Whose Face This Is I Do Not Know

Cat Rambo

I glance in the glass wall’s reflection. It faces me twenty feet away as I walk up the stairs, marble slab steps showing grainy pink underneath my red sneakers. My fingers clutch the railing’s chrome. I’m feeling shaky, that internal quiver where your body announces that it may not be up to this.

I focus on my image. Is my hair longer now? The eyes wider, bluer? The lips, are they swinging towards bee-stung or thinning?

Thinning, it seems to me, but other people move in and out of the building in the morning sunlight, interrupting the reflection.

They dress like beetles, shells blue and black and brown. The woman coming towards me eyes my clothing: faded t-shirt, jacket like thick black leather armor, unremarkable jeans. Past her shoulder my hair is bright curly blonde. I force a matching smile and trot up the stairs.

The elevator. Watery bronze strips bordering more slabs of pink granite, bronze circles around the buttons, loose with age underneath my touch.

Definitely thinner lips. A wave of red is creeping up the hair too, overtaking the blonde. Ragged edge, a fractal line. Some hairs must change faster. I wonder if it is always the same rate.

I am a marvelous machine, a wonder of the Universe.

Hettie is dead. My nose stings with repressed tears.

Dr. Basil’s administrative assistant Mindy sits typing at an expanse of gray and pink desk, a vase of white flowers near her elbow. The surface of the vase is matte clay marked with combed lines.

At first her look is sharp as she says, “Can I help you?”

Something in my silence tells her who I am. She makes a silent oh of surprise.

In her eyes, tiny images of me, too small to make out details.

“A.J.?” she says hesitantly. “A.J., is that you?”

I nod.

She thumbs the intercom on her desk. “A.J. is here.” Wonder edges her voice.

Dr. Basil’s tone is flat and unreadable on the intercom. “Send A.J. in.”

When I first enter, he is standing by the window, a long rectangle that reaches from floor to ceiling to frame winter clouds. He makes an abortive move towards me, catches himself and goes to sit behind the desk. He motions me to a seat.

The chair is too low to the floor and would be difficult to get out of quickly, so I perch on the edge, resting my weight on my legs. On the desk a brass monkey holds a globe up overhead. The monkey’s face is sad. Two images of me dance on his shiny cheeks, distorted by the metal’s shape. Both of me are tiny, insignificant, but we are there. Small mechanisms. I am a wonder of the Universe. Hettie said so.

“The newspapers reported Ms. Stillson’s death,” he says after precisely two silent minutes.

“It was icy and Hettie slipped,” I say.

“Where were you?”

“In front of her house. I went away before anyone could talk to me.”

Tension leaves his shoulders at the words. “Good,” he says. He looks at me. “Female, are you?”

“Since Friday,” I say. “Well, earlier than that, I think.

He nods again. “And the degree of change is still infrequent? Small changes at a rapid pace, but the major shifts, sometimes weeks or months apart?”

“I haven’t noticed a change.”

He hesitates, staring at me as though he were hungry, as though I were reminding him of someone. “Any other odd… episodes?”

“No. I haven’t imagined I was becoming anyone else,” I say.

He looks disappointed but nods. “Would you like something to drink? Hot coffee, tea?”

“Could we send out for a pizza?” I say. “I haven’t eaten in a couple of days.”

Twenty-five minutes later, the spices of a triple meat pizza burn their way down my throat. At first my stomach doesn’t want to take in so much, but I concentrate and it relaxes enough to let me gorge.

I don’t know when the next meal will be. It’s all been moment to moment for so long, and Hettie’s death makes it all even more uncertain. With the thought, acid roils along my throat and I wash it down with gulps of soda, full of sugar and caffeine that my body stores away.

I keep an eye on myself in the window. My hair is creeping back to black, leaving an odd silver line across it. My eyes are definitely droopier, sadder looking than when I came in. A new fullness to my cheeks.

Dr. Basil goes out to talk to Mindy. I don’t mean to listen, but I do. It’s hard to avoid in this form, when every nerve and sensory ending seems so alert. The beast still lingers underneath the human skin.

“What now?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” he answers.

A silence before she says, “Will you turn it in to the authorities?”

“A.J.? No. No, I wouldn’t do that.” But his voice is thin and unconvincing. I imagine his eyes flickering towards the door, trying to warn her that I might be hearing them. Am I imagining it or do I know this? I can’t tell any more. I wipe the thin red grease from the pizza on the box’s lid, fingertips leaving oily arcs.

“It’s been three years,” she says. “Over three years.”

“Only two days since Hettie died,” the doctor says. “That will be why she came back. It came back.”

Hettie would have never called me it. But Hettie was never maternal. She was like a rock, a boulder awakened to life by some wizard, pragmatic and wise and given to thinking in a not precisely human way. I know there was a time before I came to her, but I only dimly remember it, as though remembering that I had remembered it once.

We used to go out walking in the woods, looking for sassafras root or mushrooms. There are few mirrors in nature, particularly in the woods. It didn’t matter whether I looked different coming out than I had going in. I could give up looking at myself.

She lived on the edge of a nature preserve, Pinhook Park. With the trimming back of the Parks Service she and other people trespassed as deep inside the forests of the park as they liked.

When I’d realized what I could become, that was where I’d gone. For three years I lived in Pinhook’s woods. I don’t remember much of the moments there. There’s a difference to non-human existence, as though everything were deeper but some key emotions were missing. It felt peaceful sometimes sure, but other times it felt cold and shitty and damp and hungry above all else.

Finally I’d become aware that I was moving away from that form. I found myself naked on a bank of frost-covered grass one day and thought, “All right, I can pass now.”

An ice-glazed puddle reassured me that I could re-enter the world without too much notice. My nose was still too large but my ears had shrunk back to human size, and my teeth were moving back towards omnivore.

I stole clothing from a Goodwill drop-off box, an outfit assembled of too large jeans and a black hoodie. No socks, but luckily, happily, red sneakers just my size, as though the Universe were applauding my decision to come out of the woods and be human again.

Like I had much choice in the matter.

Hettie hadn’t said much when she saw me sitting on her front steps, waiting for her. The snow blanketed the grass, framing the sight of her straw-colored hair topped with a blue knit cap. Sunlight glinted on the snow and water dripped from the eaves of the house in a slow, steady cadence. Behind her on the street a white van rolled past and continued. The air smelled wet and cold.

Recognition in her eyes. How did she know me? Was there something that persisted in showing, beneath all the forms, the boys and girls and in-betweens that I had been?

“Hettie,” I said. “It’s me, A.J.”

“I figured you’d come back some time,” she said matter-of-factly. Hettie’s imperturbability had been a standard of my childhood. Maybe that was why Basil had picked her to raise his experiments. I’d never asked how she came here, or what she thought of me.

She motioned me inside. Enough mirrors in her house that I could catch glimpses of myself. I seemed to be stable, not making any dramatic changes other than the movement back to the human. The house smelled of pine and floor wax. Hettie had always kept it immaculate. Orderly.

She set out clean towels on a chair by the bathroom door. “I’ll fix dinner,” she said, leaving out unnecessary words to pat my shoulder. “Welcome home.”

When I came out of the shower, toweling my thin brown fur dry, I stared into the mirror, committing every feature to memory. Like meeting a stranger you are promised to, a bridegroom or a bride. But who will die right after the wedding, never to be seen again.

Hettie knocked on the door, interrupting my reverie. “Come out and eat. Your clean clothes are here outside the door.”

In the kitchen, she sat across from me and stared. She’d heated two cans of tomato soup and set out a sleeve of crackers and cheese slices beside my bowl. My stomach rumbled at the sight.

“You know I have to call him,” she said.

“Yes’m,” I said. I ate quickly at first, but slowed as I became sated. With every bite of soup, it was like I was ingesting sleepiness. I hoped I could make it through the entire bowl before I crashed face down.

I did but I don’t remember much of her taking me up to my room to sleep. Only the drum of the rain, a glimmer of drops on the windowpane, tinting the streetlight’s shine to silver.

In the morning, sun sifting through the window woke me. I lay there luxuriating in the warmth and feel of the sheets against my skin. The bed smelled of soap and ironing and a trace of lavender. My face, checked in the bathroom mirror, looked increasingly human. Nice to wear my own clothes again. Hettie had laid my glasses by the sink. Funny, I’d had no problems with my eyes all the time I was gone, even though their shifts had plagued me all through childhood.

Downstairs, Hettie was making toaster waffles. Butter and syrup sat out on the table with two Starbucks containers of coffee, one large and one small. I picked mine up and sipped it. After months of no caffeine, it rocketed through my system like being slapped.

“Where were you?” she asked without preamble.

“Near here, Pinhook Park,” I said.

She raised her eyebrows. “All that time?”

I nodded. “That’s how long I was…whatever that was,” I said.

“Looked like a big bear at first,” she said. “Like that was the destination, anyhow.”

“Did you call Dr. Basil?”

She flipped waffles onto a plate for me and started a couple for herself. “He wants you to come in this morning, after breakfast.”

“Not wasting any time.”

“It’s been three years, A.J.,” she said. “Or did you notice that, when you were off being Bigfoot?”

“I don’t think I was ever really Bigfoot,” I said. “Maybe a werewolf.”

“A very slow one,” she said. “More waffles?”

I shook my head, even though I wanted them. I didn’t want to be sluggish. “When does he want me to come in?”

“Now, if you’re ready.” She looked at the bus schedule magneted to the refrigerator. “The 545 comes in about 30 minutes.”

Outside, a layer of ice coated the trees, the sidewalk, the grass, as though they were all encased in glass.

“Pretty,” I said.

“Pretty is as pretty does,” Hettie said from behind me.

I opened my mouth to say something smart-ass and felt the porch railing shake under my grip. Hettie went down with a thump on the first step. At first I was laughing as I turned.

Then I saw her fixed stare.

I fell to my knees. The minute I touched her shoulder, the weight of her told me what I didn’t want to know, that all life was gone. Not even a flicker left.

I called 911 on her cell phone all the same, fishing it out of her pocket. I couldn’t linger. They would look too hard, too close at my features, which still were not perfectly human, still had the animal lingering underneath. So I left, went back up the steps as though I was going to fetch something, leaving her there.

I paused in the dining room, about to go upstairs and pack, but I heard the ambulance’s distant shrill. Absurdly I grabbed the closest thing to hand, a liter bottle of vodka that Hettie kept for company, which had not been touched in all the time I had lived there. I ducked out the back door and headed through the back yard, past a snow-ridden pile of wood, across an icy crunch of gravel.

I scrambled along the alleyway, ignoring a couple of dogs hurling themselves against fences. Behind me there was a crash and splinter of wood. I turned to see a bulldog bow-legging its way toward me. An old dog. White streaked its jowls. Its broad shoulders sagged. It growled.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” I said, and tried to let pheromones roil off my skin. Slowly, its hackles subsided and it stopped growling, but from its yard a backdoor slammed. A voice shouted “Percy!”

I turned and fled.

At Pinhook Park, I sat on the hill overlooking the miniature train course and got drunker than I ever had been. When I woke the next morning, propped in the corner of a chilly cement shelter, I felt as though my flesh would crawl off my bones, reacting to the amount of alcohol I had tried to drown it in. For the next two days I vomited, until finally I gathered the strength to walk the blocks to Dr Basil’s downtown office.

He comes back in, watches me while I eat the last of the pizza and mop my hands. The grease clings and I have to scrub it off. I catch him watching the gesture. I wonder what nuance of self-loathing psychiatry has taught him to read into it.

“I want to change your medication,” he tells me. “I think I have a mixture that will keep your form from drifting away from human.” He holds out an orange-brown bottle of pills, white-capped. Only three capsules in it.

“One every eight hours,” he says in answer to my look.

“What about when I run out?”

He glances away from me. I follow his gaze. He and I stand looking at the window’s reflection. My breasts seem larger than this morning.

“We’d like you to stick around so we can monitor the changes,” he says.

I take the medicine bottle, hold it in my hand. “How did you develop this?”

“What do you mean?”

“You haven’t had me to experiment on for the last three years. Who did you develop this on?”

“Ah. You weren’t the only member of your batch. You met a few growing up. Casey even lived with you for a while. And then Deejay and Deecie.”

“Are they here?”

He shakes his head. Somehow I know they’re dead, but I have no idea how. He smells of it. I push it. “Maybe they can come visit me, huh?”

“We might be able to scare up one or two visitors,” he says.

“Where am I going to stay?”

The Doctor takes me downstairs, past the basement level, to a comfortably outfitted apartment. There’s a stack of video games, and the TV is taller than me. No windows, though.

I look around.

Dr. Basil watches my reaction to the apartment. “We have paperwork we’d like you to help us with,” he says. He gestures at a memopad on the table. “Tests of perception and personality. That sort of thing.”

“That sort of thing,” I repeat.

During the days I devote myself to Dr. Basil’s tests. They seem calculated to take up as much time as I’m willing to give to them.

Memories of Hettie play themselves over and over in my head. It wasn’t that there were any words of love, it was simply that she gave me a faith that she would always be there for me.

I thought about the others Dr. Basil had mentioned. I did remember Casey, but barely. I remembered playing Mirror with them, the game where one person makes a gesture and the other follows suit. We played it for hours. I remember running over green grass on summer evenings and playing statues and freeze tag, standing as though frozen in shape, frozen in place.

I don’t remember whether Casey was a boy or girl but more importantly I don’t remember whether or not s/he changed as well. I hear Hettie in my head telling us to play nice together and that’s about it. I don’t remember anything about Casey going away other than going into their room and looking under the bed to find the blue knapsack s/he had left me, with a handful of pictures and two favorite action figures.

What had happened to the pictures? I wasn’t sure. I had held onto the dolls for years. Probably still boxed up in Hettie’s attic.

I remember the month before the change. I’d look up and see her staring at me, as though willing me to do something. She talked to me about things she’d never mentioned before.

“You’re a person, not a lab animal,” she told me. “You need to decide your own destiny. You need to be able to not worry about Basil.” She looked into my eyes. Were they changing as she watched? All I could see were hers, which never changed.

“You are a wonder of the Universe,” she said. “You deserve to be free in it.”

I play some games and watch TV. It’s canned stuff, on-demand, so I can’t see the news. They won’t give me net access outside the internal web. It’s the last that chafes me the most. It didn’t bother me at Hettie’s but here, where I know it’s just a matter of bringing me a tablet or screen, it eats at me.

“Look, bring me a kiddie laptop,” I tell Dr. Basil when he comes in that night to check on me. “Put whatever kind of lock-downs you want on it. I don’t care if all I can do is read the weather. I just want to feel connected. You know how it is, Doc.”

I smile as warmly as I can at him, thinking happiness and sensuality, trying to project them. Friendliness. Trust.

It succeeds. He brings me a cheapie screen. There aren’t even any restrictions on it that I can see. I work with the presumption that it’s all monitored, though. I have more to worry about. Giving it to me he lets his hand linger on mine in a way that made this body flush and warm.

The new machine has a shiny screen. I can keep an eye on myself even as I tab through web portals, making it look like someone catching up. I’ve been away three years, and some of this is actually just that - catching up. There are only so many ways to access a link, though, so it’s not too hard to navigate.

I do take a risk and check my mail. A two year old message in one folder reads “Call me. — KC.” And a number. I try to find the number on the net, but it’s out of service, the web tells me.

I finish by playing a game where you throw an exploding ball from character to character. It explodes in my arms time and time again. I keep holding it too long.

When Dr. Basil returns that morning, he wants to run tests. He takes my blood pressure, listens to my heart. His fingers stray here and there, never long enough to remark on, but long enough to let me know what he’s thinking. He keeps staring at my eyes.

“You said you could maybe let me have a couple of visitors,” I ask. “You know. Casey and those others.”

His eyes widen. “Did I?” he says. “Well, I can see.” His hand on mine. I disentangle, retracting my fingers to fold them in my lap.

“I wish you would,” I say, looking straight at him. “I would really…appreciate that.”

Beneath his gaze, I lean back, arching to make my chest more prominent. I hate these kind of mechanical tricks, but when someone is sending out the signals he is, they will work.

“I’ll see what I can do,” he says. He packs away his equipment, piece by piece. “May I come by and eat dinner with you tonight?”

I force a shrug. My body performs as I wish it to, mimicking acts with a grace that makes it believable. “Depends on what sort of mood I’m in,” I say and, deliberate as removing my lips from a kiss, I look elsewhere, refuse to meet his eyes.

The breath that comes from him is almost a groan.

“You’re still female?” he demands.

“Of course.” I add, “Usually the less stressed I am, the less likely I am to change.”

That evening he eats with me, bringing take out Chinese, chopsticks, and fortune cookies. I haven’t done much that day so I pick at the food.

He watches me. I put a piece of Governor’s Chicken in my mouth, biting down with delicate care and licking my lips.

He grabs my hand and raises it to his face, pulling the fingertips over the cleanly shaven skin of his cheek.

I pull it away again, shaking my head.

“I’m out of sorts tonight,” I say. “Sorry.”

“I suppose having a visitor would settle you,” he says.

The shrug gets easier with practice, a supple don’t care movement that emphasizes the pendulum sway of my un-bra-ed breasts.

“Whatever,” I say, and let out a bored breath. “Really.”

“You’re teasing me,” he says.

“Am I?” My stare is deliberate and provocative.

He grins at me, an I know something you don’t smile that clenches at my stomach. “Be careful what you wish for,” he says, then stands. “Be ready tomorrow after lunch.”

“Ready for what?”

“We’re going to see Casey,” he says.

He leaves the scatter of white boxes on the table. I abandon it in turn for the maid that comes in every day while I’m in the shower.

All through the next morning my stomach burns. I wonder if it’s some new change, but a handful of antacids calms it. Lots of calcium; I’ll need to make sure to take a Vitamin-D pill that night.

I am much more in tune with my body than the average person; a lack of potassium, for instance, leaves me almost incapacitated by headache. Fish oil restores the lubricants in my tears. Otherwise they’re not quite right, but burn and weep continuously.

We don’t leave the building, which disappoints me.

Instead, Dr. Basil takes me up to a third floor laboratory. One wall bears huge jars, a gallon size at least, some much larger, five gallons, ten. Not old yellowed pickle jars either, but clear. Newly made equipment with every line and measurement conforming to Science.

On the table one of the largest jars holds a shaggy mass the size of a bowling ball overgrown with kelp and barnacles. It takes me a moment to realize that it’s a head. Underneath it, dangling like a puppet, swims a body in miniature. A troll’s body, barely six inches tall. My face, horrified and appalled, is reflected over it. My breasts are absurdly large now.

Now that I look, the rest of jars hold other parts. A hand, a shin. A ribcage. All with these bodies, ranging in size from two inches, up to a foot, attached, like absurd, horrifying key chains to each.

The only eyes that are open, thankfully, are not the miniature sockets on the heads dangling from elbows and tibia — is that an armpit? — but the full-sized ones in the jar on the table. There, the eyes, the sorrowing green eyes that I think must be Casey’s, track my movements. The blenched lips move as though to speak, but I have no idea what they try to whisper as I reel away.

Dr. Basil’s grip on my shoulder is like iron. “Look,” he says. “It’s an amazing regenerative process. These have only been growing for two weeks, two and a half really. Each of them will have the original’s capabilities. And more, according to whatever genetic modifications I’ve made.”

“Is that what you did with all of them?” I ask.

“Don’t be so horrified. It’s how you were grown too. Disassembly, some genetic tweaking, and then reincorporation.” His other hand trails over my breast, pinches a nipple as he pulls me towards him. “God, you’re so lush. I know how perfect you are. You become what the people around you want you to become. Your skin is like velvet.”

He groans and buries his face in the side of my neck. I feel the body responding, opening, growing wet. I waste time hating it for what it cannot help. I push him away. He pulls me back to him, suffocatingly close.

“Do it,” he breathes into my ear. “Do it, or I’ll cut you up and raise myself a new crop. A more pliable crop No more raising you in an uncontrolled environment. That little experiment in socialization proved far too risky.”

“You don’t have the right to do this.”

“I own you. I own this.” His fingers pinch the nipple harder, but my time as a beast has left me with advantages, and one of them is sharp teeth.

One swift motion. Rip and tear. He reels away, the side of his head spraying blood where I have removed his ear.

I step back but he’s not looking at me any more, stumbling in the spray of blood which coats his face like a mask. I grab the keys from his hands and run away, up the stairs. Past the flashing lights and the people running in. He shouldn’t have let me keep the black leather jacket; the blood doesn’t show on it.

He’ll think I’ll move far away, try to escape by train, by plane, by automobile. He won’t realize that I can stay close, that there are shelters in Pinhook Park where I can sleep if I keep a step ahead of the rangers, and that’s easy enough if I give into the beast and its senses.

I cannot believe that Hettie, who kept me, who was doctor and nursemaid and governess and keeper, would have wanted me to be the beast, but maybe she did. Maybe she spoke to my own desire to free myself from the house that was all I knew. I had escaped, I thought, and the others could too.

Basil has shown me the key to his own destruction. I found what I need in Hettie’s garden shed. A saw, twine, salt, and a jar that will do for the first one. Sawing off my own hand is hard, but the beast surges and lets me look down dispassionately at my work. I tie it off and drop the hand in the jar before filling it with water and salt.

I will raise my own army, I think. I vanish back to the park with my jar.

The next few months pass quickly. I waver in and out of beast and human form. By the time summer is ripe and the world is full of food, my hand has fully regrown twice, and in a cave in the Park’s heart, there are four of me in varying shapes and sizes, and two more jars, along with white plastic buckets, hidden in a cluster of sewer pipes. I bring them sacks each night, the contents of the park’s trash containers. We feast on discarded potato salad and rolls and pizza crusts, eating quietly and efficiently, like the biological machines, the wonders of the universe we are.

It’s not exactly like having Hettie back, but it feels close. We sit into the night and tell stories, stories about who we are and I tell them about Hettie. About cartoons I watched when growing up. About the others.

We do not light a fire. The full moon shines down on our faces. We are thinly furred and built for speed now, much the same, but the small details of our appearance shift now and then, darkening and lightening, an ear tilting, nose building into a ridge.

The moonlight catches our eyes, reflecting each other as surely as our faces do, our faces, our face that is the thing to come.

But still, whose face this is, I do not know.

About the Author

Cat Rambo lives and writes in the Pacific Northwest. Her works have appeared in such places as Asimov’s, Tor.com, and Weird Tales. Her collection, Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight, was a 2010 Endeavour Award finalist. She has served as the fiction editor of Fantasy Magazine.

The Architect of Heaven

Jason K. Chapman

Waking up, as always, is disorienting. His mind insists that it’s only been a moment since the stinging injection and the deep breaths of cold gas that taste like metal and sugar. One of the attendants, her voice soft, tells him it’s been half a century since he last opened his eyes. Not a fleeting local century, either. Those whiz by in something under a decade. She means a real century, an Earth century. Her mother hadn’t even been born when he last walked on Terranova’s ruddy soil.

He adjusts more slowly than the other times. It’s his age. Though hiber-sleep provides the chapter breaks in the story of his life, that story still covers eighty-three waking years. He suspects that this chapter, the one he’s just beginning, is likely to conclude with “the end.”

His voice is little more than a croak until the attendant gives him water to sip. In a gritty whisper, he asks her if it will be a happy ending.

She smiles and tells him of the new star in Terranova’s sky. It’s the rich blue color of a chipchip’s egg — a bright dot pointing back toward Earth.

Diaspora, he whispers.

Tell me, she begs, her voice bright with a child’s eagerness. Tell me the story.

To her, it’s all a fairy tale, and he, a hero who has stepped from fiction to fact.

Why not? There is time. An hour or two before his legs will carry him properly. A year or two before Diaspora makes orbit. It will be good to have his memories in order before the big day.

With as deep a breath as he can manage, he plunges into the past.

Trent Bishop was the third generation of the Moon’s most prominent business dynasty. His grandfather had been instrumental in founding the original colony that had grown into an independent nation of thirty million people. Now, fifteen years into his own turn at the helm of Bishop Industries, Trent was beginning to hate his life.

He stood on the dull, dusty lunar surface, listening to the roar of his own breath inside his pressure suit’s helmet. He was on the lip of a crater two kilometers from the cluster of structures that were the core of the Lunar Republic. Below, on the crater floor, a dozen behemoths, sporting “Bishop Const.” stencils, raked and scraped the regolith into the foundation for a new dome. Above, glaring down at him from orbit, was the biggest mistake he’d ever made.

Diaspora. He looked up to where sunlight glinted off the great ship in orbit. Once it launched, the starship would spend the next one hundred fifty years ferrying four thousand people in cold sleep to the Gliese star system. It was a colony in a can, ready-made to fulfill the dreams of those who wanted to see the human race established around another star.

That was the problem. Trent had never cared much about that dream. Too late, he’d realized just how much Irene DeSart had.

“Starting over on a whole new planet?” he’d said the last time the subject had come up between them. They’d been in the Earthlight Café, grabbing a quick dinner between her back-to-back shifts at the North Dome’s oxygen garden. “Those people are crazy.”

She’d smiled at him, her head tilted to the side and her eyes narrowed. “You build cities on the Moon,” she’d said.

“It’s not the same.”

“Seventy-five years ago, you would have been one of those people.”

“Nonsense.”

“It’s in your blood, Trent.”

His blood. Maybe so. His grandfather had certainly been one of those people. He’d conquered the Moon. Trent’s father had tamed it. What was Trent doing, then?

He’d found himself losing interest in the pressed soy patty on his plate. “I have a business, here,” he’d said. “We have lives here.”

She’d sighed deeply enough to blow her napkin across the table. “Plural again,” she’d said.

“What’s that?”

“Lives.” She’d smiled, but there’d been a sadness in it that Trent hadn’t understood. “I always thought we’d have one life — together.”

Only looking back on that moment, with the naked stars above and the naked landscape around him, both daring him to bare himself as well, did he understand that smile. It had been the mask of accepted pain. Inside, she’d already said goodbye.

He looked down at the crater floor. Work lights cut dagger-shadows behind the heavy equipment. Dust clung to everything despite the antistatic paint. Inside his helmet, his sigh became a moan. He took a deep breath and told his suit radio to call his attorney.

“Trent, you’re not even supposed to know she signed up.” Carter Harmon, all lawyer jokes aside, was a fierce ethicist. He took the Republic’s laws seriously, both in letter and intent. The two had been friends since college. More than once, Trent had referred to Carter as his conscience’s conscience. “I don’t know how you found out,” Carter went on, “and if you tell me, I’ll report you. We have strong privacy laws for a reason.”

Bribery, theft, digital trespassing. He’d used a little of each in increasingly desperate measure until he’d found her. He couldn’t say he was proud of it, but what else could he have done? He’d been busy with the new dome. There’d been deals within deals to make; water contracts, space commitments, air rights. He’d even had to negotiate which hotel chain’s signage would be most conspicuous from the main glidewalk. When he’d come up for air, she’d been gone. Her phone canceled. Her apartment vacated. He’d wasted weeks using conventional means to find her.

“I just need to talk to her,” Trent said. He heard the plea in his own voice. He was sounding like the whiny rich kid he’d never wanted to become.

“It can’t be done.” Carter’s declaration was a wall of finality. “According to the foundation, the passengers are already in hiber-sleep. The process is too risky. They’re not coming out of it until the other end.”

Trent watched a scoop truck deliver another load of regolith to one of his mining haulers. It would go to another site to be processed, its oxygen and precious metals extracted. More money. More residents. More customers. Just like the last one. Like the next one.

“Trent?” Carter said. “Did you hear me?”

“You have to get me on board, Carter. Whatever it takes.”

“I already told you,” Carter said. “No visitors.”

“I know that!”

There was a long silence before Carter spoke again. “I’ve been your lawyer for fifteen years,” the man said at last. “I’ve been your friend a lot longer than that. I think you know I’d do anything for you — up to a point. What you’re asking — . It’s way on the other side of that point, Trent.”

“I want you to get me on — ”

“You screwed up,” Carter said. “I think you knew you were screwing up while you were doing it. Hell, I told you you were screwing up.”

“ — as a passenger.”

“Shit,” Carter breathed.

“I can’t do this, Carter. Not anymore. Not without Irene.”

Carter sighed. “Yeah,” he said. “I get that. Look, are you sure about this? It’s a hell of a life we’ll be — . It’s a lot to give up.”

Trent looked up at Diaspora again. “I used to think so.”

The attendant gives a little schoolgirl swoon. Love, she whispers.

Potent stuff, love. It wounds. It wrecks and rends. It tears down dynasties. Builds up worlds. It makes you squirm through sickly slime. Lets you fly on wings of woven light. Love, he says, is a bitch.

He stands on shaky legs and takes a few brief steps. She holds his arm protectively. Her grip is firm enough to be reassuring, but gentle, too. She doesn’t support him as if he’s feeble. She guides him as if he’s important. He’s not, of course. He’s just a gear — a pulley for the ropes of the universe to pull their weight on.

Love, he says again, this time without the sharpness in his voice. It’s love that’s done all the work.

Trent stood in the tenth floor observation lounge of East Dome. Broad sheets of lunamum window wrapped a third of the way around the building. His back was to the panoramic view of Mare Tranquilitatis. Instead, he watched the approach of an angular, self-assured woman whose sure-footed glide marked her as a lunar native. Her gray hair was cropped close to her head and she wore a tailored business-casual jumpsuit. She was Marina Valikova, chief coordinator of the Diaspora Project.

“I understood this was to be informal, Mr. Bishop.” She nodded toward Carter who stood at Trent’s side, hands clasped before him. “Should I have brought representation?”

Trent tried to gesture reassurance. “He’s just here in case I say something insane.”

Valikova looked at Carter. “Is that something he’s likely to do?”

Carter nodded. “Very likely.”

Trent smiled. “He’ll verify that I really mean it.”

The woman’s face remained expressionless as she looked back to Trent. She stared at him as if trying to see past everything that everyone “knows” about wealthy, famous people to find the man behind it. “Very well,” she said at last.

They sat down in a cluster of chairs angled to take advantage of the view. Before Trent could say anything, Valikova spoke again. “You should know at the start that you’re wasting your time, Mr. Bishop. Diaspora launches in three days and there is no more room.”

“So you’ve said.” Trent leaned forward. “But I understand you’re already organizing the funds for the second wave. I thought, perhaps, I might help.”

“All donations are welcome,” she said.

Trent smiled, pausing for effect. “I was thinking something on the order of my entire net worth.”

Valikova merely glanced at Carter, her eyebrows slightly raised.

“Yes, he means it,” Carter said. “And strictly off the record, yes, he’s insane.”

Still expressionless, Valikova looked back at Trent. “It took us twenty years to build Diaspora. Will you still be so committed after another twenty? You would still arrive twenty years behind her, you know.”

Trent cleared his throat, staring intently at the way his white-knuckled fingers were twisted together. He couldn’t look her in the eye. “I was thinking — ”

“No.” The woman’s voice wasn’t any louder, but it was stronger, sterner. “You were not thinking that I would keep another passenger in hiber-sleep for an extra twenty years while you took his place, because if you were thinking that, I would lose out on a lot of funding when I told you to take a long walk in a short airlock.”

Trent’s face reddened as he kept his gaze locked on his hands.

“At least you have the good sense to be embarrassed,” she went on. “Tell me honestly, Mr. Bishop. Is that the sort of person you’d want to start a new world with?”

“Sorry,” Bishop breathed. He finally forced himself to look up at her face. The hardness there was gone, replaced by a kindness and compassion that seemed to shave a decade off of her age. He tried to smile. “Maybe we can do it in ten.”

For the first time since they’d met, Valikova smiled. “Even ten years is a long time,” she said.

“Everything.” Bishop trembled with the strength of the admission. “Everything I have. Everything I am. I’d trade it all to talk to her one more time.”

Carter leaned over and put his hand on Trent’s shoulder. “It’s not that long,” he said.

Ten years is nearly half the attendant’s life so far. To her, it is very nearly forever. She shakes her head in awe of the commitment.

He can walk without her help now, but still she hovers as he reacquaints his limbs with the idea of motion.

They are all human, he notes, and humans make mistakes. Sometimes our actions are mistaken. Sometimes it’s our inaction. Either way, they haunt us. Some hide from their mistakes. Some feel compelled to fix them.

But some mistakes just can’t be fixed, can they? Not in ten years. Not in a hundred. Not in a quarter of a millennium. We can only hope to ease the consequences of the things we should have done but didn’t — to still the echoes of a moment’s carelessness.

He’d never seen a river until he came to Terranova, but he’d recognized it immediately. He’d lived his life in such a place, struggling to stay upright through the churning rapids. Thinking of it, he finds he is uncomfortable imparting wisdom to the attendant. He is not well suited to the role of elder statesman. But the words need saying, because even now, here in this quiet eddy away from the froth and foam, he still feels the inexorable pull of the current that has swept him so far along. Too, he feels the need to ease the consequences.

He moves his left arm, feeling it resist. He’d nearly lost it to a real river in his second waking period after the landing. Their power needs had outgrown the tiny nuke plant they’d brought, and the solar panels had been under-performing. He wonders if the hydroelectric plant is still running so many years later. Two people died when the original foundation collapsed. He had nearly been the third.

He smiles to himself. The plans never tell the whole story, do they? There are always hidden costs.

Trent punched up the design specs for Diaspora’s main thruster while Carter and Chen Xiang, Bishop Engineering’s most competent propulsion expert, looked on. The skeletal plans filled the two-meter bubble tank.

Chen leaned closer, his nose almost touching the glass of the three-dimensional display. “I’ve seen it,” he said. “Magneto-plasma rocket. Very elegant.”

Trent folded his arms. “I need to boost its thrust.”

Chen picked up the design station’s control puck and used it to fly through the plans. He moved around at dizzying speed, zooming in to read details here and there, then flying off to examine something else entirely. At last, he pulled away again, leaving the design rotating slowly in the middle of the tank. He looked at Trent. “By how much?”

“Double.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Fifty percent, then,” Trent said. “Whatever you can give me.”

Chen shook his head. “Mr. Bishop, that thing can already move a small asteroid, given time. Just what are you planning to — ?” He broke off, glancing at the ceiling as if he could see through the intervening structure and all the way to orbit.

“Whatever you can give me,” Trent repeated.

Chen nodded. “Give me Hirakawa from the materials division,” he said. “He’s working on some bleeding-edge ceramic magnets. He’ll probably want a raise. Just give him whatever he asks for. It’s no time to be cheap.”

More than once, Carter had suggested to Chen that he pay more attention to the norms of employer-employee relationships, but meaty engineering projects always seemed to wipe everything else from the man’s mind.

Trent smiled, giving Carter a quick shake of his head. “Anything else?” he asked Chen.

“A thirty gigawatt reactor.”

“Too much mass.”

“We’ll work it out,” Chen said. “For now, we just make it work. If I’m going to a new planet, I want to get there as soon as possible.”

“You?” Trent shook his head, looking surprised. “Chen, are you signed up for the second wave?”

“Not yet.”

“Then why?” Trent hooked his thumb at the plans in the bubble tank. “Because of this?”

“Don’t be stupid,” Chen said. “It’s just a rocket.”

“I don’t understand.”

Chen looked uncomfortable. He turned away for a moment, then snatched up the control puck and gave his full attention to the bubble tank. “Let me know when Hirakawa’s transferred, will you?”

Carter gently took Trent’s arm, steering him toward the door. He nodded firmly in answer to Trent’s questioning glance and tugged him along. Outside, already moving down the corridor, he finally spoke. “He’s going because you’re going,” Carter said. “He can’t say it. Probably doesn’t even completely understand it, but it’s true.”

“How do you know?”

Carter shrugged, walking more slowly. They were heading toward the dome’s central hub. “I recognize the look,” he said.

Trent shook his head, but kept walking. “I don’t understand.”

They reached the end of the corridor. The hub of the enormous dome was open space, fifty meters across, stretching from ground to roof. Carter led Trent over to the railing. Every one of the dome’s ten floors had a wide boulevard that circled the hub. From where they stood, five floors above the ground, the sense of space was tremendous. A delicate-looking lattice filled the hub, supporting engineered plants and mosses that contributed a good share of the building’s atmosphere recycling. The space glittered green with life. From where they stood, they could see thousands of people going about their day’s affairs.

“You built this,” Carter said. “On a dusty, airless rock, you made this happen.”

Trent smiled at that. “It was a good job.”

“It’s more than that,” Carter said, sweeping his hand across the scene. “It’s a quarter of a million lives. It’s Chen’s life.” He paused and looked at Trent’s face. “My life.”

Trent stared back at him, wide-eyed. “You too?”

Carter shrugged and looked away. “You’re my only client,” he said. “What the hell else would I do?”

“There are no guarantees, Carter.”

“There never are.” The lawyer was quiet for a while. When he finally spoke, it was with an uncharacteristic hesitancy. “This dome isn’t the only thing you built, Trent. You’ve touched…. What was I when we met? Do you remember? I do. I look in the mirror and see that rat-assed loser. Desperately trying to hide from everything. Too afraid to live. Too scared to end it.”

“You turned yourself around.”

“You got me through college and into law school,” Carter went on. “Made me stay when I wanted to quit. Kept me straight when I wanted to wash it all away in a sea of drugs. Convinced me that what happened to me mattered — to me.”

Trent peered at Carter’s face, but the man refused to meet his gaze. “Carter, this is too big a decision to make out of some sense of loyalty.”

Carter just laughed and said, “I know.”

Great men inspire loyalty, the attendant says. It’s a powerful force.

He snorts. Loyalty is a piker. It’s what you do because it’s the right thing to do. It’s a beggar, dependent for its power on the goodwill of others. Even great men are lost if all they can martial behind them is feeble old loyalty.

In his fourth waking period — the unscheduled one — there’d been that one guy — what was his name? Mendenhall. That was it. His people had been loyal to him when he’d tried to take control of the colony. The plan was all wrong, he’d said. It was stupid to live their lives for people who were already more dead than alive.

They woke you to help, the attendant says.

They’d conjured him like some elder ghost to settle things and bring peace to the world. Peace through strength. He’d done it, too. He shudders now, recalling the needless deaths that had brought the colony to the edge of failure.

He’s grown tired of this room and ready to test his legs in the hallway outside. She reluctantly agrees, but never lets her hand stray more than a breath from his arm as he toddles out the door.

She’s getting it all wrong, he fears. She just doesn’t understand. When she tells others this story, it should be the right story. Loyalty merely begs. Love commands. Even death is helpless before love.

For most, the launch ceremony for Diaspora was anticlimactic. The long, showy countdown culminated in little more than satellite-relayed video of a bright, blue-white glow streaming from the back of the ship. There was no dramatic scene of the great ship zooming off into the cosmos, not even the slow, grand rise of a ground-based lift-off. One moment, the giant screen in mission control held an image of the starship against a scattering of stars, the next the image was exactly the same, except for a flood of ion plasma streaming from the back of it. It would be weeks before Diaspora showed any perceptible motion. The cheering of the crowd made more commotion than the ship did.

Trent leaned against one of the room’s many consoles. He and Carter had been invited to watch the launch with the staff. He stared at the screen, letting the celebration surge around him, the cheers and laughter splashing uselessly against his stony mood.

“Odd, isn’t it?”

Trent started, surprised to find Valikova and Carter standing beside him. “What’s odd,” Trent said.

She glanced at the big screen. “For them, it will be tomorrow,” she said. “But they won’t arrive for a hundred and fifty years. Nearly another hundred before a signal can get back to us. They have this amazing future ahead of them, but for most of the people here, they’re already dead.”

Trent turned to look at her profile while she stared at Diaspora. “They’re not dead,” he said.

“Yes, they are.” Now she turned to him, staring into his face with a surprising intensity. “And so will you be, once you enter hiber-sleep. We who remain will be left with nothing but your memory and a vague hope that you’ll find happiness in another life. Does that sound familiar?”

Someone walked by with a tray of champagne-filled cups. Trent took one, but merely stared at it in his hand. “Are you trying to talk me out of this?”

“My people are Russian,” she said, shrugging. “Every silver lining has a dark cloud around it.” She paused for a while before going on. “You know, Egyptian pharaohs used to have their loyal servants buried with them to help in the afterlife.”

Carter stepped closer, sliding between Valikova and Trent. “Your point?” he said.

“There’s been quite a flood of sign-ups since Mr. Bishop went public.” She glanced toward Trent quickly, then back to Carter.

“Speak plainly,” Carter said. “He knows I’m going.”

“Very well,” Valikova said. “The pharaoh’s servants didn’t have a choice, Mr. Bishop. Your people do. That’s a lot of power to wield.”

“It’s their choice,” Trent said.

But the woman didn’t even glance at Trent. She kept her gaze fixed on Carter. “They’re following you into heaven, Mr. Bishop. Maybe into hell. All I ask is that you use the power wisely.”

“He knows what he’s doing,” Carter said.

“I don’t doubt that.” Valikova looked back at the image of Diaspora. “It’s not him I’m worried about.”

Twelve years, not ten. He tells the attendant that’s how long it really took to build Irene. He feels more stable now. His legs seem as good as they’re going to get. The attendant’s hovering is beginning to annoy him, but he tolerates it because he wants her full attention. The story isn’t finished yet.

He takes a few quick steps away from her and turns, just to show her that he can. Her face shows more concern than surprise, followed slowly by a smile.

He asks if she would follow someone into the great beyond, but she misunderstands. She insists he is far from any sort of tomb.

But something in her expression makes him think twice. Maybe she understands all too well. Her concern is more than professional. Yes, of course. How many greats, he asks, lie between his sperm and her granddaughter-hood.

She confesses. He is six generations her sire. She mentions a name and he pretends to remember the woman it denotes. He wonders how many of his descendants he’s known during those times when he was awake, guiding the colony through some emergency, or stretching its capabilities into new areas.

It’s hazy, those early days. Everyone slept with everyone then. Babies were the colony’s future and few wombs went unfilled. It was awkward at times, but strictly voluntary, and ended up producing a culture that at least seemed healthy. Sex was sex and relationships were relationships. If the twain met, well that was just a bonus. Love, though, that was different. Love was a thing unto itself. He’d cared about all of them, but hadn’t loved them. His love slept through it. It sleeps still.

His newly-revealed quadruple-great grandchild interrupts his thoughts. She thinks he should rest.

No rest, he says. There’s no time. Never enough time.

“There’s no time,” Trent said. He coughed again. The cough had become more insistent over the last few weeks. More painful, too. Carter kept nagging him to slow down, to rest, but it had been nearly ten years already. He had to keep to Irene’s schedule.

“A little time now,” Chen said, setting his datapad down on Trent’s coffee table, “or a hundred years later.”

Trent’s living room had become the project’s hub. The furniture was crowded by computers, displays, and bubble tanks. Bishop Industries no longer existed. Trent had killed it, but it had been left to Carter to slice its carcass up and feed it to the markets. It had taken years and had nearly destroyed the Lunar Republic’s entire economy in the process. Trent himself had been too focused on Irene to notice.

“Show me,” Trent said.

Chen just pointed to the datapad. “Run the sim,” he said. “Plasma physics plus fluid dynamics equals cauliflower.”

Trent tapped the datapad’s screen. A funnel shape appeared, ejecting a simulated ion stream. It was the business end of Irene’s engine. A power meter climbed steadily from thirty to forty percent. When it reached fifty, the stream began to fray along the edges. As the power increased, so did the turbulence, until it became a diffuse, boiling cloud.

“It’s the bell,” Chen said. “We need to redesign it. Above forty-eight percent power, most of the thrust is lost to turbulence.” He paused for a moment. “Long term, it could also cause significant damage.”

“How long?” Trent’s cough interrupted him, the fit lasting several seconds. Carter brought him a cup of water and held it while he drank. Trent sipped then nodded his thanks.

Carter set the cup on the table and went back to his seat. “Go on,” he said to Chen.

“There’s no telling,” Chen said. “We’re in new territory. Months, at least. The solution could be in the shape. It could be polish or materials. Nano-structure surfacing, maybe. I just don’t know yet.”

Valikova leaned forward in her seat. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Why now? Why Irene and not Diaspora?”

Chen just looked down at his hands. Trent, too, refused to meet her gaze. “Well?” she said.

Finally, Chen cleared his throat and spoke. “They never ran a full-power test,” he said. “No budget for it. No time on the schedule.”

“Then they’re — ”

“They’re fine,” Carter said. He glanced at Trent, who looked away, fixing his gaze on the datapad and its churning flood of simulated plasma. “Just slower than expected. Marina, you’ll need to adjust the inventory. We’re first wave, now, not second. Find room for the groundbreaking gear we left out — seed stock, hydroponics, water purification. Chen, do what you need to do.”

Chen looked up. “Trent?” he said. “Mr. Bishop?”

Trent finally looked away from the datapad. He focused uncertainly on Carter, but said nothing.

Carter gave him a reassuring smile. “I’ve got this,” he said.

With a tiny nod, Trent swung his gaze toward Chen. “We’ll make it beautiful for her,” he said.

Valikova sat back, sliding down in her seat. “When I was young,” she said, looking at Carter, “I’d always hoped to find such a love.”

“You said it yourself.” Carter nodded toward Trent as he spoke. “The man’s a Romantic.”

“Yes,” she sighed. “Him too.”

It’s this way, isn’t it? He turns to the right, proceeding slowly, but steadily, and without his descendant’s assistance.

She stays two steps behind, urging him to return to his room, but he ignores her. This is something he must do, something he always does when he awakens. This time, it feels more urgent, though. There is little time and he still has much to do.

It’s a beautiful world you’ve made, his multi-great granddaughter says. The coastal outpost is a city now. Three hundred thousand strong. The wave generators and the kelp farms you ordered have made it grow, and we’ve adapted the Earth prawns, as well. There is food and power for millions more.

He asks her about the shuttles. Have they been maintained? Is the fuel plant running? Has anyone been up to Irene recently?

She isn’t sure, but she thinks the last launch was decades ago.

He wants to be angry about that, but he is too tired to stoke the fire beyond being annoyed. He merely sighs. There is always something more to do. They are building more than a world on Terranova. They are building a future. This place should be a step, not a terminus.

She laughs, but cuts it off quickly. A colony’s colony? Would he leave them so soon?

Soon enough, he fears, but not by rocket. No, his place is here. Exactly here. He stops and touches the door before him. It’s the room he’s been seeking. He takes a deep breath, gathering himself.

Alone, he tells her. She almost protests, but he repeats himself. I go in alone. Always alone.

Carter stepped into Trent’s living room to find the man leaning against the big design station, coughing. He put his hand in his pocket and gripped the small container there, waiting for the coughing fit to subside.

Trent noticed him. He straightened up when the coughing stopped. “This damned cold,” he said. “Just won’t let go.”

Carter stared at him. “I’ve spoken to your doctor,” he said. “Selenosis.”

Trent barely looked surprised. He nodded. “Too damn many trips through poorly filtered airlocks,” he said. “Too hands-on. Always had to be there in person, you know?” He moved to the couch and eased himself down onto it. “Didn’t you lecture me once about the Republic’s privacy laws?”

“That should tell you how serious I am,” Carter said. He pulled the pills out of his pocket. “Take these. They’ll help you rest.”

“Too much to do,” Trent said.

Carter handed the medicine to Trent and got a cup of water from the kitchen. “You’re done,” he said. “Chen’s redesigned bell looks good to go. The ship is stocked. The passengers are mostly in h-sleep. You’re done.”

“The details.”

“There are always details.” Carter held the cup out. “Nothing I can’t handle. I know the plan. I know how you work. I can take care of it.”

Finally, Trent relented. He took two of the pills, set the cup down, and leaned his head against the back of the couch. “It’ll be up to you, you know. When we get there. I’ll do what I can in the couple of years I have, but after that — .”

“Just rest,” Carter said.

“You’ve done so much.” Trent’s voice grew softer, slurred. “Given up so much. I screwed up. But there you were. To catch me.”

“Always,” Carter said. He stood watching for a while, until he was sure the man was asleep. He went to the apartment door and opened it.

Valikova slid into the room. “It is done?”

“Yes.” Carter led her to where Trent slept. “Call your team.”

She laid her fingers on Trent’s neck, checking his pulse. “You are sure about this?”

Carter shrugged. “Not much choice,” he said. “It’s the only way to give him what he wants.”

“And you, my dear?” She straightened up and stepped closer to Carter, touching her palm to his cheek. “Do you get what you want?”

He gave her a faint smile, took her hand from his face and held it in both of his. “I accepted the way things are a long time ago,” he said. “Instead, I get to build a world.”

“For them?” she asked.

“For him.”

He takes a deep breath and opens the door. The lights brighten automatically. He blinks and squints until his eyes adjust. There, in the center of the room, lies a hiber-sleep sarcophagus. It has been running, uninterrupted, for a quarter of a millennium. Inside, Trent Bishop sleeps, as he has slept since that day on his sofa.

Carter lays his hand on the cool metal. Soon, he says. She’ll be here soon. You’ll be angry with me, I know, but it won’t last. And I may not be around to see it. The important thing is you’ll get your wish. A few more years with Irene. Here, in the world we’ve made for her. In the world I’ve made for you.

About the Author

Jason K. Chapman lives at the intersection of Geek and Art. His two main interests come together in his job as the IT Director for Poets & Writers (pw.org), where he was worked for twelve years. His short fiction has appeared in Cosmos Magazine, Grantville Gazette-Universe Annex, and others. This is his second appearance in Clarkesworld Magazine. He has stories coming up from Asimov’s and Bullspec.

John Barry: A Retrospective on a Wordless Poet

John T. Stanhope

On January 30, 2011, iconic and very prolific musician and composer John Barry passed away, having been in ill health for some time. He was seventy-seven years old at the time of his passing, but he was a creative force that lived a very full and productive life, as the mourning over his death has attested.

You may not immediately know him by name, but you certainly know his sound. He has written many famous and popular film scores and is known the world over for his iconic work on nearly a dozen James Bond pictures. He may not have written the ultra-famous Bond theme (as we’ll touch on more in a bit); however, his heavy stamp is all over its arrangement, which was his official task in its creation.

His influence didn’t end there though. A multitude of respected projects would be graced by his composer’s pen. He was an emotionally introspective and poetic composer whose haunting themes and pulsing atmospheric rhythms gained him far reaching notoriety. He was also a five-time Oscar winner (Born Free — both score and song; The Lion in Winter; Out of Africa; Dances with Wolves), a Grammy winner (Dances with Wolves), and two-time BAFTA winner (The Lion in Winter and the Academy Fellowship award). He was nominated for 11 Golden Globe awards, taking home a win for Out of Africa. His work was far from limited to a specific genre and he famously contributed many excellent scores to science fiction, fantasy, horror, drama, comedy, romance and action films — including, of course, several Bond pictures.

Born John Barry Prendergast in 1933, the son of a movie theater owner in York, England, he would be bitten by the film and music bug at an early age. Young Barry studied classical piano and, like many of his generation (and after), he developed a keen interest in jazz. Given how much he used the guitar in his compositions — especially earlier in his career — it’s interesting to note that the trumpet was his chosen instrument to play.

Barry studied under American jazz musician Bill Russo as well as composer Dr. Francis Jackson at York Minster and, after a three year stint in the military — having served in a band unit — he decided to strike out on his own. He formed a band, The John Barry Seven, and started a successful career in the pop and jazz genres. The band would, for approximately seven years, ironically, become one of the two or three busiest and most successful rock & roll bands in the UK. They worked as the backup group to large acts, including the likes of Paul Anka, who was quite popular in England at the time, were busy on BBC television shows and signed on with EMI’s Parlophone label. All the bouncing around between York, London and other parts of the British Isles took its toll though, and the band became less stable, with some members going and new ones coming. Guitarist Ken Richards would exit as just one of the band’s casualties and be replaced by Vic Flick, who would reach a much respected status in his own right (among other things, his would become that famous guitar riff in the James Bond theme).

At the very end of the 1950’s, the John Barry Seven had moved on to a television series called Drumbeat. It starred an up-and-comer named Adam Faith. Barry quickly became his arranger while the group became his backing band. It all must have been by the hand of providence because Adam Faith became a star and that is one of the main impulses that led to Barry becoming one of the biggest successes in early British rock & roll. The John Barry Seven was one of the two top backing bands in England. Only a group called The Shadows could claim more success than them. In fact, the group was so popular that they rather succinctly came to be known as JB7.

Soon John Barry and his band left Parlophone and signed with EMI’s more prestigious Columbia label. They maintained their working relationship with Faith, though, on both recordings and on tour. Providence continued playing its hand and in 1960 the John Barry Seven were attached to Adam Faith’s first feature film, Beat Girl, for which they created some rather spunky musical accompaniment.

Not long after this, composer Monty Norman was working on a little film project called Dr. No, the first movie in what was hoped would become a series of films about a secret agent named James Bond. Norman liked and identified with Barry’s style and recommended that he do the arranging — not the writing, mind you — on the theme for the film’s main character. What’s that they say about the rest being history? Barry took Norman’s theme and turned it into what has arguably become the most famous piece of film music on all of planet Earth.

It’s not too difficult to see why Barry was given the opportunity to head up the music on From Russia with Love, the second Bond outing. For it Barry once again worked magic and created an iconic score that helped elevate the Bond franchise to a vaulted level that it might not quite have otherwise met.

With everyone being so happy with Barry’s work on From Russia with Love and its huge box-office and critical success, there was little question as to who would be scoring the next Bond outing. Goldfinger would be the third in the series (which has thus far seen 22 screen adaptations with a 23rd on the way) and to this day it is still considered one of the very best Bond films of all time, not to mention a true classic in the annals of cinema history. Once again, a solid portion of the film’s success and endearment was due in no small part to John Barry. Just as the film as a whole is considered quintessential Bond, so too is Barry’s powerfully emotive score. Very few would question its status as not only one of the very best scores in the series, but also as one of the best and most evocative films scores of all time. The title song as sung — or rather gloriously belted out — by the great Shirley Bassey was a runaway hit, as was the soundtrack itself (it even pushed the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night off the top of the album charts and won Barry a gold disc). If there was any doubt that Barry was the perfect person for the job, it was wiped forever clear after this.

Intriguingly, however, not long after Barry completed his work on Goldfinger he received communication from producer Harry Saltzman. “I got a phone call from Harry,” cited Barry in a 2006 article in the United Kingdom’s Telegraph newspaper. “He never used to come down to the recording sessions, and he says (of the title song): ‘John, that is the worst f***ing song I ever heard in my life. We open in three weeks’ time, otherwise I’d take that f***ing song out of the picture. I’d take it out! Out!’”

Now, to be fair, Saltzman was not a producer prone to such colossal miscalls, but this was certainly one that lay at his feet. Still, when all was said and done, little questioning of Barry’s choices would occur again in relation to the scoring of a James Bond picture. He would go on to score eleven of those Ian Fleming-based secret agent films and, as indicated, in so doing would cement a solid position in the history of his profession.

To return to Dr. No and musician-composer Monty Norman for a moment, it is true (though some still like to sentimentally argue that it isn’t) that Norman did write the main theme for Dr. No (along with the rest of the score). However, it was Barry’s arrangement and performance of that version for the 007 cue which would become one of the most re-recorded pieces of music in history. Ultimately, Monty Norman landed as little more than a footnote in Bond history. Musically speaking, it became all Barry’s and he would grow into a sentimental favorite composer of film and film music fans all over the globe.

In a 1996 interview with Film Score Monthly, Barry credited big band leader Stan Kenton with the inspiration for the Bond style. “I think the genesis of the Bond sound was most certainly that Kentonesque sharp attack,” he said, pointing out Kenton’s brassy sound and notes that hit extreme highs and lows. Though that was not an actual claim of creating the theme itself, it’s close enough to cause confusion, and probably so by intent. For Norman’s part, the whole Bond theme genesis has been a real thorn in his side which he has felt compelled to pull at over the years. He has gone to court over it at least three times (twice against publications and in one instance involving Barry himself) and has been victorious each time. The theme, and the royalties from it, are his, but the fame, adulation and rare level of success are John Barry’s. 

The Bond theme actually goes back to an East Asian-set stage musical Norman was working on in the 1950s that never saw the light of day. One quick listen shows from whence the genesis of the Bond piece comes. A valuable lesson here might be to never throw out your work. You never know when the right time for it might come along… or when you might need it to defend something else you do.

At any rate, fate made its call and Barry was its main beneficiary. The Living Daylights, in 1987, would be his final Bond film. When asked in 2006 by The Sunday Express of London why he never scored another in the series he replied, “I gave up after (that). I’d exhausted all my ideas, rung all the changes possible. It was a formula that had run its course. The best had been done as far as I was concerned.” 

Though Barry is perhaps best known for the work he did on the Bond series, those scores are merely a fraction of his body of work. He would eventually write the music for well over a hundred productions. In that there would be television, stage and radio — not to mention very personal efforts — that would beckon him to put pencil to music sheet. In 2006 he would work with ten well-known tenors on an album titled Here’s to the Heroes. This featured a number of past Barry themes with lyrics provided by his friend, Don Black. A very pleasant, top-selling listening experience was the result. Barry observed, “I’ve always loved writing for singers and to have 10 voices to write for was fantastic. They have all different kinds of techniques going — falsettos, the whole range of voice production — so it’s like a band of musical instruments. They’re extraordinary.”

Earlier, in 1998, Barry produced a personal work titled The Beyondness of Things. It is one of his most lovely and perhaps loving works, full of the romance and drama that the composer has been so famous for. One of its inspirations seems to have been the feelings he would sense while traveling back and forth between Northern England and Long Island, New York. In the CD’s liner notes he wrote: “Both these visions, past and present — ‘The Old Country’ and ‘The New World’ — harbour so many dreams, memories and reflections beyond the norm: The Beyondness of Things.” A typically romantic and longing sentiment from a poet who worked without words.

In point of fact, John Barry was one of the most romantic film composers of his or any generation. Even his action cues have a romantic, moody quality which begs multiple listenings. And several films owe much of their critical and audience acclaim to his sweeping, melodic, moving style. Out of Africa and Dances with Wolves are two clear examples. These scores simply ascend with a lush beauty that instantly envelopes the viewer-listener and conjures something in the heart that refuses to be denied. Barry himself gives insight to this elegant strength within his work, as confided to The New York Times in 2000: “I like to score the inner feelings of a character — get into their shoes in an imaginative way and take the audience there and enlighten them in a poetic rather than realistic way.”

Many composers, especially modern ones, have a style that, although not bad, can be fairly easily interchanged. Barry, however, was wholly himself. No one has ever sounded quite like him. And though he has on occasion been criticized for works which sound too similar, he consistently turned out material that continues to delight, stimulate and yet at the same time sooth the soul.  The imagination of audiences and listeners of his music will no doubt continue to bloom as time marches ahead.

We all have our inspirations in life and Kenton certainly wasn’t the only influence on Barry. In fact, it all inadvertently started with his father and those theater chains. As a teen Barry operated the projectors in some of those movie houses and fell in love with cinema and especially its music. He references composers like Bernard Herrmann, Erich Korngold and Max Steiner as some of those who worked their influential magic on him.

By the time 1963 came along Barry was off and running in cinema. In addition to the projects already mentioned here he would eventually go on to score potent and very memorable works for films like Zulu, Midnight Cowboy; The Last Valley; Walkabout; Mary, Queen of Scots; Robin and Marian; King Kong (1976); The Deep; Hanover Street; The Black Hole; Raise the Titanic; Francis; Body Heat; High Road to China; Francis Ford Coppola’s The Cotton Club (which won a Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental); Oscar nominated Chaplin, and the list goes on and on.

However, Barry was not always the right choice for a film project and when he didn’t fit it really showed. Take for instance George Lucas’ Howard the Duck. His slower, intensive, moody and rhythmic style was not at all well suited for a flat-footed lethargic, over-stuffed film that needed all the help it could get with pacing and on just about every other level. The film was a miserable flop and Barry could do nothing to help it with his personal style. Indeed, it became a hindrance in its own right.

His work for a modestly budgeted fantasy film in 1980 called Somewhere in Time, though, helped place that film in cult classic status. Starring Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour, it didn’t garner much attention from audiences or critics upon its initial release, but its video release and airing on television gave it new life, with many thanks due to the beautiful melodies Barry wrote for it. It is perhaps one of his most beloved works. This is the type of almost spiritual elevation he could bring to a motion picture.

Of his own beliefs concerning the approach to film music he has said, “As a composer, you’ve got to see a scene and fall in love with it, laugh when you should do, cry when you should do. The music is what you use, but the main thing is to have the ear and the eye to map it out dramatically. And that comes a lot from being sat in my father’s theatre and watching movies when I didn’t even know what I was watching for.” 

Director Sydney Pollack once said, “You can’t listen to his music without seeing movies in your head.” It is hard to imagine a better compliment, or epitaph, than that for a film composer.

Awards for John Barry’s work

BMI: Film Music Award for The Specialist (1994)

BMI: Film Music Award for Indecent Proposal (1993)

Oscar: Best Music for Chaplin (1992)

Oscar: Best Music for Dances with Wolves (1990)

Grammy: Best Instrumental Composition for A Motion Picture for Dances with Wolves (1990)

BMI: Film Music Award for Dances with Wolves (1990)

BMI: Film Music Award for The Living Daylights (1987)

Oscar: Best Music for Out of Africa (1985)

Golden Globe: Best Original Score for Out of Africa (1985)

BMI: Film Music Award for Out of Africa (1985)

London Critics: Special Achievement Award for Out of Africa (1985)

Saturn Award: Best Music for Somewhere In Time (1980)

Oscar: Best Music for The Lion in Winter (1968)

BAFTA: Anthony Asquith Award for Film Music for The Lion In Winter (1968)

Oscar: Best Music for Born Free (1966)

Oscar Best Original Song for Born Free (1966) with Don Black

A commemorative biography titled John Barry — The Man with the Midas Touch, celebrating the man and his work, was published in 2008.

About the Author

Born in the California and raised on a farm, John grew up loving the arts, especially film and film music fantasy & science fiction have always been favorites, with the original Star Trek series, original Star Wars films and writer/producer Rod Serling being particular influences. He graduated from California State University, Northridge with a degree in film production and worked in the film industry for several years (his last stint was as Assistant Visual Effects Editor on the 1999 film My Favorite Martian) before moving to Colorado Springs, CO. He and his wife currently own a Coffee & Tea house and John contributes film-related articles to Cinefantastiqueonline.com and the Colorado chapter of FreshInk.com. He engages in weekly movie reviews and movie updates for Bargain Radio Network in Colorado Springs and he has also written for Geek Monthly magazine, as well as AintItCool.com. When he finds time he posts tiny reviews of filmsand other things that strike his fancyat Twitter.com/PocketReviews

The Spaces Between the Words: A Conversation with Lauren Beukes

Jeremy L. C. Jones

South African novelist Lauren Beukes enjoys writing. And it shows in every word and on every page of her fiction.

“It’s a great privilege to be able to play, to make up stuff, to see where it takes me,” Beukes said. “I love the craft and assembly of it. I love how type on a page can carry you into someone’s head, transport you somewhere unexpected. I love subverting language to my own diabolical purposes, making interesting things happen in the spaces between the words, in how something is said or in what’s left unspoken.”

Beukes writes non-fiction, TV scripts, and fiction. She’s written for such publications as Elle, Marie Claire, The Hollywood Reporter, and The Sunday Times. Her two novels, both published by Angry Robot Books, are fiendishly dissimilar. Moxyland is a hip and shiny techno-thriller on fast forward, whereas Zoo City is a noirish slum tale filled with African magic, spirit animals, and great big wonderful ideas. Both novels share, as Beukes said, “Black humor, sharp wit, deep, underlying anger about social injustices, imaginative, inventive, often vicious.”

Beukes’ writing is musical and muscular, lyrical and layered, fast yet precise.

“I’d like to think that the most common characteristics of my writing are that it’s sharp, dark, witty, vicious and playful,” added Beukes.

Yes, it’s playful — as playful as a mongoose with an offbeat sense of humor and great timing. The result is fiction that seethes with anger and wit, especially when she’s poking the bad guys in the eye.

The heart of Beukes’ fiction is her characters. Central, secondary, or walk on, Beukes brings out the best in the people who inhabit her novels.

Take, for instance, Zinzi of Zoo City.

“Zinzi’s a hustler who uses her wits and her fast mouth to get herself out of (and sometimes into) trouble,” said Beukes. “She’s used to being selfish, at playing hard and cool, but it’s a façade that’s cracking and mostly she’s lying to herself.”

Below, Beukes and I talk about writing fiction, her native South Africa, and the limitless possibilities of speculative fiction.

How did/does your years of writing for magazines inform your novel writing?

Being a freelance writer taught me by necessity to be flexible. I’d be switching between a hard-nosed business feature on film industry financing issues for The Hollywood Reporter and a punchy profile on an all-girl hip-hop act for Dazed ‘n’ Confused. And I had to be able to make the most tedious story interesting — whether it was on small conference venues or color printers.

Transcribing hours and hours and hours of interview tapes taught me an ear for how real people speak — and speak differently.

But the best part of working as a journalist for so long was that it was like being handed a backstage pass to the city and a badge authorizing me to snoop around in interesting things, kinda like being a private investigator, only that people were (mostly) very willing to answer my questions.

I honestly don’t think I would be the writer I am if it wasn’t for journalism and those experiences, which took me everywhere from great white shark-infested ocean channels to garbage-filled alleyways between shacks, casing the joint with electricity cable thieves. I’ve had a lot of fun doing a lot of great things and interviewing bizarre and wonderful people, but I’ve also been directly exposed to some devastating realities and social injustices that make me very angry. You try to transmute the emotion into a story that will make other people care.

With a novel, what comes first — character, setting, plot, image, sight, sound, or something else? And how does it grow from there?

I find that the ideas for novels develop like a Polaroid somewhere in my hindbrain. It’ll start with an image or a sentence of a voice and become clearer as I start working on it. Plot comes first for me and I always have my endings in mind, but the stuff that happens in between is driven by character and very often subverted by character. My novels never turn out exactly as I originally intended and I think they’re more interesting for that.

I have a roadmap. I do outlines, I make lots of notes in notebooks, collect images that resonate, whether of people or places and Work Stuff Out on paper.

The play comes in the spaces in between.

In what ways is Zoo City a departure from Moxyland?

It’s a completely different animal. They’re not even in the same universe.

Zoo City is a muti noir that ties together technology and ideas of traditional African magic. It’s about the burden of the past, guilt and redemption, magical spirit animals inspired by myth that may be the devil on your back or the guardian angel on your shoulder or the spirits of your ancestors manifested in furry form, about inner city slums and refugees and what society does with — and to — our outcasts. Zoo City is set right now in the dilapidated slums of Johannesburg.

Moxyland is a fast political techy thriller set in the near future Cape Town, in a bright ‘n’ shiny corporate apartheid state utopia where crime is practically extinct and the nasty problems of disease and poverty in the rural areas have been literally shut out. It’s a political thriller about surveillance society and genetically modified art, gaming culture, culture-jamming, branding, smartphones used for social control and trading away our rights for convenience. Moxyland uses A Clockwork Orange-style slanguage, where I’ve pushed the way we currently use words and it’s tech-heavy, which some readers, especially in my parent’s generation, have struggled with.

Where does the speed come from in your fiction and how do you modulate it?

For the last five years I’ve been working as a TV scriptwriter and I bring a lot of that into my novel-writing too. I try to write filmically where you ditch anything that’s not necessary and start the scenes as late as possible.

I like dialogue, it comes easily and it’s fun. Script-writing taught me to make a single line work hard. Journalism taught me how people speak and speak differently. If there’s a secret, I think it’s listening to people. Take a notepad to a bar or a train and eavesdrop

Dialogue is hugely important, but so is revealing something without explicitly saying it out loud.

What do you mean by “filmically?

I’ve mainly been writing kids’ animated TV shows, most recently Florrie’s Dragons for Disney’s Playhouse, and it’s been a better crash course in writing sharp, fast dialogue and action than drama or soaps would have been.

You’re writing 11 minute episodes. There’s no time to waste. You get to plot as soon as possible. You start scenes as late as possible. Cut to the chase. Every line of dialogue has to serve a purpose and anything over two sentences long is pure waffle. Scenes can’t go on for longer than a page.

You have to think visually because some poor bastard is going to have to draw and animate the scene you just described. Not just in terms of the action and where the characters are standing and what they’re doing at any one time, but in terms of the cinematography and what’s physically achievable for the animator too.

It’s a discipline and I’ve brought a lot of that learning across to novel-writing.

About which element of fiction or the fiction writing process are you most ambivalent and why?

The middle bit. I heard a great metaphor for the writing process recently: that it’s like going on a road trip at night. You know where you’re leaving from, you know your destination and maybe some of the waypoints, but on the drive itself you can see 20 feet ahead of you in the headlights and the rest is darkness. Sometimes that driving in the darkness, blundering off the track onto a more interesting detour is cool, at other times it’s exhausting staying on the road. I think it was William Gibson who said “I like having written but not writing.”

You give great details without squeezing out the reader. Where is the balance between describing and letting the reader fill in the blanks?

Hey, this story as I wrote it is playing out in your head. And what’s in there is probably more interesting and surprising and relevant to you than anything I could have come up with. It’s a collaborative effort. Call it a telepathic remix.

It’s about trusting the reader. Something blockbuster movies, for example, don’t do — treating their audiences like lobotomized popcorn-chewing mouth breathers who need to be drip-fed a syrupy, explodey mush where the entire plot is evident in thirty seconds of trailer.

Finding the balance is tricky. Painfully explicit versus so-subtle-they-missed-it.

I thread the hints into the narrative that hopefully all makes sense by the end. The ending of Moxyland, for example, is revealed in the first chapter in something Toby says to Kendra. Zoo City does the same — it’s all there (Not to be spoilerific but a lot of the most important stuff is in Chapter 18, casually dropped into conversation).

The risk is that the reader might miss it and I had at least one reviewer who loathed Zoo City the first time he read it and loved it the second, because this time round he caught the clues.

Not only are your two novels vastly different from each other, but within each novel you blend a wide variety of elements from a variety of genres. How far can you stretch the boundaries of science fiction?

I didn’t especially set out to. I wrote the kind of novel I’d like to read.

What is science fiction? Ask me rather what is the human soul, because I might be able to more easily answer!

It’s fiction that asks hard questions about where we are now and who we are now using invented scenarios. It’s a lens that, like satire or comedy, gives you a different perspective. It’s stories that push the limits of the imagination while remaining anchored to reality.

In what ways does the culture and history of South Africa inspire you to write and shape your work?

Moxyland and Zoo City are both responses to being South African and what that means in the 21st century. They tackle the things that most frustrate me about living here, head-on, from how we’re happily surrendering to surveillance society for the sake of convenience, how the government is pushing for control and repression of a free media, how corporations shut down cell phone networks on command to prevent food riots in Mozambique, for example, as happened recently.

I’m angry about the xenophobia by black South Africans against black Africans that spilled into horrific violence in 2008 and might yet again because the underlying tensions, which boil down not to racism but lack of opportunity, lack of jobs, lack of education — all apartheid-legacy stuff — are still there, still simmering.

I’m angry about the threat of crime that’s always lurking in the background in everyone’s lives, but especially the poor. I’m angry about how badly apartheid fucked up this country and furious with the people who won’t admit that or how terrible it was — with government assassination squads and disappearances and freedom fighters committing their own atrocities.

I’m angry about how long it’s going to take us to recover and that we seem to be heading in the wrong direction, the new regime replaying the corruption and nepotism and stupidities of the old regime like we’re stuck on a loop.

But it’s also a celebration of South Africa, of our multi-culturalism, of the spirit of reconciliation that is possible, that prevented this country from spilling into civil war during the democratic elections in 1994, for example, that prevails most days. It’s a fairly amazing place.

How has it been working with the people at Angry Robot?

They’re like flesh-eating terminators on cyborg amphetamines — smart and sharp and hungry! So just great — really. Marco and Lee are hugely ambitious with superb taste in inventive surprising fiction (not just mine, I’m really blown away by just about everything in their catalog) and they’re probably the most forward-thinking publishers I know of in terms of ebooks and how they use the Internet for world domination. And they’re fun guys.

What’s next for you?

I’m working on a new novel (with several more on the backburner). I just finished a nine page comic for Vertigo’s Strange Adventures anthology and hoping to do more comic work, and I just wrapped up the final edit on a documentary I directed, Glitterboys & Ganglands, which will be debuting later this year.

Any parting words?

I’d like to recommend the Moxyland and Zoo City soundtracks available from Africandope.co.za compiled by me and HoneyB.

About the Author

Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and part-time professor living in his wife’s hometown. He is on the board of the South Carolina Academy of Authors, the Hub City Writers Project, and is the interview editor for the Southern Nature Project. In July of 2008, he and Jeff VanderMeer launched Shared Worlds at Wofford College, a creative writing and world-building sumer program for high school students.

A Hellhole of Our Own Making: A Conversation with Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson

Jeremy L. C. Jones

Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson have been writing together since the late 1990s. They’ve both had active solo careers in addition to their Dune collaborations.

Brian Herbert is the author of such novels as Sidney’s Comet, Prisoners of Arionn, and Sudanna Sudanna. He points to his Timeweb Chronicle novels as a landmark in his solo career.

“Each time I begin a solo novel I think I am subconsciously trying to write a landmark work, a piece of fiction that is about important political, religious, or environmental issues, where the stakes are big and my characters are faced with daunting challenges,” said Herbert. “The three Timeweb novels cover a very large canvas, and the stakes are immense: our entire galaxy is faced with an ecological crisis of massive proportions, and the very fabric of existence is disintegrating. This series goes beyond the idea of environmental issues being confined to one planet, and extends them into the far reaches of space.”

Herbert has also written a book about the Merchant Marine and a biography of his father, Frank Herbert, the creator of the Dune universe.

Kevin J. Anderson is the author of more than thirty science fiction, fantasy, and media tie-in novels. In addition to creator owned settings, he’s contributed to the Star War Expanded Universe, the X-Files, Forgotten Realms (forthcoming), and DC Comics universes. He points to his sweeping Saga of the Seven Suns as a landmarks.

“The Saga of Seven Suns is a seven-volume epic that pulls together everything I love about the science fiction genre,” said Anderson. “[It's] a sprawling saga that, really and truly, takes seven big novels to tell.”

The Key to Creation, the third novel in Anderson’s epic Terra Incognita series comes out this summer.

After eleven books set in the Dune universe (with the twelfth on the way), Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson “felt ready to branch out into a universe of our own making.”

And so they wrote Hellhole, the first in a trilogy.

In many ways, they are three writers: Brian Herbert, Kevin J. Anderson, and Herbert/Anderson. Below, they answer together and individually, offering another layer of insight into their collaborative and creative process.

What do you enjoy about writing? What do you not enjoy?

The creative part, the development of the story, the worlds, the characters. We love to brainstorm our stories, see how the plot-pieces fit together, and then write the first drafts. That’s the real stimulating part. By the tenth draft, though, and proofreading the typeset pages, our imaginations are ready to move on to something else!

What do you admire about each other’s work?

We enjoy having the same vision, building universes together, telling grand stories that take the two of us to explore thoroughly. Brian has a strong background in philosophy and comparative religions, which adds depth to the Dune novels, as well as Hellhole. Kevin has a science background, and a great track record in world-building and action sequences. We’re both very good at plotting.

How you divide up the work when collaborating?

We get together for several intensive days of brainstorming and plotting, where we work out the characters and storylines, face to face. After we hammer out the detailed outline, chapter by chapter, side by side, we then decide which chapters, plotlines, and characters we each want to write. Then we go off to our separate corners and write the first drafts of the chapters.

After we’ve written our own chapters and all the files are compiled into a complete manuscript. All the chapters come together like pieces of a puzzle. One of us does an edit straight through, from start to finish, then transfers it to the other, who then goes over the manuscript from start to finish. The manuscript goes back and forth 7-14 times, as long as it takes to get it polished to our satisfaction.

How has your understanding of the novel form — and perhaps the genre — changed since your first efforts?

We’ve grown more ambitious, building more intricate storylines with an even larger cast of characters. It’s quite an intricate dance to control a giant story with dozens of main characters, a choreography of many players and settings to tell a genuine epic.

What, ultimately, is Hellhole about?

At its core, this is a pioneer story, based on the expansion of the American West, when desperate and optimistic people of all stripes struck out into rugged, inhospitable terrain to find a new home for themselves. In Hellhole, a group of new “habitable” worlds are opened for settlement, for those who want to get far away from a repressive and corrupt galactic government. Not all of the new colony worlds are garden spots . . . and the planet called Hallholme (”Hellhole”) is at the bottom of the list. It’s run by an exiled but extremely competent deposed general, whose rebellion failed, but he does manage to keep the lights on and the water running.

What came first with Hellhole?

The initial idea was of colonists trying to settle a planet that was still suffering the aftereffects of an extinction-event asteroid impact, such as what wiped out the dinosaurs and 95% of the species on Earth. Such a planet would be a clean slate … but not a very pleasant place to be. We wanted to set a story there. Then the character of General Adolphus took over the story and guided our plotting from there. We also had a unique idea about how to deal with a lost, ruined alien civilization. Everything came together, and the major ideas sparked off of one another.

Why a hellhole? Why not, say, a paradise or utopia?

“The colonists all traveled to a beautiful, pleasant place and lived happily ever after.” Not a very exciting novel!

What part of Hellhole would you like to visit? What part would you least like to visit?

The slickwater pools with echoes of the alien civilization seem the most fascinating, and we can see why desperate colonists would find them tempting. As for bad places, Hellhole has so many of them! Maybe the least desirable spot would be the center of the original impact crater.

What makes General Adolphus tick?

In many novels, Adolphus would be cast as the villain, an ambitious Napoleon-esque general who’s been overthrown. But he’s the sort of determined, capable character who can actually keep a colony alive under the most difficult circumstances. When you see what he’s gone through, you can definitely sympathize with him.

And how about Diadem Michella?

Diadem Michella, the queen of the galactic empire, is a very sweet old lady, like everyone’s grandmother or favorite schoolteacher — and she’s the most vile and corrupt leader imaginable. Quite a contrast to General Adolphus.

What’s next for the series?

Hellhole is a trilogy, and we have the major events mapped out — beginning, middle, and end — before we started writing the first novel. On the 13-city Hellhole tour, we spent a lot of time plotting Hellhole #2, which is our next project, now that we’ve finished The Sisterhood of Dune.

And what’s next for each of you?

Herbert: I recently completed a solo novel that is very original and high-concept. One literary professional whose opinion I value highly told me that the story is packed with ideas, and makes him think of some of the most imaginative works in science fiction and fantasy. It is a thought-provoking novel, and I hope my readers enjoy it.

Anderson: The third novel in my Terra Incognita fantasy trilogy, The Key to Creation, comes out in July, and I am starting work on three more novels set in the Seven Suns universe.

About the Author

Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and part-time professor living in his wife’s hometown. He is on the board of the South Carolina Academy of Authors, the Hub City Writers Project, and is the interview editor for the Southern Nature Project. In July of 2008, he and Jeff VanderMeer launched Shared Worlds at Wofford College, a creative writing and world-building sumer program for high school students.

Hugo Season

Neil Clarke

It’s hard to believe that it’s Hugo Award season once again. I am very proud to say that we’ve been nominated for Best Semiprozine again this year. I’d like to thank everyone who voted for us and hope that we continue to earn your support. It’s a huge honor and I’m looking forward to attending the ceremony this year, particularly after having to miss last year’s.

I’m very pleased to see several friends and Clarkesworld veterans on the 2011 ballot, but none pleases me more that the success Peter Watts has had with “The Things” from our January 2010 issue. In addition to a Hugo nomination for Best Short Story, “The Things” has also wracked up the following honors:

2010 Finalist: Parsec Award for Best Speculative Fiction Story (Short Form) as read by Kate Baker

2010 Nominee: BSFA Award for Best Short Fiction

2010 Nominee: Shirley Jackson Award for Short Fiction

and has been selected to appear in the following year’s best anthologies:

The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Eighth Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois ed.

The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume 5, Jonathan Strahan ed.

The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2011 Edition, Rich Horton ed.

The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2011 Edition, Paula Guran ed.

The Year’s Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction 3, Allan Kaster ed.

In celebration of Peter’s success, we dropped the price on the ebook edition featuring his story to 99 cents. Copies are available at the through the following retailers:

Amazon (mobi/kindle formats)

B&N (epub format)

Wyrm Publishing - Direct from us (epub, mobi/kindle)

Wizard’s Tower

Weightless Books

Ebooks have become an increasingly important source of revenue for Clarkesworld. Leveraging free content against multiple revenue streams like advertising, affiliate programs and donations alone in these tougher economic times is a challenge. Ebooks are filling the gap and offer us an opportunity to expand our readership at the same time. It’s an exciting time to be publishing a magazine and I’m working on another editorial that will further expand on this topic.

One of the magazines that I see making excellent use of the ebook model to supplement traditional publishing is Asimov’s. While I’m talking about the Hugos, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the five different nominations for fiction they picked up this year and editor Sheila Williams’ nomination for Best Editor Short Form. It’s hard to believe she’s never won a Hugo for her work, but with the showing they’ve had this year, this could be her year.

On the “not a Hugo” side of the fence, we have the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Once again, it’s a very talented ballot of writers and by total coincidence, one of them, Lauren Beukes, is interviewed in this issue. Since the time of our interview, Lauren also received the Arthur C. Clarke Award for her novel, Zoo City, so congratulations are in order.

Best of luck to all of this year’s nominees and don’t forget, if you are attending Worldcon in Reno this year, you can and should vote.

PS. It looks like Clarkesworld has the honor of being the publication with the most Hugo nominees currently banned from entering the United States. Peter Watts and non-fiction editor Cheryl Morgan are both currently “locked out.” I find this very disturbing and ultimately depressing. Hmmm… Isn’t our President supposedly a science fiction fan?

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the publisher of Clarkesworld Magazine and owner of Wyrm Publishing. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

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