his head, ascending the Ten Thousand Steps. And as RR stands at the fiery precipice, he remembers the steps he had climbed to his teacher. And he knows in his heart that slaying the monster would be easier than balancing the teetering ceramic milk pots on his head.

The demon of Varhansa comes down upon him as RR plunges the staff deep into its amber heart. It goes in smoothly, like a hot knife through butter. The demon of Varhansa bursts into more flames and the volcano mellows down. RR slides down the slope and finds himself at the base of a mostly quiet but grumbling mountain as ash rains from the sky.

His mind comes back from the fiery surroundings to frigid ones. His eyes refocus on the words.

The forest trails away into a white, smoky nothingness. RR sits down on the hard, cold ground, taking in the words written for him by an invisible hand.

What you seek waits for you at the beginning.

RR closes his eyes as the cold kisses him farewell.

The jal-jadoogar all look the same but speak in different clicks. RR knows what he has to say to them. They look at him expectantly, as if he will deliver to them a sermon. At this moment, RR is a prophet. Ruined face, battered body, gasping for air on an alien planet, on the mercy of a Ganymedian device that allows him to breathe and survive underwater.

RR floats, but the Ganymedians stand. Their bodies are misshapen blobs held together by a string, a six feet-long umbilical cord running at the edge. Their features are a science diagram of their own, part double helical structure, part isopropyl cyanide, but a complete chemical oddity. And inside water they take a dreamlike shape that the harsh exterior of the moon would stretch and morph into a different shape.

In clicks, the Xlarin-Midan-Wa introduces RR. In clicks, he receives a response. Their bodies rush toward him like an Olympian racer’s last dash to the finish line and stop inches away from his face, the watery everything around him threatening to become a fleshy grave where his innards would swim for eons like flailing tentacles.

“Your arrival was written in the depths, which have since been washed.”

“We will soak up your knowledge and swim to the surface. We’ll haunt this icy land with our newfound independence.”

“Tell us, tell us, tell us.”

“I’ll tell you a story first,” RR says. The clicks stop, and the only sound around RR is the sound of a cold, empty sea.

“Where I come from there was once a sage who prayed atop a mountain to a god who would grant him any wish. The sage wanted to be immortal. So, he prayed for a thousand years, and when he opened his eyes, the world was awash in fire. Then, he prayed for a thousand more, and when he opened his eyes, the world was in autumn, old, and withering. After the third millennia, when the land was green and baby new, the god came to him in the form of a young girl climbing the mountain. The girl told the sage that she was ready to be given the gift of immortality now that she had climbed the mountain. The sage was befuddled, as it was the first thing he had done three thousand years ago. The girl took his hand and told him, ‘Look around you. The world has changed a thousand times over, and you are still the same. Do you still think you didn’t get the boon the first day itself? When you began it all?’” Rage consumed him as he fell to his knees, and he cursed himself for being blind to the world around himself. But soon the rage was replaced by anguish and helplessness.

“What did the sage do?”

“The sage wept at the feet of the girl. Then he climbed down the mountain and lived the rest of his days in anonymity, meeting people of lands far off, building civilizations, and fighting in wars. But he was never at peace. Some say he’s still around, searching for some kind of an answer.”

“Are you the sage?”

“No, I am the little girl who has come here to tell you. You have lived long and fruitful lives already, and there’s nothing beyond all this.”

“You’re no god.”

There’s silence again. The water shivers around RR. But soon, after a cruel click, and a puncturing sound, a redness swells.

RR grabs the coconut mid-fall and smashes it on the tree-stem. He drinks the water and scoops up the cream collected at the white base. His ears catch the melodious clang of a payal. The rhythm only belongs to one woman. RR turns and looks at the face of his mother, all hard lines, yet radiating a peculiar youth with her eyes. She has brought him a plate of samosas. RR remembers from the many lives he has lived that he loves this nutty, warm smell of fried dough enveloping mashed, spicy potatoes. It all gushes back, once again, as it has, many times before. For a moment, he loses everything. Then he steadies himself, holding the stem of the tree and the gaze of his mother.

“Today, you have to win.”

“You mean father will win. I’ll cheer for him from the sides. Where’s he?”

“No, I mean literally. You are taking his place. It has already been arranged.” RR catches a glint of the afternoon sun in the gem of his mother’s bindi.

“What? But why . . . ? I don’t even know how.”

“It’s in your blood. You’ll know when you hold the oar.”

And like the crescendo of music he had often heard in the movies he had watched growing up, he somehow hears a chorus of birds, shrill sounds of insects, more clang of payals, and a jaltarang, all coalescing into a moving melody, nudging him toward the canal where the boat race was going to be held.

“Will you come with me?” he asks his mother.

“I’ll cheer you on from here. I’ll pray for you. And so will your father.”

RR smiles and rushes inside his hut, where his father sits on a stool, massaging oil on his elbow, where there is a sharp red gash. The old man looks up and locks gazes with RR. Then, with a labored movement, he hands him a wooden oar.

“This has seen many races, son. Treat it like it’s an extension of your hand.”

And in RR’s mind, from another time, similar words echo, of a bearded man, who had handed him a staff, and said, “The staff is your hand, and your hand slays the beast.” He touches his father’s feet, like he touched his Guru’s feet, and takes the oar.

When he leaves his hut and takes the beaten trail to the road, he forgets the ending he met in one of his lives following the same path. His head thrums with all the endings he has met, but he remembers not his one true beginning, which, he’s sure, involves his mother, his father, that hut, and that tree he left behind.

He reaches the backwaters. The air is humid, and his shirt sticks to his chest, pools of sweat forming on it like so many Rorschach tests. Palm trees form a canopy over a narrow river body, which widens later. Sixteen snake boats with paddlers ready to race. RR looks at his oar and the long boat and the gap among the sixteen men where his father used to sit. He is not special, just one of many. A child even, while the rest are muscular and lean. Sweat glistens on their chests proudly.

But RR has his father’s oar, and he remembers how to slay beasts. He joins the group, saying nothing. They look at him, suspiciously, expecting his father.

“I am all you get today,” he says. A dark, clean-shaven man spits on the muddy ground.

“Great, we’ll lose this year.”

RR catches the fallen gazes of his teammates. Soon, their eyes take a cruel turn, and he sees not kindness but venom in them. He is painfully reminded of a cold evening in water surrounded by aliens who demanded answers from him. RR grips his oar tightly.

“Do you believe in magic?” he says to his teammates, desperately. “This oar is infused with it. And today, we will win.”

“Even a magic oar has to be expertly handled, and you’re not your father,” says another man. His name is Sundaran. He has a mole on his left cheek, and a scar on the other. RR has an urge to slap him, but he knows he’ll end up with broken bones and a broken soul if he does something like that.

“Let’s do it and hope for the best,” says another man, whose voice is gentle, but the manner stern. He looks senior. There’s a consensus. The men wait for the gunshot.

They wait, and wait, but the sound defies expectation. It comes, as sudden as a stroke, and all the sinewy hands are plunged into motion. RR grips his oar firmly and mimics the paddlers. Slowly and steadily, his blood obliges, and the oar does his bidding, like the staff did, in another age, in another time. The man with the mole grins at RR as sweat trickles down his brow. There’s only one boat ahead of them, and at least three men on the boat look battle-strained.

RR gives it everything he has. So do his teammates. And just before the finish line, their snake boat’s head slithers ahead of the other. A roar of his teammates deafens him, momentarily, but inadvertently. He smiles. Moments later, as his teammates hurl his lithe, small teenage body high up in the air in celebration of their win, RR forgets all his previous endings. This is his one moment, one life, one beginning.

“Take it,” says the man with the mole, handing him the glittering trophy. “Take it to Karamchand. Make sure he holds it properly. Make sure he sings to it.”

Roopchand grabs the trophy, shakes hands with his teammates, and runs toward his home, taking the sun-beaten road. His heart leaps in joy at the full life ahead of him, his mind holding the memory of only one life lived. As he takes a turn in the road, a smell wafts to his nose. A smell of something divine. His ears catch a rat-a-tat of an old scooter, groaning along the road surrounded by palm trees. Roopchand’s legs feel weary all of a sudden as he looks at the man who is riding the scooter. He applies the brakes and looks at RR curiously.

“Won the race, I see,” he says. “Aren’t you hungry? After all that relentless paddling?”

RR’s stomach grumbles as the smell of a beast roasting grows profound. The man seems kind. “I am,” says RR, after much trepidation, even as his brain turns upon itself, revealing to his soul a similar ending.

“Come with me,” says the man. “I know a place nearby that sells a lip-smacking pothu roast.”

Clutching the trophy and balancing the oar, Roopchand hops on the back seat of the scooter. The salty and warm wind whips against his hair as he courses toward another ending.

About the Author

Amal Singh is a screenwriter, author, and a cat dad from Mumbai, India. While his cat silently judges him, he can be seen drafting a novel, or trying to bake brownies in a cooker. His short fiction has appeared in venues like Apex Magazine, Clarkesworld, F&SF, and Fantasy Magazine, among others.

A Universe of Possibilities: Planets of Red Dwarfs

Julie Nováková

Live fast, shine brightly, die young: some stars are like that. But they are few. So are, cosmically speaking, stars like our own Sun, though it’s taking its “life” more slowly. By far, the most numerous stars in the cosmos are M dwarfs, also dubbed red dwarfs: tiny, dim stars that will never undergo the flash of going supernova or “merely” shedding their outer envelope in the red giant stage before becoming a white dwarf. These stars, some possessing less than a tenth of our Sun’s mass, will continue shining their faint light for hundreds of billions of years, even a trillion years—magnitudes longer than the current age of the universe—getting incrementally brighter and hotter until eventually running out of their thermonuclear fuel.

Is there life to find around red dwarf stars, or are the most numerous stars in the universe—and most of the universe and its long, long future with them—barren?

Red dwarfs glow very faintly, and so their habitable zone—the distance from the central star where a planet gets just enough light to sustain surface liquid water under the right conditions—is very close. Close-in planets may have several weaknesses for habitability: First, they quickly become tidally locked, always turning one hemisphere toward their star, the other bathed in perpetual darkness. Would that be detrimental to life? And second, they’re permanently in peril from stellar flares. Red dwarfs tend to be very active stars, wildly variable, often flaring—threatening to blow away a planet’s atmosphere. Should we discount any chances for life, then? It’s not so simple . . .

Balmy, or Scorched Dry?

The sun never sets; never moves from right above you. You’re standing in the so-called substellar point on a tidally locked world. Are you baking in the constant sunlight? Surrounded by a dry barren landscape? Would you be better off on the nightside, or is it so cold there that atmosphere begins to freeze out, gradually making the planet less and less suitable for life?

Earlier notions of tidally locked planets conformed to this rather bleak view, but recent simulations have disputed it, showing that an atmosphere with a sufficient density—even less dense than Earth’s—could efficiently distribute heat all over the planet with little danger of overheating on the dayside and freezing out in the permanent darkness. Ocean currents could help as well, depending on the ratio and distribution of land and water. If a planet is mostly water-covered, it could transport heat quite efficiently. If, however, it’s mostly land-covered or plate tectonics drives its continents to the nightside (imagine a single Pangea-like continent that happens to “float” there), the dayside and nightside temperatures could grow increasingly different, and water might then become trapped in a thick ice sheet in the permanent night.

The climate is the least of our problems, though, if there is no atmosphere to enable a climate. An atmosphere is a fickle thing. Mars could tell you that: the relatively mild steady flow of particles from our friendly Sun has blown away much of its atmosphere, stripping so much of it that Martian atmospheric pressure doesn’t allow for the stable existence of surface liquid water. A planet orbiting a red dwarf could well suffer the same fate, albeit for different reasons.

Mars is much smaller than the Earth. With its approximately third of Earth’s gravity, it can’t hold onto its atmosphere as well, and even more importantly, it has lost its magnetic field—its protection against the solar wind—long ago. To avoid Mars’ fate and worse, a planet orbiting an active red dwarf would likely need to be more massive and have a strong magnetic field. That sounds simple but may not be . . . Of all the rocky planets and moons in our system, only Earth, Mercury, and Ganymede have their own magnetic fields. Venus doesn’t. Nor does current-day Mars, or any of the number of moons of the giant planets, with the single exception of Ganymede. Why these three worlds? What connects them? Or, framed differently, what sets them apart from the rest?

It’s long been thought that relatively quick rotation is needed to maintain the inner dynamo, but the case of Mercury—revolving around its axis every fifty-nine days—seems to dispel it. It’s not about size, either; both Mercury and Ganymede are much smaller than Earth and also smaller than Mars. In relative terms, the core of Mercury is exceptionally large, but the Ganymedean core is likely relatively small.

In short, we can’t really predict yet whether planets with strong magnetic fields can be expected in the vicinity of red dwarfs. It probably depends on the chemical composition of the planet, the abundance of radioactive heat sources (influenced, in turn, by the composition of the original star-forming cloud), and tidal effects from other planets.

Speaking of other planets and tides, we’ve now come across multiple, very compact planetary systems of low mass stars, such as TRAPPIST-1. Around it, seven planets orbit within a space that would well fit within the orbit of Mercury. It’s likely that at least some are locked in orbital resonance with each other, completing their revolutions around the star in such a way that they periodically exert greater gravitational influence on each other. Jupiter’s moons Io, Europa, and Ganymede do that, and it’s part of why the inner Io is so squashed by tides that it’s all dry and very volcanically active, and why Europa and Ganymede can maintain huge liquid oceans underneath their icy shells.

Tidal heating from orbital resonance could be so strong that it would leave a planet dry and akin to Io or Venus—a scorched volcanic hell—yet another nail in the coffin of habitable planets in red dwarf systems, it seems. No magnetic field can protect against tidal forces.

Still, if we avoid orbital resonance between planets leading to strong tidal heating, there’s “only” the question of protection against stellar wind and eruptions.

But flares might not be as much of a problem as originally thought. A recent survey showed that most eruptions on small stars occur near their poles—while planets typically orbit in a plane around the star’s equator. An M dwarf’s planet would still need to withstand being very close to the star, but superflares and coronal mass ejections stripping its atmosphere may not be such a great risk. Furthermore, if a planet can survive the last four or five billion years of greater stellar activity or acquire a secondary atmosphere, for instance through volcanic outgassing, it enters a much calmer period. Older red dwarfs, such as Barnard’s Star, appear to flare less, and have a less damaging UV and X-ray flux, than during their long, wild youth.

We could also solve the atmosphere protection problem another way, though: by letting our world be protected by the strong, far-reaching magnetic field of a giant planet. Let’s talk exomoons.

Temperate Exomoons?

So far, we don’t know any exomoons for sure—there are two uncertain detections—but if other planetary systems resemble ours at least vaguely, we can expect them to host a variety of moons, some of them perhaps habitable. Could they also be present in systems of red dwarfs?

Giant planets in our system orbit far away from the Sun, but we know of a few hundred “warm/hot Jupiters,” gas giants very close to their stars. Though these planets form farther away, where volatile compounds can condense and persist, they can migrate in the protoplanetary disk toward their star early on. But are they present around red dwarf stars?

They seem to be rare (as massive planets of low mass stars generally are), but a handful are known. While their proximity to the central star may make it hard to keep a moon (or, if it orbits the planet close enough to avoid disruption by the star’s gravitational pull), it appears that it’s possible, and that habitable moons of red dwarf planets may exist. Outside of the conventional habitable zone, moons could also be kept warm enough for liquid water and life by tidal heating alone—either letting moons such as Europa or Enceladus host subsurface oceans, or perhaps even allowing surface liquid water on larger and warmer exomoons. Unfortunately, we have practically no chance of ever remotely detecting life on a moon with an ocean locked under ice.

If the moon had its own magnetic field too, it could boost the protection given by the planet’s magnetosphere. Unfortunately, the habitability of exomoons in M dwarfs’ habitable zones doesn’t look promising—but the matter is far from resolved. Perhaps, one day, we might discover a moon like Asimov’s Erythro from Nemesis—whether hosting life or not, that will remain to be explored.

Sights to Behold

Imagine for a moment that you have traveled to a planet orbiting a red dwarf. You have landed on the dayside near the terminator. You can just about make out the brightly colored auroras dancing behind it in the eternal night. You can see the lights even in the permanent daytime sky—so powerful they are, due to the planet’s strong magnetic field and the intense stellar wind. Or you might not see much—a thick cloud cover might obscure your view of the star and auroras as well (but you should be glad the clouds are there, since they help cool the dayside and distribute heat more evenly).

In any case, you’re not here just for these sights; you came for the life. The first thing that startles you is the peculiar shape of the trees, looking as if someone had cut off more than half their crowns. Botanist Frank Landis depicts an image of how plant life on a red dwarf world might look: Since light on a tidally locked world would always come from the same angle, plants would have their leaves turned permanently toward it. Imagine trees with all of their foliage turned one way, as if you cut most of the tree’s crown. The steady insolation and wind patterns, in combination, might create spectacular sights alien to our Earth-accustomed eyes.

What about the color of the plants’ leaves? A popular image paints them as black in order to absorb as much of the faint sunlight as possible.

Using only visible light, plants on a red dwarf’s planet would have limited energy available—enough to sustain a less abundant biosphere than here on Earth, and potentially generating fewer chemical signatures of life for us to detect remotely.

However, exotic photosynthesis could well resemble what Earth bacteria are able to do, using far-red light or even infrared light from geothermal radiation to photosynthesize. Earth microbes can grow under simulated M dwarf spectra, using far-red light for oxygenic photosynthesis. Would there be enough evolutionary incentive for this ability to spread widely if the visual light is weak, but reliable, never going away completely and never changing in seasons, only getting partly obscured by clouds?

Speaking of light—depending on how thick the atmosphere is, whether there is any ozone layer (it might be more easily destroyed under the M dwarf light spectrum and flares), and how strong the magnetic field is, life would need to evolve ways to shield itself against radiation damage or cope with it. Aquatic life has it relatively easy—all it needs is to submerge a bit deeper. Land-based life, though, would probably use a variety of repair measures, going into dormant states and sporting shielding layers of dead tissue or excreted material. The UV and X-ray flux would be a steady limitation, while flares would be only occasional, but all the more destructive.

Still overlooking the shadow-zone landscape, you happen to notice the thick bark of the contorted trees, probably enabling them to survive minor flare events even if their leaves and shoots do not. You wonder what adaptations they might have for greater flares: perhaps sturdy seeds or deep-hidden tubers, so that when most of the surface life withers and dies, it can spring up again?

Once you wander off to the ocean and start exploring it, you find that it lacks many of the light-driven communities, such as coral reefs known from Earth; the faint, red sunlight doesn’t penetrate deep enough to enable their existence. But although photosynthesis is limited to the uppermost layer, life still thrives in the deep. Luckily, this particular planet is quite geologically active, providing plenty of hot vents for life independent of the red star’s light. How long is it going to remain active enough to support a biosphere? For M dwarf planets, the star’s lifetime is not a limiting factor, but the planet’s geophysics eventually will be.

Another sight to behold would be other planets in the sky. Compact systems, such as TRAPPIST-1, may host multiple planets in the habitable zone, getting close enough to each other to appear approximately as large in the sky as the Moon viewed from Earth. Imagine seeing another world, perhaps with continents and oceans, regularly move through your sky. What incentive would that be for early spacefaring, and for thoughts about life on other planets?

But they might not resemble Earth very much. The TRAPPIST-1 planets are less dense, which could mean many things, from little to no iron cores to high water content. If they have little metallic cores, or none at all, they probably lack magnetic fields (unless they’re generated in molten silicates, which is a possibility).

So much yet to discover for scientists—and science fiction authors too! SF is rife with planets of M dwarfs, be they around our closest stellar neighbor Proxima Centauri (such as in Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem or Stephen Baxter’s Proxima) or elsewhere, for instance The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders or Four Hundred Billion Stars by Paul McAuley. They all might resemble reality in some ways, or maybe none—that remains to be seen. We can probably expect a wide variety of worlds: Some scorched dry, their water and other volatiles irrevocably trapped in a thick ice sheet on the nightside, their atmosphere almost blown away. Some Venus-like, with a thick atmosphere and hot all over, including the dark side. Some ocean-covered “eyeball Earths,” mostly resembling Europa or Ganymede, but with an atmosphere and a fraction of open ocean closest to the star. Or maybe some worlds where the dayside is too hot and dry, the nightside too cold and dry (think an Antarctica-like desert), but life teems around the terminator in the “shadow zone.”

There are so many possible combinations of chemical compositions, radiogenic heat availability, tidal heating, tectonic regimes (largely dependent on the former traits), magnetic fields (ditto), atmospheric compositions (where, in turn, tectonics and volcanism come into play), stellar activity, and other traits important for habitability, that it’s probably going to take a lot of time to figure out whether red dwarfs commonly host habitable planets or not.

Luckily, red dwarf planets are relatively easy to discover due to their relative mass and size to the star and their short orbital period—it’s easier to detect such a planet transiting in front of its star, from our point of view, and to gather enough data to show it’s really there and what its properties might be. Their gravitational pull on the star also enables relatively “easy” detection by monitoring the star’s motion, evidenced by the Doppler shift of its starlight.

The James Webb Space Telescope, currently slated to be launched in three weeks on December 22, 2021, could help us unravel the mystery of red dwarf planets’ habitability by observing their atmospheres. Systems like Proxima Centauri or TRAPPIST-1 are among prime targets for the telescope (and other telescopes such as ARIEL). Until then, we know so much and so little at the same time. There is a whole universe of almost boundless possibilities—and so many stories waiting to be told, set on these strange, strange worlds.

About the Author

Julie Nováková is a scientist, educator and award-winning Czech author, editor and translator of science fiction, fantasy and detective stories. She published seven novels, one anthology, one story collection and over thirty short pieces in Czech. Her work in English appeared in Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, Analog, and elsewhere. Her works have been translated into eight languages so far, and she translates Czech stories into English (in Tor.com, Strange Horizons, F&SF, Clarkesworld, and Welkin Magazine). She edited or co-edited an anthology of Czech speculative fiction in translation, Dreams From Beyond, a book of European SF in Filipino translation, Haka, an outreach e-book of astrobiological SF, Strangest of All, and its more ambitious follow-up print and ebook anthology Life Beyond Us (Laksa Media, upcoming in late 2022). Julie’s newest book is a story collection titled The Ship Whisperer (Arbiter Press, 2020). She is a recipient of the European fandom’s Encouragement Award and multiple Czech genre awards. She’s active in science outreach, education and nonfiction writing, and co-leads the outreach group of the European Astrobiology Institute. She’s a member of the XPRIZE Sci-fi Advisory Council.

Navigating the Seas of South Asian Diversity:
A Conversation with Tarun K. Saint

Arley Sorg

Independent scholar and writer Tarun K. Saint was born in Kenya and moved to Long Island, New York at the age of two. He started reading around age five or six. His father taught at Friends World College. They moved to Udaipur in Rajasthan, India in 1972, and Saint was deschooled until 1977, “with the chance to read voraciously under my parents’ guidance.” Saint joined Mayo College in Ajmer, and went to Hindu College in Delhi, where he earned a BA and an MA in English literature. In 1992, he completed an MPhil and in 2006, he earned a PhD from the Department of English at Delhi University. He taught at Hindu College until 2016.

In 2010, he published Witnessing Partition: Memory, History, Fiction (Routledge India), which went into a second edition in 2020. He coedited Translating Partition (Katha) with Ravikant in 2001, edited Bruised Memories: Communal Violence and the Writer (Seagull) in 2002, and coedited Looking Back: The 1947 Partition of India, 70 Years On (Orient BlackSwan) in 2017 with Rakhshanda Jalil and Debjani Sengupta.

Both volume one of The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction and 2020 anthology Avatar अवतार: Indian Science Fiction–Fantascienza Indiana, coedited with Francesco Verso, landed on Locus Recommended Reading lists.

When he’s not changing the landscape of the science fiction industry with groundbreaking anthologies, he likes listening to jazz, especially jazz-rock fusion. He also travels when possible. Tarun K. Saint lives in Delhi, India.

How did you become a reader of genre fiction? What were some of the first science fiction books or stories that were important to you?

At the age of seven or eight, I was presented a copy of Robert Heinlein’s Red Planet, which struck a chord with its evocative description of Mars. Later, I was lucky to have a visionary librarian at school who encouraged eclectic tastes in reading, including SF. While Golden Age classics by Asimov, Clarke, and Bradbury predominated, I recall being struck by Philip K. Dick’s work, especially Martian Time-Slip, and Joe Haldeman’s remarkable The Forever War, as an allegory about a never-ending war.

Later, the works of Ursula K. Le Guin (The Lathe of Heaven) and J. G. Ballard (especially his short stories) spoke to me with respect to exploring the dialectics of inner and outer space. I came across the novels of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, especially Roadside Picnic and The Doomed City, and Stanisław Lem (Solaris, The Invincible) at a later stage, as a teacher of science fiction (mainly Asimov—Foundation) seeking to expand my horizons, especially in the domain of non-Anglophone SF. I began to realize the extent of writing that exists beyond mainstream SF, including writing from South Asian spaces.

Some readers and writers in the US and the UK draw sharp lines between “literary” and “genre.” Are there similar ideas in South Asia in terms of demarcating various kinds of fiction?

Yes, the demarcation between literary and genre or popular fiction has been in place since the colonial era. The snobbery associated with “literary” fiction has led some writers to consciously dissociate themselves from genre fiction, though there are some notable exceptions, such as Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome (1995). In the anthologies I have edited, I have sought to undo this binary through a juxtaposition of the different styles and registers of South Asian SF and speculative poetry.

How did you get into the publishing side of genre? How did your career start, and where would you like to see it go?

As a freelancer, I have a tangential relationship to the publishing world. I submitted the proposal for the first Gollancz Book of South Asian SF initially as an anthology of Indian SF, an area that I felt had not received its due. The ambit expanded as this became a series, which I hope will continue in times to come.

What are some of the most important differences between newer South Asian science fiction and classic South Asian science fiction?

Early proto-SF and SF from South Asia was heavily influenced by Western, mostly Golden Age models. Much of this writing had a pedagogic imperative, seeking to convey the wonder of scientific discovery through stories with a didactic thrust. There were some exceptions that brought in a different form of futuristic speculation, whimsicality, and humor. The best of recent writing has a more skeptical and self-critical view of science, especially in the light of the damage done by the modern developmental discourse to communities and the environment. The perils of AI-based surveillance, corporate pillaging of nature, and the unleashing of ethically unhinged forms of social media are at the forefront of attention of New Wave writers.

Do you have favorite science fiction, fantasy, or horror writers whose work is still fairly unknown to Western readers?

I really like the work of Manjula Padmanabhan, Anil Menon, Vandana Singh, Shovon Chowdhury, Muhammed Zafar Iqbal (in translation from Bengali), and Vajra Chandrasekera in the domain of SF/speculative fiction, while Usman T. Malik, Saad Z. Hossain, and Tashan Mehta, among others, have extended the boundaries of fantastika/the weird/horror in fascinating ways.

For writers in South Asia, what are the most common barriers to breaking into science fiction publishing in the US or the UK?

I have no firsthand experience of submitting stories to SF publishers in the West. My publisher, Hachette India, is a sister imprint of Orion, of which the well-known Gollancz SF imprint is a subsidiary. The first volume was liked by the Gollancz team, hence the title, which was eventually reprinted by Gollancz UK with a new title, New Horizons: The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction. Let us see if the second volume follows suit.

As I understand, this rarely happens, since the flow of books is usually from the West to India/South Asia. So, this is welcome as a precedent for future volumes in the genre. Samit Basu’s SF novel Chosen Spirits has been taken up by Tor.com and is being reprinted in the US as The City Inside.

Unfamiliarity with the cultural context and idiom is a common hurdle for South Asian writers, besides a certain degree of insularity and the overwhelming strength of the Western SF scene, which may lead to a certain undervaluation of writing from “other” spaces.

Is publishing in the West a goal that many writers in South Asia have, or are they generally more concerned with speaking to South Asian readers?

In earlier times, many writers like R. K. Narayan made their breakthrough in the West. Since the 1990s, many international publishers have opened offices in India and are releasing titles directly to the Indian market. This has obviated the need to find a Western publisher and audience to an extent, though an international audience is always welcome, as we have seen in the careers of Vikram Seth, Arundhati Roy, and Amitav Ghosh.

Of course, there are many writers working in the regional languages who do not perceive the need for a wider audience, unless this happens as a result of translation, as in the case of Satyajit Ray’s SF stories translated from Bengali, and Jayant V. Narlikar’s SF novels and stories from Marathi. More high-quality translations would certainly enable a better sense of this diverse field of literary expression.

The first The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction came out in 2019. What are some of the most important differences between that book and volume two?

Much of the first volume focused on a specific theme, since I invited writers to reflect on what South Asia might look like in 2087, seventy years from now, extrapolating from current trends. Some unrelated SF stories and speculative poems, including samples from classic SF, were included as well.

Volume two expanded the scope to include SF as well as high concept fantasy and horror, not necessarily tied into a central theme. Furthermore, we were able to reach out to Sri Lankan writers, and more authors from Pakistan and Bangladesh, besides India, as well as from the respective diasporas. I am especially pleased that we have a story here by a writer from the Tibetan community in exile. Therefore, we have more diversity in volume two, both in terms of themes, as well as geographical and cultural origins of authors (with some translations from Marathi and Bengali).

Since I had traced the history of the genre synoptically in the Introduction to volume one, in this anthology I focused more on the texts included in my critical introduction, seeking to contextualize this new work.

South Asia comprises so many languages and cultures. Most of the stories in The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction Volume Two are written in English (as opposed to being translated works). Some of the authors have cultural roots in South Asia but don’t necessarily live there. Is sourcing works that represent a broad spectrum of South Asian cultures especially challenging?

That’s a really good question.

Yes, indeed, navigating the seas of South Asian cultural diversity, whether in terms of language, culture, or nationality can seem a daunting task at times, especially if one is trying to provide a representative selection from the region. The predominance of English (an inheritance from the colonial era) and the diasporic location of many of the authors can seem like a mixed blessing while sourcing material. Since the two volumes in this series were to carry mostly original material, approaching various authors who already work in the field to write new stories/poems was a challenge indeed, besides locating promising new voices.

Finding translators for the selections from classic SF in Hindi and Bengali was an additional hurdle to cross in the first volume, to a certain extent faced in the second volume as well, also with respect to recent SF in the regional languages, not all of which have strong SF traditions. This entailed quite a bit of reading and delving into the archive. The pleasure of rediscovering forgotten classics of futuristic writing, such as Rahul Sankrityayan’s Baisvin Sadi (Tr. Twenty-Second Century) was its own reward, even if we could only carry extracts. There are many layers to this cultural archive still to be unearthed, which we hope future volumes will continue to showcase.

The publishing industry has its own internal hierarchies and priorities, of course, where the politics of language and translation play a role. In recent times we can see more of adventurousness and willingness to support offbeat ventures. Networking and coordination among academics, authors, and enlightened publishers can make a lot of difference, once the initial set of suspicions and misunderstandings are set aside.

What we often see in terms of works coming to Western audiences, is that readers have no idea how important or respected some of the authors are in the context of their own cultures. Who, for you, are the “big name” authors in volume two, and who are the “up and coming” authors that really excite you?

In this volume we sought to achieve a judicious blend of well-known and “up and coming” authors. Manjula Padmanabhan, Vandana Singh, Anil Menon, Priya S. Chabria, and Shovon Chowdhury (who sadly passed away before the volume’s release) are recognizable names, as are Jayant Narlikar (from an earlier generation in Marathi, but still with us) and Muhammed Zafar Iqbal in Bengali). Sri Lankans Vajra Chandrasekera and Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, and Saad Z. Hossain from Bangladesh, are established presences in SF circles, as is Kaiser Haq from the same country in the sphere of poetry. Usman T. Malik, Haris Durrani, and Bina Shah are major forces to reckon with in Pakistani speculative fiction.

Among the “new” or “up and coming” writers, Gautam Bhatia, Premee Mohamed, and Lavanya Lakshminarayan have brought out substantive new work recently, while Kehkashan Khalid, Medha Singh, Navin Weeraratne, and Soham Guha (a bilingual writer from Bengal) are instances of promising talent to look out for.

Another aspect of this can be that Western audiences don’t always understand when a piece is being socially or politically daring. Are there a few pieces here that are fairly daring in their subjects or subtext, in one way or another, in ways that Western readers might miss?

That’s an interesting question. Yes, I think some of the stories, especially in the vein of satirical SF, might have a contemporary and allusive dimension that might be difficult to grasp. However, like all good fiction, South Asian SF for the most part does find its way to the universal through the narrow door of the particular. In the age of Google, finding out more about “background,” culture, and sociopolitical constructs is certainly possible, even if some levels of meaning remain context-sensitive.

Were there stories that you really liked, but that didn’t end up in the anthology?

No, fortunately not! We in fact exceeded our projected length somewhat due to the quality of submissions.

When you were making selections for the anthology, what were the most important things for you, what were your priorities?

Quality of writing, thematic appropriateness, and ability to make an effective intervention in the moment.

If someone will read only two or three stories to see if the book is for them, which stories would you tell them to read, and why?

It is always difficult to pick a few. Perhaps Vajra Chandrasekera’s “The Maker of Memorials” for its sensitive exploration of the afterlife of violence and war, and complex reflection on the question of memorialization of the dead from an SF angle, Manjula Padmanabhan’s “The Pain Merchant” for its uncanny fabulation with an SF anchor, and Saad Z. Hossain’s “Bring Your Own Spoon” for its weaving together of elements from jinn lore with an SF style reflection on contemporary authoritarianism.

Do some of the stories in The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction Volume Two stand in conversation with Western, South Asian, or other science fictional narratives in important ways?

Yes, though this may be a matter of interpretation rather than preconceived design or intention. Muhammed Zafar Iqbal’s “The Zoo” certainly takes on board the interrogation of modern science bereft of ethicality seen in works like H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau, while redirecting such questioning of the relationship between knowledge and power to include the media. Bina Shah’s “Looney ka Tabadla” is in self-conscious dialogue with Saadat Hasan Manto’s “Toba Tek Singh,” as an updated version of that superb satire of the partition era. There are similar self-reflexive and metafictional dimensions to many of the stories.

What are the best resources you can recommend for readers who want to find more South Asian science fiction?

Besides my own earlier cited introduction to the first anthology, there are some really good scholarly studies now available, though the focus has been on Indian SF for the most part. See Suparno Banerjee’s Indian Science Fiction (2020), Sami Ahmad Khan’s Star Warriors of the Modern Raj (2021), and Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Aakriti Mandhwani, and Anwesha Maity’s (eds.) Indian Genre Fiction (2019), which include extensive bibliographies. Similar work needs to be done for the SF traditions in other major countries such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, perhaps extending to a consolidated view of the South Asian SF scene.

Is there anything else you’d really like readers to know about The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction Volume Two, the authors and their stories, or yourself and your work?

It is a really good sign that a sense of community and concomitant understanding is emerging among South Asian SF writers, rather than the often to be seen hostility and mutual devaluation. This platform may enable a bridging of the gulf that ensued after the partition of 1947, at least to an extent, and a restoration of awareness about some crucial civilizational patterns at risk of being lost, albeit in a futurist mode, as we see in Vandana Singh’s story “A Different Sea,” with its recuperation of alternate timelines and perspectives, including the subaltern and feminist variants. Here’s hoping for a warm reception for this omnibus and possibly a third volume to come.

About the Author

Arley Sorg is co-Editor-in-Chief at Fantasy Magazine and a 2021 World Fantasy Award Finalist. He is also senior editor at Locus Magazine, associate editor at both Lightspeed & Nightmare Magazines, and a columnist for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. He takes on multiple roles, including slush reader, film & book reviewer, and more. He conducts interviews for multiple venues, including Clarkesworld Magazine and his own site. Arley grew up in England, Hawaii, and Colorado, and studied Asian Religions at Pitzer College. He lives in Oakland, CA but can sometimes be found on Twitter as @arleysorg. In non-pandemic times, Arley usually writes in local coffee shops. He is a 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate.

A Whole New Realm:
A Conversation with Diana M. Pho

Arley Sorg

Diana M. Pho was born and raised in the suburbs of Massachusetts. She’s lived in NYC most of her adult life, but has also traveled extensively, including studying abroad in Moscow. Pho earned a double bachelor’s degree in English and Russian literature from Mount Holyoke College. She was mentored by Corinne Demas, Susan Daniels, and Erika Rundle at Mount Holyoke, and was also an active member of Asian-American Interpretive Realities, a performance troupe specializing in political theater about the Asian and Asian diasporic experience.

Going into publishing was her ambition out of undergrad. Pho worked in international sales at Hachette and did social media and blogging for Tor.com before picking up her first editorial job at the Science Fiction Book Club. She left full-time work for a while to earn a master’s in performance studies from New York University, where she was taught by giants in the field: Richard Schechner, Anna Deavere Smith, Tavia Nyong’o, and José Esteban Muñoz, among others. Her focus was the performance of racial and national identity in steampunk culture. Afterward, she went back to publishing at Tor.

“I credit a lot of my career to being a geek! Running my blog, Beyond Victoriana, introduced me to SFF book fandom in a weird way because I didn’t solely write about books! But about art, politics, and subculture.” Pho also spent considerable time in her twenties traveling the country as part of a steampunk performance group, and she was a published academic before becoming a book editor.

The first book Pho bought for Tor—Steeplejack by A. J. Hartley—won the 2017 ITW Thriller Award for Young Adult Novel and the 2017 Manly Wade Wellman Award. Steeplejack also landed on the Young Adult Library Services Association Best Fiction for Young Adults list and was included in both the Kirkus Reviews Best Teen Books list and the Booklist Top Ten YA in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror list. Pho now has over fifteen years of experience in publishing, and collectively the books she has edited have been up for pretty much every major genre award. Notable titles include Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark, A Song Below Water by Bethany C. Morrow, and Amberlough by Lara Elena Donnelly. Pho herself is an Ignyte award finalist, a Locus Award finalist, and a four-time Hugo Award finalist.

Diana M. Pho lives in New York City with her wife, Ashley Lauren Rogers, who is also a playwright, and two cats, Laszlo and Nadja.

You are a story producer for Realm. What does a story producer do, and how does it compare to some of the work you’ve done with publishing houses like Tor?

Making the leap from book publishing to audio drama has been quite the experience, but also familiar in many ways. Thankfully, my jobs at Realm and at Tor have a common thread: creating great genre stories. It helps that the audio world feels established but evolving. Radio dramas, of course, have been around for a very long time, but the movement to the podcast sphere has shaped the format in innovative ways that I’m still learning about.

Work as a story producer overlaps with being a book editor because I still work with words! As a story producer, I still edit fiction and acquire works for production. I work directly with writers and creatives to develop the most compelling and strongest show possible. Like in book publishing, there is a lot of collaboration between departments, but podcasts use different lingo: show art, audience development, the business team, product, ad sales, etc.

But audio is more theatrical. Lucky for me, I have a MA in performance studies and a background in playwriting, which helps me rethink my editorial skills for a new medium. Plus, there are things I do as a producer that I never did as an editor. As a story producer, I help review casting and music compositions with our audio director, for instance. I review audio files and get collaborative feedback toward edits. I have different sorts of outside conversations with talent agencies, production companies, and Hollywood studios than I would as a book editor, but that is very particular to the type of audio entertainment Realm does and doesn’t pertain to the podcast industry as a whole.

What excites you about Realm and the projects they are undertaking?

I love the imaginative attitude Realm brings in creating premium shows with high production value and smart, engaging storytelling. Realm works with licensed IP (Marvel and DC) and new works in established brands (Orphan Black & John Carpenter Presents). Realm also develops our own in-house ideas for shows, and we acquire original works from creatives. It’s exciting to carry over the priorities I had in the book world—inclusivity and representation, smart sociopolitical commentary, popcorn fun—to a company that supports this same mindset.

While the publishing industry is having a rough spot right now, in general, it’s great to land in a media industry that is growing by leaps and bounds, and where outfits like Realm can make a huge impact.

Is the Realm audience different from the Tor/Tordotcom audience? Are they similar, is there overlap?

The Venn diagram between people drawn to books and those who are drawn to audio is a solid figure eight, I’d say. Gone are the days where people would assume listening to audiobooks was not truly “reading”; likewise, podcasts and audio dramas are acceptable entertainment for geeks who just love good stories. Admittedly, listening to narrative audiobooks is a skill that comes with constant exposure; your ear must become attuned to following the density of books when they are read aloud. That can be a challenge, since people generally absorb information differently when it’s presented in text versus in audio.

Realm has done shows that are more like audiobooks and shows that are more like dramas. We’re learning that scripted formats make Realm stories more aurally consumable for the general listener. That explains, for instance, why many popular podcasts are journalism or conversational: both formats are more receptive and easier to track narratively.

But as more people have been tuning in, they are hungry for different types of audio. Now, audio fiction has been growing. According to a report from “The Infinite Dial”, the industry tracker of radio and podcast data, in 2021 forty-one percent of Americans aged twelve or older have listened to a podcast in the past month. People follow at least eight podcasts monthly, and the listenership is booming. One estimate states that by the end of 2025, there will be over one hundred and forty-four million monthly podcast listeners in the US alone. That is a huge potential market for storytellers! Anecdotally, even when reviewing the reception of Realm shows over the past few months, it’s encouraging to get feedback on social media and in reviews from people who say, “I’d never listened to a podcast until I found yours!”

I would say that what makes Realm stand out is that a lot of our shows appeal to the SFF reader, and a lot of past and present writers we’ve worked with also have books out from Tor and other genre book publishers. We aim to be broadly commercial and progressive-minded. We work with a diverse range of creators and content. I also want to add that if writers are looking for new formats to write for, audio fiction is not going away anytime soon.

You’re a big steampunk fan! Have you had opportunities to work with steampunk projects through Realm, or is steampunk on the back burner for now?

Realm has shows that have a steampunk “flavor” to them, such as the weird western Bullet Catcher, though steampunk in general has taken a back burner for me. The things I have in the pipeline at Realm, though, really show off my editorial taste in ways that feel invigorating and fun!

Tor as a company tends to be more involved in the genre community than a lot of publishers. Does working for Realm mean you won’t be as involved in the community as you have been, at least, professionally?

I’ll always have one foot in SFF book world, but right now, I’m diving headfirst into new territory for me, but in ways that I think will expand my horizons. I’ve been lucky enough to have an eclectic career in book publishing, to serve as editor for rising stars such as P. Djèlí Clark and Bethany C. Morrow as well as SFF giants like GRRM and Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, and to be a published academic and playwright. I love SFF and the community, and they have helped pull me through some rough moments in my life. I will always cherish the friends and colleagues I’ve met at conventions and writer’s conferences.

I’d love to take the people I have known and respected and bring them into a burgeoning industry where new opportunities await.

What are the most challenging aspects of working on projects for Realm, and what have you learned through addressing them?

The challenge, personally, is playing catch-up to learn the norms of a whole industry. But also knowing those norms are a moving target, especially as podcasts are seen as a big opportunity for news-makers, for entertainment, for education, and for activism. It’s a little bit of the unknown, a little bit of an untamed adventure. Admittedly, it’s also dealing with the influence of Silicon tech giants and old-school public radio and media moguls who all want a piece of audio to call their own. The learning curve has been steep, but I’m lucky to have a supportive group of fellow professionals that have helped me embrace the field.

What are some of your recent projects for Realm, and what do you love most about them?

Spider King by Justin C. Key was my first show at Realm, and the perfect type of chilling bite-sized horror that I loved to acquire in short fiction. I’ve also been happy to assist on Batman: The Blind Cut, which introduced me to the world of licensed IP projects, and it thrills me to contribute a tiny bit to a hugely popular comic franchise. In November, we announced a fabulous horror-comedy called Black Friday, that’s also a critique of capitalism-driven retail culture and has HUGE celebrity talent at the helm—something I can’t wait to break out over the airwaves.

Short fiction has been important to genre for decades, and people often talk about the similarities and differences between short fiction markets and book publishing, as well as their relationships. Do you see a relationship between what happens in short fiction and the creative work of Realm?

I do, mostly because Realm shows are designed to be bite-sized fun, to listen to episodically, and good short fiction is made to also be read in one sitting. You have to think about how to make a very satisfying experience in a very concentrated way.

For readers who haven’t heard about Realm, and who are curious, where should they get started, and why is that a great place to start?

Check out Realm.fm and click on any of our shows to start. The website has great UX design, if I can say so in a very biased way. Realm also has an app option so people can listen on their phones.

Do you feel companies like Realm are the future of publishing—especially with the recent collapse, sale, and purchase of major publishing houses? Are we seeing major transitions in the industry?

I can’t make any predictions about publishing’s future, but I do realize that writers are looking for new ways to establish a career. The traditional NYC houses will exist for a long time to come, but they’ll only become more consolidated over time. It’ll be hard for authors to break out, I think. New media—like podcasts, streaming, webnovels, and other digital platforms—is the future of storytelling.

You also do freelance editorial work: you offer developmental and line editing and editorial assessment on a limited-availability basis. What is your best advice for people who want to start doing freelance editing, and what is your best advice for writers looking for a freelance editor?

Oh my! This question alone can be a topic for a whole other interview!

My best nutshell advice for people who want to freelance: network with other established freelancers and get advice about what your financial expectations are before you even start. Establish an LLC if you want to do this long term. Make sure you know how to pay your taxes according to your local laws. Have hard boundaries about how many jobs you can do at once, and how much brain space you can dedicate to editing; it can be very easy to burn out through overwork. There are also freelancer services like Reedsy, which can help make finding jobs easier, and organizations like the Editorial Freelancers Association and ACES that can teach you more about this career.

For writers looking for freelance editors: it’s fine to ask multiple editors for their rates and shop around for the best service that fits your needs. Freelance editors often book jobs at least three to four months in advance, so be sure to keep that in mind with your writing schedule. Always have a contract. And always, always be kind and understanding with your editor—it’s a mutually established creative relationship as well as a business relationship. Just because you hire someone to edit your work does not give you the right to behave rudely, be overly demanding of their time and energy, or act unprofessionally in any way.

What else are you working on, what are you excited for people to know about?

I’m currently working with Levar Burton Reads as an editor and judge for their writing contest, and the winning story will be announced later in December 2021. Stay tuned! :D

About the Author

Arley Sorg is co-Editor-in-Chief at Fantasy Magazine and a 2021 World Fantasy Award Finalist. He is also senior editor at Locus Magazine, associate editor at both Lightspeed & Nightmare Magazines, and a columnist for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. He takes on multiple roles, including slush reader, film & book reviewer, and more. He conducts interviews for multiple venues, including Clarkesworld Magazine and his own site. Arley grew up in England, Hawaii, and Colorado, and studied Asian Religions at Pitzer College. He lives in Oakland, CA but can sometimes be found on Twitter as @arleysorg. In non-pandemic times, Arley usually writes in local coffee shops. He is a 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate.

Editor’s Desk: Worldcon Bound

Neil Clarke

In October, I attended Capclave, my first in-person convention since November 2019. It was small, low-key, and perfect for an overly introverted person to dip back into social waters after a long absence. Afterwards, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I needed nothing more than my normal post-convention recovery period.

In November, I attended Philcon, my second in-person convention. It was also small and fairly low-key, but for some reason, this one hit me like a ton of bricks. In the week since, I haven’t wanted to do anything except curl up somewhere warm and do nothing more complicated than watch TV or play video games. Not the best state of mind to be in ahead of publishing a new issue, but I rearranged my schedule and plowed through.

This month, I’m packing up my van and driving four hours to Washington DC for Discon III, the 2021 Worldcon. It will probably be smaller than most of the recent US-based Worldcons, but it will still be much larger than Capclave and Philcon, and draw people in from a much wider area. In the past, I’ve found Worldcons to be very energizing. I’ll be fine during the convention, but I anticipate needing a break—during the holidays no less—after. That said, I’ve always found Worldcon to be worth that price and have no qualms about attending, other than those that come with our current state of the world.

Being an introvert appears to be the default setting in our community. That can make a Worldcon a particularly overwhelming experience and even more, if it’s your first time or on your own. The unplanned conversations are often the best part of these conventions and introverts are wired to miss out on a lot of this. We can help one another by being more aware of the dynamics at play. For example, if you are in a group discussion, it’s far too easy to unintentionally close the circle and keep people out. See someone hovering on the edge? Move over a bit and open up the circle for them.

If you’re not ready to join an existing conversation, a good way to meet people is to sign up for one of the many kaffeeklatsch sessions held during the con. Think of them as a small group discussion with one of the program participants. These are times that they have volunteered to sit, chat, and answer questions with what could be a random group of strangers. It’s a great way to meet people in the field that you might be hesitant to just walk up to. Just be sure to sign up early as some of these sessions can fill fast.

While I can find a convention overwhelming, the primary reason I’m there is to meet people. It forces me a bit outside my comfort zone, but it’s only a few days and it’s great to be able to put faces to the numbers submitting their stories or reading/listening to the magazine. Having been on the other side, there’s a few things I try to make it a bit easier for people to say hi and have a discussion:

I have one of the above-mentioned Kaffeeklatsches.

Clarkesworld has a table in the dealers room and while I won’t always be there, I will spend a reasonable amount of time there. Makes me easy to find.

If I’ve rejected a story you’ve sent to Clarkesworld, you can ask me for a rejection card. (If you don’t know what they are, you can ask for the whole story behind them.) I try to have a few on me at all times. It’s a great icebreaker.

Need another icebreaker? I’m a Hugo Finalist, so “good luck” or “congratulations” is always safe.

I have a signing. Don’t have anything I edited? No worries. The program book is always good for this sort of thing.

I’m also on several panels. If one of those topics interests you, come and feel free to ask (relevant) questions or catch me after a panel to continue the discussion.

Don’t let all that effort go to waste. Stop by and say hi. If you won’t be at Discon, which is true of most of you, then I hope to see you some other time. May the rest of 2021 be kind to you and, should you celebrate, happy holidays!

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine and Forever Magazine; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and a nine-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 next anthology, The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 6, will be published this November by Night Shade Books. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two sons.

Cover Art: The Variable Man

Douglas P. Lobo

About the Artist

Douglas P. Lobo is a self-taught digital artist from Brazil who is passionate about creating through the mediums of drawing, painting, game design, filmmaking, and writing. His works are mainly generated through the lenses of otherworldly fantasy and science fiction genres, being mostly a channel to the combination of a range of cultural references.