The Sky that Wraps the World Round, Past the Blue and Into the Black

Jay Lake

I believe that all things eventually come to rest. Even light, though that’s not what they tell you in school. How do scientists know? A billion billion years from now, even General Relativity might have been demoted to a mere Captain. Photons will sit around in little clusters of massless charge, bumping against one another like boats in the harbor at Kowloon.

The universe will be blue then, everything from one cosmic event horizon to the other the color of a summer sky.

This is what I tell myself as I paint the tiny shards spread before me. Huang’s men bring them to me to work with. We are creating value, that gangster and me. I make him even more immensely wealthy. Every morning that I wake up still alive is his gratuity to me in return.

It is a fair trade.

My life is comfortable in the old house along the alley with its central court crowded with bayberry trees. A gutter trickles down the center of the narrow roadway, slimed a greenish black with waste slopped out morning and evening from the porch steps alongside. The roofs are traditional, with sloping ridges and ornamented tile caps. I have studied the ones in my own courtyard. They are worn by the years, but I believe I can see a chicken stamped into each one. “Cock,” my cook says with his thick Cantonese accent, never seeing the vulgar humor.

Even these tired old houses are topped with broadband antennae and tracking dishes which follow entertainment, intelligence or high finance beamed down from orbit and beyond. Sometimes the three are indistinguishable. Private data lines sling on pirated staples and cable ties from the doddering concrete utility poles. The poles themselves are festooned with faded prayer flags, charred firecracker strings, and remnants of at least half a dozen generations of technology dedicated to transmission of something.

Tesla was right. Power is nothing more than another form of signal, after all. If the lights come on at a touch of your hand, civilization’s carrier wave is intact.

Despite the technology dangling overhead in rotting layers, the pavement itself holds life as old as China. Toddlers wearing only faded shirts toss stones in the shadows. A mangy chow dog lives beneath a vine-grown cart trapped against someone’s garden wall. Amahs air their families’ bedding over wooden railings worn shiny with generations of elbows. Tiny, wrinkled men on bicycles with huge trays balanced behind their seats bring vegetables, newspapers, meat and memory sticks to the back doors of houses. Everything smells of ginger and night soil and the ubiquitous mold.

I wake each day with the dawn. Once I overcome my surprise at remaining alive through another sunrise, I tug on a cheaply printed yukata and go hunting for coffee. My cook, as tiny and wrinkled as the vendors outside but decorated with tong tattoos that recall another era long since lost save for a few choppy-sockie movies, does not believe in the beverage. Instead he is unfailing in politely pressing a bitter-smelling black tea on me at every opportunity. I am equally unfailing in politely refusing it. The pot is a delicate work of porcelain which owes a great deal to a China before electricity and satellite warfare. It is painted a blue almost the shade of cornflowers, with a design of a round-walled temple rising in a stepped series of roofs over some Oriental pleasaunce.

I’ve seen that building on postage stamps, so it must be real somewhere. Or had once been real, at least.

After the quiet combat of caffeine has concluded its initial skirmish, I shuffle to my workroom where my brushes await me. Huang has that strange combination of stony patience and sudden violence which I have observed among the powerful in China. When my employer decides I have failed in my bargain, I am certain it is the cook who will kill me. I like to imagine his last act as the light fades from my eyes will be to pour tea down my throat as a libation to see my spirit into the next world.

There is a very special color that most people will never see. You have to be out in the Deep Dark, wrapped in a skinsuit amid the hard vacuum where the solar wind sleets in an invisible radioactive rain. You can close your eyes there and let yourself float in a sensory deprivation tank the size of the universe. After a while, the little mosaics that swirl behind your eyelids are interrupted by tiny, random streaks of the palest, softest, sharpest electric blue.

I’ve been told the specks of light are the excitation trails of neutrinos passing through the aqueous humor of the human eye. They used to bury water tanks in Antarctic caves to see those things, back before orbit got cheap enough to push astronomy and physics into space where those sciences belong. These days, all you have to do is go for a walk outside the planet’s magnetosphere and be patient.

That blue is what I capture for Huang. That blue is what I paint on the tiny shards he sends me wrapped in day-old copies of the high orbital edition of Asahi Shimbun. That blue is what I see in my dreams.

That blue is the color of the end of the universe, when even the light is dying.

Out in the Deep Dark we called them caltrops. They resemble jacks, that old children’s toy, except with four equally-spaced arms instead of six, and slightly larger, a bit less than six centimeters tip to tip. Many are found broken, some aren’t, but even the broken ones fit the pattern. They’re distributed in a number of places around the belt, almost entirely in rocks derived from crustal material. The consensus had long been that they were mineral crystals endemic to Marduk’s surface, back before the planet popped its cork 250 megayears ago. Certainly their microscopic structure supported the theory — carbon lattices with various impurities woven throughout.

I couldn’t say how many of the caltrops were discarded, damaged, or simply destroyed by being slagged in the guts of some ore processor along with their enclosing rock. Millions, maybe.

One day someone discovered that the caltrops had been manufactured. They were technology remnants so old that our ancestors hadn’t even gotten around to falling out of trees when the damned things were fabricated. The human race was genetic potential lurking in the germline of some cynodont therapsid when those caltrops had been made.

It had not occurred to anyone before that discovery to consider this hypothesis. The fact that the question came up at all was a result of a serious misunderstanding of which I was the root cause. In my greed and misjudgment I forced the loss of a device one of my crewmates discovered, an ancient piece of tech that could have allowed us to do something with those caltrops. My contribution to history, in truth, aside from some miniscule role in creating a portion of Huang’s ever-growing millions. That the discovery of the caltrops’ nature arose from human error is a mildly humorous grace note to the confirmation that we are indeed not alone in the universe.

Or at least weren’t at one point.

The artificial origin of the caltrops has been generally accepted. What these things are remains a question that may never be answered, thanks to me. Most people prefer not to discuss the millions of caltrops lost to Belt mining operations over the decades that Ceres Mineral Resources has been in business.

Despite their carbon content, caltrops viewed under Earth-normal lighting conditions are actually a dull grayish-blue. This fact is not widely known on Earth. Not for the sake of being a secret — it’s not — but because of Deep Dark Blues, the Academy Award-winning virteo about Lappet Ugarte. She’s the woman who figured so prominently in the discovery of the artificial origin of the caltrops. The woman I tried to kill, and steal from. In their wisdom, the producers of that epic Bollywood docudrama saw fit to render the caltrops about twice as large as they are in real life, glowing an eerie Cherenkov blue. I suppose the real thing didn’t look like much on camera.

So most of the citizens of planet Earth don’t believe that they’re seeing actual outer space caltrops unless they’re seeing end-of-the-universe blue.

Huang sends me paint in very small jars. They’re each cladded with lead foil, which makes them strangely heavy. When I take the little lead-lined caps off, the paint within is a sullen, radioactive copy of the color I used to see behind my eyelids out there in the Deep Dark.

Every time I dip my brush, I’m drawing out another little spray of radiation. Every time I lick the bristles, I’m swallowing down a few drops of cosmic sleet. I’m the last of the latter day Radium Girls.

Huang doesn’t have to order the old cook to kill me. I’m doing it myself, every day.

I don’t spend much time thinking about where my little radioactive shards go when they leave my house off the alleyway here in Heung Kong Tsai. People buy them for hope, for love, to have a piece of the unspeakably ancient past. There’s a quiet revolution in human society as we come to terms with that history. For some, like a St. Christopher medal, touching it is important. Cancer will be important as well, if they touch them too often.

The truly odd thing is that the shards I sit here and paint with the electric blue of a dying heaven are actual caltrop shards. We’re making fakes out of the real thing, Huang and I.

A truth as old as time, and I’m dressing it in special effects.

I swear, sometimes I kill myself.

This day for lunch the cook brings me a stir fry of bok choi and those strange, slimy mushrooms. He is as secretive as one of the Japanese soldiers of the last century who spent decades defending a lava tube on some Pacific island. There is tea, of course, which I of course ignore. We could play that ritual with an empty pot just as easily, but the cook executes his culinary warfare properly.

The vegetables are oddly ragged for having recently spent time in a searing hot wok. They are adorned with a pungent tan sauce the likes of which I had never tasted before entering this place. The whole mess sits atop a wad of sticky rice straight from the little mauve Panasonic cooker in the kitchen.

Food is the barometer of this household. When the cook is happy, I eat like a potentate on a diplomatic mission. When the cook is vexed by life or miffed about some slight on my part, I eat wretchedly.

I wonder what I have done this day to anger him. Our morning ritual was nothing more than ritual, after all.

When I meet the cook’s eyes, I see something else there. A new distress lurks in the lines drawn tight across his forehead. I know what I gave up when I came here. It was no more than what I’d given up long ago, really, when the fates of people and planets were playing out somewhere in the Deep Dark and I went chasing the fortune of a dozen lifetimes. Still, I am not prepared for this new tension on the part of my daily adversary.

“Have you to come to kill me?” I ask him in English. I have no Cantonese, and only the usual fractured, toneless pidgin Mandarin spoken by non-Chinese in the rock ports of the asteroid belt. I’ve never been certain he understands me, but surely the intent of my question is clear enough.

“Huang.” There is a creaky whine in his voice. This man and I can go a week at a time without exchanging a single word. I don’t think he speaks more than that to anyone else.

“He is coming here?”

The cook nods. His unhappiness is quite clear.

I poke the bok choi around in my bowl and breathe in the burnt ginger-and-fish oil scent of the sauce. That Huang is coming is a surprise. I have sat quietly with my incipient tumors and withering soul and made the caltrop shards ready for market. They are being handled by a True Hero of the Belt, just as his advertising claims. Our bargain remains intact.

What can he want of me? He already holds the chitty on my life. All my labors are his. I have no reputation left, not under my real name. I bear only the memory of the heavens, and a tiny speck of certain knowledge about what once was.

It should be enough.

After a while, by way of apology, the cook removes my cooling lunch bowl and replaces it with a delicate porcelain plate bearing a honey-laden moon cake. I suspect him of humor, though the timing is hideously inappropriate.

“Xie xie,” I tell him in my Mandarin pidgin. He does not smile, but the lines around his eyes relax.

Still, I will not stoop to the tea.

Huang arrives to the sound of barking dogs. I stand behind a latticed window in my garden wall and look out into the alley. The gangster’s hydrogen-powered Mercedes is a familiar shade of Cherenkov blue. I doubt the aircraft paint his customizers use is hot, though.

There is a small pack of curs trailing his automobile. The driver steps out in a whirr of door motors which is as much noise as that car ever makes. He is a large man for a Chinese, tall and rugged, wearing the ubiquitous leather jacket and track pants of big money thugs from Berlin to Djakarta. His mirror shades have oddly thick frames, betraying a wealth of sensor data and computing power. I wonder if he ever removes them, or if they are implants. Life in this century has become a cheap 1980s science fiction novel.

The driver gives the dogs a long look which quiets them, then opens Huang’s door. The man himself steps out without any ceremony or further security. If there is air cover, or rooftop snipers, they are invisible to me.

Huang is small, with the compact strength of a wrestler. His face is a collapsed mass of wrinkles that makes his age impossible to guess. There are enough environmental poisons which can do that to a man without the help of time’s relentless decay. Today he wears a sharkskin jacket over a pale blue cheongsam. His eyes when he glances up to my lattice are the watery shade of light in rain.

I walk slowly through the courtyard. That is where Huang will meet me, beneath a bayberry tree on a stone bench with legs carved like lions.

He is not there when I take my seat. Giving instructions to the cook, no doubt. The pond occupies my attention while I wait. It is small, not more than two meters across at its longest axis. The rim is walled with rugged rocks that might have just been ejected from the Earth moments before the mason laid them. Nothing is that sharp-edged out in the Belt, not after a quarter billion years of collision, of dust, of rubbing against each other. The water is scummed over with a brilliant shade of green that strikes fear in the heart of anyone who ever has had responsibility for a biotic air recycling plant.

They say water is blue, but water is really nothing at all but light trapped before the eyes. It’s like glass, taking the color of whatever it is laced with, whatever stands behind it, whatever shade is bent through its substance. Most people out in the Deep Dark have a mystical relationship with water. The very idea of oceans seems a divine improbability to them. As for me, my parents came from Samoa. I was born in Tacoma, and grew up on Puget Sound before finding my way Up. To me, it’s just water.

Still, this little pond choked with the wrong kind of life seems to say so much about everything that is wrong with Earth, with the Deep Dark, with the little damp sparks of colonies on Ceres and Mars and elsewhere. I wondered what would happen to the pond if I poured my blue paint out of its lead-lined bottles into the water.

“Your work holds fair,” says Huang. I did not hear him approach. Glancing down, I see his crepe-soled boat shoes, that could have come straight off some streetcorner vendor’s rack to cover his million dollar feet.

I meet his water-blue eyes. Pale, so pale, reflecting the color of his golf shirt. “Thank you, sir.”

He looks at me a while. It is precisely the look an amah gives a slab of fish in the market. Finally he speaks again: “There have been inquiries.”

I reply without thinking. “About the radioactives?”

One eyebrow inches up. “Mmm?”

I am quiet now. I have abandoned our shared fiction for a moment, that pretense that I do not know he is poisoning thousands of homes worldwide through his artifact trade. Mistakes such as that can be fatal. That the entire present course of my life is fatal is not sufficient excuse for thoughtless stupidity.

Huang takes my silence as an answer. “Certain persons have come to me seeking a man of your description.”

With a shrug, I tell him, “I was famous once, for a little while.” One of history’s villains, in fact, in my moment of media glory.

“What you paid me to keep you...they have made an offer far more generous.”

I’d sold him my life, that strange, cold morning in a reeking teahouse in Sendai the previous year. Paid him in a substantial amount cash, labor and the last bare threads of my reputation in exchange for a quiet, peaceful penance and the release of obligation. Unfortunately, I could imagine why someone else would trouble to buy Huang out.

He was waiting for me to ask. I would not do that. What I would do was give him a reason not to send me away. “My handiwork meets your requirements, yes?” Reminding him of the hot paint, and the trail of liability which could eventually follow that blue glow back to its source.

Even gangsters who’d left any fear of law enforcement far behind could be sued in civil court.

“You might wish me to take this offer,” he says slowly.

“When has the dog ever had its choice of chains?”

A smile flits across Huang’s face before losing itself in the nest of wrinkles. “You have no desires in the matter?”

“Only to remain quietly in this house until our bargain is complete.”

Huang is silent a long, thoughtful moment. Then: “Money completes everything, spaceman.” He nods once before walking away.

It is difficult to threaten a man such as myself with no family, no friends, and no future. That must be a strange lesson for Huang.

I drift back to the latticed window. He is in the alley speaking to the empty air — an otic cell bead. A man like Huang wouldn’t have an implant. The dogs are quiet until he steps back into the blue Mercedes. They begin barking and wailing as the car slides away silent as dustfall.

It is then that I realize that the dog pack are holograms, an extension of the car itself.

Until humans went into the Deep Dark, we never knew how kindly Earth truly was. A man standing on earthquake-raddled ground in the midst of the most violent hurricane is as safe as babe-in-arms compared to any moment of life in hard vacuum. The smallest five-jiǎo pressure seal, procured low bid and installed by a bored maintech with a hangover, could fail and bring with it rapid, painful death.

The risk changes people, in ways most of them never realize. Friendships and hatreds are held equally close. Total strangers will share their last half-liter of air to keep one another alive just a little longer, in case rescue should show. Premeditated murder is almost unknown in the Deep Dark, though manslaughter is sadly common. Any fight can kill, even if just by diverting someone’s attention away from the environmentals at a critical moment.

So people find value in one another that was never been foreseen back on Earth. Only the managers and executives who work in the rock ports and colonies have kept the old, human habits of us-and-them, scheming, assassination of both character and body.

The question on my mind was whether it was an old enemy come for me, or someone from the Ceres Minerals Resources corporate hierarchy. Even setting aside the incalculable damage to our understanding of history, in ensuring the loss of the first verifiable nonhuman artifact, I’d also been the proximate cause of what many people chose to view as the loss of a billion tai kong yuan. Certain managers who would have preferred to exchange their white collars for bank accounts deeper than generations had taken my actions very badly.

Another Belt miner might have yanked my oxygen valve out of sheer, maddened frustration, but it took an angry salaryman to truly plot my ruin in a spreadsheet while smiling slowly. Here in Huang’s steel embrace I thought I’d managed my own ruin quite nicely. Yet someone was offering good money for me.

Oddly, Huang had made it all but my choice. Or seemed to, at any rate. Which implied he saw this inquiry as a matter of honor. Huang, like all his kind, was quite elastic in his reasoning about money, at least so long as it kept flowing, but implacable when it came to his notions of honor.

Even my honor, it would seem.

All of this was a very thin thread of logic from which to dangle. I could just keep painting shards until any one of several things killed me — radiation sickness, cancer, the old cook. Or I could tell Huang to break the deal he and I had made, and pass me back out of this house alive.

Given how much trouble I’d taken in order to surrender all control, there was something strangely alluring about being offered back the chitty on my life.

That night when the cook brought me the tea, I poured some into the tiny cup with no handles. He gave me a long, slow stare. “You go out?”

“With Mr. Huang, yes,” I told him.

The cook grunted, then withdrew to the kitchen.

The tea was so bitter that for a moment I wondered if he’d brewed it with rat poison. Even as this thought faded, the cook came back with a second cup and poured it out for himself. He sat down opposite me, something else he’d never done. Then he drew a small mesh bag on a chain out from inside his grubby white t-shirt.

“See this, ah.” He tugged open the top of the bag. Out tumbled one of my little blue caltrop fragments. I could almost see it spark in his hand.

“You shouldn’t be holding that.”

The cook hefted the mesh bag. “Lead. No sick.”

I reached out and took the caltrop arm. It was just that, a single arm broken off below the body. I fancied it was warm to my touch. It was certainly very, very blue.

“Why?” I asked him.

He looked up at the ceiling and spread one hand in a slow wave, as if to indicate the limitless stars in the Deep Dark far above our heads. “We too small. World too big. This — ” He shook his bag “ — this time price.”

I tried to unravel the fractured English. “Time price?”

The cook nodded vigorously. “You buy time for everyone, everything.”

I sipped my tea and thought about what he’d told me. I’d been out in the Deep Dark. I’d touched the sky that wraps the world round, past the blue and into the black.

“Blue,” he said, interrupting my chain of thought. “We come from sea, we go to sky. Blue to blue, ah?”

Blue to blue. Life had crawled from the ocean’s blue waters to eventually climb past the wide blue sky. With luck, we’d carry forward to the dying blue at the end of time.

“Time,” I said, trying the word in my mouth. “Do you mean the future?”

The cook nodded vigorously. “Future, ah.”

Once I’d finished eating the magnificent duck he’d prepared, I trudged back to my workroom. I’d already bargained away almost all of my time, but I could create time for others, in glowing blue fragments. It didn’t matter who was looking for me. Huang would do as he pleased. My sins were so great they could never be washed away, not even in a radioactive rain.

I could spend what time was left to me bringing people like the old cook a little closer to heaven, one shard after another.

About the Author

Jay Lake lives in Portland, Oregon, where he works on numerous writing and editing projects. His 2010 books are Pinion from Tor Books, The Baby Killers from PS Publishing, and The Sky That Wraps from Subterranean Press. His short fiction appears regularly in literary and genre markets worldwide. Jay is a winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and a multiple nominee for the Hugo and World Fantasy Awards.

Teeth

Stephen Dedman

The little oblong box was made of ebony: I had to give Klein credit for a sense of irony, and possibly his knowledge of the genre. I stared at the glistening white lumps of ivory inside, and shook my head. “Beautifully preserved, aren’t they?” said Klein.

“Suspiciously,” I growled. “How sure are you of their provenance?”

He made a see-sawing gesture. He’d never had the looks or the range to make it as an actor (though that hadn’t stopped him trying), but he was a pretty good salesman. He worked for a well-known theatrical agency, mostly getting people the stuff that they wanted that couldn’t be written into their contracts. “They came from Temple’s collection. Before that, I have my doubts,” he admitted, “but he could hardly have asked for documentation. Body-snatchers didn’t go in for paperwork.”

“So you expect me trust you? Or am I supposed to try extracting some DNA?”

Klein smiled. “You could, I suppose, if you had anything for comparison... but you’ll have to buy them first.” He closed the little casket with an audible snap. “I’m not giving away free samples here. And if you look up the records, you’ll find that when they disinterred Poe’s corpse in 1875, the sexton noted that while the skeleton was in near-perfect condition, the top teeth had been dislodged from the skull.”

I knew the story, of course. In 1873, the philanthropist George Childs had been persuaded that Edgar deserved a better monument than an overgrown grave in the Poe family plot, and paid for a new memorial. “So who collected these? The sexton?”

“Maybe, or one of the gravediggers. You could still sell teeth back then, to be made into dentures: maybe he meant to do that, or maybe he realized how valuable they were... anyway, one of Childs’ servants found them in his collection after his death in 1894, or so the story goes, and sold them to Jules Verne. After that, the trail is easier to follow, though they were always sold in secret. Temple bought them some time in the 1980s.”

I tried to look unimpressed, and refilled my glass with Amontillado, leaving his empty. “What’s in the other box?”

Klein’s smile became a grin, and he opened the second ebon casket with a conjurer’s flourish. These teeth had been set into dentures in a wire frame, though the work was obviously primitive. “Don’t touch,” he said, pulling the box away from me.

“Whose are these supposed to be?” I said, dryly. “His teeth when he was a boy?”

“His mother’s,” Klein gloated. “I don’t know whose dentures they were, but those are her original teeth.”

“You can’t be serious.”

Klein lost a minute fraction of his smugness. “The provenance on these is a little less reliable,” he admitted, “but the story is interesting. You remember Poe’s story ‘Berenice’?”

I may have sniffed: just because I make movies, doesn’t mean I can’t read. ‘Berenice’ is not Poe’s best story, and it’s most interesting for containing the seeds for ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ and ‘Ligeia’, as well as some disturbing autobiographical elements. The obsessive Egaeus is betrothed to his cousin Berenice, but only notices her beauty when he sees her in the haunted library where his mother had died. (Poe’s own mother, a beautiful actress, had died of tuberculosis when he was two: he married his cousin Virginia six months after ‘Berenice’ was published, and she died of tuberculosis several years later.) After Berenice dies, Egaeus breaks into her tomb and steals her most attractive feature, her teeth. When readers complained about the story, Poe actually apologized to the editor who published it, claiming that he’d written it on a bet that he “could produce nothing effective on a subject so singular” and allowing “that it approaches the very verge of bad taste” — which means it’s pretty tame by modern standards.

“In 1834,” Klein continued, “somebody approached Poe and offered to sell him these teeth, saying they were his mother’s. Poe may have believed them, or not, but he couldn’t meet their price, even though he’d just won a prize for ‘MS. Found in a Bottle’. He wrote ‘Berenice’ hoping to raise the money, but by the time he was paid for it, the seller had disappeared. Childs’ servant said he bought the teeth, and a letter from Poe describing the incident, from Lizzie Doten sometime in the 1870s, but the letter is lost. Of course, I can’t really prove any of this, but since you’re the biggest private collector of Poe memorabilia alive now that Temple is gone... and not exactly a premature burial, if I may say so...”

I smiled at that, involuntarily, and tried to hide it behind my glass, but I could tell that Klein had noticed. “So,” I said, as blandly as I could manage, “you’re asking me to pay out a quarter million based on the claims of a couple of grave-robbers, at least one thief, two fantasists — one of them the creator of a celebrated hoax — and a poet who claimed to be channeling the dead, and now a dealer in stolen artwork, and God knows how many fools and liars in between.”

Klein shrugged: he didn’t need to look around at the bookshelves, the bust of Pallas above the door or the mummy case in the corner to know how obsessed I was with Poe, horror’s patron sinner. “You must be used to that.”

He was right, of course — everybody in Hollywood lies constantly, if only to themselves — but that didn’t stop it sounding like an insult, and I hate being insulted. “You’ve seen them,” he continued, smirking. “Sleep on it, and decide for yourself, but don’t take too long. I can always find another buyer: do you want to spend the rest of your life wondering what you could have had?”

Poe said it better than I could, of course: And the evening closed in upon me thus — and then the darkness came, and tarried, and went — and the day again dawned — and the mists of a second night were now gathering around — and still I sat motionless in that solitary room — and still I sat buried in meditation — and still the phantasma of the teeth maintained its terrible ascendancy, as with the most vivid and hideous distinctness it floated about amid the changing lights and shadows of the chamber.

Of course, I didn’t spend all of that time motionless or meditating: I wasn’t able to sleep for long without dreaming of adding those teeth to my collection, but I made the effort. I remembered to eat, and wash, and while I didn’t need to leave the house, the phone and fax machine was never silent for very long: I had another two films in pre-production and one in post, so I had plenty to occupy my time if not my mind. But I kept returning to the library and staring at the treasures of my collection. The teeth, if I bought them, would have to go in the safe: if they were fake, then the fewer people who knew I had bought them and been fooled, the better. But if they were real, the idea of them belonging to someone else was unbearable.

I picked up a collection of Poe stories, and leafed through it, hoping he would give me an answer.

Klein was grinning again, or still, as he walked into my office at the studio on Friday night, opened his attaché case, and produced the boxes again. “I was sure you’d call,” he gloated.

“Sure enough that you didn’t try to sell them to anybody else?” I murmured.

He faltered slightly at that, but his insulting smirk returned as I handed him a glass. He gulped it down as though it were water, and I poured him another. “Yes,” he admitted. “I knew you could pay more, and sooner.”

I nodded, and opened the attaché case to show him the stacked banknotes, then snapped it shut again. “You have them?”

He opened his own case, removed the ebony caskets, and placed them on my desk. I looked inside both boxes, and nodded. “The old law of Hollywood: give ‘em what they want.” I drew a deep breath. “What do you want, Klein?”

“Well, I’d like to be paid,” he said dryly.

“You will be, I promise... but what do you do with your money? Do you collect anything?”

“No, not in the way you mean it. I mean, I like to have the best, but so does everybody, right?”

“The best of what?”

“The usual stuff. House, car, clothes... you know.”

“Anything you wouldn’t sell for a profit?”

“No, I guess not. Why?”

“So what really moves you is money?”

“Well, sure, same as everybody. So what?”

“Have you read much Poe, Klein? ‘The Cask of Amontillado’, perhaps? ‘Hop-Frog’? ‘The Conqueror Worm’?” Somehow, looking at his triumphant sneer brought that one instantly to mind. “‘The Premature Burial’?”

“I saw some of the films.”

“A poor substitute for the genuine article,” I said. “And a man in your line should be able to tell real from fake.” I pulled the small pistol from my pocket and pointed it at his stomach. “Take this, for example.”

His eyes widened. “What — ”

“This might just be a prop,” I said, “and if it is, then you can just grab that case and run out of here and tell people how you managed to take me for a quarter mill. But it might not be: sometimes it’s cheaper to buy the real thing than fake it.” I grabbed the case, and nodded at the door. “There’s something I want to show you.”

It was so satisfying him seeing him walk down the corridor, hands clasped behind his head, that I almost took pity on him — but if I did that, I’d be finished in Hollywood. I steered him towards the soundstage where the crew had reconstructed a used crematorium. I pressed the buttons to open the door, and another to start the burners. “For example,” I said, “is that fire really hot enough to actually destroy a body?”

Klein was sweating by now, and I doubted it was because of the flames. “If it helps, it would need to be about 1600 degrees not to leave any identifiable remains. But paper burns at a third of that.” And I threw the attaché case into the oven.

Klein squawked, then stared at me. “You’re crazy!”

“Crazy enough to throw away a quarter million on a whim? Maybe I am... but then, that’s not my money: it’s yours. All you have to do is go and get it — but don’t take too long.”

He stared into the flames. “You’re bluffing. The money’s fake. Counterfeit. Copies. Whatever.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not. But to me, that money’s worth less than the possibility that these teeth are real. What’s it worth to you? Do you want to spend the rest of your life wondering what you could have had?”

He turned to look at me, hoping for some clue in my expression, then leapt into the flames. I pressed the button to close the door, and stood there for a few minutes half-hoping to hear a cry of “For the love of God, Montressor!” — but there was nothing but silence.

I waited for two hours, reading e-mails and script outlines on my Blackberry, before turning the flames off. When I returned to the studio on Monday, the oven had cooled down, and the crew was emptying it out.

Maybe I shouldn’t have gone down to the soundstage to watch them, but I had to make sure there was nothing left that could be identified, no tell-tale hearts or anything of that nature. Klein was right about the money, of course: most of it was fake, but he’d probably never had a chance to find out. Fortunately, nothing in the ashes resembled a banknote, or the attaché case. Just some small fragments of bone indistinguishable from the others we’d used to decorate some of the sets, and some lumps of molten metal that had once been his Rolex and his belt buckle.

One of the stage hands picked some white lumps out of the ashes, and looked at them curiously. Teeth. Human teeth. My heart grew sick, but then he tossed them into the bin with the other rubbish. I smiled to see them there, but my smile failed as the teeth seemed to form themselves back into Klein’s familiar smirk. Another shovel-full of ash landed on top of them, but I could still see them glistening there. I see them still.

About the Author

Stephen Dedman was exposed to the works of Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe at an early age, and has never quite recovered. The author of four novels and more than 100 short stories published in an eclectic range of magazines and anthologies, he has won the Aurealis and Ditmar awards for short fiction and been nominated for the Bram Stoker Award, the BSFA Award, the Seiun Award, the Spectrum Award, the Sidewise Award and a sainthood.

Evolutionary Arms Race: Competing Interests in Male and Female Genomes

Ekaterina Sedia

Siblicide and deadly sperm — both of these are just two examples of wide-ranging and downright creepy consequences of competing interests of males and females. “Battle of the sexes” is a cliché; however, it is fascinating to see this battle play out on the level of genes. Dawkins wrote about ’selfish genes’ in 1976 — and since then, many examples of genes that behave to the detriment of the organisms that carry them had been discovered. This is especially true of the situations where male and female genomes are at odds.

There is strong evidence that the competing interests lead to a much quicker evolution of reproductive proteins, compared with pretty much any other gene. In nature, there is also a wide range of female resistance to harm from males — as well as ample evidence that males do harm females, often reducing their fitness.

For example, in Drosophila, a common fruit fly and the geneticists’ favorite subject, mating success of males is an important issue — the female flies store sperm, and often use stored sperm for fertilizing all of its eggs; however, future re-matings may change that — i.e., the female might use fresher sperm. If there’s re-mating, then sperm from different males would compete with each other for fertilization. That led to the evolution of more and more potent sperm; it was shown in the laboratory that the increased potency of sperm can be evolved in the lab, and that the female flies evolve corresponding resistance. This ’supersperm’ is potent enough to kill females who have not evolved the corresponding defenses.

In terms of progeny, this conflict becomes complicated — after all, we are the product of two parental genomes, which may be in conflict with each other. And this is where the idea of parental imprinting of genes (perhaps one of the most intriguing areas of genetic research) comes into play. “Imprinting” in this context means that the copies of some genes behave differently depending on which parental source they came from. For example, in female mammals only one X chromosome is active — in early embryonic development, it is the copy from the egg that is active in the embryo. Later on, the inactive paternal X is released, and then X chromosomes are inactivated randomly in different cells — this is how we get tortoiseshell and calico cats, each different color patch corresponding to the original cell in the embryo, indicating either paternal or maternal X chromosome being active. So all female mammals are in effect mosaics of their maternal and paternal X chromosomes.

Some diseases are also associated with parental imprinting — for example, both Prader-Willi and Angelman syndromes are associated with a deletion on chromosome 15. If the deletion originated in the egg, the individual will have Angelman syndrome, and if it originated in the sperm — Prader-Willi syndrome. In the rest of us, both copies are present, indicating that both paternal and maternal imprinting are necessary for normal development.

Besides delaying male obsolescence, imprinting has a number of fascinating genetic consequences — and one of them had recently (in the past ten years or so) has drawn quite a bit of scientific and lay attention, because it seemed to shed some harsh light on the most sacred and frequently romanticized of human relationships — the bond between mother and child.

Evolutionary biologists working with both plants and animals have noticed one interesting issue: a conflict between maternal interests and those of the developing embryo. It is clearly in the maternal interest to limit the nutrients she allocates to any given offspring in favor of her own health and survival as well as the any future offspring she might have. The embryo, on the other hand, would clearly benefit from the increase of maternal allocation.

The genes that increase embryo’s ability to demand and receive more resources are imprinted by the father — especially in species where multiple paternities are likely (a good percentage of mammals). The natural selection is likely to favor the offspring of the males that are able to increase maternal allocation at the expense of both the mother and her future offspring. Thus, it results in many unsightly things happening in the mammalian womb: sib murder, as well as tapping of the maternal resources in the manner most similar to parasitism.

Search for genes responsible is well in progress. Mice, who are fairly similar to humans genetically, have a gene known as Mest. It is imprinted paternally, and it regulates maternal care. Mice who are missing this gene are shockingly bad mothers — they pretty much ignore their helpless progeny, usually resulting in their death.

A Mest gene was located in humans; however, it is unclear (and unlikely) that the gene would have such clear-cut consequences, since in humans parental behavior is the result of learning and socialization; moreover, any effects of such genes are likely to be masked by family and social support systems. Instead, in humans the conflict between the mother and offspring are more likely to play out in the womb.

In placental mammals, the embryo implants in the womb and the exchange of nutrients and chemical signals occurs across the placenta. According to David Haig, one of the world’s leading authorities in the issue, there is quite a bit of evidence that the evolutionary arms race resulted in the embryo secreting a lot of hormones designed to manipulate the mother into increasing a nutrient output, while the mother shows very little response to these demands — such resistance likely to have evolved during the selection process as well. Ultimately, the mother and the embryo are two separate beings, honed by the evolutionary process for maximum self-interest, and mothers’ resistance to the embryonic demands ensure her own survival as well as her ability to have more offspring in the future.

Incidentally, this conflict is likely the reason why pregnancy carries so many hazards for the mother — especially considering how common this process is. Most routine biological processes do not carry such a high risk of complications and mortality; the reason why pregnancy is so hazardous is the competing interests of the embryo who uses the placenta to invade and divert maternal blood supply, and to send chemical messages to manipulate the maternal investment and resource allocation.

Many of the genes that are expressed in placenta are, not surprisingly, also imprinted by the father. From the genetic perspective, the father and his offspring share common genes, while the father and the mother (and whatever other offspring she may have in the future) do not; as the result, the selective process would favor father’s ability to increase the survival of his offspring at the expense of the mother and half-siblings.

But what about mother’s genes? Since the offspring shares half of the genes with the mother, it would stand to reason that there would be some synchronization and common interest between mother’s and offspring’s behavior, increasing the survival of both. There are many such examples — such as offspring begging for food causes a maternal response of feeding (unlike the case of placenta where embryonic demands are pretty much ignored.) Such harmonious coevolved behaviors of offspring and mother are likely to be due to the maternal genes.

Each of us is the product of two parental genomes, which often have conflicting interests. These conflicts can play out in the offspring-mother conflict as seen in the expression of Mest and placental genes, as well as the wider issue of parental imprinting.

References used:

Dawkins, R. (1976) The Selfish Gene, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Genomic Imprinting: A Talk with David Haig (2002). Edge (www.edge.org)

Godfray, H. C. J. (2002) Evolutionary theory of parent — offspring conflict (review article). Nature 376: 133-138

Linder, J.E. and W.R Rice. (2005) Natural selection and genetic variation for female resistance to harm from males. Journal of Evolutionary Biology 18: 568 — 575

Panhuis, T.W., N.L. Clark, and W.J. Swanson (2006) Rapid evolution of reproductive proteins in abalone and Drosophila. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London: Biological Sciences 361: 261 — 268.

Wade, N. (1998) Good Maternal Behavior Is Linked to the Genes of a Father. New York Times, 29 September. [Online] http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=
9E0CE1DA1039F93AA1575AC0A96E958260 Retrieved 15 February 2008.

About the Author

Ekaterina Sedia resides in the Pinelands of New Jersey. Her critically acclaimed novels, The Secret History of Moscow and The Alchemy of Stone, were published by Prime Books. Her next one, The House of Discarded Dreams, is coming out in 2010. Her short stories have sold to Analog, Baen’s Universe, Dark Wisdom and Clarkesworld, as well as Japanese Dreams and Magic in the Mirrorstone anthologies.

An Interview with Kage Baker

Jeff VanderMeer

Kage Baker is one of my favorite writers — wise, clever, funny, shrewd, deep, and sometimes horrifying, her stories and novels display a range and sensibility uniquely her own. She has been a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula Award, in addition to having won the Sturgeon Award. Her novels have been translated into Spanish, French, Italian, Hebrew, and German. Still, to my mind she’s not received nearly the critical attention she deserves. Having made her reputation with her Company novels, about a far future organization dedicated to making sure no one changes the past, Baker is now in the process of moving on to other milieus. We talked about that transition, about her talent for humor, about her relationship with the internet, and several other topics via email in February of this year.

My understanding is that you’ve phased out the Company novels and are focusing more on fantasy. If this is correct, has there been any trauma in this? Has it been tough to wean yourself off of that milieu, or are you just sick of it all by now and ready for new things?

There won’t be any more Company novels; that whole 8-book story arc is finished once and for all. There will undoubtedly be other Company short stories, as I find historical incidents that intrigue me, and I’m blocking out a steampunk novel featuring the Company’s 19th-century predecessor, the Gentleman’s Speculative Society; but the Company story is told. Finito. I wasn’t at all traumatized, considering I’d devoted my life to the damn thing since approximately 1985. There are other stories to tell, for now. Some fantasy, some straightforward historical adventure. The science in my science fiction was never that strong, in any case.

The Company’s often morally ambiguous, to say the least. Do your readers recognize that for the most part? Have you gotten fan mail from readers saying “Man, the Company rocks! I’d totally love to be an operative for them.”?

Nobody ever says the Company rocks — and I’d be incredulous if anyone did, since working for a corporate entity with that kind of power would be nightmarish. But a lot of people love the operatives themselves (primarily Joseph and Lewis) and others would love to be immortal operatives. And every so often I’ll get these distressing little emails saying things like, “You know, you’re almost right about the way time travel works, but you have some details wrong” or “If you reveal any more about the Lizard People, you will regret it”.

What’s your own favorite Company novel, and why?

Probably The Life of the World to Come. It’s the point where the whole saga sort of reboots and moves forward into the future, since Garden of Iden and Mendoza in Hollywood are flashbacks, Mendoza’s story told from her prison, and Sky Coyote and Graveyard Game catch up Joseph’s past history so the reader understands how and why he finally rebels. With all that past grief shed, writing LWTC felt like flying at times. It was a lot of fun to write.

What I’ve always been struck by in the Company novels and stories is how varied they are. For example, in your short story collection Black Projects, White Knights, you’ve got serious, horrific, and very funny stories. I’m curious as to what comes most naturally to you. Did you start out writing funny stuff or more serious? Which is most difficult for you?

I never start out to be funny, it just happens... sometimes the most horrific things are also ludicrously funny. My inclination is generally to write serious stuff, but life is absurd, and the more honestly I try to write about the world, the less its essential ridiculousness can be gotten around. Take — at random — the death of Rasputin. Read about his murderers nervously feeding him poisoned petits-fours, and poisoned vodka, and watching in disbelief as he just keeps shoveling it in and demanding their guitarist play his favorite songs. And when they finally can’t stand it any more and unleash this horrifying catalogue of assaults on him — shooting him, beating him with chains, throwing him into the damn frozen river — and he’s still trying to climb out, right up to the moment he freezes to death — you’re wondering, what must they have been thinking? “Christ, can’t we get anything right?”

You’re one of the only writers I know who can pull off slapstick in fiction. Do you have a background in theater or film? Is there any influence that informs this element in some of your fiction? This kind of approach requires a consummate sense of timing.

I do have a background in theater, yes. I’ve been a character actress, stage manager and director with a number of little troupes orbiting mostly around the historical fairs — the Great Dickens show in San Francisco, the old original Renaissance Faire, the Old California Celebration. A lot of what you’d call Vaudeville Nouveau was generated out of those events. Both the Flying Karamazov Brothers and the Reduced Shakespeare Company, for example, got their start there. If my comedic timing is any good, it’s because I learned from some frickin’ geniuses like Marque Siebenthal, David Springhorn, Judy Cory and Billy Scudder — whose names you will not recognize but who are hallowed in comedy heaven.

Let’s talk about your pirate novel. It’s coming up later this year, titled Or Else My Lady Keeps the Key, and I’m very much looking forward to it. There’s a lot of pirate material out there. Is there a particular model you’re riffing off of?

I did a historical novella for the Night Shade collection Dark Mondays which was about Sir Henry Morgan’s sack of Panama in 1670. “The Maid on the Shore”, it was titled. I told it primarily from the point of view of this spear-carrier, a fairly dense but good-hearted young man named John. He grew as a character — as they will — and the end of the story left some interesting possibilities for him. So I wrote Or Else My Lady Keeps the Key which picks up with John returning from Panama, swearing to give up piracy because it doesn’t pay. First, though, he has to fulfill a promise made to a dying friend and deliver a letter to the friend’s mistress. Things get complicated. The title comes from a popular song of that era, The World Turn’d Upside Down.

At some point in the writing of the first story, I had one of those revelatory moments when I could see John’s entire life stretched out — sort of a Pirate’s Progress. So there will be other pirate stories about him, I guess. I did one for the forthcoming antho Fast Ships, Black Sails (forthcoming in the next year) called “I Begyn as I Meane to Go On” which would be the opening illustration, as it were, in the series. My own particular pirate continuum is set about a generation and a half before all the Good Pirate Stuff — could have kicked myself when I realized I’d have no chance to incorporate Blackbeard or the hilarious Stede Bonnet into the stories, because they hadn’t even been born yet. So I can’t really riff off any of the modern takes on pirate adventure, which are all set around 1720. It crimps one’s style a little — no cocked hats yet, and ships have tillers, not wheels — but one has the consolation of being original.

What are some of your favorite pirate novels or stories?

Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island of course. And I still have my dog-eared copy of Tim Powers’ On Stranger Tides.

You rarely enter into online discussions, as far as I know, and even had your message board deleted at one point. What is your relationship to the internet, and do you think this online element to our lives has helped the genre community as a whole or hurt it?

The internet... nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there. My relationship to it these days is primarily as a reference source — Google Earth is great, Wikipedia OK if used with a big grain of salt and other sources used to fact-check. I did use to take part in online discussions, in the days when Asimov’s scheduled them, but... message boards and online discussions are a lot like study hall or detention, where mostly people are shoving each other and giggling and passing notes with dirty limericks. And one kid in the room is a psycho, and one is a bully, and one is a pompous twit, and you’re at the back of the room dodging spitballs and thinking “Jesus fucking Christ, I’m fifty-five! I could be somewhere else. Why aren’t I?”

I think it has harmed the genre community, personally. People are talking about writing, instead of writing. That’s a bad sign...

What do you read for pleasure? And what recently have you really enjoyed?

When I get the time to read, I’ll read anything Terry Pratchett writes. Ditto Peter S. Beagle and Ian McEwan. I like all the Dead White Males like Somerset Maugham, O. Henry, Kipling, Hammett, Chandler. The late George MacDonald Fraser and Patrick O’Brien. And I absolutely adored “The New Moon’s Arms” by Nalo Hopkinson.

What else do you have coming out in 2008 and what are you working on?

I have a fantasy novel called The House of the Stag coming from Tor. I have the aforementioned Or Else My Lady Keeps the Key coming from Subterranean. I just finished a steampunk story for an anthology Nick Gevers is editing. And I’m working on a novelization of the novella “The Empress of Mars”, because there was a lot more story there than got told.

About the Author

Jeff VanderMeer is an award-winning writer with books published in over 20 countries. He has collaborated on short films with rock groups like The Church, has had his fiction adapted for promotional purposes by Playstation Europe (by filmmaker Joel Veitch), and writes for the Amazon book blog, io9, New York Times Book Review and The Washington Post, among others.

Jeff’s novel Finch and writing book, Booklife, are forthcoming this fall.