Clarkesworld Magazine

Issue 64

Table of Contents

Scattered Along the River of Heaven

by Aliette de Bodard

What Everyone Remembers

by Rahul Kanakia

All the Painted Stars

by Gwendolyn Clare

The Future Sounds of Yesterday: A Sequence of Synthesizers in Science Fiction

by Christopher Bahn

Things You Will Never Understand: A Conversation with Robert Jackson Bennett

by Jeremy L. C. Jones

2011 Reader's Survey

by Neil Clarke

Rockman

Art by Arthur Wang

© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2012
www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

Scattered Along the River of Heaven

Aliette de Bodard

I grieve to think of the stars
Our ancestors our gods
Scattered like hairpin wounds
Along the River of Heaven
So tell me
Is it fitting that I spend my days here
A guest in those dark, forlorn halls?

This is the first poem Xu Anshi gave to us; the first memory she shared with us for safekeeping. It is the first one that she composed in High Mheng — which had been and remains a debased language, a blend between that of the San-Tay foreigners, and that of the Mheng, Anshi’s own people.

She composed it on Shattered Pine Prison, sitting in the darkness of her cell, listening to the faint whine of the bots that crawled on the walls — melded to the metal and the crisscrossing wires, clinging to her skin — monitoring every minute movement she made — the voices of her heart, the beat of her thoughts in her brain, the sweat on her body.

Anshi had once been a passable poet in San-Tay, thoughtlessly fluent in the language of upper classes, the language of bot-handlers; but the medical facility had burnt that away from her, leaving an oddly-shaped hole in her mind, a gap that ached like a wound. When she tried to speak, no words would come out — not in San-Tay, not in High Mheng — only a raw croak, like the cry of a dying bird. Bots had once flowed to do her bidding; but now they only followed the will of the San-Tay.

There were no stars in Shattered Pine, where everything was dark with no windows; and where the faint yellow light soon leeched the prisoners’ skin of all colors. But, once a week, the prisoners would be allowed onto the deck of the prison station — heavily escorted by San-Tay guards. Bots latched onto their faces and eyes, forcing them to stare into the darkness — into the event horizon of the black hole, where all light spiraled inwards and vanished, where everything was crushed into insignificance. There were bodies outside — prisoners who had attempted to escape, put in lifesuits and jettisoned, slowly drifting into a place where time and space ceased to have any meaning. If they were lucky, they were already dead.

From time to time, there would be a jerk as the bots stung someone back into wakefulness; or low moans and cries, from those whose minds had snapped. Shattered Pine bowed and broke everyone; and the prisoners that were released back to Felicity Station came back diminished and bent, waking up every night weeping and shaking with the memory of the black hole.

Anshi — who had been a scholar, a low-level magistrate, before she’d made the mistake of speaking up against the San-Tay — sat very still, and stared at the black hole — seeing into its heart, and knowing the truth: she was of no significance, easily broken, easily crushed — but she had known that since the start. All men were as nothing to the vast universe.

It was on the deck that Anshi met Zhiying — a small, diminutive woman who always sat next to her. She couldn’t glance at Zhiying; but she felt her presence, nevertheless; the strength and hatred that emanated from her, that sustained her where other people failed.

Day after day they sat side by side, and Anshi formed poems in her mind, haltingly piecing them together in High Mheng — San-Tay was denied to her, and, like many of the Mheng upper class, she spoke no Low Mheng. Day after day, with the bots clinging to her skin like overripe fruit, and Zhiying’s presence, burning like fire at her side; and, as the verses became stronger and stronger in her mind, Anshi whispered words, out of the guards’ hearing, out of the bots’ discrimination capacities — haltingly at first, and then over and over, like a mantra on the prayer beads. Day after day; and, as the words sank deeper into her mind, Anshi slowly came to realize that the bots on her skin were not unmoving, but held themselves trembling, struggling against their inclination to move — and that the bots clinging to Zhiying were different, made of stronger materials to resist the fire of Zhiying’s anger. She heard the fast, frantic beat of their thoughts processes, which had its own rhythm, like poetry spoken in secret — and felt the hard shimmer that connected the bots to the San-Tay guards, keeping everything together.

And, in the dim light of Shattered Pine, Anshi subvocalised words in High Mheng, reaching out with her mind as she had done, back when she had been free. She hadn’t expected anything to happen; but the bots on her skin stiffened one after the other, and turned to the sound of her voice, awaiting orders.

Before she left Felicity, Xu Wen expected security at San-Tay Prime’s spaceport to be awful — they would take one glance at her travel documents, and bots would rise up from the ground and crawl up to search every inch of skin, every body cavity. Mother has warned her often enough that the San-Tay have never forgiven Felicity for waging war against them; that they will always remember the shame of losing their space colonies. She expects a personal interview with a Censor, or perhaps even to be turned back at the boundary, sent back in shame to Felicity.

But it doesn’t turn out that way at all.

Security is over in a breeze, the bots giving her nothing but a cursory body check before the guards wave her through. She has no trouble getting a cab either; things must have changed on San-Tay Prime, and the San-Tay driver waves her on without paying attention to the color of her skin.

“Here on holiday?” the driver asks her in Galactic, as she slides into the floater — her body sinking as the chair adapts itself to her morphology. Bots climb onto her hands, showing her ads for nearby hotels and restaurants: an odd, disturbing sight, for there are no bots on Felicity Station.

“You could say that,” Wen says, with a shrug she wills to be careless. “I used to live here.”

A long, long time ago, when she was still a baby; before Mother had that frightful fight with Grandmother, and left San-Tay Prime for Felicity.

“Oh?” the driver swerves, expertly, amidst the traffic; taking one wide, tree-lined avenue after another. “You don’t sound like it.”

Wen shakes her head. “I was born here, but I didn’t remain here long.”

“Gone back to the old country, eh?” The driver smiles. “Can’t say I blame you.”

“Of course,” Wen says, though she’s unsure what to tell him. That she doesn’t really know — that she never really lived here, not for more than a few years, and that she has a few confused memories of a bright-lit kitchen, and bots dancing for her on the carpet of Grandmother’s apartment? But she’s not here for such confidences. She’s here — well, she’s not sure why she’s here. Mother was adamant Wen didn’t have to come; but then, Mother has never forgiven Grandmother for the exile on San-Tay Prime.

Everything goes fine; until they reach the boundary district, where a group of large bots crawl onto the floater, and the driver’s eyes roll up as their thought-threads meld with his. At length, the bots scatter, and he turns back to Wen. “Sorry, m’am,” he says. “I have to leave you here.”

“Oh?” Wen asked, struggling to hide her fear.

“No floaters allowed into the Mheng districts currently,” the man said. “Some kind of funeral for a tribal leader — the brass is afraid there will be unrest.” He shrugs again. “Still, you’re local, right? You’ll find someone to help you.”

She’s never been here; and she doesn’t know anyone, anymore. Still, she forces a smile — always be graceful, Mother said — and puts her hand on one of the bots, feeling the warmth as it transfers money from her account on Felicity Station. After he’s left her on the paved sidewalk of a street she barely recognizes, she stands, still feeling the touch of the bots against her skin — on Felicity they call them a degradation, a way for the San-Tay government to control everything and everyone; and she just couldn’t bring herself to get a few locator-bots at the airport.

Wen looks up, at the signs — they’re in both languages, San-Tay and what she assumes is High Mheng, the language of the exiles. San-Tay is all but banned on Felicity, only found on a few derelict signs on the Outer Rings, the ones the National Restructuring Committee hasn’t gone around to retooling yet. Likewise, High Mheng isn’t taught, or encouraged. What little she can remember is that it’s always been a puzzle — the words look like Mheng; but when she tries to put everything together, their true meaning seems to slip away from her.

Feeling lost already, she wends her way deeper into the streets — those few shops that she bypasses are closed, with a white cloth spread over the door. White for grief, white for a funeral.

It all seems so — so wide, so open. Felicity doesn’t have streets lined with streets, doesn’t have such clean sidewalks — space on the station is at a ruthless premium, and every corridor is packed with stalls and shops — people eat at tables on the streets, and conduct their transactions in recessed doorways, or rooms half as large as the width of the sidewalk. She feels in another world; though, every now and then, she’ll see a word that she recognizes on a sign, and follow it, in the forlorn hope that it will lead her closer to the funeral hall.

Street after street after street — under unfamiliar trees that sway in the breeze, listening to the distant music broadcast from every doorway, from every lamp. The air is warm and clammy, a far cry from Felicity’s controlled temperature; and over her head are dark clouds. She almost hopes it rains, to see what it is like — in real life, and not in some simulation that seems like a longer, wetter version of a shower in the communal baths.

At length, as she reaches a smaller intersection, where four streets with unfamiliar signs branch off — some residential area, though all she can read are the numbers on the buildings — Wen stops, staring up at the sky. Might as well admit it: it’s useless. She’s lost, thoroughly lost in the middle of nowhere, and she’ll never be on time for the funeral.

She’d weep; but weeping is a caprice, and she’s never been capricious in her life. Instead, she turns back and attempts to retrace her steps, towards one of the largest streets — where, surely, she can hammer on a door, or find someone who will help her?

She can’t find any of the streets; but at length, she bypasses a group of old men playing Encirclement on the street — watching the shimmering holo-board as if their lives depended on it.

“Excuse me?” she asks, in Mheng.

As one, the men turn towards her — their gazes puzzled. “I’m looking for White Horse Hall,” Wen says. “For the funeral?”

The men still watch her, their faces impassive — dark with expressions she can’t read. They’re laden with smaller bots — on their eyes, on their hands and wrists, hanging black like obscene fruit: they look like the San-Tay in the reconstitution movies, except that their skins are darker, their eyes narrower.

At length, the eldest of the men steps forwards, and speaks up — his voice rerouted to his bots, coming out in halting Mheng. “You’re not from here.”

“No,” Wen says in the same language. “I’m from Felicity.”

An odd expression crosses their faces: longing, and hatred, and something else Wen cannot place. One of the men points to her, jabbers in High Mheng — Wen catches just one word she understands.

Xu Anshi.

“You’re Anshi’s daughter,” the man says. The bots’ approximation of his voice is slow, metallic, unlike the fast jabbering of High Mheng.

Wen shakes her head; and one of the other men laughs, saying something else in High Mheng.

That she’s too young, no doubt — that Mother, Anshi’s daughter, would be well into middle age by now, instead of being Wen’s age. “Daughter of daughter,” the man says, with a slight, amused smile. “Don’t worry, we’ll take you to the hall, to see your grandmother.”

He walks by her side, with the other man, the one who laughed. Neither of them speaks — too hard to attempt small talk in a language they don’t master, Wen guesses. They go down a succession of smaller and smaller streets, under banners emblazoned with the image of the phuong, Felicity’s old symbol, before the Honored Leader made the new banner, the one that showed the station blazing among the stars — something more suitable for their new status.

Everything feels… odd, slightly twisted out of shape — the words not quite what they ought to be, the symbols just shy of familiar; the language a frightening meld of words she can barely recognise.

Everything is wrong, Wen thinks, shivering — and yet how can it be wrong, walking among Grandmother’s own people?

Summoning bots I washed away
Ten thousand thousand years of poison
Awakening a thousand flower-flames, a thousand phoenix birds
Floating on a sea of blood like cresting waves
The weeping of the massacred millions rising from the darkness

We received this poem and its memories for safekeeping at a time when Xu Anshi was still on Felicity Station: on an evening before the Feast of Hungry Ghosts, when she sat in a room lit by trembling lights, thinking of Lao, her husband who had died in the uprisings — and wondering how much of it had been of any worth.

It refers to a time when Anshi was older, wiser — she and Zhiying had escaped from Shattered Pine, and spent three years moving from hiding place to hiding place, composing the pamphlets that, broadcast into every household, heralded the end of the San-Tay governance over Felicity.

On the night that would become known as the Second Ring Riots, Anshi stood in one of the inner rings of Felicity Station, her bots spread around her, hacked into the network — half of them on her legs, pumping modifiers into her blood; half of them linked to the other Mheng bot-handlers, retransmitting scenes of carnage, of the Mheng mob running wild in the San-Tay districts of the inner rings, the High Tribunal and Spaceport Authority lasered, and the fashionable districts trashed.

“This one,” Zhiying said, pointing to a taller door, adorned with what appeared to be a Mheng traditional blessing — until one realized that the characters had been chosen for aesthetic reasons only, and that they meant nothing.

Anshi sent a subvocalised command to her bots, asking them to take the house. The feed to the rioting districts cut off abruptly, as her bots turned their attention towards the door and the house beyond: their sensors analyzing the bots on the walls, the pattern of the aerations, the cables running behind the door, and submitting hypotheses about possible architectures of the security system — before the swarm reached a consensus, and made a decision.

The bots flowed towards the door — the house’s bots sought to stop them, but Anshi’s bots split into two squads, and rushed past, heading for the head — the central control panel, which housed the bots’ communication system. Anshi had a brief glimpse of red-painted walls, and blinking holos; before her bots rushed back, job completed, and fell on the now disorganized bots at the door.

Everything went dark, the Mheng characters slowly fading away from the door’s panels.

“All yours,” Anshi said to Zhiying, struggling to remain standing — all her bots were jabbering in her mind, putting forward suggestions as to what to do next; and, in her state of extreme fatigue, ignoring them was harder. She’d seen enough handlers burnt beyond recovery, their brains overloaded with external stimuli until they collapsed — she should have known better. But they needed her — the most gifted bot-handler they had, their strategist — needed her while the San-Tay were still reeling from their latest interplanetary war, while they were still weak. She’d rest later — after the San-Tay were gone, after the Mheng were free. There would be time, then, plenty of it.

Bao and Nhu were hitting the door with soldering knives — each blow weakening the metal until the door finally gave way with a groan. The crowd behind Anshi roared; and rushed through — pushing Anshi ahead of them, the world shrinking to a swirling, confused mass of details — gouged-out consoles, ornaments ripped from shelves, pale men thrown down and beaten against the rush of the crowd, a whirlwind of chaos, as if demons had risen up from the underworld.

The crowd spread as they moved inwards; and Anshi found herself at the center of a widening circle in what had once been a guest room. Beside her, Bao was hacking at a nondescript bed, while others in the crowd beat down on the huge screen showing a sunset with odd, distorted trees — some San-Tay planet that Anshi did not recognise, maybe even Prime. Anshi breathed, hard, struggling to steady herself in the midst of the devastation. Particles of down and dust drifted past her; she saw a bot on the further end, desperately trying to contain the devastation, scuttling to repair the gashes in the screen. Nhu downed it with a well-placed kick; her face distorted in a wide, disturbing grin.

“Look at that!” Bao held up a mirror-necklace, which shimmered and shifted, displaying a myriad configurations for its owner’s pleasure.

Nhu’s laughter was harsh. “They won’t need it anymore.” She held out a hand; but Bao threw the necklace to the ground; and ran it through with his knife.

Anshi did not move — as if in a trance she saw all of it: the screen, the bed, the pillows that sought to mould themselves to a pleasing shape, even as hands tore them apart; the jewellery scattered on the ground; and the image of the forest, fading away to be replaced by a dull, split-open wall — every single mark of San-Tay privilege, torn away and broken, never to come back. Her bots were relaying similar images from all over the station. The San-Tay would retaliate, but they would have understood, now, how fragile the foundation of their power was. How easily the downtrodden Mheng could become their downfall; and how much it would cost them to hold Felicity.

Good.

Anshi wandered through the house, seeking out the San-Tay bots — those she could hack and reprogram, she added to her swarm; the others she destroyed, as ruthlessly as the guards had culled the prisoners on Shattered Pine.

Anshi. Anshi.

Something was blinking, insistently, in the corner of her eyes — the swarm, bringing something to her attention. The kitchens — Zhiying, overseeing the executions. Bits and pieces, distorted through the bots’ feed: the San-Tay governor, begging and pleading to be spared; his wife, dying silently, watching them all with hatred in her eyes. They’d had no children; for which Anshi was glad. She wasn’t Zhiying, and she wasn’t sure she’d have borne the guilt.

Guilt? There were children dying all over the station; men and women killed, if not by her, by those who followed her. She spared a bitter laugh. There was no choice. Children could die; or be raised to despise the inferior breed of the Mheng; be raised to take slaves and servants, and send dissenters like Anshi to be broken in Shattered Pine with a negligent wave of their hands. No choice.

Come, the bots whispered in her mind, but she did not know why.

Zhiying was down to the Grand Master of Security when Anshi walked into the kitchens — she barely nodded at Anshi, and turned her attention back to the man aligned in the weapons’ sights.

She did not ask for any last words; though she did him the honor of using a bio-silencer on him, rather than the rifles they’d used on the family — his body crumpled inwards and fell, still intact; and he entered the world of the ancestors with the honor of a whole body. “He fought well,” Zhiying said, curtly. “What of the house?”

“Not a soul left living,” Anshi said, flicking through the bots’ channels. “Not much left whole, either.”

“Good,” Zhiying said. She gestured; and the men dragged the next victim — a Mheng girl, dressed in the clothes of an indentured servant.

This — this was what the bots had wanted her to see. Anshi looked to the prisoners huddled against the wall: there was one San-Tay left, an elderly man who gazed back at her, steadily and without fear. The rest — all the rest — were Mheng, dressed in San-Tay clothes, their skin pale and washed-out in the flickering lights — stained with what looked like rice flour from one of the burst bags on the floor. Mheng. Their own people.

“Elder sister,” Anshi said, horrified.

Zhiying’s face was dark with anger. “You delude yourself. They’re not Mheng anymore.”

“Because they were indentured into servitude? Is that your idea of justice? They had no choice,” Anshi said. The girl against the wall said nothing; her gaze slid away from Zhiying, to the rifle; finally resting on the body of her dead mistress.

“They had a choice. We had a choice,” Zhiying said. Her gaze — dark and intense — rested, for a moment, on the girl. “If we spare them, they’ll just run to the militia, and denounce us to find themselves a better household. Won’t you?” she asked.

Anshi, startled, realized Zhiying had addressed the girl — whose gaze still would not meet theirs, as if they’d been foreigners themselves.

At length, the girl threw her head back, and spoke in High Mheng. “They were always kind with me, and you butchered them like pigs.” She was shivering now. “What will you achieve? You can’t hide on Felicity. The San-Tay will come here and kill you all, and when they’re done, they’ll put us in the dark forever. It won’t be cushy jobs like this — they’ll consign us to the scavenge heaps, to the ducts-cleaning and the bots-scraping, and we won’t ever see starlight again.”

“See?” Zhiying said. “Pathetic.” She gestured, and the girl crumpled like the man before her. The soldiers dragged the body away, and brought the old San-Tay man. Zhiying paused; and turned back to Anshi. “You’re angry.”

“Yes,” Anshi said. “I did not join this so we could kill our own countrymen.”

Zhiying’s mouth twisted in a bitter smile. “Collaborators,” she said. “How do you think a regime like the San-Tay continues to exist? It’s because they take some of their servants, and set them above others. Because they make us complicit in our own oppression. That’s the worst of what they do, little sister — turn us against each other.”

No. The thought was crystal-clear in Anshi’s mind, like a blade held against starlight. That’s not the worst. The worst is that, to fight them, we have to best them at their own game.

She watched the old man as he died; and saw nothing in his eyes but the reflection of that bitter knowledge.

White Horse Hall is huge, so huge that it’s a wonder Wen didn’t see it from afar — more than a hundred stories, and more unveil as her floater lifts higher and higher, away from the crowd massed on the ground. Above the cloud cover, other white-clad floaters weave in and out of the traffic, as if to the steps of a dance only they can see.

She’s alone: her escort left her at the floater station — the older man with a broad smile and a wave, and the second man with a scowl, looking away from her. As they ascend higher and higher, and the air thins out — to almost the temperature of Felicity — , Wen tries to relax, but cannot do so. She’s late; and she knows it — and they probably won’t admit her into the hall at all. She’s a stranger here; and Mother is right: she would be better off in Felicity with Zhengyao, enjoying her period of rest by flying kites, or going for a ride on Felicity’s River of Good Fortune.

At the landing pad, a woman is waiting for her: small and plump, with hair shining silver in the unfiltered sunlight. Her face is frozen in careful blankness, and she wears the white of mourners, with none of the markers for the family of the dead.

“Welcome,” she says, curtly nodding to acknowledge Wen’s presence. “I am Ho Van Nhu.”

“Grandmother’s friend,” Wen says.

Nhu’s face twists in an odd expression. “You know my name?” She speaks perfect Galactic, with a very slight trace of an accent — heard only in the odd inflections she puts on her own name.

Wen could lie; could say that Mother spoke of her often; but here, in this thin, cold air, she finds that she cannot lie — any more than one does not lie in the presence of the Honored Leader. “They teach us about you in school,” she says, blushing.

Nhu snorts. “Not in good terms, I’d imagine. Come,” she says. “Let’s get you prepared.”

There are people everywhere, in costumes Wen recognizes from her history lessons — oddly old-fashioned and formal, collars flaring in the San-Tay fashion, though the five panels of the dresses are those of the Mheng high court, in the days before the San-Tay’s arrival.

Nhu pushes her way through the crowd, confident, until they reach a deserted room. She stands for a while in the center, eyes closed, and bots crawl out of the interstices, dragging vegetables and balls of rolled-up dough — black and featureless, their bodies gleaming like knife-blades, their legs moving on a rhythm like centipedes or spiders.

Wen watches, halfway between fascination and horror, as they cut up the vegetables into small pieces — flatten the dough and fill up dumplings, and put them inside small steamer units that other bots have dragged up. Other bots are already cleaning up the counter, and there is a smell in the room — tea brewing in a corner. “I don’t — ” Wen starts. How can she eat any of that, knowing how it was prepared? She swallows, and forces herself to speak more civilly. “I should be with her.”

Nhu shakes her head. Beads of sweat pearl on her face; but she seems to be gaining color as the bots withdraw, one by one — except that Wen can still see them, tucked away under the cupboards and the sink, like curled-up cockroaches. “This is the wake, and you’re already late for it. It won’t make any difference if you come in quarter of an hour later. And I would be a poor host if I didn’t offer you any food.”

There are two cups of tea on the central table; Nhu pours from a teapot, and pushes one to Wen — who hesitates for a moment, and then takes it, fighting against a wave of nausea. Bots dragged out the pot; the tea leaves. Bots touched the liquid that she’s inhaling right now.

“You look like your mother when she was younger,” Nhu says, sipping at the tea. “Like your grandmother, too.” Her voice is matter-of-fact; but Wen can feel the grief Nhu is struggling to contain. “You must have had a hard time, at school.”

Wen thinks on it for a while. “I don’t think so,” she says. She’s had the usual bullying, the mockeries of her clumsiness, of her provincial accent. But nothing specifically directed at her ancestors. “They did not really care about who my grandmother was.” It’s the stuff of histories now; almost vanished — only the generation of the Honored Leader remembers what it was like, under the San-Tay.

“I see,” Nhu says.

An uncomfortable silence stretches, which Nhu makes no effort to break.

Small bots float by, carrying a tray with the steamed dumplings — like the old vids, when the San-Tay would be receiving their friends at home. Except, of course, that the Mheng were doing the cutting-up and the cooking, in the depths of the kitchen.

“They make you uncomfortable,” Nhu says.

Wen grimaces. “I — we don’t have bots, on Felicity.”

“I know. The remnants of the San-Tay — the technologies of servitude, which should better be forgotten and lost.” Her voice is light, ironic; and Wen realizes that she is quoting from one of the Honored Leader’s speeches. “Just like High Mheng. Tell me, Wen, what do the histories say of Xu Anshi?”

Nothing, Wen wants to say; but as before, she cannot bring herself to lie. “That she used the technologies of the San-Tay against them; but that, in the end, she fell prey to the lure of their power.” It’s what she’s been told all her life; the only things that have filled the silence Mother maintains about Grandmother. But, now, staring at this small, diminutive woman, she feels almost ashamed. “That she and her followers were given a choice between exile, and death.”

“And you believe that?”

“I don’t know,” Wen says. And, more carefully, “Does it matter?”

Nhu shrugs, shaking her head. “Mingxia — your mother once asked Anshi if she believed in reconciliation with Felicity. Anshi told her that reconciliation was nothing more than another word for forgetfulness. She was a hard woman. But then, she’d lost so much in the war. We all did.”

“I’m not Mother,” Wen says, and Nhu shakes her head, with a brief smile.

“No. You’re here.”

Out of duty, Wen thinks. Because someone has to come, and Mother won’t. Because someone should remember Grandmother, even if it’s Wen — who didn’t know her, didn’t know the war. She wonders what the Honored Leader will say about Grandmother’s death, on Felicity — if she’ll mourn the passing of a liberator, or remind them all to be firm, to reject the evil of the San-Tay, more than sixty years after the foreigners’ withdrawal from Felicity.

She wonders how much of the past is worth clinging to.

See how the gilded Heavens are covered
With the burning bitter tears of our departed
Cast away into darkness, they contradict no truths
Made mute and absent, they denounce no lies

Anshi gave this poem into our keeping on the night after her daughter left her. She was crying then, trying not to show it — muttering about ungrateful children, and their inability to comprehend any of what their ancestors had gone through. Her hand shook, badly; and she stared into her cup of tea, as hard as she had once stared into the black hole and its currents, dragging everything into the lightless depths. But then, as on Shattered Pine, the only thing that came to her was merciless clarity, like the glint of a blade or a claw.

It is an old, old composition, its opening lines the last Anshi wrote on Felicity Station. Just as the first poem defined her youth — the escaped prisoner, the revolution’s foremost bot-handler — this defined her closing decades, in more ways than one.

The docks were deserted; not because it was early in the station’s cycle, not because the war had diminished interstellar travel; but because the docks had been cordoned off by Mheng loyalists. They gazed at Anshi, steadily — their eyes blank; though the mob behind them brandished placards and howled for her blood.

“It’s not fair,” Nhu said. She was carrying Anshi’s personal belongings — Anshi’s bots, and those of all her followers, were already packed in the hold of the ship. Anshi held her daughter Mingxia by the hand: the child’s eyes were wide, but she didn’t speak. Anshi knew she would have questions, later — but all that mattered, here and now, was surviving this. “You’re a heroine of the uprising. You shouldn’t have to leave like a branded criminal.”

Anshi said nothing. She scanned the crowd, wondering if Zhiying would be there, at the last — if she’d smile and wish her well, or make one last stab of the knife. “She’s right, in a way,” she said, wearily. The crowd’s hatred was palpable, even where she stood. “The bots are a remnant of the San-Tay, just like High Mheng. It’s best for everyone if we forget it all.” Best for everyone but them.

“You don’t believe that,” Nhu said.

“No.” Not any of that; but she knew what was in Zhiying’s heart, the hatred of the San-Tay that she carried with her — that, to her little sister, she would be nothing more than a collaborator herself — tainted by her use of the enemy’s technology.

“She just wants you gone. Because you’re her rival.”

“She doesn’t think like that,” Anshi said, more sharply than she’d intended; and she knew, too, that she didn’t believe that. Zhiying had a vision of the Mheng as strong and powerful; and she’d allow nothing and no one to stand in its way.

They were past the cordon now, and the maw of the ship gaped before them — the promise of a life somewhere else, on another planet. Ironic, in a way — the ship was from the San-Tay High Government, seeking amends for their behavior on colonized stations. If someone had ever told her she’d ride one of those as a guest…

Nhu, without hesitation, was heading up towards the dark tunnel. “You don’t have to come,” Anshi said.

Nhu rolled her eyes upwards, and made no comment. Like Anshi, she was old guard; a former teacher in the Mheng schools, fluent in High Mheng, and with a limited ability to control the bots. A danger, like Anshi.

There was a noise behind them — the beginning of a commotion. Anshi turned; and saw that, contrary to what she’d thought, Zhiying had come.

She wore the sash of Honored Leader well; and the stars of Felicity’s new flag were spread across her dress — which was a shorter, less elaborate version of the five-panel ceremonial garb. Her hair had been pulled up in an elegant bun, thrust through with a golden phoenix pin, the first jewel to come out of the station’s new workshops — she was unrecognizable from the gaunt, tall prisoner Anshi remembered, or even from the dark, intense leader of the rebellion years.

“Elder sister.” She bowed to Anshi, but did not come closer; remaining next to her escort of black-clad soldiers. “We wish you happiness, and good fortune among the stars.”

“We humbly thank you, Your Reverence,” Anshi said — keeping the irony, and the hurt from her voice. Zhiying’s eyes were dark, with the same anger Anshi remembered from the night of the Second Ring riots — the night when the girl had died. They stood, staring at each other, and at length Zhiying gestured for Anshi to move.

Anshi backed away, slowly, pulling her daughter by the hand. She wasn’t sure why she felt… drained, as if a hundred bots had been pumping modifiers into her blood, and had suddenly stopped. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected — an apology? Zhiying had never been one for it; or for doubts of any kind. But still —

Still, they’d been on Shattered Pine together; had escaped together; had preached and written the poetry of the revolution, and dared each other to hack into Felicity’s network to spread it into every household, every corridor screen.

There should have been something more than a formal send-off; something more than the eyes boring into hers — dark and intense, and with no hint of sorrow or tears.

We do not weep for the enemy, Anshi thought; as she turned, and passed under the wide metal arc that led into the ship, her daughter’s hand heavy in hers.

In the small antechamber, Wen dons robes of dark blue — those reserved for the mourners who are the closest family to the dead. She can hear, in the distance, the drone of prayers from the priests, and the scuttling of bots on the walls, carrying faint music until the entire structure of the hall seems to echo with it. Slowly, carefully, she rises, and stares at her pale, wan self in the mirror — with coiled bots at its angles, awaiting just an order to awaken and bring her anything she might desire. Abominations, she thinks, uneasily, but it’s hard to see them as something other than alien, incomprehensible.

Nhu is waiting for her at the great doors — the crowd has parted, letting her through with an almost religious hush. In silence, Wen kneels, her head bent down — an honor to the dead, an acknowledgement that she is late and that she must make amends, for leaving Grandmother’s ghost alone.

She hears a noise as the doors open — catches a flash of a crowd dressed in blue; and then she is crawling towards the coffin, staring at the ground ahead of her. By her side, there are glimpses of dresses’ hems, of shoes that are an uneasy meld of San-Tay and Mheng. Ahead, a steady drone from the monks at the pulpit, taken up by the crowd; a prayer in High Mheng, incomprehensible words segueing into a melodious chant; and a smell of incense mingled with something else, a flower she cannot recognise. The floor under her is warm, soft — unlike Felicity’s utilitarian metal or carpets, a wealth of painted ostentation with patterns she cannot make out.

As she crawls, Wen finds herself, incongruously, thinking of Mother.

She asked, once, why Mother had left San-Tay Prime — expecting Mother to rail once more at Grandmother’s failures. But Mother merely pulled a low bench, and sat down with a sigh. “There was no choice, child. We could dwindle away on San-Tay Prime, drifting further and further away from Felicity with every passing moment. Or we could come back home.”

“It’s not Grandmother’s home,” Wen said, slowly, confusedly — with a feeling that she was grappling with something beyond her years.

“No,” Mother said. “And, if we had waited too long, it wouldn’t have been your home either.”

“I don’t understand.” Wen put a hand on one of the kitchen cupboards — the door slid away, letting her retrieve a can of dried, powdered shrimp, which she dumped into the broth on the stove.

“Like two men carried away by two different currents in the river — both ending in very different places.” She waved a dismissive hand. “You’ll understand, when you’re older.”

“Is that why you’re not talking with Grandmother?”

Mother grimaced, staring into the depths of her celadon cup. “Grandmother and I… did not agree on things,” she said. “Sometimes I think…” She shook her head. “Stubborn old woman. She never could admit that she had lost. That the future of Felicity wasn’t with bots, with High Mheng; with any of what the San-Tay had left us.”

Bots. High Mheng — all of the things that don’t exist anymore, on the new Felicity — all the things the Honored Leader banished, for the safety and glory of the people. “Mother…” Wen said, suddenly afraid.

Her mother smiled; and for the first time Wen saw the bitterness in her eyes. “Never mind, child. This isn’t your burden to carry.”

Wen did not understand. But now… now, as she crawls down the aisle, breathing in the unfamiliar smells, she thinks she understands. Reconciliation means forgetfulness, and is it such a bad thing that they forget, that they are no longer chained to the hatreds of the past?

She reaches the coffin, and rises — turns, for a brief moment, to stare at the sea of humanity before her — the blurred faces with bots at the corner of their eyes, with alien scents and alien clothes. They are not from Felicity anymore, but something else — poised halfway between the San-Tay and the culture that gave them birth; and, as the years pass, those that do not come back will drift further and further from Felicity, until they will pass each other in the street, and not feel anything but a vague sense of familiarity, like long-lost families that have become strangers to each other.

No, not from Felicity anymore — and does it matter, any of it?

Wen has no answer — none of Mother’s bleak certainties about life. And so she turns away from the crowd, and looks into the coffin — into the face of a stranger, across a gap like a flowing river, dark and forever unbridgeable.

I am in halves, dreaming of a faraway home
Not a dry spot on my moonlit pillow
Through the open window lies the stars and planets
Where ten thousand family members have scattered
Along the River of Heaven, with no bridges to lead them home
The long yearning
Cuts into my heart

This is the last poem we received from Xu Anshi; the last one she composed, before the sickness ate away at her command of High Mheng, and we could no longer understand her subvocalised orders. She said to us then, “it is done”; and turned away from us, awaiting death.

We are here now, as Wen looks at the pale face of her grandmother. We are not among our brethren in the crowd — not clinging to faces, not curled on the walls or at the corner of mirrors, awaiting orders to unfold.

We have another place.

We rest on the coffin with Xu Anshi’s other belongings; scattered among the paper offerings — the arch leading into the Heavens, the bills stamped with the face of the King of Hell. We sit quiescent, waiting for Xu Wen to call us up — that we might flow up to her like a black tide, carrying her inheritance to her, and the memories that made up Xu Anshi’s life from beginning to end.

But Wen’s gaze slides right past us, seeing us as nothing more than a necessary evil at the ceremony; and the language she might summon us in is one she does not speak and has no interest in.

In silence, she walks away from the coffin to take her place among the mourners — and we, too, remain silent, taking our understanding of Xu Anshi’s life into the yawning darkness.

“With apologies to Qiu Jin, Bei Dao and the classical
Tang poets for borrowing and twisting their best lines”

About the Author

Aliette de Bodard lives and works in Paris, where she has a day job as a Computer Engineer. In her spare time, she writes speculative fictionshe is the author of the Obsidian and Blood trilogy of Aztec noir fantasies, and her writing has been nominated for a Hugo Award, a Nebula Award and the Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

What Everyone Remembers

Rahul Kanakia

I remember being with maman in the cabin of her ship, anchored someplace where the wind was always howling, the temperature was always freezing, and fires were always dancing just beyond the horizon. I spent most of my time inside the mattress where she slept, burrowing as close as I could to maman so that I could feel her solidity and heat spreading out above me without burrowing so close that I came in contact with the harsh light and cold air. It was a delightful spongiform environment, flecked with tinier insects — mites and flies and spiders — and with the crumbs of food and flakes of human skin on which the lesser creatures fed. Life was not hard for me there.

But maman frightened me. When I emerged from the mattress, she would sometimes grab me, pinch my useless wings and interrogate me in front of bright lights. She’d put me in her nest of tubing and plastic cupboards and order me to run from one place to another as quick as I could. She would touch delicate golden wires to my various legs and my body would dance with strange impulses.

Usually my days passed in total silence, except for the few occasions when maman interacted with the other occupant of the ship, Uncle Frederick. These conversations were always initiated by Frederick, who would stare at her for a long time, then nod. They’d go onto the deck, shut the cabin door behind them, and talk in very low voices. On one of these occasions I oozed out through a crack in the doorway and tried to listen to them more clearly.

They were huddled together behind the wheel of the ship.

Frederick said, “…have to interact with her. Want all of her descendents to be poorly socialized?”

“It is an insect,” maman said. “Don’t anthropomorphize it. It can be anything it wants to be. Why should it carry all our human baggage? I want to give them a blank slate.”

“And what about survivors? What if she finds more of us? Or if her descendents do? What will they think of us if we don’t at least try to be kind to her?”

“I developed it. I know what is best for it.”

“And I risked my life to keep her alive. Food is getting low. I’m not bringing more supplies unless I can get some sort of input.”

“Fine, talk to it, if that will make you happy. But don’t involve me.”

After this, there was one day when she did not pinch me. Instead, she called out, “You’ve been hiding from me.”

“No,” I said. “I always come when I hear you calling for me. But sometimes I don’t hear.”

“No more hiding. I’ve given the whistle to Frederick. You must go to him whenever he calls for you.”

“Please, not the whistle,” I said, but she had already turned away.

The next day, my restless burrowing was interrupted by a sound that dragged hooks all across my body. Despite the pain, I tried to resist that insistent tootling. I stayed still for minutes, until the whistle had become near continuous, before I scuttled across the sticky deck of the cabin, up the stairs, and out into the freezing night.

Uncle Frederick lived in the cabin underneath the stairs. During the day he was largely quiescent: a vaguely human bulk that I sometimes perceived in the distance. But during the night he would lumber up the stairs and outside. He’d be wrapped up in seven layers of cloth and nylon and plastic. He’d seat himself down carefully on a mat, and stare up at the sky for hours.

I insinuated myself into the folds of his jacket to avoid the buffeting blasts of wind.

His body rumbled with speech. “Took you long enough to get here, didn’t it?”

All along the horizon line, fires blazed just out of sight, filling the sky with a sunset glow, even though it was midnight.

“You’re getting a good look aren’t you?” Frederick said. “It’s not so scary there. And it’ll be even less scary for you.”

“You’re…you’re taking me to the shore?” I said.

“Eventually. When your mother and I are gone, you’ll need to forage for food. Don’t worry, though, by then you’ll have help.”

“Are there more people, then? On land?”

“I meant that you’d have help from your own kind.”

“Oh.” The prospect of meeting more of myself was disgusting. I thought of them scrambling all over maman and felt slightly ill. “I would have liked to see more people.”

“Well, maybe you will. What would you do if you saw them?”

I nestled more deeply into Frederick’s jacket. “I wouldn’t ever bother them. I know that you and maman don’t like to be bothered.”

“No, no, there’s no need to be afraid of us. You should think of yourself as one of us.”

I moved deeper into Frederick’s garments. He shuddered. His hand twitched and started scratching the places where I had been. “I’m sorry,” I said. “So sorry. I won’t touch you again.”

“No, that’s my problem. I’m not used to people shaped like you. But you’re fine. You’re beautiful.”

“When are there going to be more of me?”

“Soon. When your egg case bursts, there should be forty or fifty more of you.”

I shifted my egg case uneasily, pressing it against Frederick’s bulk as if to stop it from splitting open right there. I’d seen what happened to the mothers of the spiders and flies in maman’s mattress.

“Will I have to die, then?” I said

“Die?” Uncle Frederick said. His body shook slightly. “No, never. You really don’t know, then? You’re never going to die. All your children will remember everything you remember. It will feel like closing your eyes to give birth, and then opening them in a new body. You’ll live forever.”

At the time, this was not a shock for me. I was too young to appreciate the gift that maman had engineered into me.

Frederick was silent for long moments after this. When I assayed a crawl up onto his face, I caught a brief glimpse of tear-stained eyes before an instinctive sweep of his hand dropped me to the deck with an exoskeleton-jouncing crash.

I picked myself up off the damp, salty deck and scurried back to the safety of maman’s mattress.

Frederick and maman were arguing again. I did not have to try hard to hear them, since the cabin hatches had been left open in order to air out the stale and dusty smells.

“I told her,” Frederick said.

“And you’ve put your own spin on it. Called it ‘immortality’ or some such nonsense. You won’t rest until you’ve fully humanized it, will you?”

“You know that she thinks of you as her mother, don’t you?”

“I’m no such thing.”

“You are the only mother her species will ever have. All the millions and billions of her descendents will only remember one childhood: her childhood. You have to pay more attention to her psychology, to her development, to her socialization and her adjustment. Every interaction her species will ever have is going to be governed by the shadow of you.”

“Don’t project,” maman said. “I barely remember my own childhood.”

“And why is that? Why are you so cold?”

“You’ve made it clear that you have the upper hand here, Frederick, so I suppose I can’t stop you from telling it whatever you want. We can even decant another, if you think I’ve ruined this one. You can train the next one to call you papa.”

“A second Eve?”

“Sure, or two more, or three, or a hundred…whatever it will take to satisfy you.”

“And have a hundred nations spring up to fight with each other, bomb each other, and create another disaster?”

“It will happen eventually.”

“You don’t understand. They won’t be like that. Not if we do our jobs, they won’t. They’ll remember this, every single one of them…they’ll look into each others’ eyes and see themselves. They’ll see that the good of everybody is the most important thing, and that if the race goes forward, then their memory will go forward, and they’ll live forever.”

“I know that my survival depends on your survival,” maman said. “But that hasn’t prevented me from developing a hatred for you. Why should they be different?”

When maman came in, she was smiling. She stared at the mattress for a long moment.

She was far away, too far to be able to catch me up, so I scrambled out of the mattress and called out, “Is my name ‘Eve,’ then?”

Maman frowned. “No,” she said. “You don’t need a name.”

“Why not?”

“What is it that you call me?” Maman was creeping closer, and I skittered back slightly.

“Maman.”

“Where did you get that name?”

“In the books that Frederick showed me, that is what the elephant called the woman who took care of him.”

“You liked his idiotic books?”

“Nnnnooo.”

“Good. You don’t need them.” She crouched and spread her hands on the edge of the mattress, and looked at, past, through me.

“Your memory is good,” maman said. “I know that, from the mazes I had you run. Please. Try to remember my face. You must never forget me.”

She coaxed me up onto her hard, pitted hands — those hands that were like whole worlds to me — and lifted me up right in front of her face. This was my first good, long look at her. Usually, I only peeked at her with sidelong glances, in order to see if she was about to come after me.

Her strangely-scented breath shivered right through my body, and I looked up with kaleidoscopic sight at her enormous face. Since then, I’ve seen many human faces. But, in my memory, there is nothing human about maman’s face; it is a machine of snorting nostrils and slowly dilating pupils.

Then she grabbed me by the wings and performed more tests on me.

A few days later, Frederick motored away in the dinghy. He was heading off to the shore: to the fires. I was happy when he left, since I would not have that whistle tugging at me. But I was also sad. I crept into maman’s workroom, where she was poking her head into and out of her refrigerator and other equipments. I was all alone with her. Now that Uncle Frederick wasn’t here to protect me, she could do anything.

She grunted as I crossed the threshold. She had not turned around. It was my first clue that she was always trying to sense where I was.

“Is he ever coming back?” I said.

Maman did not say anything. She played with her implements. As I waited, she picked up a very sharp tool that I had never seen her use before. I knew that she was not working. She was trying to scare me into running away.

“Did you send him away because of me?”

She turned towards me and pursed her lips. “He’s left before. The last time was several months ago, when you were very young. He is going to get more food and gasoline.”

“So he isn’t gone forever?”

“Don’t worry. You’ll hear the whistle again, soon enough.”

Several days later, when Frederick came back, I was still ecstatic at having had such a long and nonviolent conversation with maman. She had not come for me since we’d spoken. I climbed up top and watched him unload the dinghy. Maman came out and helped him as he lifted things up.

“What was the land like?” I said. “Did you walk into the fires?”

Maman and Frederick exchanged a look. He handed her a satchel of cans. Everything in the boat was blackened with soot.

“The forests are still burning, but the fires are mostly gone from the city,” he said.

“Did you see any humans?” maman said.

“A good number,” he said. “They’re starting to emerge.”

She looked down at the cargo. “Did you have to fight?”

“Some,” Frederick said.

They continued loading in silence, and didn’t respond to my increasingly chipper questions. I scurried back and forth across the length of the metal hand-rail, and barely avoided being inadvertently slapped under Frederick’s hand.

I’d hoped that Frederick would be too tired from his journey to use the whistle, but as night fell, I heard its shriek. It was even more terrible than I remembered.

I ran out and settled on his chest.

He was quiet for several moments, then said, “You’ll be kind to the people you find, won’t you?”

“I won’t even bother them at all!” I said. “Except maybe when they’re sleeping would it be maybe okay if I went inside their mattresses?”

“That’s not what I meant. I meant…will you help them? They won’t be having as easy a time as you. Will you tell them where food is? And not hurt them?”

“Talk to them…?” I said. “But…will they…will they have whistles?”

“No, of course not. They don’t even know that people like you exist. They’ll probably be surprised to see you. But they’ll want your help. They’re hungry and they’re dying.”

“Why don’t they get more cans?”

“They can’t find them. And nobody is making more.”

“Then why don’t they eat the spiders and the flies and the crumbs of…”

“They can’t. They’re not like you. You’ll need to talk to them, and ask them questions, and see what they need, and do what they want, just like you would for your mother.”

“Just like maman?” I said. “But maman doesn’t need any help from me.”

“If she needed it, wouldn’t you help her? These people will need your help very much.”

“Okay.” I lay there on Frederick for a while, and then murmured, “But they won’t have whistles, will they?”

After Frederick let me scurry into the warm insides of the ship, he called maman onto the deck. I was too chilled to be willing to go farther than the door in order to listen to them.

“…more survivors than I expected…” he said.

“You knew there would be some,” maman said.

“But they’re starting to organize.”

Maman didn’t say anything. I imagined her plucking up Frederick by the arms and running her tests on him while he kicked around uselessly.

“Eve is terrified of human beings,” Frederick said. “I’m not sure what she’ll do when she encounters the survivors.”

“It will do what it decides is right.”

“It won’t do anything. It associates human beings with silence and neglect and electric shocks and tests.”

“According to those tests, it is in good health. It’s ready for reproduction.”

“I told you to pay attention to her socialization. You neglected her so much…I don’t think she’ll ever be able to interact normally.”

“I told you to do what you thought was necessary. You are still free to try to cure the psychic wounds I supposedly inflicted on her. You brought enough supplies to buy you that.”

“I had to kill a man in order to get these supplies. Next time, I doubt I’ll be lucky enough to find such a poorly-defended cache.”

“You brought enough for a few months. That is more than enough time.”

“Or barely enough. If we have to start over.”

“You want me to hatch another female?” maman said.

“We need to make the decision now. I think that Eve is too traumatized. She’s not going to be able to function. We need to start over. You won’t do any tests on the next one. I’ll take care of her. I’ll teach her all the things you held Eve back from: technology, art, literature, history, everything…Eve is such a fast learner…she really could have — ”

“She disgusted you,” maman said. “You didn’t want anything to do with ‘that damned roach.’ Until it first spoke, you called this a crazy scheme.”

“And how much earlier could she have spoken, if someone had been talking to her?”

“Why should their language be English? Why not something better? Something more suited to them?”

“You knew the kinds of things her mind was capable of. And you were still willing to drive her crazy, and stunt her forever. In fact, that’s pretty much what you did.”

“Did our art and literature and history help us? No. If its descendents create a better world than ours, they will do so because of their inhumanity.”

“That’s all moot now. There are too many survivors. That changes everything. This won’t be a post-human world. It’ll be a human one. The next Eve needs to be as human as possible.”

“No,” maman said.

“I risked my life to keep this boat running! Risked it four times now. You’ve contributed damn all. I could have lived twice as long if I’d gone off on my own, without you.”

“I’ll hatch another. But we won’t be ’starting over.’”

“Then the two of them will go to war eventually. Even you must see that there can only be one of them.”

“I won’t destroy it. It is perfectly healthy. Billions of dollars and lifetimes of work were spent in creating it. But I will start decanting another progenitor tomorrow. This discussion is over.”

The two of them entered. I waited until Frederick had gone off into his cabin and maman had settled down into bed. Then I crept up to her ear and softly whispered. “So I’ll have a sister, then?”

Maman’s hand twitched and I skittered away. I heard a soft exhalation of air, and waited for the words that would come next, but she never said anything.

I stayed in the mattress for hours, stewing in excitement and confusion. I hadn’t known that Frederick disliked me so much. I was sorry that he’d had to yell at maman because of I hadn’t given him the right answers. I knew that maybe Frederick wanted to be mean to me, but I was so happy that maman had stood up for me and said such good things about me. I knew that she loved me, just like the elephant’s maman had.

But, shortly before dawn, I felt the whistle. It was not the normal time for meeting with Frederick and I was especially lethargic. I lay in the mattress. The whistle cut through me again and again, but I didn’t want to move. Finally, I started to leave my burrow. The whistling was coming from Frederick’s cabin, where I’d never visited. I was on the edge of the mattress now, and was about to drop to the floor.

Something picked me up by the wings. “Wait,” said maman.

She got up out of bed and dropped me onto the mattress. She walked into Frederick’s cabin, and I heard the sound of three slaps. When she came back, the whistle was in her hand.

She grabbed me and took me into her workroom, then locked the door behind her.

Frederick pounded on the workroom door. “What the hell are you doing?” he said.

“Stay back,” maman called. “If you try to break down that door, I’ll destroy the rest of the specimens. Then you’ll never get your second chance.” Maman held me down with pressure against my back.

“You don’t know how many people I saw out there,” he said. “There were hundreds of them, already organized into bands, tribes, and families. We’re going to make it through this catastrophe, you know.”

Then I felt the worst pain I’d ever had in my life. All my legs tried to move at once, but they moved in different directions. I craned around, trying to look up, and glimpsed a metal syringe pulling away from my posterior.

“That’s what I’ve been thinking about all night,” Frederick said. “About how humanity is going to endure. And how maybe it’s wrong for us to play God. Maybe the real catastrophe will be when all these creatures: so tiny, so intelligent, and so efficient, descend on the survivors. I’m wondering, I really am, if unleashing Eve — any Eve — is the right thing to do here.”

“What’s happening?” I said. Maman didn’t answer. She sank back, against the door. Frederick kept pounding on it. I lay there in the shallow receptacle where she’d set me down. After a few moments, maman got up and bustled around the workshop. Frederick kept saying things in the background, but I was no longer paying attention. What had maman done to me?

It seemed like hours later when I heard a crashing noise. The door flew inwards, and Frederick charged. Maman was standing next to the door. She jabbed him with a needle. He turned towards her and slapped her on the face. He hit her again and again. She hit back at him, but it didn’t seem that she was hurting him very much. Finally he saw me on the table, and took a step towards me. He fell down. Maman got up, and looked at him for a few moments. She took him by the feet and dragged him out of the workroom.

For the next thirty days, it was just the two of us. Maman only spoke to me one time. She told me that I was carrying eggs, and that I would soon be hatching into fifty new bodies. And even though the bodies would think and feel different things, all of them would think of themselves as me. I lay in her mattress as the eggs swelled. Sometimes she plucked me up by the wings and examined me under a looking glass. I think she’d become afraid to run electricity through me.

After one of the tests, she nodded to herself. She put me in a covered box and went out to the dinghy. I heard the motor start, and we traveled for several hours. I felt the boat hit something. I felt her pick up the box and carry it along with her. We were walking. Was I on land now? The box was still covered. I could not see where we were or where we were going. My abdomen was swelling. My body was aching. I felt a heavy pain along my back.

Frederick had tried to kill me. Now Maman was abandoning me. Was I so disgusting? For a moment, I was very angry with them. I wanted to hurt them all. Then I realized how awful I was. The reason that Fred and Maman had hated me was because I’d been such a brat about the tests and the whistle. But I swore that I’d show them they were wrong about me. I’d help every human being I saw. I’d be their best friends. I would do anything they wanted and I’d never, ever shy away or complain.

When the cover was taken off the box, I was in a dark alcove, like a cupboard or shelf made of stone. Warm air washed over me. I could see a light bobbing up and down in the distance. A door opened, and I saw maman silhouetted against the light of the sun. I tried to run to her, but I couldn’t move.

About the Author

Rahul Kanakia grew up in Washington, D.C.. He graduated from Stanford University with a B.A. in Economics in 2008 and subsequently returned to D.C. to work for the World Bank on environmental operations in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. He currently lives in Oakland, C.A., and works as an international development consultant. His short stories have been published by Clarkesworld, Redstone, Nature, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.

All the Painted Stars

Gwendolyn Clare

They are not the Brights, and so I hesitate to save them. Part of me is eager, and part of me ashamed.

Even through the haze of plasma blasts dispersing over their shields, I recognize the ship as a Bright construct — too much glass, arranged in sharp geometric panels so the entire upper surface glitters with reflected starlight. Still, I know the pilots must not be Brights. First, because they fly clumsily and appear not to know how to fire the main cannon. Second, because the Brights went extinct some twelve hundred solar cycles ago.

I decide to take a closer look at their attackers, and the fibers in my flesh tauten with anticipation — though I tell myself I will just look, not engage. Intent ripples down my middle tentacles to the interface between flesh and machine, and my little stellate-class fighter zips nearer. The attackers have seven mid-size cruisers, nothing so cumbersome as the Bright ship nor so whimsical — boxy and compact, and decked with weapons. I do not recognize the design. Some backwater species, no doubt. I am patrolling near the edge of protected space, so it is to be expected.

I choose a wide selection of frequencies and broadcast an audial message to all the ships in the vicinity. “Hostile vessels, please be informed you have entered protected space. Under the laws of the Sheekah, acts of genocide are punishable by death. Power down your plasma weapons.”

The attackers do not respond. But then, if they do not know our laws, what is the chance they know our language?

I broadcast the same message in the Bright language, and then add, “You must provide evidence of personal grievance to a Sheekah enforcer prior to engaging in interspecies violence.”

I wish I did not feel a surge of excitement at their silence, at the continued barrage of plasma fire.

I spin the fighter nervously, considering my options. The aggressor may hold a legitimate grievance and simply suffer from an onboard system too crude to translate the transmissions. Or they may have chosen to ignore me, assuming my tiny fighter poses no threat. A compromise then: I will destroy one ship at a time until they relent.

My neurochemical balance adjusts, heightening awareness and reducing reaction time, and I cannot help but enjoy the feel of neurons singing for battle. I trigger the thrusters and slice through the void toward the nearest ship, my body fibers tensing against the heavy acceleration. My fighter is a difficult target to hit — shaped like an eight-pointed geometric star, with just enough room for my core mass in the middle and a tentacle stretching down each ray of the star for interfacing. Stellate-class fighters are highly maneuverable, but I am still outnumbered six to one. This is why I am an enforcer: I am one of the few Sheekah violent enough to accept such odds with glee.

I fire my own weapons in quick, precise bursts, and the reactors of the first cruiser explode in a glorious ultraviolet light-show. Now I have the attention of the rest; two of the remaining cruisers break off from their engagement with the Bright ship to pursue me. I dance away like a comet on an eccentric orbit, there and gone again before they can look twice.

When I repeat the transmission, I should be saddened that they still do not cease fire, though in truth the challenge thrills me. I dart through their fleet and destroy two more cruisers, pausing between each explosion, but the remaining cruisers seem if anything incensed to further violence.

I am closing in on the fourth cruiser when my fighter is hit.

Stellate-class fighters are much too small to carry shield generators, relying instead on maneuverability to avoid getting hit. Ironically, it is not a plasma blast that finds my little fighter, but a shred of shrapnel from one of the cruisers I destroyed. Through the interface, I feel the shrapnel impact as if it were slicing my own flesh, and then one of my tentacles goes numb, a safety precaution against excess stimulation. I run diagnostics and discover that one ray of the star is badly damaged, the thrusters useless.

Well. This changes things.

My fighter has a Stillness Bomb installed, though I have never before activated it. Use of the Stillness is tightly regulated under Sheekah law — it is considered a last resort. But here I am, damaged and outnumbered, and the Brights were never formally removed from our list of treatised allies so I am justified in using the Stillness to defend the Bright ship. A technicality, of course, since I know the inhabitants aren’t Brights, but it allows me to use the weapon nonetheless.

To save them, I need to maneuver into contact with their hull, a task I struggle to accomplish without my full array of thrusters. After long seconds of angling, I pass through the Bright shields and stab into the ship, one of the rays of my fighter penetrating the hull. The ray unfolds, sealing the two vessels together and leaving one of my tentacles dangling down through an open aperture into a hallway in the Bright ship. This fusion complete, I can now calibrate the Stillness Bomb to avoid the Bright ship and its occupants. When I am certain the weapon identifies the Bright ship as an extension of my fighter, I meticulously disengage three levels of safeties and activate the Stillness.

My fighter shudders, straining to stay attached to the Bright ship, then goes still. For a moment, nothing seems to have changed, and I wonder if perhaps the weapon was damaged in the firefight. Then the attackers’ plasma weapons sputter and die out, and the four remaining cruisers start to drift very slowly out of formation. The motion is barely perceptible, but it fills me with a cold, sick dread. All those lives snuffed out, and what if my judgment was wrong? What a wretched Sheekah am I, who would choose this life of killing.

I do not have long to think on it, though, because the stress of activating the weapon has exacerbated the damage, and my fighter’s systems are failing. I must abandon it or die with it. I consider the second option — after all, what am I without my fighter? — but the automated preferences are set for survival, so the fighter disconnects me without waiting for my decision.

As soon as the emergency disconnect triggers, I am blind and suffocating. I fall through the aperture of my fighter into the Bright ship, bits of metal interface still clinging to my tentacles, and I land hard. I flop helplessly on the deck, unadapted for artificial gravity, and without my fighter I sense nothing. My circulatory fluid is slowly turning toxic, and even if the atmospheric composition were appropriate, I have no organs designed for interfacing with air.

I need lungs or I will die. I need visual and auditory organs, too. Immobile as I am, I must wait for the telltale vibration of feet upon the deck, heralding the arrival of the aliens. I think I feel it now, I can’t be sure — even my ability to feel the shudder of metal against my flesh is dulled without the electronic stimulus of my fighter.

I flail my tentacles, panicking, and find nothing but empty air. To calm myself, I focus on the task of slowing all nonessential bodily functions. This will buy me a little time, I hope. I cannot quite think rationally with all my neurochemical feedbacks screaming at me to adapt, to survive.

Again, I flail desperately, but this time one tentacle lands on bare flesh. Yes! I eagerly wrap my tentacle around the limb and begin probing for genetic information. Stem cells are ideal — they retain the broadest memory of how the organism as a whole works — though gametes provide a useful perspective, too. I do not dare to hope for embryonic cells, because that would require an incredible stroke of luck and my luck has not been good today.

The stem cells of this species have disappointingly limited potency, but I explore enough to start appropriating their genetic design. The toxin buildup in my circulatory system clouds my thoughts and slows my progress. I hope what I can glean from this individual will be sufficient.

I begin to understand this species as my body begins to integrate their design. They are bilaterally symmetric, endoskeletal, bipedal, endothermic, sexually dimorphic. (Definitely not Brights — if I had any doubts about that, they are gone now.) They have sensory organs for electromagnetic radiation, compression waves, and chemicals. I grow the lung tissue first, so I will be able to breathe as soon as my cellular respiration has altered, then I focus on retinas and cochleae.

As my new senses sharpen and stabilize, I gain awareness of the aliens. There are several of them encircling me, black handheld weapons cradled in their arms. They raise their weapons menacingly, and raise their voices as well; the one I am touching emits a shrill warning call. I begin to realize how very dire my situation is. Have I violated a taboo against physical contact? Perhaps they are a race of clinical xenophobes? I do not know what I have done to agitate them so quickly after I saved their lives.

I was never meant to be an ambassador — I do not have the training, and I am too violent besides. I have spent the last thirty-six solar cycles alone inside my fighter, engaging with other species only in my capacity as an enforcer of Sheekah law. And now I find myself in contact with a new species, trying to remember how to mimic physiology, to become one of them. I fear I have already ruined any chance of rapport.

When I am sure I have collected sufficient genetic data to survive in their atmosphere, I unwrap my tentacle, releasing the gene donor. I suck down my first lungfuls of oxygen through newly formed facial orifices.

And the difficult part begins.

They do not kill me right away. I take this as a good sign. They lift me onto a mobile platform and move me to a room with other platforms, some of them occupied by members of their own species. These ones do little in the way of moving or vocalizing, but they also leave me with two males holding weapons. I do not try to ask the killers for more gene donation.

Time passes. Other aliens — ones who do not carry weapons — are often present, watching me, waving diagnostic equipment over me, trying to communicate. I have no translating abilities without my fighter, so I must learn their language the slow way. I grow legs and arms, I learn to metabolize their sugars, I grow vocal chords and lips and a tongue to shape their words. I wonder if my fighter is irreparably damaged, which would mean all this effort to survive is a waste.

I am learning names. Mosby, Rosenberg, Liu; Ahmed, Levitt, Jones. But I do not know what to tell them when they ask for mine. I pause, they think I do not understand and gesture more vigorously towards me. Mosby Rosenberg Liu Ahmed Levitt Jones, they repeat, touching themselves with their hands, then they aim their digits at me and wait for an answer. What can I tell them? Sheekah are named when they choose their lifepath — as a pilot, my name is the name of my stellate fighter. Or at least it was. My fighter is damaged, I am no longer interfaced, and I have taken a new form, yet I am hardly in a position to ask them to name me as a true ambassador would. I cannot even communicate what the problem is.

“Ohree,” I eventually say. It was my childhood nickname long ago. Fitting, because I am so like a child now — awkward and unplaced.

“Ohree,” they repeat, and the name sounds distorted even though we share a vocal anatomy now.

I cannot explain anything, I cannot ask for anything. I can only point to an object and earn a garble of syllables for an answer. Does “medbay” describe the platform, the material it is made of, the function it serves, or the person lying prone upon it? Is “door” the word for an egress, or the object that blocks the egress? For the first time since I was a child, fumbling to find my lifepath, I feel hopelessly frustrated.

Liu and Rosenberg are in the room with me when I decide I no longer care about upsetting them. If they tell the killers to shoot me, then I will be shot, and at least that will be a change from what I am now. I slide off the platform, balancing uncertainly with my new bipedal body, and take careful steps toward one wall where there appears to be some kind of interface terminal. Rosenberg makes loud vocalizations, and I ignore her.

The terminal has a manual interface — buttons to be depressed by fingers, unthinkably primitive — which I rip out of the wall. I press one palm to the exposed circuitry and close my eyelids, concentrating on the task of growing a direct electronic interface of my own.

They still haven’t shot me yet.

I learn this terminal was designed for accessing the medical portion of the ship’s database, which is unfortunately not the portion that I need. I mentally slip behind the front-end processes and gain access to the database in its entirety. It is very large, and organized with the dubious logic of Bright minds, information twisting and twining back on itself like a jumble of vines grown together. Eventually, I access the language files for these aliens and use what little I know to identify “English” as the dialect I need to download.

When the task is done, I disengage from the terminal and resorb the interface into the flesh of my hand. “Now,” I say, “this will be easier.”

“Incredible,” says Liu, shaking his head. The gesture makes me wonder if I should have looked for a file on nonverbal communication among humans.

Rosenberg stares at me, and then says, “Someone better get Mosby.”

Upon my life, I do not know why it was so important to fetch Mosby. He asks the most inane questions, while Rosenberg holds her lips tight together and Liu backs away as if ceding the whole room.

Once I prove to Mosby that I am now conversant in his language, the first thing he says to me is, “We need to know about that weapon you fired.” Mosby is the most important of their trained killers and holds the title of “colonel.” He tells the other killers what to do.

I don’t see the relevance, but I answer his question anyway. “It produces a sort of space-time whiplash that disrupts neurological functioning. Fatally so, in all organisms we’ve encountered so far.”

“Is it still usable?”

I stare at him for a moment. “No, that’s unlikely. The damage to my fighter is too extensive. Were you planning to commit genocide in the near future?”

Mosby’s face scrunches up in an expression I do not understand. Rosenberg takes a step forward, places a hand on his arm, and says to me, “Of course not. The Colonel’s just worried about defending the ship against another attack.”

“That is no longer my concern,” I say.

“What do you mean ‘not your concern’?” Mosby says, his volume and pitch rising. “Aren’t you supposed to be some sort of interstellar policeman?”

“I am no longer interfaced with my fighter.”

Mosby says, “Listen, you — ” but Rosenberg drags him by the arm out into the hallway.

They talk. I cannot quite hear, but I believe I have displeased one or both of them. I am not sure how — it was not my intention.

Liu, who seems to avoid standing in proximity to Mosby, comes closer again now that Mosby is elsewhere. “Don’t judge all of us based on the likes of Mosby,” he says. “There’s a reason they put a civilian in charge of the expedition.”

I don’t know who “they” refers to, but I doubt it matters. “I am not here to judge you. The only judgment I am authorized to make is to determine the legitimacy of grievance in interspecies conflict.”

Liu does something with the muscles in his lips. “I’m sorry, it’s easy to forget you learned our language less than an hour ago. I meant that you must be forming impressions of what our species is like, and Mosby isn’t representative. Not of all of us, anyway.”

“I will take that under consideration.”

Rosenberg returns alone. She apologizes for Mosby’s behavior, though I would not have known he behaved inappropriately if she and Liu had not told me. Rosenberg is a leader, but not a killer, and seems to have incomplete authority over Mosby.

“So,” Rosenberg says as she leans against the exam table next to mine. “You saved our butts out there, and now you’re stuck with us. First of all: thank you. Second, if we could impose upon you further, we could use some help navigating this region of space.”

Now I am truly confused. “You do not know where you are going?”

Rosenberg lets out a breath noisily. “The Brights left this ship in our home system a little over thirteen thousand years ago. When we discovered it, their recorded instructions were… cryptic, but the nav system came pre-programmed. We’ve been following the course they set for us, but obviously we’re having some trouble with the locals along the way.”

Her lengthy reply does not actually answer my question. I try to rephrase it to be clearer. “What is the purpose of your journey?”

“We’re going to Bright space. It’s not clear why they want us to come, but we couldn’t pass up an invitation like this.” She raised a hand as if to indicate the room, or perhaps the ship at large. “I’ve done some poking around in the database to learn about your species, so I know the Sheekah were allies of the Brights once. Would you consider helping them now, even if they’re not here to ask for it?”

This surprises me. “You do not know?”

“Know what?”

“They are gone.”

“Gone,” Liu interjects loudly, before Rosenberg can answer. I do not understand why he repeats the word — perhaps I misused it.

“The Brights went extinct,” I clarify. “They developed a genetic anomaly that spread from cell to cell throughout the body, causing widespread genomic degradation, and was, like a pathogen, highly transmissible between individuals. Many Sheekah were infected trying to help them before the Ambassadorial High Council declared quarantine.”

“Gone,” Rosenberg says and goes silent for a minute. (Does everyone need to say this word?) Something appears to be wrong with her, but I do not know what to do. Eventually, she says, “Did they know they were dying off when they left us the ship?”

I do a little quick math, converting unfamiliar units of time based on what I gleaned from the ship’s database. “Given the age of the ship, that seems probable.”

“I guess now we know why they named the ship Legacy.” She puts her hand over her mouth, as if to hold in the words, but I can still hear her clearly. “We have to figure out where we’re going, and why. Would you consider helping Ahmed with the database?”

I stare, not knowing how to respond. What happens to those I protect after I enforce the law has never been my concern. I wonder what it would feel like to be invested in their fate, but all I can feel is the absence of metal against my skin, the ghost-memory of tentacles I no longer possess.

“I am here,” I say dispassionately. “I will help with what I can.”

Days pass. I interface again with the Legacy database and develop a rudimentary understanding of the systems architecture. This helps, a little, to alleviate the ache of losing my fighter and my lifepath with it. At least when my mind is occupied, I am not dwelling on how wrong everything feels. I try and fail to explain the database to the technologists, who cannot grasp the Bright way of thinking. Whole sections of the ship are offline and locked down, and I am surprised they made it this far with such limited control.

I also learn more from the database about these humans; they live short lives, for instance, the equivalent of only nine or ten Sheekah solar cycles. I must seem ancient to them, though among the Sheekah I am considered young. They have so little time — this helps me understand why they seem so desperate to accomplish something, even if they do not know the nature of their task.

I grow irritated with the technologists. They are always near, bothering me with questions, even though they do not generally understand the answers. After the long cycles of solitude in my fighter, I am unused to tolerating so many individuals in such close proximity. I look for something else to do.

Instead I help the botanist, Keene, revive some of the plant species, the ones whose genomes indicate they will be harmless to humans. It is tiring but not particularly difficult work; I must grow a temporary interface with which to access the genomic database, and my body requires extra sustenance to provide the molecules with which to shape the seeds. Keene seems very pleased with the results. I care little for reviving extinct species from the Bright homeworld, but it also costs me little, so what does it matter either way? The Brights loved their botany and would not have wanted Legacy to fly with empty solaria. Indeed, from what I learned of the systems architecture, I suspect healthy solaria will prove important for restoring and optimizing certain functions elsewhere on the ship. Not that this matters to me.

I miss my old self. I think about fixing my fighter, but I can find only some of the tools and none of the spare parts I would need for the task aboard Legacy.

I consider ending my existence.

I sit on a bench in the aft solarium, which remains dark and unused and skeletal. In the central solarium Keene’s seeds have begun to sprout, so I come here instead to avoid the curious visitors drawn in by the promise of green growth. Back here, if I hold very still, I can feel the subsonic hum of the main engines vibrating the hull.

Through the geometric panes of the ceiling and walls, the stars look strangely close, as if the hull were not clear at all but rather painted with the likeness of stars. I stare into space, remembering how this view used to belong to me every hour of every cycle. It’s not the same, of course — these human eyes see such a narrow spectrum — but at least it feels familiar.

The aft solarium doors breeze open and Liu, the psychologist, enters. I do not look away from the stars but I can tell it is him from the way his soft gait whispers on the deck. He takes a seat next to me on the bench. Humans are highly social and require near-constant interaction and stimulation when conscious.

“How are you adjusting?” he says.

I think my habit of sitting here alone disturbs Liu. He does not understand me at all. “I do not know if I wish to adjust.”

“Look — I know this isn’t where you want to be, but the truth is, we could use your help here. The Legacy database is thirteen thousand years out of date and so huge we can’t find what we’re looking for most of the time anyway. We could use a guide who knows what they’re doing.”

I lower my gaze to look at him. Humans seem to desire a quite specific quantity of eye contact while communicating — not too much, not too little — though I have not yet mastered the exact proportion. “I am not an ambassador,” I say. “I was trained to be an enforcer of the law. I cannot perform another life.”

Liu’s brows tighten and draw together. “Life?”

“Job,” I say, to clarify. I have not yet discerned why they have two words for this concept.

Liu exhales forcefully and leans back against the bench, stretching his legs. If the gesture means something, it is lost on me. Humans rely heavily on nonverbal communication, much of it subconscious, and it frustrates my efforts to understand them. Or rather, it would frustrate me, if it were important for me to understand them. Which it is not. Because I think I will kill myself today.

After a while, Liu speaks again. “In the ship’s logs, the Brights say they left us Legacy because they knew we would someday build conservatories.”

I do not know the word. “Conservatories?”

“Places where we cultivate plants for aesthetic value.” He points at the solarium ceiling. “The architecture usually looks something like this. Anyway, at the time when they left us the ship, humans had barely started getting a handle on agriculture. We didn’t build conservatories until thousands of years later.”

“Are plants of great cultural significance to you now?”

“They’re not central to our society, no. Well — Keene might argue otherwise, but most people don’t think twice about the cultural value of plants.” He lifts his shoulders in an unfamiliar gesture. “I don’t know. Maybe the Brights saw what they wanted to see in us.”

“As you see what you want to see in me.”

“The point is,” Liu says, “you hardly ever get the ideal situation you’re hoping for. But if you’re lucky, you find something that will suffice.”

“I am not an ambassador,” I say again.

“No, but you’re close enough for us.”

Maybe I will wait until tomorrow to kill myself.

Tomorrow comes, but the humans distract me. Over the comm, they say they have desperate need of me in the systems control room. And what does it matter if I delay another hour, another day? So I go to them.

The systems control room lies buried deep in the ship, in one of the few areas with no view of the stars. The room itself is dimly lit and decagonal, a display and a crude manual interface affixed to each of the walls. Rosenberg and Mosby are there with Ahmed, the chief technologist, and a subordinate technologist whose name I do not recall.

I move too quietly for them to notice my arrival. (Always, these details I cannot seem to get right. I wear human skin, but it will never fit exactly.) To announce myself, I say, “What has happened?”

Four pairs of eyes look in my direction. As soon as they register my presence, everyone tries talking at once. Rosenberg and Mosby quickly turn on each other. These humans spend so much time arguing about what to do, it’s amazing they ever get anything done.

Finally, the rest of them agree to quiet down so Ahmed can speak. “We’re getting power fluctuations all over the ship. Life support keeps trying to shut down — we’ve had to force a restart three times in the past fifteen minutes. No idea what’s causing it.”

This does not surprise me. The Brights did not design their systems architecture to be solid and immutable, but rather flexible and adaptive. “I will look,” I say.

I place my palm on an exposed patch of hardware, grow an interface, and begin sifting through the diagnostic reports. Bright diagnostics are so literal they are almost evasive — always describing what is happening, but never hinting at why. I skip past the reports and prod gently at the underlying systems, doing the command equivalent of poking life support with a stick to see if it twitches.

Life support seems raw and hypersensitive, overreacting to stimulus. The shields seem lethargic, the main engines argumentative.

I mentally pull back to give my analysis to the waiting humans. “Legacy is experiencing some sort of systems destabilization, possibly triggered by the introduction of plant life in the central solarium. The ship is attempting to re-evaluate resource allocation and re-integrate, but systems integration seems to require guidance.” For clarity, I add, “Guidance from a Bright engineer.”

Predictably, Mosby wants to know if the power to the main cannon can be restored, and Rosenberg starts arguing about prioritization. Humans are a confrontational and violent people, whatever Liu might say to the contrary. Perhaps I understand this better than any trained ambassador could. Sometimes I even see a little of myself in them. Were I still an enforcer, would I not take great care to restore my weapons systems? Of course I would.

But I tell him, “Systems integration is a very complicated process. I most likely will not be able to complete it at all, let alone to your desired specifications.”

This silences them. They all stare at me, wide-eyed. Have I somehow misspoken? In a situation like this, am I supposed to ply them with false hope instead of giving an honest status report?

I do not know the Brights the way an ambassador would; I am too young to even have spoken to anyone with first-hand knowledge of the Brights. I have only a superficial understanding of their thought patterns, and this is a task best reserved for someone who truly knew them. If not for a Bright itself.

I cannot do what the humans expect of me. And yet, I must try.

I close my eyes to block the stimulus so I can delve deeper. Soon, I can visualize the interconnected web of the ship’s systems, each hub enmeshed among the others as if held in place with thick, pulsing vines. The offline sectors and systems appear marooned and dark, disconnected from the vital flow of the web.

Concentrating, I examine the systems more closely. Here: movement, change. And here, and here. Everywhere I scrutinize, the deep structural connections are unraveling, senescing, peeling away like flower petals destined to be supplanted with fruit. It is a process I understand only with academic distance — from my examination of plant genomes, not from personal experience. Still, I recognize the patterns as organic design, organic thinking. Only the Brights would build a ship as convoluted and self-referential as a genome.

Back in the control room, the humans are getting restless. “What is going on?” demands Mosby.

I retreat from the depths enough to answer him. “The architecture you have now was never meant to last. It is…” I do not know why I pick the word: “juvenile.”

Mosby opens his mouth but Ahmed looks at him says, “Less talk, more work.”

I must agree with Ahmed.

Ignoring the sounds of the control room, I return my focus to the Legacy’s architecture. I pull myself deeper, down into the disordered conglomeration of systems, losing awareness of my physical body. I focus all my mental acuity to study the ship.

It wants to grow, to metamorphose, to mature. I can tell this much: growth could be good, but it also could be cancerous. The old connections run dry and slough off, and the systems sprout wild new vine stubs that quest in every direction. Left to their own devices, the systems will strangle themselves with malformed, overgrown connective structure. But how am I to guide this process, rife with botanical zeal only a Bright could comprehend?

I pause, thinking. Metamorphosis is an animal concept. They are not vines, they are tentacles — and tentacles I understand. I think of my stellate fighter, how cleanly designed it was, with its eight rays each encapsulating a tentacle, and all the neatly arranged interfaces. And at the center, my brain to process and control.

So, me — and by extension, the control room — at the nexus of the web. The strongest connections, thick and steady, direct from each system to the nexus. Lesser connections, flexible and mutable, exchanging information among the systems themselves. I weave the ship the way I would weave my own flesh, easing the nascent tentacles over a new growth template as if it were a foreign genome to be integrated.

When the connections have been laid, the most delicate part still remains to be done: I carefully extract myself from the center of the web, leaving behind the shell of the control room, not so much a vacancy as a resting state. I pull away, leaving all the connections intact, the hollow space waiting patiently for its next command.

It is done. And, if all is right, it will even be receptive to the humans’ control.

I rise slowly, like floating up to the surface from the depths of an ocean, the lights and sounds of the control room wavering and resolving. I blink, eyes slow to focus as the ciliary muscles reawaken to their duties.

On every wall of the room, the display screens shine with dazzling varicolored light. My tear ducts water, my pupils hasten to contract. I see the humans shading their faces with their hands, so I know my body’s reaction is not an oversensitive after-effect of deep interfacing. The screens are very bright.

Yes, I realize. The screens are Bright.

“They’re beautiful,” says Rosenberg, “even if it hurts to look at them.”

Ahmed is still bent over a console. “There’s an audio recording, too, but the frequencies are all ultrasonic.”

Rosenberg asks, “What are they saying?”

“It’ll take a while for the translators to work it out,” says Ahmed.

“Unnecessary,” I say. I force some crude adjustments to the anatomy of my ears, expanding the range of my hearing. The recording is part-way through the message, but I wait until the end and it loops back to the beginning. “Roughly translated: the Legacy’s destination is a research base on a dwarf planet in the outskirts of the Brights’ home system. They hope that, in the time it has taken your primitive species to develop interplanetary travel and discover Legacy, the pathogen will have gone extinct. The research base contains preserved samples of healthy Bright genomes. If you have the technology to restore plant biota from the genomic database and shepherd Legacy through the transition to maturity, you will be able to restore the Brights.”

Everyone goes quiet. What have I done, meddling in the fate of these humans? An ambassador would have known better than to do for them what they cannot do themselves; I was a fool to think I could help without entangling myself. I feel nauseated, an unfamiliar physiological response to this upwelling of emotions inside me.

Ahmed is the one who says what they all must be thinking. “But it wasn’t us who brought back the plants and guided the ship, it was you.”

Which means the task of restoring the Brights falls on my shoulders, not theirs. “I know,” I say, and rush from the room.

Hiding in the aft solarium, I stare out at the painted starscape. By human means of reckoning, this region of space was my home for three lifetimes: cold empty death punctuated with tiny oases of energy and life. They all belonged to me, once. I felt at home in the void, satisfied with what I was, and now I am trapped behind this glass and can only yearn for that silent solitary existence.

At my core I am a fighter pilot — a thug, a killer. I was made to do what the rest of the Sheekah, with their delicate dispositions, could not. How can anyone expect me to resurrect a whole sentient species when all my training and experience has been in dealing death, not life?

I am no one’s savior. It is too heavy a burden to bear.

Liu comes in: shuffle, shuffle, soft steps on the deck. He approaches hesitantly, hanging back as if he doesn’t wish to intrude on my thoughts.

“Rosenberg sent you?” I say. I am learning how their hierarchy works.

Liu takes the words for an invitation and joins me on the bench. “She wants me to try talking with you.”

“We have now spoken.” I look at him. “You may report success.”

“Why, Ohree, that was almost a joke. Are you growing a sense of humor to go with the mammalian physique?”

“Doubtful,” I say, looking away again. Though maybe I am.

Liu lets out a loud breath. His vocal pitch drops lower. “You know what I’m here to ask you about.”

“Rosenberg wants me to continue with you to your destination. Rosenberg wants me to revive the Brights.”

“We can’t do it without you, obviously.”

“You do not understand. The process will not be a simple one, like with the seeds. Brights are very complex organisms. I will have to adapt my whole physiology, I will have to gestate the embryos inside me.”

Liu is silent for so long that I give up my view of the stars and turn to face him. He is staring at me. “What exactly do you have on your to-do list that ranks more important than this?”

I pause. “If they made the smallest mistake, if even one gene region is tainted with pathogenic code, I will die.”

“Since when were you more afraid of dying than of not having a purpose?” Liu’s lips curl in an expression I now know to indicate amusement. “How human of you.”

The words fall on me like a blow. He is right — only two days ago I was contemplating suicide. I fall back on an older argument. “An ambassador would be properly trained for such a task, which I am not.”

“You thought you couldn’t guide the Legacy through her transition, but you could,” he said. “It doesn’t matter that your own society marked you a castaway. It doesn’t matter what life you had before. You are capable of things you haven’t even dreamt of yet, and it would honor us to be the ones who help you discover those things.”

I go very still. I do not dare to hope this could be true. It violates a paradigm so deep-seated in my psyche that I did not even suspect its existence until now.

Liu says, “Humans aren’t in the habit of changing their given names. Surnames, though, were originally descriptive — you were named for your profession, or the village you came from, or your parentage.” He pauses, the silence almost livid in the air. “You don’t have a surname.”

If I was frozen before, now I am a comet lost between the stars — even my molecules feel stuck. I am sure I could not look away if I tried. I know Liu knows how Sheekah naming works.

Liu smiles, though somehow the expression seems grave, as if he understands exactly what it is he’s doing. “I think we’ll call you Ohree Brightbearer, if the sound of it suits you.”

“Yes,” I say, hardly able to breathe. “Yes, it suits me fine.”

I am named, and there is work ahead of me.

About the Author

Gwendolyn Clare has a BA in Ecology, a BS in Geophysics, and is currently working to add another acronym to her collection. Away from the laboratory, she enjoys practicing martial arts, adopting feral cats, and writing speculative fiction. Her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Asimov’s, Ekaterina Sedia’s Bewere the Night anthology, Daily Science Fiction, and Abyss and Apex, among others.

The Future Sounds of Yesterday: A Sequence of Synthesizers in Science Fiction

Christopher Bahn

Music and technology have always gone hand in hand — and the explosive flowering of music as an art form in the last century is also the story of the explosive growth of technology. Indeed, people have recognized the potential of computers to revolutionize music since before there even were computers. In 1842, writing about the theoretical uses of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine, computer-science progenitor Ada Lovelace enthused that once the fundamentals of harmony and musical composition were properly understood, “the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.” (And there’s something wondrous about a woman at the dawn of the Victorian Age dreaming of something now commonplace with electronic groups such as Daft Punk.) Like computing itself, electronic music began as the arcane province of technology specialists and slowly became a truly democratic force that put the power to change the world — or at least soundtrack it — in the hands of everyone. And because cutting-edge technology is particularly good at sounding alien and futuristic, it’s meshed perfectly with science fiction as a subject matter. Below is a brief history of the ways those three elements — the music, the tech, and the SF themes — have intersected and influenced each other, in various media, over time.

The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951)

In 1919, a Russian scientist named Lev Termen invented one of the earliest electronic instruments, which came to be called after the anglicized version of his last name: the theremin. (Termen himself has a history at least as fascinating as his instrument: After emigrating to the U.S. where he scandalously married an African-American ballet dancer, he was kidnapped by Soviet secret police and repatriated to the USSR, where he worked on espionage tech including one of the first bugging devices.) Although its ethereal sound is now practically synonymous with ’50s SF movies, the theremin made its way into cinema 20 years earlier, first via Russian composers like Dmitri Shostakovich, then as a background element in 1933’s King Kong and 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein. In 1945, the theremin’s weird warble was used in a pair of thrillers, Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound and Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend, to illustrate the emotional chaos of their amnesiac and alcoholic protagonists. But the theremin was first used as a major foreground soundtrack element in the alien-contact classic The Day The Earth Stood Still. Composer Bernard Hermann put two theremins at the center of his score to highlight both the wise and gentle alien ambassador Klaatu and his deadly robot Gort. For a decade after, the theremin was de rigueur for any movie about alien creatures, showing up in It Came from Outer Space, Operation Moon — and much later in Tim Burton’s retro-futuristic Mars Attacks.

Forbidden Planet (1956)

Perhaps ironically, the theremin is absent from the first major movie to feature a totally electronic soundtrack, the SF-meets-Shakespeare space drama Forbidden Planet. Husband-and-wife composing team Louis and Bebe Barron got their start as avant-garde musicians in the orbit of the radical composer John Cage, but they made a stab at the more lucrative land of studio soundtrack work with Planet. They hand-built their own circuitry to create the phenomenally eerie music accompanying Leslie Nielsen and company’s journey through space. The main device in the Barrons’ toolkit was a tone-generating circuit called a ring modulator (famously used later by the BBC for the distorted squawks of Doctor Who’s Daleks), which they manipulated with reverb, delay, and other effects. Crucially, they didn’t see their music merely as mechanical sound, instead treating their instruments as actors whose job was to produce an emotional response. Though their soundtrack was hugely innovative and influential, the experience was a mixed success for the Barrons: Because they weren’t members of the musicians’ union, their score was classified not as music but as “electronic tonalities,” denying them a well-deserved shot at an Oscar and effectively ending their Hollywood career.

The Tornados, “Telstar” (1962)

The first British group to score a number-one hit in America wasn’t The Beatles, but an instrumental surf-rock band called The Tornados — thanks to a song written by their producer, the decidedly eccentric electronics wizard Joe Meek. Named after the first successful communications satellite to achieve orbit around Earth, “Telstar” captured the early-’60s fascination for the space age with a jaunty, buzzy keyboard-driven melody that incorporated bleeps and whooshes alongside a soaring background vocal. The main instrument here was a clavioline, an electronic keyboard that was a precursor to modern synths, but much of the magic came in post-production via Meek’s jerry-rigged assembly of tape machines, compressors and other devices in his home-built London studio. Meek’s own career was less stratospheric: Though the song sold five million copies and was covered by dozens of other bands, a plagiarism lawsuit (almost certainly groundless) ensured that Meek never saw a dime from it during his lifetime, and mounting pressure from his business problems, his drug use, and his (then-illegal) homosexuality led him to the murder-suicide of himself and his landlady in 1967.

Doctor Who (1963)

Set up in the late ’50s to bring the new worlds of electronic music to British TV and radio productions, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop pushed the boundaries of what was possible to do with sound. And with their longest-lasting popular success, the theme song to the venerable science-fiction TV series Doctor Who, they went all the way to the edge of time and space. Although the tune itself was written by Australian composer Ron Grainer, the song didn’t truly come to life until a then-uncredited engineer named Delia Derbyshire got her hands on it. Lacking advanced synthesizers or multi-track recording, she created each note of the song individually, combining them via a series of tape loops of white noise and a simple bass line painstakingly adjusted for speed and pitch. The result was, in a word, fantastic, evoking in a few moments everything important about Doctor Who’s enigmatic title hero — his questing wonder, but also loneliness, outsiderhood, and otherworldly danger that have stayed with him in all incarnations, for nearly 50 years. Side note: One Doctor Who sound you might think would be electronic isn’t: The TARDIS takeoff and landing effect was created by scraping a door key up and down the strings of a piano.

David Bowie, “Space Oddity” (1969)

Most of the music talked about so far was made using highly specialized equipment — often massive, complicated and expensive pieces built by musicians who were also formidable technicians. But in 1967, a British gadgeteer named Brian Jarvis fixed his niece’s broken toy piano by giving it an electronic upgrade, later refining the idea into a simple handheld keyboard operated with a metal pen: the Stylophone. His invention sold millions of copies, but might still be seen merely as a battery-operated toy if not for David Bowie, who used a Stylophone as a key instrument on “Space Oddity.” The first in a string of legendary singles, “Space Oddity” not only made Bowie a star but was a calculated stab at capturing the late-’60s’ fascination and optimism with the idea of space travel — ironically enough, in a bleak but captivating story about a lonely astronaut floating in a doomed spaceship. Still, it was exactly the right song at exactly the right time, and the BBC’s adoption of it as the theme tune for their coverage of the Apollo moon landing helped ensure Bowie’s status as something like an alien ambassador to humanity. Bowie’s love of the Stylophone wasn’t just a flash-in-the-pan, either: He used it on a number of subsequent songs, and said in 2002 that he still carries it with him when he travels to help write new material.

A Clockwork Orange (1971)

The Stylophone may have been just a toy, but the 1960s also saw more complex synthesizers start to make their way into mainstream music, as the technology was refined and made easier to use. After getting his start with a mail-order built-your-own-theremin business in the ’50s, Robert Moog invented the game-changing synthesizer that bears his name, which used transistors that made it small enough to be cheap and portable. It first gained wide public attention in 1968 when musician Walter (now Wendy) Carlos applied the futuristic instrument to centuries-old classical music on Switched-On Bach, going on to sell more than a million copies and bringing electronica to audiences who never would have been open to it otherwise. Three years later, Carlos’ electro-classical creations got an even wider audience when filmmaker Stanley Kubrick turned his lens on Anthony Burgess’ dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange — the tale of a street thug in a nightmarish near-future Britain who loves Beethoven even more than he loves beating and raping. Kubrick naturally turned to Carlos for the soundtrack, which helped give the movie just the sense of baroque surreality it needed.

King Crimson, “The Court of the Crimson King” (1969)

Pre-’70s Moog synthesizers were hampered by what now seems like a bizarre limitation — they could only play a single note at a time. Even simple chords were only possible by repeated overdubs in the studio, meaning that it was impossible to play any of these compositions live. The Mellotron, on the other hand, worked via strips of audio tape connected to a keyboard, meaning that it could be played live. Sure, it was as heavy as an elephant on Saturn, but what had been impossible was now merely very difficult. Mellotrons show up in pop music as far back as 1965 on songs like The Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever.” But they really came to the fore when English group King Crimson made pioneering use of the Mellotron to help found progressive rock with their 1969 debut single “The Court of the Crimson King,” which helped lead to the massive, spectacle-driven arena rock of the ’70s. As prog evolved, it embraced the tropes of science fiction and fantasy for its expansive concept albums, and “Crimson King” was no exception, spinning a Dylanesque allegorical tale about the devil that begins with “prison moons” being destroyed in a solar explosion. In 2006, director Alfonso Cuaron highlighted the song’s SF roots again with prominent placement in his post-apocalyptic film Children of Men.

Sun Ra, Space is the Place (1974)

Jazzman Sun Ra claimed to be an emissary from the planet Saturn — and maybe that’s true, considering just how far ahead of everyone else he was in using electronic instruments, debuting a Wurlitzer organ on his album Super-Sonic Jazz in 1956. A pioneer of ambient music, Ra continued to supplement his recordings with tape effects and other electronic devices throughout his career, and never lost his sense of the cosmic. In fact, his blend of Egyptian, psychedelic and science-fiction imagery, seen in its full flower in his surreal 1974 movie Space Is the Place, helped create the Afrofuturist movement soon to be embraced by the space-funk outfit Parliament.

Kraftwerk, “The Robots” (1978)

As advances like the Moog and Mellotron made electronic instruments increasingly available to any talented musician and not just the technocracy, they infiltrated a wide range of popular music, causing revolutionary new changes in some genres and also allowing the invention of totally new ones. German group Kraftwerk were massively influential in the latter regard, exploring new ways of making pop music entirely with electronic instruments that led directly to synth-pop, electronica, house, and club music, and cast long shadows over hip-hop and other genres. They deliberately courted a technophile style, playing up the machinelike qualities of their music not only by writing songs like “The Robots” and “Metropolis” (the latter a tribute to the pioneering Fritz Lang SF film of the same name), but actually building robotlike mannequin versions of themselves that played their music in concert.

Space Invaders (1978)

The late ’70s also saw the rise of a completely new phenomenon, video games, that would rival and even supplant the movie theater and the concert stage as a natural home for electronic music. Space Invaders, which debuted in 1978, not only sparked a craze for coin-operated arcades, it was the first to feature music playing continuously throughout the game. It was incredibly primitive sounding compared with Switched-On Bach, but it was a start, expanded on later by games like Defender and Donkey Kong on the long road to today’s far more complex game music. And it’s been embraced again more recently by the chiptunes movement, about which more in a moment.

Thomas Dolby, “She Blinded Me With Science” (1982)

Kraftwerk was just the vanguard of the popularization of the synthesizer. ’70s arena-rock synths were still bulky and expensive, but the ’80s brought new instruments, like the Roland TB-303 bass synthesizer and Yamaha DX7 keyboard, that didn’t require an army of roadies to move and could be bought for a few hundred bucks. And that was the tipping point: Electronic music invaded everywhere, from the pop-rock of Duran Duran and Depeche Mode to the industrial noise of Einstürzende Neubauten and Ministry to the groundbreaking sampled beats and turntablism of hip-hop’s Grandmaster Flash. English musician Thomas Dolby, a confirmed gearhead who was well ahead of the curve technologically, used a combination of Moogs and less expensive synths like the Roland JP-4 to create his biggest hit, “She Blinded Me With Science” — a classic and charmingly goofy example of early synth-pop that tells the story of a brilliant but emotionally clueless mad scientist who falls in love with his assistant.

Scientist, Scientist Meets The Space Invaders (1982)

Created in the late ’60s by a Jamaican collective including eccentric-genius producers Lee “Scratch” Perry and King Tubby, dub reggae’s experiments with the electronic manipulation of sound was undeniably trippy and organic, especially in comparison to what musicians in Europe and the U.S. were doing at the time. Dub’s heavy reverb and overdubbing was simultaneously an embrace of cutting-edge technology and an aural recreation of a psychedelic state of mind, and it came to embrace SF ideas as a way to express that duality. It helped that “scientist” has a double meaning in Jamaican slang, indicating not just circuitry and tech but occult symbolism. King Tubby’s protégé Overton Brown, who took the pseudonym Scientist, raised dub’s SF flag high on records like Scientist Meets the Space Invaders and Scientist Encounters Pac-Man. Dub would go on to be a guiding influence on hip hop and electronic music into the ’90s and ’00s.

Metal Heads, “Terminator” (1992)

The rise of hardcore dance music in the ’90s took dub’s innovations firmly into the computer age, creating a whole new world of beats, samples, and rhythm-heavy effects. Under the project name Metal Heads, Scottish-Jamaican DJ Goldie pioneered a technique called “timestretching,” which slows down a piece of audio without affecting its pitch, giving his beats a distinctly metallic tone. The track “Terminator” picked up on that vibe by taking its name — and sampling Michael Biehn’s and Linda Hamilton’s dialogue from — James Cameron’s SF thriller about an unstoppable time-traveling killer robot.

Daft Punk, Tron Legacy (2010)

Kraftwerk may have sent android versions of themselves out to play their songs on tour, but Frenchmen Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo took that idea to its logical conclusion: becoming androids themselves. As Daft Punk, the duo stays almost entirely hidden, Residents-like, behind the masks and personae of steel-headed robots — characters they took beyond the music in the clever yet patience-testing arthouse film Electroma. Their greatest mainstream success came in 2010 when Disney brought them on board to enliven the soundtrack of its retro-gamer SF blockbuster Tron Legacy, a perfect marriage of the story’s inherently nostalgic appeal as a sequel to a 28-year-old movie, and Daft Punk’s unflagging futurist approach.

About the Author

Christopher Bahn lives in Minneapolis, where he avoids the cold as much as possible and writes about pop culture, music, film, science fiction, travel, history, and the arts for venues including The A.V. Club, MSNBC, St. Paul Pioneer Press, Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Momentum, Spaces, The Rake, Request, and Memory Lane. He is also the writer/co-creator of the radiodrama series Where Threads Come Loose.

Things You Will Never Understand: A Conversation with Robert Jackson Bennett

Jeremy L. C. Jones

The writing of The Troupe started for Robert Jackson Bennett with the image of “a boy in the dark, muddy and wounded, holding a body in his arms, and singing.”  He wrote the novel to understand who the boy is and how he got there.

Bennett jokingly calls himself an “accidental horror” writer. Much of that self-identification comes from simplifications and from his having won the Shirley Jackson Award for his first novel, Mr. Shivers. As Bennett discusses below, there are elements of horror in his fiction, but there seems to be more of the strange and weird — the unknowable, the un-understandable — than the scary or terrifying. The unknowable coupled with a desire to know, to learn about the world and oneself, fuels his fiction with a tension that is at times unbearable.

“Writing fiction is an interesting form of self-deception, because it’s a self-deception you’re aware of, and one you consciously initiate,” said Bennett. “It’s a strangely schizophrenic, disparate process: your attention and personality are put through a thresher, split up into facets, and set to work independently on different questions and problems. Your left hand has no idea what your right hand is doing until your left hand encounters a problem and stops, wondering how on Earth it’s going to get out of this one, which is when your right hand swoops out of nowhere with a solution you had no idea you were even working on.

“You learn a lot about yourself, writing fiction,” he added. “You just have to hope the end product is fun enough for everyone else.”

Indeed, his novels are “fun” and disturbing and a pleasure to read. There’s his first novel, Mr. Shivers, a dark fantasy set during the Great Depression as seen from the perspective of hobos riding the rails. His second, The Company Man, pits industry and unions, technology and telepathy. And his forthcoming third novel, The Troupe, which is set in the delightfully strange world of vaudeville.

The Troupe focuses on George Carole, a sixteen-year-old piano prodigy. Carole travels the Vaudeville circuit under the guidance of Harry Silenus, who teaches Carole about the First Invocation (also known as the First Song) which is the very tune the Creator sang in the beginning. It is their job to sing the song of creation to lift the shadows of the world. Here lies one of the fundamental differences in The Troupe as compared to Bennett’s first two novels.

In Mr. Shivers, Bennett uses a shadowy mood, layered atmosphere, and painfully real characters to reveal the darkness of the world; The Company Man takes a scalpel to the heart of capitalism to shake out the grit and grime of corruption. The Troupe, on the other hand, sings of... “hope” isn’t quite the word, but it’s close.

Below, Bennett and I talk about vaudeville, writing, and the search for peace.

First things first, what compelled you to set a novel in vaudeville?

Vaudeville is a fascinating time in American history: it’s when the rails really started to open up, and all sorts of barriers started becoming permeable. The great melting pot that is America actually began to percolate.

Entertainment is always a fascinating expression of a nation’s subconscious, and vaudeville, which was meant to be light, frothy, diverting entertainment for the masses, suddenly became a huge source of cultural cross-pollination: anything strange or exotic would do. Modern country music owes the slide guitar to vaudeville, for example, due to country acts touring the circuits alongside Hawaiian bits.

But moreover, The Troupe is a story about the building blocks of creativity, and how they still resonate today. And vaudeville might have been the first definer of modern American entertainment, so the building blocks it created can still be found now, whether it’s in Looney Tunes, sketch comedy, stand-up, musicals, or even comic books (is there any bigger vaudevillian than Batman’s arch-nemesis?). The people who made movies, and especially comedies, what they are — Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy — all started out on the circuits, and none of them have lost their verve.

How much of vaudeville is improvised, I wonder? Is any of it off the cuff, responsive to the audience?

The best vaudevillians had their acts fine-tuned and prepared to the smallest degree. And once they had something down, they never changed it — which is why film killed off vaudeville so quickly. There was never anything new there.

How does orchestrated music like, say, Aaron Copland, speak of a different America? Or is it that Copland speaks differently of the same America?

I would probably say that Aaron Copland speaks more to a Mid-Century America, one that had seen a great deal of trouble and wanted to re-envision itself as something more pastoral, majestic, and peaceful. Aaron Copland wrote about a home we all wanted to go back to: vaudeville, on the whole, just wanted to entertain.

Whose music is likely to show up on a soundtrack for The Troupe?

Probably Bert Williams. I listened to a lot of The Magnetic Fields while writing it, probably because of the whole overly-earnest-emotions thing. But I feel like the 78-version of Tom Waits’ “Innocent When You Dream” captures something that’s in The Troupe.

Where does a novel usually start for you — image, plot, character, historical event, somewhere else altogether? And how do you develop the novel from there?

I usually start with an image, frequently an image of the ending. The image comes loaded with atmosphere and subtext and other vague abstracts I can’t immediately define. Defining those things, and figuring out how we got there, is the interesting part.

It is probably the least efficient way to start writing: I start with nothing concrete. Not even names, which is quite inconvenient. But I don’t get to choose these things.

What is it about transience (Mr. Shivers) and touring (The Troupe) that sparks your creativity?

Well, there are two practical matters to take into account. One is that it’s a classic story template, going off into the wide world to seek your fortune and all. It’s something the human mind is geared to accept. The second is that the traveling mode usually makes it easier to introduce interesting and surprising situations than a static mode. (Though it can make things a logistical nightmare — readers might wonder, “How does the antagonist keep up with them?” or, “I thought she lost that in Cheboygan. Why does she still have it in South Dakota?”)

But the thing that chiefly interests me is the question of identity. There are some characteristics and beliefs we have solely because of where we come from. Taking characters out of their homes and putting them into strange, challenging circumstances essentially nullifies those characteristics: it forces characters to ask themselves who they are, and to decide how they will act when their friends and family are not watching.

When the world is changing around you, a lot of you will change with it. But some part of you will not. That part you cannot change is who you are.

You were born, raised, educated, and currently reside in the South. Are you a Southern writer? What of the South appears in your writing? Or, put a little differently, what are some of those beliefs and characteristics that you have or had by grace of being born in the South... and how have those beliefs and characteristics been challenged in your writing and travels?

I actually spent most of my formative years in Houston. Which is not really part of any region — it’s Houston. Just as London is not England, and Tokyo is not Japan, Houston is neither quite Texan nor Southern. It’s a huge, huge metropolis, made of satellite towns with no real, definable center. It is also profoundly international — most of my friends were Korean, Pakistani, and so on.

My parents, and a lot of my extended family, are probably a lot more Southern than I am. And I do not think much of that Southern sensibility finds its way into my work. Except possibly drinking.

The interesting thing about growing up in Houston is that Houston — a city which is now founded mostly on large corporations and suburbs, where your neighbors are always in flux and there is no agreed-upon “hangout” for anyone — is largely bereft of intrinsic culture. It is not like New Orleans, which is definitely New Orleans; it is not like Austin, which is most certainly Austin (in fact, the first time I saw someone in a cowboy hat and cowboy boots was when I came to Austin; it was also the first time I saw someone covered in tattoos and piercings, but... that’s Austin). There are definitely parts of Houston that have a sense of character — the Rice Village, Bellaire, the Museum District, and so on — and I got to visit them quite frequently, and I’m happy for that — but my experience of the whole does not.

It is this sense of communal identity, or lack thereof, that has probably shaped a lot of my beliefs and outlook. I always want to ask people — who are you? Is that something you decided, or something that was impressed upon you? Was it really impressed upon you, and did you really choose that, or do you simply think you did?

After all, “character” in Greek translates into “that which is engraved.” The question, then, is who, or what, is doing the engraving.

How much of you is there in George Carole?

Probably more than most characters, and probably more than I’d care to admit. George was initially hard to write for reasons I will explain a little later, but I will say that if I were to meet my sixteen-year-old self today, it would take an awful lot for me to resist punching that condescending little shit in the face. It would probably do him some good.

What makes for a compelling protagonist? How do you create one?

A good protagonist must 1. have functionally believable and preferably interesting characteristics that 2. result in or directly affect clearly-defined, active goals that 3. the protagonist keeps to consistently throughout the story, though 4. keeping to those goals either changes A. what the protagonist thinks of themselves, the world, or both, or B. what the reader thinks of the protagonist, the world, or both.

A lot of the actual character is not determined by a trait of characteristics, but by voice, which is the manner in which things are described, the process of logic their thoughts follow, the way the character engages a scene or other characters, and much more besides. Voice is both the most important quality of any protagonist, and indeed any story, as well as the hardest thing to learn or to teach. Naturally.

George was actually a bit of a challenge, at the start. I first wrote The Troupe from a fairytale perspective, and as such George was initially a naive, soft, somewhat mopey and painfully earnest character. Overall, he was very bland and, as one early reader put it, “kind of a pussy.”

When I heard this, I knew that I had problems with numbers 1 and 2 of the formula above.

Which is when I realized that, if he grew up without a father figure, George would naturally overcompensate, and emulate a discerning maturity as much as possible, and if he’d grown up marvelously talented, he would also be conceited as hell, much more so than the average teenager (which is already plenty).

So I re-imagined him as a bit of a vain, self-important young man, the sort of kid we all know who tries to talk about things he doesn’t know much about while everyone else at the table exchanges glances as if to say, “Well there he goes again, just don’t say anything.” Then he became quite easy for me.

It’s worth keeping in mind that the rules I laid out can, of course, be broken by anyone with a large enough vision or talent. Passive, wandering protagonists don’t matter if the prose, world, or story itself is involving enough.

What about an antagonist?

Antagonists just need cool hats, really, preferably black.

Atmosphere is so central to your novels. How do you capture and create atmosphere?

A lot of atmosphere is in voice — the “how” of looking and talking about things. But there is a sense of physical movement to atmosphere: zipping or touring or stumbling through a background or location. The way this occurs — whether it’s a plod, or a cruise, or a downward climb into what feels like a dark tunnel (though it may be a hallway) — is what builds atmosphere the most.

Description is not necessarily just a means of relaying characteristics: when you describe an object, you inadvertently imbue that object with new characteristics, just as a result of the way you describe it. Describing it shapes the way the audience perceives it. So, you have the option of imbuing objects which are quite still and static with a sense of action. Or you can reduce that feeling of action in a room until it feels like not only is nothing happening, but nothing has ever happened in that room, nor will it ever.

In what ways, if any, is The Troupe a horror novel? In what ways isn’t it?

The Troupe is a horror novel in that it contains creatures and elements that are dark, unnerving, and disturbing.

However, to me, true horror inculcates in the reader a very vicious sort of loneliness: any horror, be it cosmic or slasher, makes you feel powerfully alone, vulnerable, and helpless. That is its chief goal.

The Troupe does not have that goal. It is not so much about feeling helpless in the world, but rather learning about the world and gaining perspective and, most importantly, understanding that there are things you will never understand. It could possibly be about learning to move past that deep loneliness inherent in all of us, and finding peace.

Have you found peace yet?

On occasion. Peace, like happiness, is not a destination at the end of a road: it’s momentary, and frequently coincidental. It just takes work, and a lot of luck, to become the sort of person who can feel happy, or peaceful, with more ease and frequency. I do not think I am quite there yet — but no one really does.

So if you were in vaudeville... what would your act be?

Do you know, I have no idea. A lame answer, but a true one.

About the Author

Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and teacher. He is the Staff Interviewer for Clarkesworld Magazine and a frequent contributor to Kobold Quarterly and Booklifenow.com. He teaches at Wofford College and Montessori Academy in Spartanburg, SC. He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006. Jones lives in Upstate South Carolina with his wife, daughter, and flying poodle.

2011 Reader’s Survey

Neil Clarke

Every year, we give you the opportunity to pick your Clarkesworld favorites from the prior year. This time around, you’ll have the opportunity to select your favorite story and cover art from 2011, as well as give us a little feedback. Feel free to use the comments area on our site to help promote your favorites. (No attacking other people’s choices.)

You can take the survey at http://clarkesworld2011.questionpro.com.

Please cast your votes by January 30th. Results will be published in our February issue.

2010 Fiction

Ghostweight by Yoon Ha Lee

Tying Knots by Ken Liu

Diving After the Moon by Rachel Swirsky

Three Oranges by D. Elizabeth Wasden

The Book of Phoenix (Excerpted from The Great Book) by Nnedi Okorafor

Perfect Lies by Gwendolyn Clare

The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees by E. Lily Yu

Matchmaker by Erin M. Hartshorn

Whose Face This Is I Do Not Know by Cat Rambo

The Architect of Heaven by Jason K. Chapman

Semiramis by Genevieve Valentine

Trickster by Mari Ness

Trois morceaux en forme de mechanika by Gord Sellar

Frozen Voice by An Owomoyela

Conservation of Shadows by Yoon Ha Lee

The Fish of Lijiang by Chen Qiufan

Pack by Robert Reed

Signals in the Deep by Greg Mellor

Staying Behind by Ken Liu

Pony by Erik Amundsen

Silently and Very Fast by Catherynne M. Valente

A Militant Peace by David Klecha and Tobias S. Buckell

The Smell of Orange Groves by Lavie Tidhar

In Which Faster-Than-Light Travel Solves All of Our Problems by Chris Stabback

Sirius by Ben Peek

Cover Art

Beckoning Ancient Depths by Alejandro MGNZ

Nautili by Julie Dillon

Connie and Donnie by Patryk Olejniczak

Post-apolacalyptic Fisherman by Georgi Markov

The Towers of KEILAH by Ferdinand Ladera

Off Road by Facundo Diaz

Valley of Mists by Peter Mohrbacher

Into the Woods by Erik Storstein

Forest Spirit by Mike Azevedo

A Sense of Importance by Bryn Jones

Planetary Alignment by Julie Dillon

Reactor by Folko Streese

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.

Clarkesworld Magazine

Issue 65

Table of Contents

And the Hollow Space Inside

by Mari Ness

A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight

by Xia Jia

All the Young Kirks and Their Good Intentions

by Helena Bell

From Farm to Fable: Food, Fantasy, and Science Fiction

by Matthew Johnson

Everything's Surprising: A Conversation with Lev AC Rosen

by Jeremy L. C. Jones

Wendigo Waistcoat Spyglass and Other Words with Lisa L. Hannett

by Jeremy L. C. Jones

2011 Reader's Poll Results

by Neil Clarke

Pilot

Art by Alexander Trufanov

© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2012
www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

And the Hollow Space Inside

Mari Ness

Doug reaches for my hand as the ship approaches. He continues to hold it as the great doors open, as we watch them leave the ship. They pause; they have been in space and ultra-low gravity for five years now. Five years, one month, and three days, to be precise; I cannot believe my mind has memorized this.

We are too far away to see this, but I know their eyelids are blinking as they adjust, process, calculate, move, adjust again, the change in gravity no more than a problem to be solved.

As always, I am struck by how human and inhuman they look. Even their pauses have a precise, calculated feel. No one has ever seen them show uncertainty. No one ever will.

Gravity adjustments made, they walk with precision to the terminal, directly in front of us. It takes me a moment to recognize her, out of the eight faces. That is not surprising; it has been twelve years since I last saw her. What is surprising is how, even now, I am still desperately looking for any trace of my daughter’s smile in my daughter’s face.

The Mars missions, we were assured, would be the eventual saving grace of humanity. Oh, certainly, we hadn’t managed to use up all of the world’s resources yet, but that was only a matter of time. Population growth had slowed, but not stalled out completely, and wars over resources kept getting bloodier — while not reducing the population much. Mars was the only planet we could reach in an acceptable period of time, terraform, and begin colonizing. Other worlds would come, but by the time we reached the next nearest acceptable planet — a 40 year journey each way, under optimum conditions that few scientists thought we would meet — it would be too late for Earth. The Mars missions offered us that saving grace.

Only one problem: ordinary humans couldn’t survive the trip.

Beside me, Doug takes a deep breath. “She looks good.”

“Yes,” I agree.

The four years in low gravity, not to mention the years of dehydrated food before that, should have taken their toll, but she still looks fit and considerably younger than her actual age. Then again, she always did. They all did, a side effect of programming and lack of temptation, and (but this is only my opinion) emotions and stress.

The eight of them reach the terminal, turn in unison, and wave in precision. I have to remind myself once again that I have been assured that they all have individual implants and computers, individual programming. They were all expected to perform different tasks, after all; it would make no sense to have them

They vanish into the facility.

“They didn’t say hello,” says Doug.

I do not tell him that I am relieved.

The facility explained: humans needed interaction. A mere eight people, stuck together in the tight confines of a ship, and then on the almost equally tight confines of the first Mars base, could not be trusted to stay sane. The astronauts on the space stations had remained sane only because they were regularly rotated in and out, and could also continue to converse via radio and satellite to people back on earth. By the time the mission reached Mars, these transmissions would be delayed — not by much, but just enough to leave a long silence after a statement.

Just enough to drive people over the edge — only this edge was out in space, or on a hostile planet with no real edge to go to.

Unless they had no edge to fall off from.

Amy is blind, navigating with touch, sound and precision memory. Her taste and pleasure centers are nonfunctional. She eats carefully balanced meals at carefully programmed times, although she is never hungry.

“I don’t understand why they’re using the… children.” I shouldn’t have hesitated before that word, but I’d never been comfortable using it. They weren’t children. I didn’t know what they were, but they weren’t children, not by any definition of the word. But Doug hated the other, better word: implants. And adults just sounded wrong. The hesitation made Doug flinch. Which might have been why I’d hesitated. “If they think regular people can’t handle it, then why not just send out regular robots?”

Doug flinched again. Any reminder that his — our — daughter was any sort of robot did that to him. “As I understand it, they want to understand and see the long term effects of Mars gravity and terraforming on human bodies, since eventually they do plan to send the rest of us out there.”

“But — ” I swallowed, tried to get my thoughts in order. “They’re programmed. They’ll be eating and exercising absolutely regularly in a way regular adults wouldn’t. Couldn’t. Even Olympic athletes aren’t that careful.”

“But it will give them a general idea. Plus, they need to ensure that human bodies — ” it was my turn to flinch — “are capable of spending sustained time in a Martian environment.” He sounded like someone quoting a speech from a marketing consultant; it took me a second to realize that was probably exactly what he was doing.

I gave up attempting to eat. “Ok. What I don’t understand is this. Why are you telling me this?”

“Because they want us to talk to her before she goes.”

By “they” he meant the facility’s attorneys, of course.

Amy is also a skilled engineer and astronaut, programmed with the equivalent of multiple doctorate degrees in engineering, computer science, astronomy, microbiology, geology and geophysics and to speak multiple languages with the same flat intonation, who has to be reminded by a computer program to eat, who has never laughed or cried in her entire life.

“I’ll sign more papers if I have to,” I said. “I don’t want to see her.”

“Crystal.”

“I’m serious.”

“Crystal. If you don’t go, she can’t go. And — ” He swallowed, and I saw that he was about to start crying. “She doesn’t belong here. You’ll see.”

The reason for their quick disappearance is soon explained. The eight of them must be thoroughly checked — their programs are not yet perfectly adjusted for self-maintenance, although they are able to observe and check each other. Then a patch, to ensure that they are properly programmed to adjust to the new gravity, and another patch to ensure that they are able to translate and understand the very latest idioms in multiple languages.

And, of course, they must eat, which none of us will want to see.

This last part is true. The implants do not respond to appetite or taste, and although they are programmed to eat, with the precise, mechanical movements they use for everything else, they have difficulty with this. Eating, it turns out, is somewhat more complicated than mere programming, and it is not something I want to watch again.

None of this is anything I want to watch again.

“Of course she’s agreeing to go,” I ranted at Ariela, my best friend, the only one other than Doug who knew the whole story. “She’s programmed to go. Why do I have to go to see this for myself?”

Ariela fiddled with her coffee cup. “I don’t think that’s it,” she said, after a moment.

“Then what is it?”

“I think they want you to be able to say good-bye.”

I have a picture of my daughter, in her crib, surrounded by wires and tubes.

It is the only one I have. Most of the time, I leave it buried at the bottom of a drawer in the guest room, face down. But sometimes I take it out, and try to imagine that in it, my daughter is smiling.

When I found out my child would be born without a brain, I didn’t cry. I couldn’t. Everything inside me was swallowed up, gone, empty, and I had nothing to cry with. I just sat quietly, hands folded over my abdomen, listening. I didn’t have much to say.

I had options, they explained, carefully. I could terminate the pregnancy — it was difficult to find anyone who would terminate late term pregnancies here, but a trip to Europe or Asia could be arranged. I could bring the child to term. (Beside me, Doug jerked, but didn’t say anything.) The child would not live, but some parents found that comforting, and I could hold her afterwards. (”Comforting”? The hollow part of me could not ask.)

Or, they said, they could offer a third possibility.

I’ve cried enough about this already. Enough.

The medical procedure was less simple than they had promised. Eight hours of initial surgery, and then two days in bed, another surgery, and then a third. Doug tried to read books to me, but I was so sick I could barely understand his words. Finally he set me up with an tablet and music and let that play while he slept and slept.

With each procedure, I dreamed, dreamed that metal was moving through my skin and bones, dreamed that wires were replacing my nerves. I saw myself as a computer. I saw myself linking to my daughter.

I threw up, over and over. The pregnancy, said the nurses sympathetically. Or the drugs. But I knew it wasn’t either.

Even now, I sometimes wonder if some of those nanobots entered my blood, my skin, if their presence is why I can now look at my daughter and have no desire to hold her.

I was allowed to hold her, briefly, after the birth. It was psychologically better for the mother, one of the doctors argued; a compassionate thing to do, agreed the attorneys, who probably had other fears in mind. I had no thoughts of a lawsuit, not then.

She was small, so very small. And so limp. For some reason I had thought that the procedures would extend metal all the way through her body, but no. Not that she was lacking in metal; she had wires and tubes seemingly everywhere, controlling her food intake and bladder and monitoring pulse rates and the electronic activity in her brain.

But no tubes in her nose or her mouth, and her tiny chest rose and fell steadily.

“There were some problems,” Doug says.

“Problems,” I repeat.

He swallows. “They could send commands to them while they were on the mission, but apparently, something about the distance and time — anyway, they weren’t able to successfully upload all of the patches and fixes. Some of the programming broke down.”

“And?”

“Some of them — well, they’re saying some of them may be nonfunctional.”

It takes me a moment to sort through the pronouns. “Amy?”

“I don’t know.” He swallows miserably.

“The implant is letting her breathe,” explained one of the doctors. “In time, it might allow her to do more.”

“What more?” asked Doug.

“We don’t entirely know,” said the doctor. “Movement, walking, certainly. Speech, hopefully. And more beyond that.”

I touched her cheek. It was warm to the touch, and I could tell that she was breathing. But that was all. She did not move, did not even flutter an eye at my touch.

She had not cried, not even that first baby cry after birth.

“This is your fault,” I shout at Doug, although it isn’t. “You were the one who insisted on fixing her.”

“You are the one who keeps thinking she’s dead,” he shouts back.

“Did you have a name in mind?” One of the lawyers, a young man who had seemed almost human. “We can use that, if you like. Otherwise a name will be randomly chosen by computer.”

I had not. “Amy,” I said. It had been the name of one of my childhood dolls.

He made a note on his tablet.

“Will you need my breast milk?”

“We would be grateful.”

And then a doctor came and took her away, and the hollow space was inside me, consuming me, and I couldn’t even cry. I couldn’t even move. Doug was crying, shaking, and I was nothing.

We will not be allowed to talk to Amy, to see Amy, until an unspecified time. Doug is furious, but the lawyers he calls are not encouraging. If Amy is a fully legal human, and that status is dubious, capable of making decisions without the facility, she is also an adult, and we have no legal claim on her. And since she has just traveled to Mars and back, we can hardly claim her as a disabled dependent. And if she is not a fully legal human — the conclusion of most of the attorneys — she is property, and not ours, and any attempt to push these boundaries is a crime.

The hollow place inside me is growing again, and I desperately need to return to work.

I never explained to anyone why I continued to pump milk for six months.

No one was unkind enough to ask.

They sent us the first pictures when she was five. An unsmiling child, looking straight at the camera, unblinking.

I begin to receive messages from Doug’s lawyers. I delete them. I need to focus, focus.

Doug received the status updates and read them regularly. I couldn’t. He told me tidbits, however: that Amy had been able to sit up, to move her legs and arms. That Amy had successfully downloaded the program that might help her control her urination. That Amy had connected with her vocal cords —

“Not Amy,” I finally shouted at him. “Not Amy. Her goddamn implant. The implant. The implant is making all of these goddamn connections!“

It is so easy, on a computer, to move a few pixels around, to change an image from sorrow to laughter. So easy to use the programming already there.

We got a divorce about two years after that.

Much later I heard that attempts had been made to get the children with implants to smile, to make laughing sounds, to move their faces. It had all been abandoned. Emotions were, it seemed, the one thing that a program could not fake, and a face was all emotions. Some of the caretakers at the facility had become physically ill just watching a computer attempt to move their faces.

On Ariela’s advice, I switched careers entirely, moving from insurance to marine biology. I focused on the microorganisms in mangrove ecosystems, forgetting, in my kayak, or on my computer, or snorkeling in the mangrove roots, that I had ever had a daughter, that I in some ways still had a daughter. Instead, I had spironemids.

Doug and I stayed in touch, meeting once a year or so. I went to his wedding, to a small fierce musician named Inari. He met some of the succession of boyfriends I had and disposed over the years.

And he kept me updated on Amy.

Whenever he did, I allowed myself to think of my mangroves, disappearing into them, into the images I created of spironemids racing up and down the mangrove roots.

I receive an email from one of the other parents, one of the few who understands. Their son and his implant have failed; they will be heading to the facility to say goodbye, and put some of the dust of Mars on his hand. “I feel as if we already said this,” says the email. “I feel as if I have to say this every day.”

I agreed to meet her. At the very least, it might help end Doug’s endless updates, coming at odd intervals through the year. I should have insisted to an end to those in the divorce agreement.

I made him drive us to the facility, and pay for the hotel stay. In separate bedrooms.

“One meeting,” I say. “Just one.”

“No.”

“I’m her mother,” I manage. I remember Ariela’s words. “I have to say good-bye.”

“Hello,” came a voice.

Something was wrong with that voice, terribly wrong, but I could not pinpoint the problem.

“Hello,” I managed back.

“Should I enter?”

“Yes,” said Doug.

And she stepped into the light.

Doug’s features. My mother’s hair. My eyes.

Our daughter. And yet, not our daughter.

It — she? — stepped forward with small, efficient movements, as if every step was carefully measured — which, I realized in shock, was actually what was happening. The face — Doug’s nose, his chin, in her face — was extraordinarily, perfectly still. Her hands brushed the chair in front of her, and she sat. The motion — I tried to find words for it, and then realized. She was not moving the way a human would. She was moving the way a computer thought a human would move.

She has an individual implant, my daughter. It can still be accessed, still be reprogrammed at the will of the facility. Doug and I have no rights over this, cannot stop the facility from turning her into whatever it wishes. That was part of the agreement we signed, to keep her alive.

“Hello,” Doug said, his voice remarkably steady under the circumstances.

The face turned towards him. “Hello,” it repeated. Its eyelids blinked, rapidly.

It’s processing, I thought. They had warned us of that facial tic, programmed to allow others to tell when the implants needed to pause to process.

I was going to throw up. I knew it. I stood, wobbled, and pushed my way out of the door, not sure I could even make it to the nearest bathroom, feeling the floor rock beneath him. Behind me I heard Doug say something, but I could not be sure if he was talking to me or Amy.

Amy.

I am in the middle of finishing up a presentation for an important conference when the email arrives. Doug, of course, telling me that he has contacted people in the facility, who say that Amy is not completing all of her programmed tasks, that she is instead sitting at a window staring up into a sky.

That sounds most unlike Amy. I have never known her to stare at anything.

I threw up, again, and again, then leaned against the toilet for a while, body shaking.

The second meeting went better.

I refused to think of it as my daughter, as anything remotely related to me, even if its eyes were the same color as mine. Oddly, what helped was the voice, the same voice that had made me so sick. I had never heard anything like it; the “computer” voices I’d heard before were either the recorded voices of actors, or clearly mechanical synthesized sounds that had never approached human vocal cords. This — this was different; the sound of a mechanical voice pushed through human vocal vocals, precise, emotionless, flat, with no accent that I could think of. At Doug’s request, it demonstrated 50 languages for us, all with that same precise flatness. It explained how it spent its day, in regular exercise and eating and downloading. I watched the eyelids blink each time it answered our questions.

I signed the papers.

“Thank you,” it said.

I find myself wondering what she is thinking. If she is thinking. Can she think? She is programmed to process, to sift, to keep herself alive while analyzing vast amounts of data and transmitting it back to computers for further analysis.

I know she cannot see the stars. But I cannot stop wondering if she looked at them anyway, in those quiet hours between the earth and Mars. If something in her looked at them. I clench my fists and rub them against my legs.

We made other visits before the launch. She had downloaded more languages, which she demonstrated for us. She did not listen to music, but could list off every song and album from any artist I named, knowing the exact length of each song, the record company, and where it was produced.

She could not use my daughter’s eyes to see. But a million million images had been downloaded into her brain, including mine. She navigated by touch and utter precision, and had been updated with the very latest in voice recognition software.

We arranged to meet her outside. For some reason, this seemed more natural, easier on both of us. I could not tell if this affected her or not. But when we were outside, she sometimes turned her face to the sky.

After she left for Mars, I almost forgot about her.

Almost.

I receive an urgent email from the facility. It is not an update on Amy’s medical condition. It is a request, typed by her and signed with her electronic thumbprint. In it, she asks that we authorize her return to Mars.

“She says she wants to go,” I tell Doug.

I cannot believe that I am saying this, that I am the one arguing for her, that I am the one saying that she — an implant, a computer, should be allowed to make her own decisions.

“You said it yourself. She’s a computer program. She can’t want anything.”

My voice is barely a whisper. “Maybe she wants this.”

It would be easier to have Amy away from here, on a spaceship, or on Mars.

I do not think that is why I am arguing for her to leave. But I cannot be sure.

After the launch, people found us — all of us, every parent that had given, donated, lost a child to the implant program. We got calls, emails, twitters, comments. Hellish. I had to slam my sites down, only to find myself stalked at work and home by media, by religious zealots, by advocates of one side or another. People who thought I had done the right thing, people who thought I was the living embodiment of evil. I changed my name, my address.

My colleagues would not meet my eyes at biological conferences. I understood; I had, in a way, created Frankenstein’s monster, or at least consented to it. And it was easier to handle than their curiosity would have been.

I sometimes imagine breaking into that facility, and wiping away all of its computers with a single program, or perhaps just taking an axe to its servers. (My practical mind whispers that with a program like this, the facility must have multiple backups in multiple places, but my imagination will not be silenced.) I imagine the implants twitching in response, the bodies falling into heaps on the ground, puppets suddenly cut from their strings.

I imagine putting flowers on a gravestone, and weeping.

My eyes remain dry.

Doug insists on another visit.

“You look terrible,” he tells her.

Amy does not respond. To me, she has never looked well, even when she has looked fit. But looking at her closely, I see she is less fit, less trim, than when she originally emerged from the ship and headed into the facility without talking to us. She looks slightly — loose, if that makes sense. Perhaps her programming has not adjusted to the gravity, or perhaps she is merely getting old. I realize with a shock that she is middle aged by now, and even regularly programmed exercise can only do so much, especially when combined with the radical changes in gravity she has been undergoing.

A shock because of her unlined face, her almost childlike skin. Any dermatologist claiming that wrinkles are an inevitable part of aging, and not a result of emotion and stress, should take a look at her face. She does not even have lines between her cheek and her mouth, or around her eyes.

The hollow part inside me rises up again, swallowing me, and I am at a loss for words.

Doug is right about something else as well. I cannot pinpoint it, but since she has returned, something is… missing.

“How can we tell them that you are physically able to make the trip?” asks Doug.

“I am programmed with a word,” my daughter says, in the flat, toneless voice that no human vocal cords should ever make. “The word is lie.”

When she left for Mars, I did not watch her leave. I stayed on my computer, modeling, modeling, writing, writing, drafting, organizing, too lost in my work and my words to catch the faintest roar of burning engines, the faintest cheers that humans — well, humans of a sort — were headed to Mars at last.

At my request, a nurse arranges one more meeting, in one of the gardens on the edge of the facility.

When I arrive, it — Amy — my daughter — is facing into the sky, eyes unblinking. It is the first time, I realize, that I have ever seen her focused on anything.

“This is not my programming,” she says.

It is so easy to sign documents, to watch those documents get swallowed up in a machine.

When I tell this story, I can see its events taking place, one after another, as inexorably as life and death.

When I remember this story, I can feel myself holding my daughter, my baby, and rocking her back and forth, a moment that has never quite stopped.

I dream of giving Amy a doll, a doll covered in wires and strings. I help her cut the strings. But with each string I cut, another wire grows on Amy’s head, until she is held in place, unable to move.

She is alive, I think. She breathes. She moves. She processes. She communicates. She knows the songs and titles of every album published since the invention of those old phonographs.

She is alive.

I think.

This time, I watch the launch, from ten miles away, on a comfortable beach chair, surrounded by loud beachgoers and picnickers. And children. Hordes of children, all seemingly determined to out-scream each other as they leap in and out of the waves.

I have my net radio on, with the broadcasters comparing this to the old moon and shuttle launches that I have seen only in documentaries and history shows. I cannot focus on their words, although I try. I can only look at the endless blue of the sky, keep my eyes trained on the spot where a golden flame will soon be lifting into a sky.

The countdown starts. I stand.

It is more beautiful, this launch, than anything I could have expected, a bright golden streak against the sky, trailing steam and mist behind it. And I am crying, crying, as the gold hits my eyes, as if the flame is burning through me. I feel it traveling through my eyes, my arms, my chest, feel it burning in the hollow place inside, the hardened still place that has been my center for thirty-three years. I feel it burning, splitting, fading. Tonight, I promise myself, tonight, I will watch the stars, and imagine what it is like to be moving towards them.

About the Author

Mari Ness lives in central Florida with two cats who think her fingers should spend less time on a keyboard and more time in their fur. Her fiction and poetry have previously appeared in numerous print and online publications, including Fantasy Magazine, Ideomancer, Daily Science Fiction, and Shine: An Anthology of Optimistic Science Fiction. On Thursdays, she blogs about classic works of children’s fantasy literature over at Tor.com. You can also follow her on Twitter at mari_ness.

A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight

Xia Jia

Awakening of Insects, the Third Solar Term:

Ghost Street is long but narrow, like an indigo ribbon. You can cross it in eleven steps, but to walk it from end to end takes a full hour.

At the western end is Lanruo Temple, now fallen into ruin. Inside the temple is a large garden full of fruit trees and vegetable patches, as well as a bamboo grove and a lotus pond. The pond has fish, shrimp, dojo loaches, and yellow snails. So supplied, I have food to eat all year.

It’s evening, and I’m sitting at the door to the main hall, reading a copy of Huainanzi, the Han Dynasty essay collection, when along comes Yan Chixia, the great hero, vanquisher of demons and destroyer of evil spirits. He’s carrying a basket on the crook of his elbow, the legs of his pants rolled all the way up, revealing calves caked with black mud. I can’t help but laugh at the sight.

My teacher, the Monk, hears me and walks out of the dark corner of the main hall, gears grinding, and hits me on the head with his ferule.

I hold my head in pain, staring at the Monk in anger. But his iron face is expressionless, just like the statues of buddhas in the main hall. I throw down the book and run outside, while the Monk pursues me, his joints clanking and creaking the whole time. They are so rusted that he moves as slow as a snail.

I stop in front of Yan, and I see that his basket contains several new bamboo shoots, freshly dug from the ground.

“I want to eat meat,” I say, tilting my face up to look at him. “Can you shoot some buntings with your slingshot for me?”

“Buntings are best eaten in the fall, when they’re fat,” says Yan. “Now is the time for them to breed chicks. If you shoot them, there won’t be buntings to eat next year.”

“Just one, pleaaaaase?” I grab onto his sleeve and act cute. But he shakes his head resolutely, handing me the basket. He takes off his conical sedge hat and wipes the sweat off his face.

I laugh again as I look at him. His face is as smooth as an egg, with just a few wisps of curled black hair like weeds that have been missed by the gardener. Legend has it that his hair and beard used to be very thick, but I’m always pulling a few strands out now and then as a game. After so many years, these are all the hairs he has left.

“You must have died of hunger in a previous life,” Yan says, cradling the back of my head in his large palm. “The whole garden is full of food for you. No one is here to fight you for it.”

I make a face at him and take the basket of food.

The rain has barely stopped; insects cry out from the wet earth. A few months from now, green grasshoppers will be jumping everywhere. You can catch them, string them along a stick, and roast them over the fire, dripping sweet-smelling fat into the flames.

As I picture this, my empty stomach growls as though filled with chittering insects already. I begin to run.

The golden light of the evening sun splatters over the slate slabs of the empty street, stretching my shadow into a long, long band.

I run back home, where Xiao Qian is combing her hair in the darkness. There are no mirrors in the house, so she always takes off her head and puts it on her knees to comb. Her hair looks like an ink-colored scroll, so long that the strands spread out to cover the whole room.

I sit quietly to the side until she’s done combing her hair, puts it up in a moon-shaped bun, and secures it with a pin made of dark wood inlaid with red coral beads. Then she lifts her head and re-attaches it to her neck, and asks me if it’s sitting straight. I don’t understand why Xiao Qian cares so much. Even if she just tied her head to her waist with a sash, everyone would still think she’s beautiful.

But I look, seriously, and nod. “Beautiful,” I say.

Actually, I can’t really see very well. Unlike the ghosts, I cannot see in the dark.

Xiao Qian is happy with my affirmation. She takes my basket and goes into the kitchen to cook. As I sit and work the bellows next to her, I tell her about my day. Just as I get to the part where the Monk hit me on the head with the ferule, Xiao Qian reaches out and lightly caresses my head where I was hit. Her hand is cold and pale, like a piece of jade.

“You need to study hard and respect your teacher,” Xiao Qian says. “Eventually you’ll leave here and make your way in the real world. You have to have some knowledge and real skills.”

Her voice is very soft, like cotton candy, and so the swelling on my head stops hurting.

Xiao Qian tells me that Yan Chixia found me on the steps of the temple when I was a baby. I cried and cried because I was so hungry. Yan Chixia was at his wit’s end when he finally stuffed a handful of creeping rockfoil into my mouth. I sucked on the juice from the grass and stopped crying.

No one knows who my real parents are.

Even back then, Ghost Street had been doing poorly. No tourists had been coming by for a while. That hasn’t changed. Xiao Qian tells me that it’s probably because people invented some other attraction, newer, fresher, and so they forgot about the old attractions. She’s seen similar things happen many times before.

Before she became a ghost, Xiao Qian tells me, she had lived a very full life. She had been married twice, gave birth to seven children, and raised them all.

And then her children got sick, one after another. In order to raise the money to pay the doctors, Xiao Qian sold herself off in pieces: teeth, eyes, breasts, heart, liver, lungs, bone marrow, and finally, her soul. Her soul was sold to Ghost Street, where it was sealed inside a female ghost’s body. Her children died anyway.

Now she has white skin and dark hair. The skin is light sensitive. If she’s in direct sunlight she’ll burn.

After he found me, Yan Chixia had walked up and down all of Ghost Street before he decided to give me to Xiao Qian to raise.

I’ve seen a picture of Xiao Qian back when she was alive. It was hidden in a corner of a drawer in her dresser. The woman in the picture had thick eyebrows, huge eyes, a wrinkled face — far uglier than the way Xiao Qian looks now. Still, I often see her cry as she looks at that picture. Her tears are a pale pink. When they fall against her white dress they soak into the fabric and spread, like blooming peach flowers.

Every ghost is full of stories from when they were alive. Their bodies have been cremated and the ashes mixed into the earth, but their stories still live on. During the day, when all of Ghost Street is asleep, the stories become dreams and circle under the shadows of the eaves, like swallows without nests. During those hours, only I’m around, walking in the street, and only I can see them and hear their buzzing song.

I’m the only living person on Ghost Street.

Xiao Qian says that I don’t belong here. When I grow up, I’ll leave.

The smell of good food fills the room. The insects in my stomach chitter even louder.

I eat dinner by myself: preserved pork with stir-fried bamboo shoots, shrimp-paste-flavored egg soup, and rice balls with chives, still hot in my hands. Xiao Qian sits and watches me. Ghosts don’t eat. None of the inhabitants of Ghost Street, not even Yan Chixia or the Monk, ever eat.

I bury my face in the bowl, eating as fast as I can. I wonder, after I leave, will I ever eat such delicious food again?

Major Heat, the Twelfth Solar Term:

After night falls, the world comes alive.

I go alone to the well in the back to get water. I turn the wheel and it squeaks, but the sound is different from usual. I look down into the well and see a long-haired ghost in a white dress sitting in the bucket.

I pull her up and out. Her wet hair covers her face, leaving only one eye to stare at me out of a gap.

“Ning, tonight is the Carnival. Aren’t you going?”

“I need to get water for Xiao Qian’s bath,” I answer. “After the bath we’ll go.”

She strokes my face lightly. “You are a foolish child.”

She has no legs, so she has to leave by crawling on her hands. I hear the sound of crawling, creeping all around me. Green will-o’-the-wisps flit around, like anxious fireflies. The air is filled with the fragrance of rotting flowers.

I go back to the dark bedroom and pour the water into the wooden bathtub. Xiao Qian undresses. I see a crimson bar code along her naked back, like a tiny snake. Bright white lights pulse under her skin.

“Why don’t you take a bath with me?” she asks.

I shake my head, but I’m not sure why. Xiao Qian sighs. “Come.” So I don’t refuse again.

We sit in the bathtub together. The cedar smells nice. Xiao Qian rubs my back with her cold, cold hands, humming lightly. Her voice is very beautiful. Legend has it that any man who heard her sing fell in love with her.

When I grow up, will I fall in love with Xiao Qian? I think and look at my small hands, the skin now wrinkled from the bath like wet wrapping paper.

After the bath, Xiao Qian combs my hair, and dresses me in a new shirt that she made for me. Then she sticks a bunch of copper coins, green and dull, into my pocket.

“Go have fun,” she says. “Remember not to eat too much!”

Outside, the street is lit with countless lanterns, so bright that I can no longer see the stars that fill the summer sky.

Demons, ghosts, all kinds of spirits come out of their ruined houses, out of cracks in walls, rotting closets, dry wells. Hand-in-hand, shoulder-by-shoulder, they parade up and down Ghost Street until the narrow street is filled.

I squeeze myself into the middle of the crowd, looking all around. The stores and kiosks along both sides of the street send forth all kinds of delicious smells, tickling my nose like butterflies. The vending ghosts see me and call for me, the only living person, to try their wares.

“Ning! Come here! Fresh sweet osmanthus cakes, still hot!”

“Sugar roasted chestnuts! Sweet smelling and sweeter tasting!”

“Fried dough, the best fried dough!”

“Long pig dumplings! Two long pig dumplings for one coin!”

“Ning, come eat a candy man. Fun to play and fun to eat!”

Of course the “long pig dumplings” are really just pork dumplings. The vendor says that just to attract the tourists and give them a thrill.

But I look around, and there are no tourists.

I eat everything I can get my hands on. Finally, I’m so full that I have to sit down by the side of the road to rest a bit. On the opposite side of the street is a temporary stage lit by a huge bright white paper lantern. Onstage, ghosts are performing: sword-swallowing, fire-breathing, turning a beautiful girl into a skeleton. I’m bored by these tricks. The really good show is still to come.

A yellow-skinned old ghost pushes a cart of masks in front of me.

“Ning, why don’t you pick a mask? I have everything: Ox-Head, Horse-Face, Black-Faced and White-Faced Wuchang, Asura, Yaksha, Rakshasa, Pixiu, and even Lei Gong, the Duke of Thunder.”

I spend a long time browsing, and finally settle on a Rakshasa mask with red hair and green eyes. The yellow-skinned old ghost thanks me as he takes my coin, dipping his head down until his back is bent like a bow.

I put the mask on and continue strutting down the street. Suddenly loud Carnival music fills the air, and all the ghosts stop and then shuffle to the sides of the street.

I turn around and see the parade coming down the middle of the street. In front are twenty one-foot tall green toads in two columns, striking gongs, thumping drums, strumming huqin, and blowing bamboo sheng. After them come twenty centipede spirits in black clothes, each holding varicolored lanterns and dancing complicated steps. Behind them are twenty snake spirits in yellow dresses, throwing confetti into the air. And there are more behind them but I can’t see so far.

Between the marching columns are two Cyclopes in white robes, each as tall as a three-story house. They carry a palanquin on their shoulders, and from within Xiao Qian’s song rolls out, each note as bright as a star in the sky, falling one by one onto my head.

Fireworks of all colors rise up: bright crimson, pale green, smoky purple, shimmering gold. I look up and feel as though I’m becoming lighter myself, floating into the sky.

As the parade passes from west to east, all the ghosts along the sides of the street join, singing and dancing. They’re heading for the old osmanthus tree at the eastern end of Ghost Street, whose trunk is so broad that three men stretching their arms out can barely surround it. A murder of crows lives there, each one capable of human speech. We call the tree Old Ghost Tree, and it is said to be in charge of all of Ghost Street. Whoever pleases it prospers; whoever goes against its wishes fails.

But I know that the parade will never get to the Old Ghost Tree.

When the parade is about half way down the street, the earth begins to shake and the slate slabs crack open. From the yawning gaps huge white bones crawl out, each as thick as the columns holding up Lanruo Temple. The bones slowly gather together and assemble into a giant skeleton, glinting like white porcelain in the moonlight. Now black mud springs forth from its feet and crawls up the skeleton, turning into flesh. Finally, a colossal Dark Yaksha stands before us, its single horn so large that it seems to pierce the night sky.

The two Cyclopes don’t even reach its calves.

The Dark Yaksha turns its huge head from side to side. This is a standard part of every Carnival. It is supposed to abduct a tourist. On nights when there are no tourists, it must go back under the earth, disappointed, to wait for the next opportunity.

Slowly, it turns its gaze on me, focusing on my presence. I pull off my mask and stare back. Its gaze feels hot, the eyes as red as burning coal.

Xiao Qian leans out from the palanquin, and her cry pierces the suddenly quiet night air: “Ning, run! Run!”

The wind lifts the corner of her dress, like a dark purple petal unfolding. Her face is like jade, with orange lights flowing underneath.

I turn and run as fast as I can. Behind me I hear the heavy footsteps of the Dark Yaksha. With every quaking, pounding step, shingles fall from houses on both sides like overripe fruits. I am now running like the wind, my bare feet striking the slate slabs lightly: pat, pat, pat. My heart pounds against my chest: thump, thump, thump. Along the entire frenzied Ghost Street, mine is the only living heart.

But both the ghosts and I know that I’m not in any real danger. A ghost can never hurt a real person. That’s one of the rules of the game.

I run towards the west, towards Lanruo Temple. If I can get to Yan Chixia before the Yaksha catches me, I’ll be safe. This is also part of the performance. Every Carnival, Yan puts on his battle gear and waits on the steps of the main hall.

As I approach, I cry out: “Help! Save me! Oh Hero Yan, save me!”

In the distance I hear his long ululating cry and see his figure leaping over the wall of the temple to land in the middle of the street. He holds in his left hand a Daoist charm: red character written against a yellow background. He reaches behind his back with his right hand and pulls out his sword, the Demon Slayer.

He stands tall and shouts into the night sky, “Brazen Demon! How dare you harm innocent people? I, Yan Chixia, will carry out justice today!”

But tonight, he forgot to wear his sedge hat. His egg-shaped face is exposed to the thousands of lanterns along Ghost Street, with just a few wisps of hair curled like question marks on a blank page. The silly sight is such a contrast against his serious mien that I start to laugh even as I’m running. And that makes me choke and can’t catch my breath so I fall against the cold slate surface of the street.

This moment is my best memory for the summer.

Cold Dew, the Seventeenth Solar Term:

A thin layer of clouds hides the moon. I’m crouching by the side of the lotus pond in Lanruo Temple. All I can see are the shadows cast by the lotus leaves, rising and falling slowly with the wind.

The night is as cold as the water. Insects hidden in the grass won’t stop singing.

The eggplants and string beans in the garden are ripe. They smell so good that I have a hard time resisting the temptation. All I can think about is to steal some under the cover of night. Maybe Yan Chixia was right: in a previous life I must have died of hunger.

So I wait, and wait. But I don’t hear Yan Chixia’s snores. Instead, I hear light footsteps cross the grassy path to stop in front of Yan Chixia’s cabin. The door opens, the steps go in. A moment later, the voices of a man and a woman drift out of the dark room: Yan Chixia and Xiao Qian.

Qian: “Why did you ask me to come?”

Yan: “You know what it’s about.”

Qian: “I can’t leave with you.”

Yan: “Why not?”

Qian: “A few more years. Ning is still so young.”

“Ning, Ning!” Yan’s voice grows louder. “I think you’ve been a ghost for too long.”

Qian sounds pitiful. “I raised Ning for so many years. How can I just get up and leave him?”

“You’re always telling me that Ning is still too young, always telling me to wait. Do you remember how many years it has been?”

“I can’t.”

“You sew a new set of clothes for him every year. How can you forget?” Yan chuckles, a cold sound. “I remember very clearly. The fruits and vegetables in this garden ripen like clockwork, once a year. I’ve seen them do it fifteen times. Fifteen! But has Ning’s appearance changed any since the year he turned seven? You still think he’s alive, he’s real?”

Xiao Qian remains silent for a moment. Then I hear her crying.

Yan sighs. “Don’t lie to yourself any more. He’s just like us, nothing more than a toy. Why are you so sad? He’s not worth it.”

Xiao Qian just keeps on crying.

Yan sighs again. “I should never have picked him up and brought him back.”

Xiao Qian whispers through the tears, “Where can we go if we leave Ghost Street?”

Yan has no answer.

The sound of Xiao Qian’s crying makes my heart feel constricted. Silently, I sneak away and leave the old temple through a hole in the wall.

The thin layer of clouds chooses this moment to part. The cold moonlight scatters itself against the slate slabs of the street, congealing into drops of glittering dew. My bare feet against the ground feel so cold that my whole body shivers.

A few stores are still open along Ghost Street. The vendors greet me enthusiastically, asking me to sample their green bean biscuits and sweet osmanthus cake. But I don’t want to. What’s the point? I’m just like them, maybe even less than them.

Every ghost used to be alive. Their fake, mechanical bodies host real souls. But I’m fake throughout, inside and outside. From the day I was born, made, I was fake. Every ghost has stories of when they were alive, but I don’t. Every ghost had a father, a mother, a family, memories of their love, but I don’t have any of that.

Xiao Qian once told me that Ghost Street’s decline came about because people, real people, found more exciting, newer toys. Maybe I am one of those toys: made with newer, better technology, until I could pass for the real thing. I can cry, laugh, eat, piss and shit, fall, feel pain, ooze blood, hear my own heartbeat, grow up from a simulacrum of a baby — except that my growth stops when I’m seven. I’ll never be a grown up.

Ghost Street was built to entertain the tourists, and all the ghosts were their toys. But I’m just a toy for Xiao Qian.

Pretending that the fake is real only makes the real seem fake.

I walk slowly toward the eastern end of the street, until I stop under the Old Ghost Tree. The sweet fragrance of osmanthus fills the foggy night air, cool and calming. Suddenly I want to climb into the tree. That way, no one will find me.

The Old Ghost Tree leans down with its branches to help me.

I sit, hidden among the dense branches, and feel calmer. The crows perch around me, their glass eyes showing hints of a dark red glow. One of them speaks: “Ning, this is a beautiful night. Why aren’t you at Lanruo Temple, stealing vegetables?”

The crow is asking a question to which it already knows the answer. The Old Ghost Tree knows everything that happens on Ghost Street. The crows are its eyes and ears.

“How can I know for sure,” I ask, “that I’m a real person?”

“You can chop off your head,” the crow answers. “A real person will die with his head cut off, but a ghost will not.”

“But what if I cut off my head and die? I’ll be no more.”

The crow laughs, the sound grating and unpleasant to listen to. Two more crows fly down, holding in their beaks antique bronze mirrors. Using the little moonlight that leaks through the leaves, I finally see myself in the mirrors: small face, dark hair, thin neck. I lift the hair off the back of my neck, and in the double reflections of the mirrors, I see a crimson bar code against the skin, like a tiny snake.

I remember Xiao Qian’s cool hands against my spine on that hot summer night. I think and think, until tears fall from my eyes.

Winter Solstice, the Twenty-Second Solar Term:

This winter has been both dry and cold, but I often hear the sound of thunder in the distance. Xiao Qian says that it’s the Thunder Calamity, which happens only once every thousand years.

The Thunder Calamity punishes demons and ghosts and lost spirits. Those who can escape it can live for another thousand years. Those who can’t will be burnt away until no trace is left of them.

I know perfectly well that there’s no such thing as a “Thunder Calamity” in this world. Xiao Qian has been a ghost for so long that she’s now gone a little crazy. She holds onto me with her cold hands, her face as pale as a sheet of paper. She says that to hide from the Calamity, a ghost must find a real person with a good heart to stay beside her. That way, just like how one wouldn’t throw a shoe at a mouse sitting beside an expensive vase, the Duke of Thunder will not strike the ghost.

Because of her fear, my plan to leave has been put on hold. In secret I’ve already prepared my luggage: a few stolen potatoes, a few old shirts. My body isn’t growing any more anyway, so these clothes will last me a long time. I didn’t take any of the old copper coins from Xiao Qian though. Perhaps the outside world does not use them.

I really want to leave Ghost Street. I don’t care where I go; I just want to see the world. Anywhere but here.

I want to know how real people live.

But still, I linger.

On Winter Solstice it snows. The snowflakes are tiny, like white saw dust. They melt as soon as they hit the ground. Only a very thin layer has accumulated by noon.

I walk alone along the street, bored. In past years I would go to Lanruo Temple to find Yan Chixia. We would knock an opening in the ice covering the lotus pond, and lower our jury-rigged fishing pole beneath the ice. Winter catfish are very fat and taste fantastic when roasted with garlic.

But I haven’t seen Yan Chixia in a long time. I wonder if his beard and hair have grown out a bit.

Thunder rumbles in the sky, closer, then further away, leaving only a buzzing sensation in my ears. I walk all the way to the Old Ghost Tree, climb up into its branches, and sit still. Snowflakes fall all around me but not on me. I feel calm and warm. I curl up and tuck my head under my arms, falling asleep like a bird.

In my dream, I see Ghost Street turning into a long, thin snake. The Old Ghost Tree is the head, Lanruo Temple the tail, the slate slabs the scales. On each scale is drawn the face of a little ghost, very delicate and beautiful.

But the snake continues to writhe as though in great pain. I watch carefully and see that a mass of termites and spiders is biting its tail, making a sound like silkworms feeding on mulberry leaves. With sharp mandibles and claws, they tear off the scales on the snake one by one, revealing the flesh underneath. The snake struggles silently, but disappears inch by inch into the maws of the insects. When its body is almost completely eaten, it finally makes a sharp cry, and turns its lonesome head towards me.

I see that its face is Xiao Qian’s.

I wake up. The cold wind rustles the leaves of the Old Ghost Tree. It’s too quiet around me. All the crows have disappeared to who knows where except one that is very old and ugly. It’s crouching in front of me, its beak dangling like the tip of a long mustache.

I shake it awake, anxious. It stares at me with two broken-glass eyes, croaking to me in its mechanical, flat voice, “Ning, why are you still here?”

“Where should I be?”

“Anywhere is good,” it says. “Ghost Street is finished. We’re all finished.”

I stick my head out of the leaves of the Old Ghost Tree. Under the slate-grey sky, I see the murder of crows circling over Lanruo Temple in the distance, cawing incessantly. I’ve never seen anything like this.

I jump down from the tree and run. As I run along the narrow street, I pass dark doors and windows. The cawing of the crows has awakened many of the ghosts, but they don’t dare to go outside, where there’s light. All they can do is to peek out from cracks in doors, like a bunch of crickets hiding under houses in winter.

The old walls of Lanruo Temple, long in need of repairs, have been pushed down. Many giant mechanical spiders made of steel are crawling all over the main hall, breaking off the dark red glass shingles and sculpted wooden molding, piece by piece, and throwing the pieces into the snow on the ground. They have flat bodies, blue-glowing eyes, and sharp mandibles, as ugly as you can imagine. From deep within their bodies comes a rumbling noise like thunder.

The crows swoop around them, picking up bits of broken shingles and bricks on the ground and dropping them on the spiders. But they are too weak and the spiders ignore them. The broken shingle pieces strike against the steel shells, making faint, hollow echoes.

The vegetable garden has been destroyed. All that remains are some mud and pale white roots. I see one of the Monk’s rusted arms sticking out of a pile of broken bricks.

I run through the garden, calling for Yan Chixia. He hears me and slowly walks out of his cabin. He’s still wearing his battle gear: sedge hat over his head, the sword Demon Slayer in his hand. I want to shout for him to fight the spiders, but somehow I can’t spit the words out. The words taste like bitter, astringent paste stuck in my throat.

Yan Chixia stares at me with his sad eyes. He comes over to hold my hands. His hands are as cold as Xiao Qian’s.

We stand together and watch as the great and beautiful main hall is torn apart bit by bit, collapses, turns into a pile of rubble: shingles, bricks, wood, and mud. Nothing is whole.

They’ve destroyed all of Lanruo Temple: the walls, the main hall, the garden, the lotus pond, the bamboo grove, and Yan Chixia’s cabin. The only thing left is a muddy ruin.

Now they’re moving onto the rest of Ghost Street. They pry up the slate slabs, flatten the broken houses along the sides of the street. The ghosts hiding in the houses are chased into the middle of the street. As they run, they scream and scream, while their skin slowly burns in the faint sunlight. There are no visible flames. But you can see the skin turning black in patches, and the smell of burning plastic is everywhere.

I fall into the snow. The smell of burning ghost skin makes me vomit. But there’s nothing in my stomach to throw up. So I cry during the breaks in the dry heaves.

So this is what the Thunder Calamity looks like.

The ghosts, their faces burned away, continue to cry and run and struggle in the snow. Their footprints criss-cross in the snow, like a child’s handwriting. I suddenly think of Xiao Qian, and so I start to run again.

Xian Qian is still sitting in the dark bedroom. She combs her hair as she sings. Her melody floats in the gaps between the roaring, rumbling thunder of the spiders, so quiet, so transparent, like a dreamscape under the moon.

From her body come the fragrances of myriad flowers and herbs, layer after layer, like gossamer. Her hair floats up into the air like a flame, fluttering without cease. I stand and listen to her sing, my face full of tears, until the whole house begins to shake.

From on top of the roof, I hear the sound of steel clanging, blunt objects striking against each other, heavy footsteps, and then Yan Chixia’s shouting.

Suddenly, the roof caves in, bringing with it a rain of shingles and letting in a bright patch of grey sky full of fluttering snowflakes. I push Xiao Qian into a dark corner, out of the way of the light.

I run outside the house. Yan Chixia is standing on the roof, holding his sword in front of him. The cold wind stretches his robe taut like a grey flag.

He jumps onto the back of a spider, and stabs at its eyes with his sword. The spider struggles hard and throws Yan off its back. Then the spider grabs Yan with two sharp claws and pulls him into its sharp, metallic, grinding mandibles. It chews and chews, like a man chewing kimchee, until pieces of Yan Chixia’s body are falling out of its mandibles onto the shingles of the roof. Finally, Yan’s head falls off the roof and rolls to a stop next to my feet, like a hard-boiled egg.

I pick up his head. He stares at me with his dead eyes. There are no tears in them, only anger and regret. Then with the last of his strength, Yan closes his eyes, as though he cannot bear to watch any more.

The spider continues to chew and grind up the rest of Yan Chixia’s body. Then it leaps down from the roof, and, rumbling, crawls towards me. Its eyes glow with a deep blue light.

Xiao Qian jumps from behind me and grabs me by the waist, pulling me back. I pry her hands off of me and push her back into the dark room. Then I pick up Yan Chixia’s sword and rush towards the spider.

The cold blue light of a steel claw flashes before my eyes. Then my head strikes the ground with a muffled thump. Blood spills everywhere.

The world is now tilted: tilted sky, tilted street, tilted snow falling diagonally. With every bit of my strength, I turn my eyes to follow the spider. I see that it’s chewing on my body. A stream of dark red fluid drips out of its beak, bubbling, warm, the droplets slowly spreading in the snow.

As the spider chews, it slows down gradually. Then it stops moving, the blue light in its eyes dim and then go out.

As though they have received some signal, all the other spiders also stop one by one. The rumbling thunder stops, plunging the world into silence.

The wind stops too. Snow begins to stick to the spiders’ steel bodies.

I want to laugh, but I can’t. My head is now separated from my body, so there’s no way to get air into the lungs and then out to my vocal cords. So I crack my lips open until the smile is frozen on my face.

The spiders believed that I was alive, a real person. They chewed my body and tasted flesh and saw blood. But they aren’t allowed to harm real people. If they do they must destroy themselves. That’s also part of the rules. Ghosts, spiders, it doesn’t matter. Everyone has to follow the rules.

I never imagined that the spiders would be so stupid. They’re even easier to fool than ghosts.

The scene in my eyes grows indistinct, fades, as though a veil is falling from the sky, covering my head. I remember the words of the crows. So it’s true. When your head is cut off, you really die.

I grew up on this street; I ran along this street. Now I’m finally going to die on this street, just like a real person.

A pair of pale, cold hands reaches over, stroking my face.

The wind blows and covers my face with a few pale pink peach petals. But I know they’re not peach petals. They’re Xiao Qian’s tears, mixed with snow.

About the Author

As an undergraduate, Ms. Xia majored in Atmospheric Sciences at Peking University. She then entered the Film Studies Program at the Communication University of China, where she completed her Master’s thesis: “The Representation of Women in Science Fiction Films.” Currently, she’s pursuing a Ph. D. in Comparative Literature and World Culture at Peking University. She has been publishing science fiction and fantasy since 2004 in a variety of venues, including Science Fiction World and Jiuzhou Fantasy. Several of her stories have won the Milky Way, China’s most prestigious science fiction award. Besides writing and translating science fiction stories, she also writes film scripts. (In accordance with Chinese custom, Ms Xia’s surname is listed first on this story.)

All the Young Kirks and Their Good Intentions

Helena Bell

2249 A.D.

All the young Kirks in Riverside Public High School are assigned to the same Homeroom class. They sit together in the back corner on the far side from the door. They speak only to each other.

The young Kirk on the Moon goes to school with no one. Each of the colonists has a job and he or she is responsible only to the duties of that job. The others call him Fisher instead of James since he spends his days knee deep in the trout pond, allowing the fish to glide between his legs. When the fish become completely inured to his presence, he thrusts his hands into the water and grasps one around the belly. It fights and Fisher holds on. He is supposed to take it out of the water, to throw it into the white bucket by the shore, but Fisher never does. He lets the fish go and when he comes home, with nothing to show for it, his mother expresses her irrevocable disappointment and sends him to bed.

Jamie

All the young Kirks in Riverside are in love with Jamie. She wears tight green skirts and impractical shoes. When she crosses and uncrosses her legs all the Kirks, even the girls, turn their heads ever so slightly to watch. Jamie does not have a boyfriend as none of the Kirks are so bold as to admit their feelings to another. Sometimes, when the teacher lectures on the sixth extinction and flashes slides of West African frogs and fungal diseases, Jamie slides the heel of her shoe off and lets it dangle from her toes. She enjoys being wanted, but sometimes imagines instead that she is a girl named Lucy who is allowed to love whomever she chooses without upsetting the balance.

Jamie Kirk has a plan. Every year they send the best and brightest students to the moon to join the colony. She hears there are animals there long dead on earth, and everyone is beautiful and kind and exotic. There will be no other Kirks there to demand she talk and act in a certain way. She will be free.

The moon colony is very selective, only one couple from Riverside has ever gone, but Jamie knows she alone of the Kirks will be selected as she is the best, the brightest, the most adored. The other Kirks will beg her to bring them too as her one true love and companion. They will fight amongst themselves to see which of them is the most worthy, and Captain, or perhaps Jimmy, or Tiberia of the surreptitious movements, will win. When she is about to consent, a gleaming stranger with skin brighter than fresh fallen snow will appear as there is always a twist in these kinds of dreams.

Jamie is in love with the Challenger. She has been in love with him/her since the first night she climbed to the top of her parents’ barn and saw him/her walking on the road leading away from the river. Jamie believes the Challenger must a creature of magic: the embodiment of hope and freedom and walks the roads alone because he/she is unafraid of the night time creatures, of the illnesses which travel on the air. Jamie suspects The Challenger is an alien, an unknown race who wanders the dark roads for someone worthy of his/her company. Jamie is worthy. Jamie is worthy of all.

But Jamie cannot tell any of the others about the stranger as they are all in love with her and she must pretend to not be in love with them all equally. To balance between the sharp edges of desire and duty to her companions is a very Kirk-like thing to do. And so she waits.

T

All the young Kirks ride their bicycles to the Wal-Mart parking lot after school. They draw straws to see which of them will go inside and attempt to buy a case of beer. Though he does not know how, T’s straw is always the shortest. Captain hands him a wad of sweaty, five dollar bills and wishes him luck. With a confidence which is not his own, T walks in and slams the beer and the money on the counter.

“Go home,” the cashier says.

“Please,” T says. “Just once.”

The cashier shakes his head.

When T comes out, empty handed, Captain sighs and goes in himself.

“You just have to know how to talk to them,” Captain says.

“Yeah,” Jimmy says. “It’s all in the attitude.”

Captain hands the cans out in order of his favorites. T is always last, and he always refuses to take it. “I don’t drink shit.”

Captain smiles. “Now I see. You’re choosing not to buy it each time. Making an executive decision, saving us from this foul tasting beverage.”

T shrugs. “Think what you want.”

T suspects that the cashier and Captain have a secret arrangement designed to humiliate T in front of Jamie and everyone else. He fears that one day Captain will kick him out of the group entirely unless he can find a way to be useful. One night, as they ride home, T tells Captain that there’s a tree on T’s property from which, with a telescope, one can see into Jamie’s bedroom window.

“I know,” Captain says. “You can see into Red’s too,” and with a grin, rides off.

Red

Red has a job at the local Wal-Mart. She is the only one of the Riverside Kirks to have dropped out of school and seek employment elsewhere. She saves every cent and one day will buy a steamboat ticket to anywhere out of Iowa. She does not care about the moon or space or destiny. She loves her family and cheers for the local team at football games, but there is a deep restlessness in her feet. Each night she wakes from her dreams to find herself knee deep in the English River with her nightgown and underclothes floating away downstream. She doesn’t tell anyone of her plan to escape, least of all her brother T who will see it as yet another rejection. She suspects her presence is the only thing which protects him from the other Kirks. One day they will discover his birthday is not March 22, but 2 minutes past. She does not know what will happen then, but does not trust the calculated laziness in Captain’s eyes, or the pounding of Jimmy’s fists, or Jamie’s nonchalance, or any of the others whose only concern is moving in perfect synchronization with what is expected of them.

It must be the thought of her brother, the need to protect him which wakes her before she can dive into the deep part of the river and float away forever.

Walking back on the long dirt road Red feels her skin tingling in the moonlight and she knows that any boy looking out from his window will think she is a white stag or changeling or star. She hopes he falls in love with her so one day, when she is gone from this place, there will be an idea of her that takes root and grows. Perhaps in this way enough of her spirit will remain behind to cocoon her brother. Perhaps when she is gone he will fill into some of her Kirkness, enough to belong. Enough that the others will not push him away.

Water is always the problem, Red thinks. It moves and carries where it will. Red caresses the open sores on her legs, and the infections taking root therein. She wishes her sleeping brain had the sense to put on waders before stepping out the door but knows that contagion is an inevitable condition. If not the river, then the rain, then the tap, then the bottled water they import from the Delta in exchange for organic crops. At Wal-Mart she prepares the sleeping lofts where the outlying farmers will come to live when the river floods. No one builds for permanence anymore and she marvels at the other Kirks insistence on pattern.

Every day her brother comes in attempting to buy beer. Every day he fails.

“Why,” she asks T.

“If I don’t, they’ll kick me out.”

“Why,” she later asks the cashier.

“Have you seen the crap floating around in one of those cans?”

“But Captain?”

“Little prick deserves whatever salmonella he catches.”

In the winter months, Red returns to school and sits with the other Kirks in the back corner but she is ever so slightly out of step. While the others gaze longingly at the mauve pump dangling inches away from Jamie’s instep, Red is leaning back to examine the topographic maps on the walls. The Mississippi stretches from floor to ceiling, its many tributaries and old beds undulating in multi-colored bands. The teacher watches her and after class guides her hand up one stream and down the other.

“This is where we lined it with concrete to save the port, this is where it jumped its banks. This is where we think it may go, and where we now try to guide it.”

His hand on her wrist and the inside of her arm is insistent and imploring. “You can’t control a river forever. It goes where it wants. Or goes where it does not want, just to spite you.”

Red pulls back, the backs of her legs tingling with flashes of hot then cold. In the bathroom she pulls up her pant leg and dabs at the cracked scabs. She considers telling the nurse, but there’s not much to be done. She will be dead by summer, like so many others before her.

During her evening shift, Red tells the cashier she’ll make out with him if he agrees to sell T the beer.

“Just once,” she adds.

The cashier shrugs. “You’re not my type, but if it means that much to you.”

T

T’s mother says names have power. They are invasive, like a white fungus, a vine, a jumping carp. Names can take hold, changing the host and adapting it to become the perfect carrier. Why name your son and daughter after an ordinary person: Martha, George, John, Abigail when you can name your children something which will inspire them to a greatness which is not their own, but could be?

T suspects his mother failed him by having twins. If names have power, then surely that power can be diluted. Not all the Kirks are equal. Jamie is the one with whom they are all in love. Captain is the one who can charm. James is particularly good with guns. Jimmy is the bully, but he is strong and fair when it comes to the other Kirks, most of the time. Tiberius and Tiberia are lithe as willow branches and quick as rabbits. Once they claimed to have seen a falcon swooping down upon the highway, and if anyone has eyes fast enough to catch an extinct bird, they do. Jimmy K and Kirkland don’t speak much, but when they do it is measured and wise. What weaknesses he has identified in himself, T sees converted into strengths in others. They are like wandering palms in some ancient forest, constantly moving into the light. He alone feels himself slowly falling down. What space he used to occupy shall be trod over by many soft, green leaved feet.

One afternoon Captain hands T the cash and slaps him on the back. “This time, try not to fail.”

When he walks in the cashier heads him off. “Compliments of your sister,” he says and hands T a bottle of whiskey.

T is convinced that this is yet another ploy to humiliate him though he does not know how except for the suspicion that everything in his life is a mere contrivance to expose his weaknesses. When he reaches the group, Captain holds out his hand for the bottle but T ignores him. He opens it and hands it to Jimmy. It goes around and around, until finally someone hands it back to T, empty.

T shrugs. “Hasn’t tasted right since Scotland went under anyway.”

“How the fuck would you know?” someone says.

T doesn’t answer, but looks up at the sky. The sun has gone down and they all shiver in the cooling air. It will be difficult riding back in the dark, with loose stones and jostling cyclists on the road. One of them could take him out, if they perceived him as a threat or a mere annoyance. Jimmy might take him out just ’cause. For once the thought doesn’t scare him and he realizes that knowing death is certain and not caring is his first Kirk-like thought. Maybe the clock at the hospital was wrong; maybe his mother was right.

“Same way he knows everything,” Captain says. “He pretends. He thinks he’s better, different, special. But he’s not. He’s just the same as any one of us.”

T smiles back. “Think what you want,” he says.

No one attacks him on the way home, but T knows it is only a matter of time. None of them are safe; they are not a team and were never meant to be.

Jamie

The colony will select new immigrants any day now. Applications have been submitted: education, skills, physical exams. Jamie waits and waits while fending off the advances of the other Kirks.

“We will fly to the moon, you and I,” Captain says. “They let you take a companion, and I will always choose you.”

Weeks go by, months. Rumors spread that an illness has delayed the selection process and the most likely candidates will have advanced degrees in human physiology and evolutionary biology. Jamie doesn’t worry as she knows she is the perfect example of youth and health and they will want her for these attributes alone.

When the spring floods begin most of the Kirks begin to pair off: Kirkland comforts T after his sister’s funeral and rather than calling her a slut, the other girls begin turning to her for advice. When Jamie shifts her legs in class, fewer and fewer Kirks turn their heads. Jamie’s skirts become shorter and shorter until eventually the teacher pulls her aside and gives her a sweatshirt to tie around her waist.

“The noise your flesh makes when it sticks to the seat is distracting. This will help.”

Jamie pouts and twirls her hair in her fingers. “Is that the only thing about it which is distracting?”

“Yes. Now go sit down.”

Jamie believes when the floods recede everything will go back to normal. But it doesn’t. Even her white skinned alien has abandoned her, and no longer walks along the road by her house. She begins to doubt she ever saw him/her at all.

Only Captain favors Jamie openly and she pretends to favor him back to spite the others. She lets his hand wander up her leg and kisses him when the others are looking. She tells herself she is only salvaging her plan when she allows him to undress her in the dark. She is only recapturing her essence when he moves against her. But she feels nothing when he murmurs that their souls are mere whispers in the dark. She is robotic in her movements and she feels Captain, the other Kirks, the alien, her entire world slipping away from her. When they finish, Jamie goes back to the roof hoping that now she has sacrificed some small part of herself, perhaps the alien will come back. But instead there is only silence and the moon gleaming on the empty gravel.

Fisher

Everyone in the colony is slowly dying, save Fisher. He suspects his immunity is a sign of his guilt. He is the new typhoid Mary: asymptomatic and always suspiciously present. He eats only nutrition capsules and does not handle the food or animals. He walks while covered in latex gloves, hazmat suits and sanitizes constantly. If the others blame him, they do not let on and instead insist that he learn how to operate the colony in their inevitable absence.

No new immigrants will come, not until the disease is quarantined and eradicated. The computers and robots and Fisher will need to carry on, long enough to stave off the extinction. When each colonist dies, the others strip the body and place it outside the clear walls of the compound. No one is buried or incinerated. Rather, a pile of dehydrated corpses piles up in view of the corn fields where the wild deer graze. No single human matters, only the responsibility to the birds, amphibians, lizards and mammals which were saved and transplanted.

“We never intended to stay, you know,” Fisher’s mother tells him. “We just thought… a foothold. Something to get us started.”

Fisher knows that one day all the colonists save him will be dead and he will be consigned to carrying on alone. Earth will send him one companion each year and he will fall in love with him or her each time but he or she will die and another one sent. He will have to be brave enough each time, hoping that this one is different.

He reaches into the water and lets the fish glide by. If one looks long enough, one can see a pattern in any movement but it does not mean you can change it. Still, he believes one day someone will arrive who is strong enough to adapt to the path on which he or she finds herself. One day someone will open the shuttle bay door and be the person with whom Kirk can settle down and live a long, fruitful life.

About the Author

Helena Bell is an occasional poet, writer, and international traveler which means that over half of what she says is completely made up, the other half is probably made up, and the third half is about the condition of the roads. She has a BA, an MFA, a JD, and is pursuing a Tax LLM in order to fulfill her life long dream of having more letters follow her name than are actually in it. Her work has appeared in Brain Harvest, Daily Science Fiction, and Rattle.

From Farm to Fable: Food, Fantasy, and Science Fiction

Matthew Johnson

Food is one of our most basic desires. It’s the first thing we ask for after being born, the fuel for our work and our reward at the end of a long day. Because of this, it’s been an integral element of storytelling since Eve ate the apple, and science fiction and fantasy are no exception. It’s true that food has had a lower profile in the fantastic genres than in literature as a whole — but while it’s rarely the star of the show, food frequently plays an essential role.

Perhaps the most common use of food in SF and fantasy is to ground a work. Taste is our most intimate sense, the only one that we experience by taking things into our bodies. For this reason, food imagery can make the most outlandish setting more real and immediate by tying it to familiar sensations. J. R. R. Tolkien, for example, had his characters eat essentially the same foods he enjoyed, and there is a strong connection drawn in his The Fellowship of the Rings between food and home: the last scene set in the Shire is a dinner with Farmer Maggot, whose famous mushrooms Frodo was beaten for stealing many years before. The basket of those mushrooms that the hobbits are gifted with serves as a reminder of what they are leaving behind. It is the homeliness of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit — in which Bilbo’s first challenge is to cook breakfast for thirteen hungry, fussy dwarves — that helped set those books apart from Tolkien’s earlier work and contributed to their accessibility and timelessness.

The association of food and home is a natural one. Our notions of home are made up largely of the flavors and smells of what we cook and eat. This applies on the level of a family — most of us have experienced the mild culture shock of visiting a house that uses margarine when we are used to butter, or white bread instead of brown — but it is even more powerful in defining a whole culture. It’s the smells of different foods — say, of certain spices or kinds of meat — that can sometimes cause friction when peoples from different cultures are forced to share space.

SF and fantasy writers take advantage of this phenomenon when they use food to establish distance rather than familiarity, as George R. R. Martin does in his A Song of Ice and Fire series. While the largely authentic medieval cooking he describes is not strange enough to make his setting feel entirely alien, it communicates a powerful sense that the novels’ world is different from ours — partly by featuring foods that have fallen out of favor, such as lamprey pie (see the excellent Inn at the Crossroads blog for recipes and more information on the use of pies in Martin’s series), but also by highlighting the regional and seasonal differences in food. As Waldo Jaquith points out in his essay “On the Impracticality of a Cheeseburger,” the biggest gap between the present and the past is not what we eat but when we eat it. Until the development of railroads, canning, and refrigeration, along with the complex financial infrastructure that makes it profitable to ship and store food around the world, only a tiny number of foods could be eaten out of season. As a result, our ancestors’ meals were deeply rooted to the time of year in a way that we can hardly imagine.

Using food in this way, to highlight cultural differences rather than similarities, is a common SF trope. Works of SF nearly always include some token examples of foods that are exotic on a surface level — an obvious one being the blue milk in Star Wars — but this technique may also be used in a more thorough way to make aliens seem more alien. In particular, aliens’ eating habits are often shown as being disgusting to humans. For example, Klingon food in Star Trek is generally used as a challenge or an obstacle to the humans who must eat it: Our first introduction to Klingon cuisine on Star Trek: The Next Generation comes when Commander Riker eats a Klingon meal, to the open disgust of his colleagues, in order to accustom himself to it before serving as an exchange officer on a Klingon ship. The archetypal Klingon food — a living (and still moving) worm called gagh — is an example of a classic cultural slander: To accuse others of eating their food raw is to claim that they either have not developed or worse have rejected the use of fire for cooking — making them so savage as to be barely above the level of animals.

Historically, the only food-related slander worse than saying that people didn’t cook their food was to accuse them of eating the wrong things entirely — like other people. An example in fantasy is Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, whose eating habits — implied by his name, which is a near-anagram of “cannibal” — justify Prospero’s conquest of the island and Caliban’s enslavement. The ingestion of human tissue is, of course, a frequent activity of certain monsters, most notably vampires and zombies. In both cases the bite may transform the victim as well, a common feature of cannibalistic monsters. The Wendigo, according to the Algonquian peoples, was most often a malevolent spirit, but it could also be a person transformed by eating human flesh. In SF, humans are more likely to be victims of human-eating aliens — as in (spoiler alert) the Twilight Zone episode “To Serve Man” — than to be cannibals themselves.

There are exceptions to this rule, though, one of the most famous being the film Soylent Green. Although Harry Harrison complained about the changes made to the source material for Soylent Green — his novel Make Room! Make Room!, which did not contain any references to cannibalism or even the phrase “soylent green” — those changes give the movie a deeper currency than the novel. By juxtaposing heavily processed food with cannibalism, Soylent Green’s very title has become a shorthand for the way in which our industrial food system, thanks to which we may go our entire lives eating food that has been picked, processed, cooked, and packaged out of our sight, distances us from our moral responsibility toward what we eat — leaving open the possibility that what we eat could be soylent green without our knowing it.

Like the Wendigo’s cannibalism, the invention of soylent green is caused by famine. This illustrates another way in which SF uses food: to speculate about scarcity and abundance. One of the building blocks of SF is the question, “What happens if this goes on?” — and many writers have explored the idea that developments in technology, society, or demographics might lead us to either critical shortages of food or to a future where those shortages are a thing of the past. Both visions exist side by side in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. Musing on the increasing economic disparity of his day, Wells describes a life of ultimate leisure for the indolent, upper-class Eloi. While all their physical needs are tended to, however, the Eloi themselves end life as food for the subhuman Morlocks — a situation Wells likely imagined as both an echo and a reversal of Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, which satirically suggested that Ireland’s potato famine could be solved if the Irish were only willing to eat their own children.

Genuinely endless food supplies are not often found in SF, and when they do they are rarely the central idea of the story. Rather they are devices that keep the writer from having to deal with food as an issue, such as the food dispensers in Philip José Farmer’s Riverworld and the replicators in Star Trek. Nevertheless, food pills and machines have become fixed in the general public’s mind as one of the key elements of SF. Rather than being created by SF writers, though, the idea of the food pill more likely arose from nutritionists of the 19th century, who attempted to solve hunger by boiling down food (in some cases literally) to its supposedly essential elements. The fact that those who embarked on these diets often became worse off eventually led to the discovery of vitamins. Ironically, the isolation of vitamins in pill form encouraged a widespread belief that a complete food pill was on its way, whereas the truth was that people needed vitamins to supplement the heavily processed and barely nutritious “food pills” they were already eating.

For most contemporary readers, especially those in more developed areas of the world such as North America, the notion of a food shortage is so distant that fantasies of abundance have little power. What has taken their place is the imagining of food that is not just free but guilt-free — such as meat that can be eaten without killing animals. This, too, may be played straight or satirically, but it is the satirical examples that have endured. For instance: the vat-grown meat found in Ferderik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants and William Gibson’s Neuromancer; the Chickie Nobs in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, genetically engineered to have no heads and therefore feel no pain; and of course the sentient Meat served in Douglas Adams’ The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, which introduces itself to diners and, in an effort to soothe their consciences, tries to reassure them by insisting, “I’ll be very humane.”

One place the fantasy of an endless food supply is still alive is children’s fiction. Food is a major part of the power dynamic between adults and children, who learn early that the pleasures of dessert only come after the sacrifice of eating vegetables. This dynamic is reproduced in Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games series, where the impoverished Districts make do with fish and greens stew (and, no doubt, broccoli and Brussels sprouts) while the rulers in the Capitol enjoy such exotic treats as a purple-fleshed melon. With a few exceptions (such as foie gras, surely chosen for its associations with gluttony and cruelty), nearly all of the foods associated with the Capitol are sweets: melon, pancakes, marmalade, and orange juice — as close to candy as is possible in the world of the series. Because it is controlled, withheld, and only occasionally doled out by adults, candy is a natural focus for children’s fantasies. When British author Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was published in 1964, many readers had vivid memories of wartime shortages (the rationing of candy had only ended in England in 1953), making the image of endless chocolate extra appealing. But the novel’s fantasy goes beyond mere abundance: It also imagines that all the restrictions adults place on eating candy may be removed by such magical treats as caramels that fill the dental cavities they create.

The most lasting images from Dahl’s book (and its film versions) are not the visions of plenty, however, but those of transformation — such as Violet Beauregarde’s metamorphosis into a giant blueberry as a result of chewing experimental gum. The notion that food can change us has a long history; as the adage has it, “You are what you eat.” In some cases this means that food acts essentially as a drug. To the cyborgs in Kage Baker’s Company series, chocolate is literally a drug, intoxicating them as alcohol does normal humans. More often, though, food is seen as having a medicinal effect — a common feature of many medical beliefs, such as the medieval theory of humors and the central tenet of the health-food movements of the last two centuries. Soylent green is in part a satire of health food; so, too, is the deadly yogurt in the movie The Stuff, which is also a critique of the have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too mentality that has produced low-fat versions of ice cream and mayonnaise.

In fantasy, the transformative effects of food tend to run deeper, altering the soul as well as the body. Lembas, the Elven bread in The Lord of the Rings, resembles a food pill in its physical effects, but it is also shown as lightening the souls of good people while being inedible to evil creatures such as Gollum. Underlining its healing power, Tolkien also refers to lembas as waybread — the Anglo-Saxon name for plantain leaf, an herb whose healing and protective powers were so revered that it was numbered among Woden’s Nine Herbs in the medieval English tradition. Food can also be the cause of a negative transformation, and in some cases may change a character’s identity entirely: In some Norse sources, Loki turns from mischievous to truly evil only after eating the heart of a witch. Similarly, visitors to fairyland are typically warned to avoid eating any food there, or else they will be forced to lose their humanity and remain forever — as the Greek goddess Persephone was bound to remain in the underworld for half of every year after eating six pomegranate seeds.

While Loki brought his transformation on himself, Persephone was tricked by someone she should have been able to trust — her host Hades, the god of the dead. For the ancient Greeks, xenia — the responsibility of a host to a guest (and vice versa) — was one of the highest values. The relationship between guest and host is symbolized by food. To break bread with someone is to accept them as a guest, essentially considering them a part of the family for the length of their stay. Because of this, meals are often used in fiction to bring antagonists together in a situation where their conflict must be restrained; think of all the dinners Dracula has served his guests over the years. But they may also serve as symbols of reconciliation or restoration, as the meals served at Beorn’s and Elrond’s houses in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings do, or of a restoration of the natural order. An example of the latter is the ending of every one of René Goscinny’s Asterix stories, where Asterix’s Gaulish village joins together in a feast that shows all is once more right with the world.

The ultimate expression of the idea of feast-as-reconciliation is a wedding, in which two unrelated groups are permanently joined; this is why comedies traditionally end with weddings. The symbolic power of weddings makes it doubly powerful when those attending betray the ethic of xenia, as in the Red Wedding in Martin’s A Storm of Swords. (The link between food and xenia here is underlined by Robb Stark’s request to be fed just bread and salt, which symbolize the host’s duty to his guest in the world of the series.) A similar use of xenia in play is the scene in The Empire Strikes Back where Lando Calrissian ushers the heroes to dinner with Darth Vader. This serves as a dramatic betrayal of xenia, as Calrissian is violating his duty to his guests. Placing Vader at the head of the table makes the scene a parody of xenia as well, by having a host who presumably cannot eat.

To the Greeks, the greatest offender against xenia was Tantalus, who failed as both guest and host. After stealing ambrosia from the gods’ table, he served them his own son for dinner. For this he was punished by being made to stand in a pool of water that drained whenever he tried to drink it, near a fruit tree whose branches pulled away whenever he tried to pick from it — which gave rise to the English word tantalized, something which may happen to you when you read about some of the meals described in SF and fantasy.

About the Author

Matthew Johnson lives in Ottawa with his wife Megan and their sons Leo and Miles, where he works as a media educator and writes fantasy and SF when time and circumstances permit. His novel Fall From Earth was published in 2009, and his short fiction, which has appeared in places such as Asimov’s Science Fiction, Fantasy & Science Fiction and Strange Horizons, will be collected in 2013 in Irregular Verbs from Chizine Publications. Many of his stories involve food in some way, in particular “Long Pig,” which may be the only fantasy story ever written in the form of a restaurant review.

Everything’s Surprising: A Conversation with Lev AC Rosen

Jeremy L. C. Jones

In All Men of Genius by Lev AC Rosen, Violet Adams doesn’t necessarily want to be a man, but she does want to attend the prestigious, all-male Illyria College. Denied what she desires by social convention, she does what Viola in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and the male leads in Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest do: she changes her external identity in order to get what she wants.

In the process, Violet learns about herself, the society she lives in, and the way that society attempts to define her. At its heart, you see, All Men of Genius is a book about identity.

“Identity,” said Rosen, “how it’s formed, what it means, how it shifts and how we feel about the labels put on us. It’s also about invention — of identity, of course, but also of art and science and what it means for us, as people to create. Yeah, that sounds crazy-pretentious enough, I think.”

As you can imagine, there is nothing simple about Violet — her character or her situation — and there lies the beautiful heart of this book: the lead character.

“The truth would come out sooner or later,” Rosen writes early in the novel, “[Violet] just needed to make sure it was later, after she had made her genius so clear that the world could no longer scorn or punish her for what lay between her legs.”

Rosen captures Victorian England and academia with elegance, with plenty of stained glass, gears, and arched ceilings; mistaken identity, alter egos, and love triangles; human ambivalence, murderous automata, and mad science.

Through all this dances Violet and a charming ensemble of characters. And they, like Rosen, dance with great elan, plenty of gracefulness with just enough reckless abandon to keep each other and readers off-balance. The truth, the novel promises, will come out sooner or later.

Below, Rosen and I talk about style, gender roles, and the joy of writing about a large ensemble cast and the ways they are shaped by their world.

How would you describe your style?

This is hard one. I like to say every book writes itself. In All Men of Genius, I very consciously imitated a Victorian Style while still trying to stay true to my own voice and keeping it accessible to a modern audience. And I also tried to stay true (or at least lovingly pay homage to) the voices of Shakespeare and Wilde (although I also lovingly mocked their voices in the form of two rabbits, but that’s another story…).

But now, I’m working on a noir, and I’m trying to stay true to that hardboiled, pulpy noir style/voice. It’s extremely different from All Men of Genius, because the story is so different that the style is has to be told in has to be different, too. The story tells itself, and shapes its own style. That said, I like to think that I have some sort of style and it is present in everything I write. But if you asked me to pin down what that was, I don’t know if I’d be able to. I think someone else is going to have to come along and say what the Lev AC Rosen Style is.

Where did you start with All Men of Genius? What came first — image, character, situation, something else all together?

An image of the wall of gears in Illyria. I’m a big fan of the aesthetic of gears, though I couldn’t say why. But I especially love them en masse, huge clanking arrays of them, and when I first set out to write something Steampunk, this image of a wall of rotating gears was the first thing that came to mind. It was almost like a church in my mind, with spots where the gears parted for stained glass, and huge arched ceilings. I think that image pretty much stayed the same in the book.

What is the secret to writing such beautiful descriptions?

Ha. Thank you for saying that the descriptions are beautiful. As for how to write them, I think you have to find those images beautiful first and just keep writing and rewriting them until you feel like you’ve done as best credit as you can to what’s in your head. Not everyone is going to think they’re beautiful — the key is that you think they’re beautiful.

How closely does the book follow Twelfth Night?

Well, the inclusion of The Importance of Being Earnest as another inspiration does create some deviations — though not very many, as both plays have similar themes. There’s cross-dressing, though this time to prove something, as opposed to doing it for a job, and there’s a love triangle, of course… it’s difficult to answer this one without spoiling the book, since the changes I made primarily effect the ending. But there are more characters, and the more minor characters from Twelfth Night get more screen time, as it were. Sorry, I don’t think I’m answering this one very well — I really don’t want to give too much away.

Is there a moment in the book that stands out for you?

A moment? I love the parts where Miriam stands in the rain. Miriam was inspired by Mary, from Twelfth Night, but I decided to really expand her character because I wanted to explore women’s roles in Victorian London — not just the upper classes, but the lower classes and outsiders as well. Miriam is a Persian Jew, so she’s visibly “other” and culturally “other” and I really enjoyed writing her and her place in society.

Miriam’s scenes in the rain started out as my wanting to make sure there was some reference to the Wind and the Rain song that Feste sings in Twelfth Night, but when I did some research on Jews in mid-19th-century Persia, I came across an actual, historical law that forbade Jews from going out in the rain. Which, of course is terrible, but it opened up a lot for me to do with Miriam. So I loved writing these rain scenes for Miriam, because the mere act of her being outside in the rain is this act of intense rebellion and freedom. Which is what a lot of Miriam’s character is about.

I’m also really proud of the tiny things that people might not notice — little links between smaller characters, like which professor is sleeping with which other professor’s mother, and who Fiona’s first client was when she was a prostitute. I love little links like that.

What makes for a compelling protagonist in general and in a speculative fiction in particular? Can you talk a little about creating Violet or another character?

I don’t know if there’s a good answer to that question, because not all characters are compelling to all people. I know readers who refuse to read anything with female or queer protagonists, because as straight men, they feel they just can’t relate to anyone else who isn’t a straight man. This might be more a limited mindset, but it’s an extreme example of the idea that not all characters appeal to all people. That said, I think what’s important is making sure your characters are complete, and well-rounded. That means that while Ashton is a bit of a flamboyant dandy gay-man-stereotype, I tried to make him more than that — he worries about his sister, keeps things from his family, he has contradictory motivations and doesn’t always know why he feels a certain way — that’s human. Were he just a flouncing stereotype, or merely had a nod to humanity by giving him some secret sadness that pops out for one scene, he would be doing a great disservice to the reader.

In the case of Violet, it would have been easy to fall into the super-girl trap, where she had no flaws and way amazing in every way and never doubted herself, etc. etc. etc. But doubt makes a person real. Flaws make people real. Violet is flawed — she’s massively overconfident, judges people fairly quickly, and often times doesn’t really know what she’s feeling because she’s so focused on her inventions. But she’s also amazing. I love her because of her flaws, not in spite of them, and I think that’s how you make characters that people really love — no matter the genre — by making them human.

What does having a character disguise her gender allow you to do?

It lets you talk openly about gender. “Oh you do things this way” and such. Essentially, for those of us who are cisgendered, we grow up conditioned and socialized a certain way based on our sex (even your super-liberal hippie families can’t keep a child from seeing the pink and blue differentiations at some point. I mean, maybe if they were raised in a cult-situation, cut off from the rest of the world… but I digress). When you have a character who switches the outward appearance of her sex (I won’t speak to writing a trans-character, I think that’s probably very different as it’s about physically changing into what the character already is on the inside), you get to examine that socialization from the point of view of someone outside that socialization. So, things that are taken for granted about the way a man behaves might be questioned by a woman disguised as a man.

I think about that Simpsons episode a lot. The one where the school gets divided up by gender, and Lisa disguises herself as a man to joins the boys section. She does this because in the girls side she finds the math to be nonsense and soft (”what does a four feel like?”), so the implication is that she thinks “like a man” (although the episode is simultaneously mocking the idea that genders think specific ways) — but she doesn’t know how to “act like a man.” I think having a character disguised as the opposite gender is great, because you get to explore the performativity of gender. It’s not about how people think or look or any of that — it’s how they behave without thinking. Which is fascinating stuff.

What spin have you put on this classic situation?

I think the academic setting is a new one — so often you see women disguised as men to go to war, or travel alone, but it’s not usually a “for academic achievement” scenario. But also I really tried to explore not just what it means to dress up as a dude in Victorian London, but what it means to be a woman — how does Cecily, who gets to go to the school as a woman, compare to Violet, in terms of how they think about their situations. And what about Miriam, who is there, but not as a student? Or Fiona, who is completely outside it? I tried to really deconstruct so much of what gender meant back then. How’s that for a tedious, academic answer?

Did it ever get hard juggling such a large ensemble of characters?

I love large ensembles. They’re not hard for me to keep track of because every character is totally human in my mind — what’s hard is cutting. Just because I know a thousand different things about each character and wrote more detailed backstories and scenes doesn’t mean they belong in the book. But when I cut parts of their story, it feels like I’m hurting friends. But you have to do it. Not every piece of information is relevant. Fiona, especially, got a lot of her scenes and story cut, and I had to fight my agent to keep what is there. She was almost totally done away with. But I think she’s important because she’s the only really lower-class woman in the book. She’s the one who has to fight to survive and do whatever she can, no matter how mercenary it might seem, and she’s the one who can call Violet on her BS, and also the one Violet turns to when she wants to know what behaving like a woman should look like (which gets us back to gender performance).

But back to your question — like I said, I had to cut a lot. That’s the hardest part of writing a large cast. To give you an idea, the book was over 100 pages longer before we gave it to my publisher. That’s over 100 pages I essentially cut from my characters lives. But the cuts had to be made. Otherwise there’d be a 30 page stall in the middle of the action to talk about Bracknell’s childhood. And while that might be interesting, it isn’t necessary for the book.

That said, I also know reading a large ensemble can be hard for some folks. But I wasn’t trying to write a big action adventure here. I was trying to write something about people in a place and time and how they are shaped by the world and shape it in return. This goes back to your question about style: Were I trying to write a fast-paced gunslinger, there wouldn’t have been a large ensemble to begin with. The book writes itself and it creates exactly the right amount of characters.

Did the cast and crew ever get out of hand in the writing of this? Did they surprise you?

I’m not a writer who “shows up to the page” and sits in front of a blank screen waiting for the next word to come. I respect that technique but it doesn’t work for me. I’m a lie-in-bed-staring-at-the-ceiling-thinking writer. I don’t sit down at the computer until I know the next scene I’m going to write and then it flows out very quickly. I go back and fiddle with language as I’m writing it, of course, but overall, when I sit down at the keyboard, I know what’s going to happen. So the characters never surprise me as I’m writing. Sometimes, when I’m doing the thinking part, one of them will suddenly smack me upside the head with what should have been an obvious choice, but when you’re just lying there thinking the characters and story have such free reign that there are no surprises, because everything is a surprise.

What’s next for you? You mentioned writing a noir novel. Can you talk a little more about that?

I only just finished a rough draft, and it needs some serious work before I even show it to my agent, but it’s a futuristic noir, a sort of Bladerunner with climate change sort of thing. The central character is a detective named Simone Pierce, and she gets caught up in what first appears to be a cheating husband case, then an art heist, but in the end is something stranger than all that. Again, I’m playing with gender a bit as I am familiar with noir themes and archetypes and I’ve switched around the genders while trying to keep the old-school noir feel alive. So we have a female detective with men constantly fawning over her, and a possible homme fatale, plus a female nemesis and a female partner-figure. So it’s classical noir, but with science fiction and with plenty of gender bending, which changes how the classical noir elements come across.

My agent and I are also hoping to try to sell my first novel, which is a magical realism-y novel about seven interconnected people in NYC who don’t realize how connected they are. I’m also working on a YA and I have a rough draft of a sequel to All Men of Genius finished. But I put it aside for a while because I was feeling a little steampunked-out. I should be going back to it soon, though.

Oh, and the German version of All Men of Genius comes out in the spring. I don’t speak German, but I’m looking forward to seeing the book in German. It’s being translated by someone named Hanne Hammer, which is possibly one of the best names ever.

Wait, did you say a sequel? To All Men of Genius? What’s it about?

I did! It takes place two years later and opens with Jack and Cecily’s wedding, which is interrupted by the sudden appearance of Cecily’s long-lost father, who says he’s promised her hand to the prince of Lemuria and promptly kidnaps her. Jack and his friends, of course, then begin a search for Illyria so they can rescue her. The book focuses more on Jack and Cecily, but it also shows how Illyria has changed in the past few years, since Violet’s plan, and also how Violet and Earnest have adjusted to married life — Violet, after all, is a Duchess now, and the standards of gender conformity are much higher than they were when she lived at home and had only Mrs. Wilks to deal with. Now she has all of society to deal with, and she’s too famous to just go out in drag again.

This one is inspired by An Ideal Husband and The Tempest, and I’ll be frank, I sometimes wonder if The Tempest, being a problem play, was the best choice. It’s leaning more adventure-y than comedy of errors-ish. It’s also somewhat darker. A character from the first book dies, in fact (at least in the current draft). But as I said, it’s only a rough draft. It needs a lot of work before we show it to my editor and ask her to give me money for it.

Any parting words?

Is it appropriate to say “buy my book” here? Like ninety times in a row? No? Ah, well. But I will say that people can visit my webpage, LevACRosen.com for the usual blogging, news and such, but also for reading group questions, and this amazing lockpicking game my friend Sam made, which unlocks passwords to deleted scenes from the book. It’s also unnervingly addictive.

And thank you, Jeremy. This was a really fun interview.

About the Author

Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and teacher. He is the Staff Interviewer for Clarkesworld Magazine and a frequent contributor to Kobold Quarterly and Booklifenow.com. He teaches at Wofford College and Montessori Academy in Spartanburg, SC. He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006. Jones lives in Upstate South Carolina with his wife, daughter, and flying poodle.

Wendigo Waistcoat Spyglass and Other Words with Lisa L. Hannett

Jeremy L. C. Jones

In Bluegrass Symphony, Lisa L. Hannett writes of a place that is, perhaps, somewhere (or nowhere) in the rural United States — a place that is inspired, in equal parts, by the American South and Medieval Icelandic literature.

“Lisa Hannett weaves words the way the Norns weave fates, elegantly, seamlessly and with just a little bit of cruelty,” said Angela Slatter, author of Sourdough and Other Stories. “Her stories are astonishing in their scope, so strange and yet familiar. Her ability to insert the unlikely and the terrifying into the everyday with such a convincing touch that you have no problem believing in Swan Girls, Minotaur rodeos, soul cigars and twig-wives, is simply stunning.”

Raised in Ottawa, Canada, Hannett now lives in Adelaide, South Australia, a coastal city much like Charleston, SC on a very weird day. Her fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, Weird Tales, ChiZine, Midnight Echo, Shimmer, Electric Velocipede, Tesseracts 14, and Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded, among other places. She is a graduate of Clarion South.

There is a relentless musicality to Hannett’s prose and fierceness to her vision. Beware of her beautiful song.

“L.L. Hannett’s work has the uncanny ability to get under your skin,” said Ann VanderMeer. “Her stories are so comfortable and familiar until they turn on you in the best possible way. Never a boring minute, her fiction is fiercely original and imaginative.”

Below, Hannett and I talk about style, the short form, and “the human side of even the nastiest creatures.”

Why the short form? What is it that you love about the short story?

Initially, I started writing short stories because I was also working on my PhD, which is a long and often tedious process. I wanted to write something brief, immediate, with a clear end in sight. Also, I had loads of ideas for stories, and no matter how much I tried to ignore them, more kept cropping up. I’d be reading all sorts of dry academic articles or translating passages from the Icelandic sagas while my back-brain was jumping up and down, shouting “There’s a crow stuck in a mechanical carnival! What’re you going to do about it?” or “She’s got to sing while eating corpses! How’s she going to do that without a voice?” Things like that are hard to ignore.

I grew to love short stories not just because they were convenient to write, but because they are beautiful capsules of narrative. They are complete without revealing everything. They evoke rather than explain at length. They make us wish they were longer, even though we know that stretching them out to novel length would break them, make them somehow less magical. I love that in short stories things can happen quickly — but since they’re so brief, they can also get away with having nothing happen at all. They can be vignettes, or philosophical musings, and still be satisfying. Take Kij Johnson’s “Spar”: very little happens, plot-wise, but simultaneously so much is going on in this story that we want to re-read it almost before we’ve reached the final paragraph. I love writing short stories because it’s possible to hold the whole narrative in your head, from beginning to end, and know all the twists and turns and nuances — not so with a novel (at least not for me, anyway). A novel unfolds. A novel has to be teased out. A novel needs time. But a short story is complex but compact. And it can offer more instant gratification.

What should a short story do? How should it work on the reader?

A few years ago at Clarion, I was chatting with Sean Williams about this very subject and he described the function of a short story in a way I’ll never forget. He said to imagine the short story as one facet in a diamond. In one story, you can explore that facet completely, and through it you can describe glints and corners of the other planes — but you can’t draw them fully into your piece. Novels are long and big enough to accommodate the whole diamond, but stories are more effective if they are confined to one aspect. It’s basically another take on Poe’s “Single Effect” theory, but presented in a prettier package.

As I mentioned before, I think short stories should evoke ideas beyond the single effect without actually exploring them. Readers should get the feeling that they’ve been in a three-dimensional world with a complete history and realistic characters, but without having to sift through superfluous detail to get that feeling — the kind of extra information that would be fine, expected even, in a novel. In short stories, no word should be wasted. They should be trimmed and trimmed and trimmed again until all that is left is what is essential to the narrative.

What is style and how would you describe yours?

The way I see it, style is inherent in narrative structure, tone, and voice. Style should reinforce the story’s world and its inhabitants; in other words, it should give readers extra insight into how the setting and characters function. It should highlight the story’s themes, manipulate the pace, and help to convey the concepts driving the piece. For instance, if we were presented with a story about people in exile, disconnected from their homeworld, floating about lost in space, I’d hope the style would echo and emphasize their plight: sentences would be short, choppy, disconnected, not flowing lyrical rambles. Or if you were writing a story in which the protagonist is insane, you might want the structure of your piece to be off-kilter. You might leave chunks of information out so that the reader feels a bit nuts too — that sort of thing. In this respect, Jeff VanderMeer’s Finch offers readers one of the most satisfying blends of style and content published in recent years.

My style changes from piece to piece. I like to set myself challenges, to write from different perspectives, with various voices, drawing on or breaking conventions. I’ve recently written a Regency fairy story in which the language and long sentences are part of the point. “Gutted” (Shimmer) and “The Good Window” (Fantasy) deal with gruesome and harrying subjects, so I’ve kept the style simple. By contrast, the stories in Bluegrass Symphony are, for the most part, about rednecks and hillbillies who live in the Middle of Nowhere, U.S.A. Many of these people have a twang in their voices. They have little to no education, their society is deprived (and depraved), superstitious and sometimes downright nasty. And yet… Publisher’s Weekly describes the style of these stories as “filled with lush imagery, unsettling concepts, indirect prose, and multilayered plots” and I think this description is spot-on. Just because these people are poor, uneducated farmers doesn’t mean they’re simple, less emotionally complex, less capable of being beautiful, or less pathetic and hopeful than people with money and cars and city lives. I wanted the style of the stories in Bluegrass Symphony to reflect this complexity — to contrast with the Deliverance stereotype that often comes to mind when we think of isolated, close-knit rural towns.

What has Medieval Icelandic literature taught you about life, love, and writing?

A famous Icelandic scholar once said that all of the medieval Family Sagas (Íslendingasögur) could be summarized in four words: “Farmers came to blows.” This might seem overly simplistic for such a rich and broad body of literature, but the more you read these sagas, the more you realize what an insightful comment this is. Saga characters are perhaps most famous for their stereotypical “Viking” characteristics — pillaging and plundering, sailing, adventuring, fighting — just as stereotypical “hillbillies” are often portrayed as banjo-plucking, inbred, narrow-minded, toothless hicks. In both cases, we are poorer, as readers and writers, if we stop at these generalized, superficial descriptions. One of the most beautiful things about the Icelandic works is that, stylistically, they are quite straightforward. However, they use Spartan sentences to convey multiple symbolic meanings. These are masterpieces in restraint; universally, the Íslendingasögur use words economically to express extremely complex ideas. They are riddled with black humor, veiled threats, incredible intelligence and, in most cases, passion.

These Icelandic characters are far from the mindless horned-helmet-wearing brutes we often see cast in “Viking” roles. There certainly is violence, and this violence is driven by honor — but this isn’t some comic book trope. Honor in Iceland entails much more than some incontrovertible, ephemeral notion of “duty” to one’s “chief”. Honor is bound up with emotion and love. It’s about avoiding embarrassment; proving your worth as a lover; proving yourself to your parents; proving yourself as a human being who warrants remembering.

Spending six years analyzing the Íslendingasögur has affected my fiction writing not so much stylistically as in terms of characterization. I can’t help but look for the human side of even the nastiest creatures. I also can’t help but couch beautiful elements in fraught or horrific contexts.

Where does a short story usually start for you — image, turn of phrase, character, situation, something else altogether?

All of the above, really, but if I had to narrow it down I’d say it’s mostly the first two. I am a visual person: my first degree was in Fine Arts (painting and photography) so a lot of my ideas come to me as disconnected pictures or tableaux in my mind before they translate into words. “Carousel,” the first story in Bluegrass Symphony, first appeared as an image of a girl in a birdcage, surrounded by moths. I could see “Down the Hollow” — the snow, the ravine, the girl, Jesse’s face — before I started writing the piece itself. “Forever, Miss Tapekwa County” started off as a visual, too: a tadpole in a round gelatinous egg. “Depot to Depot” practically wrote itself after I saw a news clip showing a horrendous car crash. But a lot of the time, a phrase will trigger the tale. The title of “From the Teeth of Strange Children” was what bred the narrative — actually, I have a notebook filled with titles that don’t yet have stories attached. If I’m not sure what to write next, I flick through it and inevitably something jumps out at me (usually in the form of an image…)

Is there a landmark piece of fiction in your career?

I suppose it would have to be “Commonplace Sacrifices,” which was one of the first stories I ever wrote. The day after I sold it to On Spec in 2008, I discovered that it had also earned me a spot in the Clarion South Writers Workshop for 2009. Going to Clarion was an incredible first step in my writing career — if I hadn’t taken the chance and sent in that story as my audition piece, I have no idea where I’d be now.

What did you learn from compiling Bluegrass Symphony?

Bluegrass Symphony was my first major project: it’s a collection of twelve short stories, yet all but one of them is original to this book. So I spent a lot of time writing new material, but also editing out the stories that didn’t quite fit. I think I could probably fill another book with stories set in this world, based on all the ones I left out. I also carefully considered the order in which these stories appear. Many of them go to quite dark places, and I didn’t want to put readers off right away. I wanted to lull them in with mildly disturbing stories, plunge them into the horrors of “From the Teeth of Strange Children” and then pull them back out and leave them unsettled, but hopefully not shattered. And since these are mostly new works, it was great putting Bluegrass Symphony together and seeing all the connections between the stories once they’d been compiled.

Your forthcoming collection Midnight and Moonshine is co-authored with Angela Slatter. How did you work out the collaboration? How did you guys work together? What do you admire about Angela’s writing?

Angela and I met at Clarion in 2009, and have shared a brain ever since. Individually, our stories are quite different, but we share the same values when it comes to work ethic, aesthetics vs. content, character motivations, delving into the creepiness behind the beauty, etc… So while we were at Clarion, we’d bounce ideas off each other and soon discovered that we just “got” what the other had in mind. We started collaborating on stories in 2010, writing some fun and wacky pieces for Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded and then writing a more traditional fantasy story, “The February Dragon,” which won the Aurealis Award for “Best Fantasy Short Story 2010″. We wrote “Prohibition Blues” last year, which will appear in Midnight and Moonshine but is first being published in Damnation & Dames, Ticonderoga Publications’ new paranormal noir anthology, later this year. As was the case with Bluegrass Symphony, all but one of the stories in Midnight and Moonshine will be original to the collection. And I say “will be” because we’re still writing them…!

How does the collaboration work? Via email, Skype, in hotel rooms during conventions… We live in different States, so we meet and plot whenever we can in person; otherwise we chat over the internet to come up with the book’s major story arcs. This is a collection of interconnected short stories — a mosaic novel — so we are constantly in touch about where the overarching narrative is going.

On a more practical level: I’ll start a story, or Angela will, and then we’ll swap drafts, filling in gaps, fixing each other’s gaffs, adding new twists and turns. Basically, it works because we trust each other implicitly. When we collaborate, neither of us is precious. If things need to go, they go.

And I admire everything about Angela’s writing. Everyone should read Sourdough and Other Stories. Once they do, they’ll know why I can be so unequivocal here.

How did you and Ann VanderMeer get to know each other?

A last-minute change in the teaching team at Clarion meant that Jeff came to Australia to be our Week 6 tutor, but Ann wasn’t able to come at such short notice. However, because Ann is so unbelievably generous, she read all of my Clarion stories anyway and I met her “virtually” this way. The feedback Ann gave me about where to start a story always comes to mind when I find myself trying to get into a story through the wrong door… We kept in touch after Clarion, and Ann bought my story “Sisters Under the Skin” for Weird Tales. Since then, we’ve worked on a bunch of wild projects together (from steampunk to bestiaries to other weird things) and I couldn’t be more delighted that she agreed to write the introduction to Bluegrass Symphony.

On your blog, you recently posted a list of “Random Words I Kinda Love,” including Hacienda, Spyglass, and Waistcoat. What do you look for in a word? Is it the sound? The meaning? Mouth feel? Associations? And likewise for “Random Words I Hate”.

Meaning first, of course. Rhythm is next in importance (partially mouth feel and sound), then associations. I love the musicality of hacienda, just as I love the period that spyglass and waistcoat evoke. They’re such proper words, so ornate, and they conjure up images of polished brass and places to go. Wendigo has such a great rhythm and it sounds wonderful when spoken with an Australian accent (something happens to the “o” that makes it even more strange than it already is). Egypt is a word I love to write, physically, with pen and paper. All those loops connected in cursive — try it. It’s such a fun word to write down.

And, yes, the same random rules apply for words I hate. Moist sounds like someone smacking while chewing their food, and the images it evokes are always gross. I use ‘moist’ in stories if I want the character to seem disgusting or sleazy (if only to me!) As a child, I hated tummy because I thought it sounded babyish and stupid — and I still do. I will use the words I hate, almost as much as the words I love, but when I do it’s nearly always to make the characters seem uglier, more disgusting, more repellent than they would otherwise be.

What’s next for you?

I’ve recently won a grant from Arts SA, which has bought me almost a year of full-time writing time to complete my first novel, The Familiar. This is the first book in a dark fantasy trilogy focusing on witches and lunatic shapeshifters in the city of Stokenveld. There’s magic! Dead cats! Did I mention the shapeshifting lunatics? Meanwhile, finishing Midnight and Moonshine is also a top priority. Later this year, I’m heading up to Toronto for the World Fantasy Convention — and it’ll be great to meet some of you there.

About the Author

Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and teacher. He is the Staff Interviewer for Clarkesworld Magazine and a frequent contributor to Kobold Quarterly and Booklifenow.com. He teaches at Wofford College and Montessori Academy in Spartanburg, SC. He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006. Jones lives in Upstate South Carolina with his wife, daughter, and flying poodle.

2011 Reader’s Poll Results

Neil Clarke

The results from our 2011 Reader’s Poll have been tabulated and your feedback gone over with a fine-tooth comb. Without further ado, I give you this year’s winners:

COVER ART

THIRD PLACE
(TIE, listed in order of appearance)

Nautili
by Julie Dillon

The Towers of KEILAH
by Ferdinand Ladera

Off Road
by Facundo Diaz

SECOND PLACE

Planetary Alignment
by Julie Dillon

FIRST PLACE

A Sense of Importance
by Bryn Jones

FICTION

THIRD PLACE

Ghostweight
by Yoon Ha Lee

A Militant Peace
by David Klecha and Tobias S. Buckell

SECOND PLACE

Silently and Very Fast
by Catherynne M. Valente

FIRST PLACE

The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees
by E. Lily Yu

CONTEST

The winner of the contest for a signed hardcover copy of Silently and Very Fast by Catherynne M. Valente is Pat Wyatt.

Congratulations to all of the winners and thanks to everyone who participated!

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.

Clarkesworld Magazine

Issue 66

Table of Contents

Sunlight Society

by Margaret Ronald

The Bells of Subsidence

by Michael John Grist

From Their Paws, We Shall Inherit

by Gary Kloster

The Romance of Ruins

by E. C. Ambrose

The Biker Chick Who Rides Her Own Bike: A Conversation with Nathan Long

by Jeremy L. C. Jones

Writing Is Magic: A Conversation with John R. Fultz

by Jeremy L. C. Jones

And Now for a Few Short Words from our Editor

by Neil Clarke

Dead Space Girl

Art by Sergio Diaz

© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2012
www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

Sunlight Society

Margaret Ronald

When the Fourth Street biolab went up, I didn’t think of Casey right away. I was working in the far side of the complex, which meant I was one of about four hundred people who got to see the entire dome rise up off its foundations, rotate counterclockwise ninety degrees, and shoot up into the sky. My immediate reaction followed the same pattern as everyone else: first What the hell, then, just before a needle of light vaporized the biolab, Are those people up there?

I could hazard a guess at the second question; I’d gotten that far into the shadow organizations, even then. I knew enough to guess at the identities of some of the blurry shapes darting through the smoke, shapes that official press releases would call confabulation and that the conspiracists would call aliens or Muslims or Freemason-built androids. The shadow orgs had been sloppy that time; usually they didn’t like to be seen at their work, but there’d been so little warning that they’d had no choice but to break out the big guns. Literally, in this case.

But that wasn’t what came to mind as I stared up into the sky, the glare of that solar blast fading bit by bit from my retinas, my nethead links relating the intensity of that blast, the projected knock-on effects on the rest of the Niobe web, the first stirrings among the dataminers. Instead, I just thought Casey would love this. I kept coming back to that thought over the next few weeks, even after word got out about the low-rent terrorists who’d gotten so close to taking over the biolab that vaporizing the whole place was the only alternative. Even after the arrests started.

I still think it’s true.

Today marks the first time I’ve been allowed into the Albuquerque facility. My credentials have been checked and re-checked so many times that they could probably tell you the weight and density of my last three bowel movements. Even so, they’ve been cutting corners on security, just so they can get me in here.

I fully expect that within twenty years, someone will have figured out a way to install nethead technology in anyone regardless of individual brain structure. But until they do, I’m pretty much guaranteed work wherever I go. And there’s even fewer of us netheads with the proper security clearances to get into the Madison facility, let alone Albuquerque. I’m a valuable commodity.

The facility isn’t much to look at: any decent biolab would have more apparent security. My nethead links are telling me otherwise, though; streams and warnings buzz against my skull so hard I can almost feel my teeth rattle. It unnerves me in a way that Madison didn’t, and Madison’s where they keep the host site for the Niobe satellite web. Enough solar power to — well, to blow up a biolab, for instance — focused onto the energy collectors for five dozen countries, and it’s still less well protected than this place.

It’s cool and dark inside the guard shack, and the back of my neck prickles after the blazing heat outside. The guard’s got a laser sight wired into his left eye; the silver tracery of it fades into his pale complexion much more smoothly than the similar patterns on my own skin. He gestures to the marks while the machines verify my ID. “Looks nice.”

“Thanks.” It’s striking, or so the nethead PR department says. They claim that’s why they want my image for their publicity stills, not just to provide the illusion of diversity. Some days I think they even believe it.

“Been here before?” The guard knows I haven’t — a glance at the screens could tell him as much and more — but sometimes courtesy trumps efficiency.

I shake my head. “I’ve been to Madison.”

“Madison, pfft.” He grins. “That’s nothing to what we got — ” He stops and turns red, as if he can’t quite believe what he’s saying. I used to have that reaction, way back when I was sharing what I knew with Casey, when I tried to tell her that the comics we’d read were — well, not true, not close to true, but had some basis in reality.

“Got what?” I ask, as the computers spit out my ID and agree that yes, my fingers and retinas appear to be my own.

“Well, you know. Them.” He opens up the doors, and the flickering readouts in my periphery flare and scramble into new configurations. “The heroes.”

The official story of Casey and me is that we were kids together, grew apart, came back together, screwed around, and then split up for good once I realized how crazy she was. Both times it was the heroes that brought us together, the first time through the comics that had come out in the wake of Maxentius sightings and the rumors about the Sixth Seal group. We read them all, regardless of quality, lying on our backs in the vacant lot behind her house, ink on our fingers and intent discussions of whether Mistress Fivepoint could beat Jack o’the Green or if they’d just team up against Memetek. The second time it was because in my first months as a full nethead I learned so much about the shadow organizations, the reality behind all those rumors, and I could only think of one person I wanted to share that with — Casey, who could rattle off the Liberty League’s oath or Red Knight’s transformation mantra as easily as the Pledge of Allegiance.

Both times it was her head, or what was wrong with it, that split us up.

It’s a useful official version. But one thing you learn when you start getting involved in the shadow orgs is that the official version means very little. After all, none of them show up in any official version, except in the records of what didn’t happen, the plots that failed, the disasters averted.

Or, sometimes, in the lists of people who’ve disappeared.

The transport behind those metal doors takes me maybe eight floors down, with that bone-twitching stutter you only get from passing through negation fields. I don’t notice it; I’m too busy dealing with the sudden silence in my head. I can handle it — mental stability is one of the most important factors that they test for in determining nethead fitness — but that doesn’t mean I enjoy it. Particularly because the one link that does remain is the one that got implanted when I started working for the shadow orgs. For insurance, they told me. The Niobe GPS link.

I remember the Fourth Street biolab, and the back of my neck goes abruptly hot again.

When the doors open again, though, all thoughts of the world outside vanish. The visual input’s bad enough: between the scream of light on my right from what might be a laboratory and the dizzying drop twenty feet ahead of me, I can barely register mundane details like the polished-glass sheen of the floor, the central spindle of memory staves, the man waiting for me just to the side.

But all that’s nothing compared to the chatter of computers on every side, the information in patterns I’ve never seen before. It’s like being picked up from one set of rapids and dropped into another, and it takes all of my concentration not to drown.

The biggest difference is that there’s not much trace of nethead work. It’s tradition to leave our marks on the usernodes, stegans encoded into the streams of data like graffiti in a canal, but here there’s only two: Klaatu Barada Nikto! from the designer of the Niobe web, and Welcome to Olympus (plus a handy map) from a woman who’s now on permanent detail with the Secret Service. If this were a normal job, I’d be tempted to add my own mark to the tabulae, but right now I don’t trust what I’d leave.

A permanent link unscrolls with the boxy look of official work. IN RESIDENCE: Kazemusha/Lady Nettle/Oculus/Matthew Glendower/Maxentius . . . The list goes on, code names and real names (not that it matters which is which, this far in) and designations I’ve only seen in the most hidden records. Names to conjure with.

And finally I recognize the man who’s been standing just to the side of the entrance. They’ve sent the shining face of the org to meet me.

He’s just like Casey and I always imagined, resplendent in ivory and gold, and while he doesn’t have the red cape the comics gave him, I get the sense he’d like one. Barrel chest, brilliant smile, voice with enough bonhomie for a tri-state area. “Bit overwhelming, eh?” Maxentius says

“A bit,” I agree weakly.

“It does that to me too, sometimes.” No it doesn’t, I think, but he’s not talking about the information overload. He gestures to the vista behind him: dozens of circular floors leading off a central shaft, lifts and elevators between for those who can’t just fly. “This sight — when I tire of it, then I’ll know the skein of my days has run out. Good to meet you, Seth.” He clasps my hand and shakes it vigorously.

“Good to meet you.” I’ve read papers on how much force that hand can exert, how many diamonds it can crush into powder.

“And you’re here to see Glendower. Splendid.” He turns and strides forward across the gleaming floor. I follow, and if it looks like I’m not gawking, that’s because I’m only doing so in my head. Of the levels I can see, some are sterile white and glassed in; some hold weapons and implements I can only guess at; a few look inhabited, homes for those who can’t or won’t stay outside in the world they claim to protect. A blur on the next floor up, across from us, resolves into a sparring match between two figures I’ve only heard rumors of, and even then I have to slow the visual down by a factor of ten to get a glimpse.

At the far end of the walkway, Maxentius glances over his shoulder. “Come along, lad! Mustn’t keep him waiting!”

Of all the members of the shadow organizations, Maxentius has read too much of his own press. He really does talk like a comic book; ‘lad’ is nothing to worry about.

Still, it bothers me, and not just because I can remember one too many cops calling my father ‘boy’ on one too many late-night drives.

There are some things I know for sure about Casey: she loved superhero comics; she didn’t keep in touch with her family after graduating; she wrote pamphlets for the Oakland Anti-Gnosis society; she couldn’t keep a job for more than six months at a time; she could make fantastic biscuits out of damn near any ingredients she had at hand. When her parents moved away the first time, when we were in school, it was because the first round of mandatory testing had come through. I was on the track to being a fully-functional nethead; Casey had tested positive for a number of dysfunctions, including predisposition to schizophrenia.

There are things I wonder about — whether the chemical imbalances in her brain were caused by her father’s exposure to some of the nastier weapons of the Second Chinese War, whether she knew what a risk I was taking associating with her, whether we should have gone ahead and slept together after all.

There are things I’ve been told about her in the wake of Fourth Street, about her mental state and the company she kept. These are things I will never believe about her.

Maxentius leads me around one side of the silo shaft, through what looks like a trophy room (it’s not, according to the nethead stegans). He’s rapidly figured out that I’m not listening to him, but that doesn’t stop him; in fact, I think he’s taken it as license to ramble on.

I catch a glimpse of someone I think is Pale Rider down one hallway. If it is him, that means this particular shadow organization has gone global. Most of them have; a few nationalists cling to their identity in places like Turkmenistan and France, and somehow I’d always assumed the U.S. shadow orgs would be the same way.

Of course, they have the Niobe web. That automatically makes them global; I’ve got the reminder in my skull if I ever forget that.

We walk past cases holding remnants of past work, plots unraveled, events that were hushed up and now only remain as a footnote to history. Still talking, Maxentius gestures vaguely at what looks like a giant pair of shears. “. . . didn’t tell us that the phase shift had affected only half of her, and the other half was stuck in another dimension entirely!” He chuckles, and I remember to smile. “Down this way. Glendower, are you there?”

A gray-haired man in a white shirt and bow tie — there’s even a tweed jacket, the kind with the elbow patches, tossed over a chair — waves back without looking. He’s talking to a woman I don’t recognize. I wouldn’t know her if we met on the street; I’d only know her if she wore her mask. She folds up her clipboard, nods to Maxentius, and fades into invisibility with a faint scent of calla lilies.

Glendower’s in his late fifties but looks older. He walks with a cane, and while he doesn’t have the same build as Maxentius, he’s not a small man either. His gray hair is still thick, but there are autofocusing spectacles perched on his nose, and when he pulls a chair over and sinks into it, it’s clear that standing for so long was a strain for him. He’s the one who pushed through my security clearance, since the virus affected the orgs’ datalogs and he’s the one who has to work with them. Bookkeeper to the gods. “Well, Mr. Carson, what do you think of our little home?”

“It’s amazing,” I say, truthfully, and then a touch of the perverse prompts me to add, “if a little rough on visitors.”

To my surprise, it’s not Glendower who answers, but Maxentius. “The price of our work,” he says with a regretful sigh. Maxentius doesn’t hide his feelings much; the man’s all surface, glossy and deep as a four-color page spread. “These days, to defend the innocent requires one to have a home of which all are innocent.” He sees my expression and shakes his head. “I assure you, lad, we’re all on the same side here. We are protectors of the world we love, sworn to defend it.”

He’s entirely serious, and of all the members of the shadow orgs, he embodies those values the most. And yet I can’t help myself. “‘To protect the weak, the innocent, and the defenseless from the indignities, wrongs and outrages of the lawless, the violent and the brutal,’” I quote. Glendower shoots me a sharp look.

Maxentius, though, hasn’t noticed. “Yes! Exactly.” He shakes my hand a second time, beaming, and nods to Glendower. “I must be off. Good luck — I hope we’ll see you here again.”

I watch him go. He rescues kittens; that much is a matter of record. It’s part of why there’s now a cleanup detail assigned solely to him. The shadow orgs may prize their secrecy, but Maxentius does make a useful distraction. And, after all, they are all on the same side.

I shouldn’t have made fun of him. It’s not his fault he’s an innocent.

Glendower’s watching me, but unless he’s a nethead — and I know he’s not — he can’t see everything I’m doing. “I’ve set up a contact terminal for you,” he says. “We’d been meaning to change out our security, but good netheads with clearance are few and far between, and I’m afraid we were caught with our trousers down. The virus doesn’t seem to be actively hostile, but my projections show it stopping work outright if it overloads any more of our systems. At the moment it’s benign, just irritating.”

“I can imagine.” Twenty years ago, we’d have been fine with a microsecond lag; forty years, and a five-second lag was nothing. But technology spoils us — I should know, I’ve got a few dozen terabytes’ worth of it in my head. I switch from wireless to node work, and put my hands on either side of the contact terminal, relying on the points wired into my fingertips to carry me in. “I can upgrade some of your security while I’m here, but it’ll just be a patch-up job till I can come back, and I don’t yet have clearance for a second visit. You sure you couldn’t fix it yourself?”

Glendower shakes his head. “It’s rapidshift. I just don’t have the speed to keep it from mutating as I’m working on it. That’s nethead work.”

Of course it is; I created the damn virus. My consciousness is already split between the terminals that dot the base; I damp wireless input to make up for it and start searching.

Glendower waits for a response from me, then shakes his head and laboriously gets up from the chair. He’s got a pacemaker; I can sense the pulse of it like a cricket in the room. “It’s rare to have a nethead down here,” he says, opening a cabinet and pouring a glass of tonic water. “I had to argue just to get the first few working on our security.”

“You’ve got failsafes in place, though.” Those failsafes gave me nightmares for weeks, after I first found out that the Niobe web wasn’t just for solar energy.

“True.” He pours a second glass and sets it on the shelf next to me. I nod my thanks but don’t take it. We’re both silent a moment; realtime maybe ten seconds, wiretime much longer, long enough for me to cordon off my virus and distinguish the main archives from what I’m looking for. They don’t let these out to the general public; they don’t even have access through the Madison facility. The Oculus records.

“You didn’t need to tease Max like that,” Glendower says quietly.

“Probably not.” I’m sorting through records, searching by time, date, subject, even setting aside a part of my brain to flash through random stills, looking for Casey. Oculus’ uploads take up entire spindles; I’ve heard that no one knows why it records everything it sees, but they don’t want to upset it by asking. “It just bothered me.”

“When he finds out you quoted the mission statement of the Klan at him, he’ll be a mess. Max doesn’t work well when he has a crisis of conscience.” He settles back into his chair with a grunt, and tonic water splashes over the back of his hand.

“Then he’ll only be saving the world eighty percent of the time. I’m sure the rest of you can cover the remaining twenty percent.” Something about the virus cordon is bothering me, but I’m so close — and there she is, Casey’s face blurring by, the brief video record categorized with about four hundred others, each no more than a couple of minutes.

“Would you be willing to help out with that twenty percent?”

I stop, sliding Casey’s record into my personal memory like a shoplifter sliding a necklace into his pocket, and turn to face him, keeping one hand on the contact terminal. “Sorry?”

Glendower smiles and thumps his cane on the floor. He needs that cane, I know; an accident when this place was being built wrecked his right foot, and he hasn’t had it replaced. “If nothing else, this incident highlights our need to have a nethead on the team. You’re the best, you’ve got the offline intelligence we need, and you’ve shown great discretion in your work for us here and in Madison.”

Discretion. Right. Which is why I’m now fixing a problem I created. It’s tempting, though — I can imagine Casey saying Who wouldn’t jump at a chance to be a superhero? Or is it only that I want her to say that?

I unpack Casey’s record for later viewing, thinking of the smell of hot dirt in the vacant lot and four-color ink smudged across my fingers. “Let me think about it.”

“Well.” Glendower sighs, then leans over and sets his glass down on the far terminal. “I understand, you’ve got doubts. After all — ” the screen behind him lights up, “ — I think I know why you’re here.”

Casey stares down at me from Glendower’s screen, twenty times larger than life, and I finally recognize what the virus report is telling me: someone, probably Glendower himself, got to it first. I stare at Casey’s image on the screens — an ID photo, not a mug shot. They’d only had mug shots for the ones who’d gotten arrested, and Casey didn’t even make it that far.

Glendower nods. “She was important to you.”

“She was.” I open the video record that I went through so much to find. It’s only about twenty seconds’ worth of Oculus’ point-of-view, showing a door bursting open. Casey crouches at the far end of the room, frizzy hair tied up in a bright red cloth, eyes wide and dark.

She’s just as I remember her.

The record shows her turning and reaching for something — a gun? a phone? a vial that could be her medicine and could be something else entirely? All of them are on the same table. She never even touches it before a flash of light from the door cuts her down.

I close my eyes, then open them to face Glendower, and behind him, Casey. “You knew?”

“We’re everywhere, Mr. Carson. We knew.” He looks over his shoulder, at the image of a smiling dead girl. “She’d been part of the Fourth Street terrorist cell. We got to the lab first, but when we came to apprehend her — ”

“Don’t.” I can see what happened. I take another look back into the Oculus records; someone’s lumped all of the recorded deaths together, whether criminal or civilian or just plain dumb luck. Glendower’s assembled them for his own penance, I guess. He doesn’t let himself forget either.

It’s not enough.

“My offer still stands.” He props his hands on his cane and gazes at me. Casey does the same, over his shoulder. “You wouldn’t be the first to forsake vengeance and turn your considerable talents toward a good cause. Or — ” he sits back a little, “ — you can take that vengeance on me. I won’t stop you.”

My breathing slows, and the hand that isn’t on the terminal curls into a fist. I could do it. I could kill him in any number of ways — stop the pulse of his pacemaker, use the autofocus in his spectacles as a link into his optical nerve and burn his skull from the inside out, scramble his neurons till he’s a drooling vegetable — and walk away. I might even get out of here unscathed, depending how what method I chose.

But kill him, and there’ll be another just as certain that they’re justified in their actions. Because it’s their job to save the world. They’re everywhere already, and so many of them wear masks. They say it’s to protect their identities, but it’s also so that we’re never sure who’s one of them, who’s watching. They’re always anonymous again in daylight.

Who was that masked man? I don’t know, but there’s twenty more of them outside.

Or join them. That’s the logical ending for a nethead; most of us find one big project and stick with it, and this would be in a good cause. If the terrorists had gotten their hands on the Fourth Street biolab, the result could have killed thousands. How many lives could I save that way, how many Caseys could I save . . .

I snip the virus out of the system with an absent thought and take my hands from the terminal, switching back to wireless. “Let me think about it,” I say again, and this time I’m not stalling, I’m pleading.

Glendower nods. “I’m sorry,” he says, bowing his head. “About your friend’s death — I’m sorry.”

And that decides it. Not I’m sorry we killed her, but I’m sorry about her death. Sidestepping the responsibility. Making it an act of God.

I take a few steps toward the exit, hesitant and unsteady. It’s not acting; I have to retract some of my motor skills to handle the download, the massive quantity of Oculus records pouring into my head. But Glendower sees it as the agony of indecision, and he lets me pass. He’s a good man; he wouldn’t deliberately hurt someone like me.

I find my way to the exit unhindered — I think Maxentius, or maybe one of his cleanup crew, waves to me as I go by. As the doors close, I wonder with the portion of my brain that isn’t unpacking records if I’ll make it out of here at all. If the shadow orgs wanted, they could kill me right here, and I couldn’t do a thing about it.

But these are the good guys.

In the silence of the transport I have time to craft the message that will go out with each clip. It’s not much, just a few lines for each record, an autovoice that’s recognizably my own. And links, archives, paths to data that isn’t shared or acknowledged, not even by netheads. Even crafting this, having a message like this unsent in my skull, is punishable by federal law.

The guard waves me through, and I step out into blinding sunlight. The world of data flows around me again — and this time I leap into it, sending out into all nodes, the conspiracists and the news media and the archives. The Niobe GPS activates, and above me the satellite web moves, shifts, focuses.

It’s not enough to stop me.

These people have died because of the shadow organizations, I say over each clip, each death, each victim of the shadow orgs. The desert sunlight shifts, shading from yellow-white to blazing, bright enough to hurt my eyes. They were deemed guilty and executed without trial. The guard is yelling, first running after me and then, as he realizes what’s happening, back to the shade and safety of his bunker.

They were unlawfully executed. And links, lists, the shadow orgs and all their work, thrown open to the world they claim to protect. If they can’t take the scrutiny, they don’t deserve to last.

I turn my face to the incandescent sky and smile, racing to meet the sunlight.

About the Author

Margaret Ronald is the author of Spiral Hunt, Wild Hunt, and Soul Hunt, as well as a number of short stories. Originally from rural Indiana, she now lives outside Boston.

The Bells of Subsidence

Michael John Grist

The Bell is coming.

It’s night, and I’m lying beside Temetry on a cold grey crater of this world’s endless desert, listening to the oscillations of the Bell. At times we glimpse its Brilliance, the after-image of its long and branic toll splashing across the plush black firmament like an endless corolla borealis. I imagine it far overhead, arcing through the universe, plancking the anthropic landscape from yoke to clapper, and can think of only one word to describe it.

“Godly,” I whisper.

Temetry nods by my side. He doesn’t speak, not since the last Bells came when we were babies, but I know what he’s thinking. I’m thinking it also.

“How are your non-orientable insects?” I ask.

He shrugs. This shrug means he’s had no breakthroughs. I know it, because he’d not be here with me if he had. The men of this world would have taken him for the Gideon heat-sink long ago.

“I won’t forget you,” I say to him quietly.

He turns to me, and smiles, because he knows I cannot keep that promise. The Bell is coming tonight. His hand worms the grey sand, folds my fingers within his own, and I remember that he is the most beautiful thing I have.

“I love you,” I whisper to him. His fingers tighten, rippling over mine in Euclidean gymnastics, until our hands are joined partway between a reticulated conch shell and an intersecting Klein bottle.

I laugh. It is our joke, a vestige of what Subsidence has brought us both. We are only 11, and I love him, because I know in my heart that he will never forget me.

“I’ll whisper your name to the branes until I die,” I promise him, feeling the urgency of this moment, alone in this crater for the last time.

His smile turns sad. It is the last abiding image I have of him, because then comes the sound of old Ingen, and the moment is lost. She is huffing and panting her rooty head over the crater-lip. This place is no longer special or secret. Temetry’s dazzling smile is sad, forever, because I’ll never see him again.

Ingen is my mother, and she uses me.

She plucks me from the crater without even glancing at Temetry. I don’t think she even sees him anymore. Arm in arm we stroll back to the Gideon bore, and she chatters on about her day, about what permutations she wrought in this planet’s atmosphere, what gains in the heat-sink they explored.

We arrive at the bore-head, a silver pipe in this dry planet’s haunch, and she kneels before me in the grey sand, her hands on my shoulders. I know this is how she talks to her simulacra, plugging fresh wavelengths into their pea-sized minds, laying in the algorithms of growth. I am just another of her extremities, to be ordered, wound, and sent chuttering on my way.

“You must forget that boy, Aliqa,” she tells me. “He’s lost, too far under the Bell. You know that, don’t you? He can’t follow where you’re going.”

She aspires to love me, but I know the thing she loves most is herself.

“Yes mother,” I reply. I am polite and correct, a good Gideon girl.

Ingen ruffles my hair in the way I hate. I am not an infant anymore. Temetry would never do it. “Good girl,” she says, and she leads us into the bore-head. We stand atop the dimple, and she initiates the involutions.

Space folds, and I taste the familiar feel of my mother’s mind in my own, twisting the anthropic plane. A moment later we emerge in our living room.

“Go to your involutions, Aliqa,” Ingen says. “Hone your mind for the Bell.”

I go. In my room I close my eyes, stand upon my dimple, and begin. Far into the night I manifold four dimensions in non-Euclidean space, inverting Tesseracts, decanting Klein kettles, shaving Möbius strips into interlocking many-twisted chains.

I finish in the dark morning, as ever unable to speak or think, the involutions have so stripped away my sense of self. I sit on my bedside vacantly, emptied into submission, until the folds of my mind remember the shape they ought to take, and I can heal.

Then I will sleep.

This is not my hope. It is my mother’s hope for me. She will have me upon the Bells though she must strip the last shred of self from my mind. I am matter to be prepared, used, and replaced.

In my non-state I struggle to think of Temetry, but there is nothing of him there. No I, no you, only the endless entangled looping of the branes.

Pink dawn comes, and on a Gideon screen in my empty room I watch the Bell snuffing down over the grey desert.

It is immense, a vast colorless ark that fills the horizon, eclipsing the grey desert I have known all my life. At the atmospheric boundary its toll emerges as a jarring rumble in the earth, a Brilliance so complex with harmonies and grace notes that it makes all the simulations I’ve heard seem like one-fiddle jigs. The sound is a universe of its own, oriented through the branes in ways I cannot grasp.

It snuffs down, and all I can think of is Temetry. He will be out there somewhere, sitting the grey crater-sand, folding paper with his hands, his eyes sad as the first sun rises. Before him will be an array of non-orientable sand-hoppers, each folded like Möbius strips with only a single side. Each of their eight limbs will be perfectly formed, aligned, so life-like they could at any moment hop away. He will have sat awake all night folding them, as the only thing he can do.

He will watch as this Bell lands, and he will name it after me, for he knows it will be the Bell that takes me away.

Grey sand fills the screen, and it lands. I feel the branes tremble around me. This is my life, now. Tears run down my cheeks as I realize what it means. I will truly never see Temetry again.

Then old Ingen is at my side, dabbing at my cheeks with her sleeve, hustling me to the door.

“Don’t worry on my account, child,” she bustles, and I realize she thinks my tears are for her. “Old Ingen will abide. There’s much work to be done here yet, don’t cry for me.”

I want to tell her I am not, but bite my lip hard. There is no need to be cruel, now. It will change nothing, only hurt us both more.

At the door she holds me again by the shoulders, and I see that she too is crying. She runs her hands down my sides, smudges away a non-existent speck of dust, and I wonder. Perhaps she does love me after all. Perhaps she is sad to see her most talented creation disappear.

“Be a good girl,” she says. “Do as they say, be polite.”

I smile and nod a this fallacy. We both know I will have no choice. For the next five years I will be indentured to the Bell, and my mind will not be my own. There will be no need for me to do a thing, except survive.

“You’ll make me proud, Aliqa,” she says. “Don’t worry about that.”

I smile, I nod.

We enter the Gideon bore together. The world flutters like a butterfly kaleidoscope, I taste my mother’s mind for the last time, and the next phase of my life begins.

We are a class of 100, boys and girls of Bell-age, drawn from all the Gideon bore-holes sunk into our planet. Spotless white simulacra gather us in a vast hall, colorless as the Bell’s exterior, and move us to stand upon our marks; dimples in the smooth flooring.

I let myself be shunted into place by their cold palms. I look down at my dimple, and wonder briefly how many have stood here before me, how many have gone under the Bell to keep Subsidence alive.

I push that thought aside, and in the seconds before it begins, try to sequester what parts of myself I can, hidden within the folds of my mind.

Then the anthropic plane is unleashed upon us.

It is unlike any involutions I have done before. It is an inexpressible order of magnitude larger. In the face of it, I am obliterated. I am rewritten.

An endless torrent of images pounds through the thin capillaries of my mind, effortlessly scrubbing away all the tiny levees and dams I have prepared against it; a tidal surge of unorientable, non-intersecting, non-Euclidian possibilities.

As the torrent comes, I cannot help but seek order from the chaos; raveling and inverting Klein bottles, stacking and nestling them within each other like Matroska dolls, folding tesseracts upon themselves, helixing Möbius strips into Riemann planes. Around me the 100 do the same. Together, by the combined resonance of our efforts, we will planck the branes for the first time. We will build our own Brilliance. Through our efforts, the Bell will toll.

I barely feel the effects of gravity, as the Bell rises up through the atmosphere, and leaves my desert world behind.

Only when it is over, and it has been over for six of the eight rest hours allotted to us, do I begin to remember who I am, where I have come from, and what I have done.

The Bell has already left my world. Ingen is gone, left behind. Temetry is gone. All the things that tied me to who I was are gone.

I feel more than an ache, I feel an erasure. Already I have lost so much of what I was. My mind has diminished, has enlarged, has shrunk.

I am lying on a double-bunk cot in a dark room, where the simulacra brought me. Beside me a girl’s hand dangles down from the cot above. One of her fingers is marked by a line of lighter skin, and I wonder that she had once worn a ring.

I push her hand. It sways nervelessly.

“Wake up,” I say to her hand.

“She’s under the Bell,” comes a voice. There is another girl standing in the semi-dark before me, her hair in ratted pigtails. She smells overpoweringly of sweat.

“I’m Aliqa,” I say to her.

“Mazy,” she answers. Her eyes are shot through red. “You were talking in your sleep.”

“I was?” I mumble. My lips seem thick, foreign appendages on my face. “What did I say?”

“The same as all these others,” Mazy says, and gestures at the groaning, sleeping, moaning bodies of the other 98 of us, stacked like folded tesseracts in our cots. “A load of old balls.”

I can’t help the frown from crossing my face. I was raised to be correct. Mazy laughs more when she sees my expression, then she leans in, and her sweaty stench rolls in with her.

“You listen to me, girl. You aren’t special, no way no how. Nothing in that brain of yours is worth going under the Bell for. You just let it go, let it all go, and you and me’ll be pals. You hear me?”

I blink hard, as if it’ll somehow push back her smell. It doesn’t.

“And if I don’t?”

Mazy laughs again, leans back, and gives the nerveless hand hanging from the cot above a playful shove.

“Then it don’t hardly matter a thing now, does it?”

She winks. She walks away.

There’s a little over an hour left before our next involutions; the red digits of a countdown clock on the distant black wall glow fuzzily. In the dim light I look at the white band round the girl’s nerveless hand, and wonder who gave her that ring, and what it might have meant. I listen to the others moaning, as Mazy said. They are whispering names, whimpering, crying in their sleep.

For a little while, I cry too.

Soon the simulacra come for us again, and carry us back to our dimples. I let them lift and maneuver me. I feel too weak to move more than my eyes. They lay me in my allotted space, and as I wait for the barrage to open, I think about Temetry. I know now that I cannot hope to hide him in an enfoldment of my mind. I can only say goodbye, again and again, until one day the Bell scores him from my mind forever.

“I won’t forget you,” I promised him on the sand, but I have not the strength to keep that promise. I am too small.

Then the barrage begins again.

I don’t come back to myself for a long time. When I do, it is to the freckled face of Mazy, up close to mine. She is lying by my side, sharing my cot, her tousled red hair on my pillow. I feel her warm breath on my lips. Her arm is wrapped around me. I try to shrug it off, but sharp pain aches through me, and I fall still.

Mazy stirs, and her eyes slit open. Her irises are deep green. She smiles at me.

“I thought you’d gone under,” she whispers. “It’s good to see you back.”

I open my jaw, struggling to ignore the pain. “How long?” I whisper.

Mazy shrugs. “Weeks? I forget. They really worked you good that time, though.”

“What?” I ask. My mouth is so dry. “What do you mean?”

She doesn’t answer. Instead she pushes herself up on her elbow, reaches to my face, and pushes a strand of hair behind my ear. I try to pull back.

“Stop it,” I mumble. “Get off my cot.”

“Your cot?” says Mazy. “This is my cot. You climbed in here yourself.”

“What?”

“After they were finished with you, whispering that damned name.”

I am confused. How could I climb here without knowing it? What cot am I in? “What name?”

“Temetry,” she says, and watches my face for the reaction. There is none, because the name means nothing to me.

“Who’s Temetry?” I ask.

“I don’t know. You were the one screaming it, in the middle of the involutions. They had to pull you off the floor and double your involutions to shut you up.”

Her words shake me. “I don’t remember any of that.”

“Not after a session like that, I’m not surprised.”

I lay there and say nothing.

“Was he a boyfriend?” Mazy asks.

I don’t answer. I try to cast my mind back, feeling as though I am probing a fresh wound. My mind is raw. Temetry. I reach back, back, and touch upon something. I handle it gently, calmly as I would a sand-hopper, lest it take fright and skitter away. Temetry; a feeling more than anything, a sense of something, insubstantial and shifting, but something definitely good.

“Maybe,” I say. “Maybe a friend.”

Mazy snorts, and runs her hand through my hair again. My body aches too much to push her away. “Well, you’re my friend now. You and me. I’ll look after you, don’t worry.”

I don’t worry. I lie there, and wonder who Temetry might have been.

Months pass. The cots grow quieter every night, as memories are plancked out of our minds. Soon there is no one left to miss, no home to yearn for, no one to cry for. More of us go under the Bell.

Mazy shares my cot every night. She smooths my hair. When I become quiet, she speaks the name to me; Temetry. It has no meaning in itself, it is just a word that we share, something to bond us together. We lie in each other’s warm arms, and wonder on what it might mean.

Our lives are involutions and sleep. Tolling the Bell becomes something rote, ringing out our Brilliance across the universe in our wake. There are no questions to ask of each other, because there is no past to speak of. There are only questions in the now.

“Where do you think the Bell is going?” Mazy asks, most nights. I spin stories for her of all the furthest systems I’ve heard of, worlds where the people travel through Gideon bores and harvest the heat of stars on desert planets. Mazy smiles, laughs, and tells me about planets where everything is an endless city, and people drink the blood of plants and fly through the sky on rainbows and just have all the fun you could imagine.

I wonder if I we are from an endless city, or a desert, or a jungle. I wonder what Temetry is. Is it a place, a person, or a thing?

Around us, the 100 dwindle. I forget my own name, and she forgets hers. We come to know each other by touch, by feel, by the one word that stays with us; Temetry. It becomes a totem.

Then one day, I wake in her arms, and she is still. I shake her, but she doesn’t move. I open her eyelids and look into her eyes, and see within her a void, carved and hollowed out.

Her heart beats, her body lives, but her mind is gone. She is under the Bell.

Within a day she is only a memory.

Simulacra move me to my own cot. The others are removed. Lying there, wondering on the meaning of this word Temetry, I realize I am the only one left.

The only one left? Were there others?

I am to be captain.

Days pass and there are no involutions for me. Simulacra come in and out of my room, nameless as ever, and occasionally I ask the word at them.

“Temetry?”

They never reply. Their white bodies and flat blank faces seem to look past me. They bring me training cycles that I am to rewrite my mind with, sad stories of the origin of Subsidence, but I cannot watch them for long. All I want to know is the origin of this hole within me, this thing that I have lost.

I set down the latest of the cycles and exit my room. I walk the corridors and call out the word Temetry, though there is no one to respond. White-bodied simulacra move by me at times, carrying shapes on their flat white palms that seem to defy dimension. Pieces for the clapper, I presume, that revolve and involute as I watch.

I wander for days. When I’m hungry I eat, food brought by the simulacra as I need it. When I’m tired I sleep. I know these explorations are pointless, that even were I to walk a hundred years I would never cover more than a hundredth of the whole of the Bell. But that doesn’t seem to matter now.

I walk the involution rooms, hundreds of them, each stretching on and on, every one of them a hammer to hit the clapper at the Bell’s core, to keep us moving, to keep Subsidence alive if only in memory. I wander over dimples where generations have involuted the anthropic planes before me, where generations have gone under the Bell to keep Subsidence moving.

I am alone, now, but for this word that haunts me; Temetry.

This is my odyssey. I know that as well as any.

I am sitting at a port looking out over our sparkling Brilliance, a branic contrail sizzling back through space like corolla borealis, when the captain comes to me. He sits by my side. I am not surprised. I have expected this for a long time.

He is very old; his face riven with lines deep as the dimples. He is the first living thing I have seen for as long as I can remember.

He sighs, and smiles at me.

“Temetry,” he says.

I smile back. Though we have never met, never spoken, I feel I know him well. “Do you know what it is?”

He shrugs. His eyes flicker with quiet amusement.

“I heard it in the Brilliance. You tolled the word into space. Even now, that word is floating through the anthropic planes, reverberating, echoing forever.”

“I wish I knew what it meant,” I say.

He only smiles.

We sit quietly for a long time, as the Brilliance ripples out like a whip-tail from our Bell, glissandoing into space.

“What happened to the others?” I ask him, at last. I don’t know who they might be, but I know there were others. I am not the only one the Bell took for fuel.

“They went under the Bell,” he replies, his voice soft. “Left behind on the planets we passed. They’ll live out quiet, uninspired lives. They’ll procreate.”

“And what about me?”

“That’s your choice. You’ll be captain, if you want. You’ll steer the Bell, and ring out your beautiful, mournful, sweet Brilliance to the universe. The other Bells will hear, and know you, and Subsidence will continue. Or you will not.”

“What else would I do?”

He shrugs, answers slowly. “Leave. Start a new life on the next planet. Forget about the Bells, about the branes and the Brilliance.”

I see it in his pale blue eyes. He has already made that choice, and left this place behind.

“Where will you go?” I ask. His gentle smile gives me the answer. We both know the Bell keeps no logs. There is no home for him to return to. There is nothing left in his mind now but the beauty of the branes.

He stands up.

“Goodbye, child,” he says. “I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

He walks away down the long and arcing corridor. I watch him go.

The simulacra come for me as darkness falls across the Bell. They wipe away my drying tears, and carry me to my dimple. Through the long hours of the Subsidence night, I planck the branes that toll us through space.

We will snuff upon a planet soon. There will be a hundred waiting, thinking glory and duty await, ready to sacrifice their minds to the might of this Bell, to the continuation of Subsidence, trusting me as their captain to lead.

But lead to where?

All I have is this word. I dream it while the planes reticulated about me, Temetry. It has no meaning, but I feel its weight, like a Gideon bore sucking me down. I am not free. I am not alone. I am weighted to this dying Empire, and there is only the grace of the branes to tell of my loss.

So I tell it to the branes. I dream them filled with this thing that is Temetry, this thing that matters so much even the Bell could not scrub it from my mind. I sing it, watch it spiral out into the dark, and wait for the Bell to snuff down.

We come to a planet. It is black with vegetation, life creeping every inch of crust beneath twin helixing suns. There are 100 waiting, adepts, all of them young.

I walk out amongst them. The black vines underfoot writhe at my touch.

These people do not know what I have brought to them. They look at me as though I am a god. They have adapted to the light of this place; their skin is dark, their violet eyes are wide, but they are people like me. I wonder at their dreams, at their lives, at the new adaptations the Bell will force upon them.

The captain’s words haunt my mind.

They talk to me, honor me, offer feasts in my name, but I do not know my name. The honor is for Subsidence. The feasts are for the Bell.

I stand for a long time, looking out at them and their world as though through glass, studying a thing I once knew. I watch their twin suns spiral overhead, patterns dictated by forces unleashed at the start of the universe, tracing through time, inexorable, unstoppable.

One of their leaders comes to me at last. She is tall, regal, dressed in long robes of finely braided black twine. I know to her violet eyes these fabrics have color. To me it is all the same.

“Is something wrong, Bell-captain?” she asks, her eyes downcast.

I look over her 100 and wonder how I can steal away their minds. I look over her black world and wonder if I could adapt, could make it my home.

“Do you know what Temetry means?” I ask her.

She looks up briefly, and I see in her eyes the frisson of confusion.

“Is this a test?” she asks warily.

I wonder if it is.

I walk past her, to the first of the 100.

“Do you know Temetry?”

I ask them every one, but none of them know, and at each of their answers the path before me becomes more clear, like order folding out of the branes.

I return to my Bell with none aboard. I will sound the clapper myself. I will toll the distances alone, and at each planet waiting for me, I will ask my question.

I will not fade away like the captain. I will not give my life to Subsidence. I will find the meaning of Temetry, and make of it my home.

Years pass.

Always there are more planets; worlds of lavic sulfur ice, worlds of ammonia oceans, worlds of aluminum sands, and on each one, the descendants of Subsidence. They live afloat on tar-balked ships of petrite, in cloud-castles held aloft by technologies long forgotten, in Gideon bores beneath the ground, in bubbles of molten neon endlessly revolving through the core.

At each I am met by the 100, and hopes that Subsidence has resurged, that the hand of the empire will once again come to steer their lives.

I bring no solace, only questions. I ask every one of them of Temetry, but none of them know. I leave them behind, my Bell empty and sounding only with my voice, my dreams in the Brilliance, my turn of the branes.

I see the wonders of the Universe from my dimple. There are galaxies yet forming, out near the discordant rim of existence. I see red shift blur the anthropic landscape about me, feel the echo of entropy as it is born. I hear the stripling birth-song of stars yet to bloom, the grand harmonies of systems flung out like the petals of a sand-flower, spiral arms interwoven as though the arms of long-lost lovers.

I dream of Tesseracts, and Temetry. I enfold Klein bottles and slice Möbius strips, and think of Temetry. It is the only thing to sustain me. A hundred times I have thought to leave the Bell behind, and a hundred times I have pulled back, held by this weight in my middle, pinning me in my place.

At each planet I tell them I will take none of their 100. At each I tell them to forget Subsidence. The Empire is gone. It is dead.

And I travel alone, in my Bell.

Others come.

I feel them first as grace notes in the rippling Brilliance, the tolling of loss through the branes. I feel them gathering at my back, tracking me through my enfoldments, keeping pace, adding their long melancholic tones to the anthropic landscape about me.

The sound of them fills me with sadness. I need not see them, the large colorless hulks of their Bells, to know they have come because of me. But I have nothing to give them.

Every passing day there are more. They swarm at my back, each Bell a string to planck the branes, to make the anthropic landscape tremble with ordered life. I feel them rising as though a wave, cresting behind me, an orchestra to pulse my dreams of Temetry to the universe.

At the next planet, a world of grey lead mists, I meet the first of them.

He is young, as I once was. Has it been 20 years? His hair is long and dark, his skin pale, his eyes so full of yearning.

He stands before me, looking at me as though I can give him back what he has lost. This world’s 100 watch us, there in the boiling mists with our two vast Bells snuffed down behind us. I do not know what to say.

“Where are you going?” he asks.

“I am searching for a thing I can’t remember.”

He nods. He steps closer. I feel his need to reach out, to touch me, to know me.

“Temetry,” he says.

I nod. I watch as his eyes fill with tears. He makes no effort to brush them away. They slide down his cheeks like the oscillating Brilliance of the Bells.

“Why are you following me?” I ask.

“Because you are beautiful. Your search is beautiful. In the emptiness your tolls ring with meaning.”

“But I do not know the meaning. It is only a word.”

He smiles, steps closer, as though he is grateful for this.

“I remember nothing,” he says. “I do not know who I am, or where I came from. Your word is everything to me.”

I shake my head. I do not want this. I cannot be responsible for him.

“You should not follow me. It is a dream I have followed for too long. It has no meaning.”

“You are wrong,” he says, his voice firm. “It is the light of all the Bells. Your tolls spill hope through the universe.”

I too feel like crying to hear him say it so. I have no hope. Only the endless reticulation of the branes, and the black of space, and a word that is empty at my core.

“Don’t follow me,” I tell him. I can do nothing else. “Please. I am as lost as you.”

I do not speak to the 100. I return to my Bell. I have been a fool to continue this long. I am a fool with impossible dreams.

That night I resolve to leave the Bell at last. I will make my life among these people in their thick mists. I will learn their ways, and forget the word that has haunted me for 20 years. I will at last be free.

That night I dream of Temetry. It is a swollen river flowing from the clapper of my Bell, spreading out across the universe, dappling the branes with its flavor, ringing out for melancholy, and loss, and a thing once loved. It is beautiful, endless, threading the anthropic landscape with hope.

I wake to a thought that upturns my world.

I dare not think it, can scarcely imagine it. As I hurry to the first dimple I ever used, I cannot voice it aloud in my mind. It is too large, too terrifying, and I cannot bear any more, not now, not so close to the end.

But I must know.

At the dimple I enter the involuting trance, turning non-orientable shapes in non-Euclidean space as I have a thousand times before, until I can feel the flow of anthropy unfolding around me, the branes swelling like budding fruit within, opening the pathways that will allow my Bell to travel through the enfoldments of space.

But I do not travel. I reach out.

Here is my own trail. I can feel it in my Bell’s Brilliance, the hints of what I was 20 years ago, stitched together and held fast by the single word that remained throughout, spreading back from now to the time I was a child: Temetry.

It arcs up through the mesosphere of this leaden planet and out into space. It is the path I have left, the vibrations of Temetry that these other Bells have followed, the hope they have sought.

I speed my involutions, turning the endless flood of images harder than I have for years, reaching back, tracking my Brilliance through enfoldments and entropy, piecing together the reverberation of my travels through Subsidence’s empire.

In the midst of it, I launch the Bell. I can feel Temetry thrumming through me like a geyser of hope, a feeling I cannot hide, cannot mask from the other Bells. If I am to do this, they will surely follow. I do not care. Let them. All that matters is Temetry.

My Bell races the branes, back along a trail I have written across the stars for these past 20 years, with the fleet of Subsidence in my wake.

Days pass by, perhaps weeks, swimming up the contrail of my Brilliance to its source. I have traveled back through so many years already, five, perhaps ten. I have spun together the fading echoes of Temetry I left scattered through the darkness, leaping from tone to tone, straining at the limits of my shuddering mind to hold the trail together.

Then the trail is gone.

Its notes are too diffuse, split apart and wafted by solar winds and the expansion of the universe, broken by entropy, the echoes too faint for me to hear. I strive for it, I reach out desperately, but it is gone.

I collapse about my dimple. I feel like a child again, rewritten by her first involutions, scarcely able to think. There is only Temetry, and my failure. I sag there, and sob, because now I have lost all hope. It has dispersed, been erased, rubbed out by the endless reshuffling of the universe. Time has blown away my Brilliance. There is no more trail to find.

I sob, and sob, until sleep finds me.

I wake to a hand on my shoulder. It is a young man, but I do not know him. He is dressed in the clothes of a Bell captain. He has long dark hair, pale skin, and such a yearning in his eyes.

“Do you know Temetry?” I ask him.

He shakes his head slowly. He is sad, I feel that much.

“No,” he says. “But I can help you find it.”

I sit up. In his eyes is a desire burning as deep as my own.

“How?”

He steps back, and gestures to the involution hall around us. I rub the tears from my eyes, and see there on every dimple, at every one of the 100 stations, a Bell captain looking back at me.

It is impossible. There is only one captain to a Bell. My jaw drops slack.

“They want to help,” he says. “All of us, we want to help.”

I look around at them, back to the young man, and feel something cinch tight in my chest. There is a weight there, it has been there for such a long time, too much for me to bear. Perhaps now I will have the strength.

“Why?”

He smiles. It is sad, but laced with quiet strength.

“Because you give us hope.”

He does not wait. He moves to my side, where he takes up the one remaining dimple. I look around once more. The hall is full, as it has not been since I was a girl.

“Thank you,” I whisper.

And the involutions begin.

It is more than it ever was before.

Where it was a torrent before, now it is an inferno. It is chaos incarnate, blazing through our minds, a violent tsunami of impossibilities to be ordered and stacked.

And we stack them. Beneath the torrent, we stand. From its burning and furious heart we hundred Bell-captains forge the pure and startling music of the branes, each sounding a perfect note that entwines perfectly with the others. As the brutal force of the anthropic plane blasts across us, our notes rise and interweave like pillars into the sky, glissandoing harmonies I never heard before, chords that should ring false but now, under the combined force of our involutions, ring true. Our symphony swells through the chaos, growing into a thing larger than any one of us, larger than the sum of us, larger than Subsidence itself ever thought possible.

I soar on it. I feel it propelling me from behind, feel the will of the others beneath me, lifting me above the inferno, giving me the strength to do what I must.

I toll the clapper with their strength, and the Bell roars across the empty gulf of space faster than it ever flew before. I trawl the anthropic plane with their will, gathering up the long-faded remnants of my Brilliance, tracking the distant branic echoes that were once the word Temetry, sung out into nothing.

Faster, further, we hurtle back through the long years of my lonely voyage, and I feel the captains trembling around me. The inferno is too furious, the task too vast, and one by one they reach their limits. The anthopic flow overcomes them, and they slip beneath the Bell.

But we do not stop, nor slow. Less than ten remain, but we have been honed to incandescent perfection by the raging of the branes. I stand at the cutting edge of our Brilliance and hack into the decayed trail I left as a child, fusing the many parts together until the path emerges, and leads back, and back, and back.

The young man by my side shudders and drops limp. Somewhere far off simulacra carry him away, but I cannot stop. I am roaring now, tearing into the meat of the fabric of all things, forcing entropy to reform, meshing light from dead stars with the frequencies of interstellar dust blown on solar winds, building a tapestry of all chaos, of all order, pounding it in the furnace of this collective mind, smashing it until I totter under its weight, forging from it the single molten trail that I must follow.

Explosions, as the world begins again. Light floods out. Subsidence is born on a far-gone planet, and grows out into the galaxy. They spread, and spread, until their Empire is stretched so thin there is no union remaining, and entropy consumes them. All that remains is the Bells, their last vestige of civilization, ferrying their memory to worlds slowly sinking back into isolation and simplicity.

I read the history of all the Bell captains in the diffuse echoes of their Brilliance, and I understand why they have followed me here. Without Temetry, I would be just like them; as empty as Subsidence, as empty as their Bells, left orbiting like hollow moons about dead and dying planets.

The inferno rises, and rises, and at last, breaks.

Involutions rendered a hundred-minds strong finally crash as spume all about me. Everything is rewritten. Everything is under the Bell. We collapse, and around us this vast ship finally comes to a long, lone toll, as we snuff down upon a dry world, a grey desert planet, stocked with heat sinks and Gideon bores.

I stagger to the glass to look out over the world that was once mine. It is all craters. I fall in the corridor, struggling to hold on to what I am, as the sands billow up around us.

Simulacra wake me with water. The corridors are empty. I remember the long search, but there is no sign of the other captains. Perhaps they have already gone out, to my world, to find Temetry. Perhaps they all fell under the Bell.

I look out and see this planet’s atmosphere sparkling like corolla borealis, flecks of mist catching the reflections off my Bell’s sloping sides. I feel the branes thrumming around me, through my mind, filling me with possibilities.

I exit with nothing but the captain’s clothes on my back. This place is a desert, and the air is hot and dry. I feel the heat from their sinks radiating up from the grey sand. I walk a little way, past the silver Gideon bores, past the crowds of people watching and waiting. I see the 100, hastily turned out and waiting for admittance, flanked by their parents, grand and fierce expressions lashed across their faces.

They watch in confusion as I climb a dune and sit at the top. The vast weight of my Bell towers above me, shadows everything. I am yet its captain.

A man walks from the crowd to join me. He is perhaps as old as me, dressed in simple brown smocks. He sits by my side, but says nothing, only looks at me as though he knows me, with sorrow, with love.

He holds something out to me, on the palm of his hand. It is a speckled white sand-hopper. It is a pretty thing, its long legs stretched out to skein it over the hot desert surface. I reach out, thinking to touch it, expecting it to flee, but it does not move. I touch its back, its side.

It is folded paper. I lift it from his hand, turn it over in my hands. The folds and twists of its craftsmanship are stunning. All of its limbs, its sinewy body, its whip-thin antenna, are folded from a single sheet of paper. It has been twisted into a single side, like a simple Möbius strip, non-orientable.

I have never seen anything like it. It is beautiful. In all my travels, in all my years upon the Bell, I have never seen anything so alive brought out of the folding.

I turn to the mute man, look into his eyes.

“Temetry?”

About the Author

Michael John Grist is a science fiction & fantasy author and ruins photographer who lives in Tokyo, Japan. His stories can be found in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Ideomancer, and Andromeda Spaceways, and he is currently writing an epic fantasy novel. He runs a website featuring his writing and photographs of the ruins or ‘haikyo’ of Japan; filled with dark short stories and matching images of abandoned theme parks and ghost towns. Follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/michaelgrist.

From Their Paws, We Shall Inherit

Gary Kloster

Monkey waited until the sky over the Gulf had gone all black and empty except for a billion stars before he pulled himself back onto the sailboat.

“Ceegee’s roughed your stuff,” he said, perched dripping on the rail. “They rough you too, Cesar?”

I spit in the ocean. When the cutter caught me, the ceegee boys had swarmed aboard and slammed me down so that some officer, all pretty in her white and brass, could question me.

Who’re you, where you going, where you been? Where’s the sugar? Over and over she’d asked, while her boys tore the boat apart. She hadn’t liked my answers. She knew I was lying, even when they couldn’t find anything. Finally, she had her boys rip my shorts off and gave me to her machines.

The ceegee robots had tentacles, reeking of rubber and lube. Those thin limbs had pushed between my teeth and down my throat, burrowed up my nose and shoved themselves deep into my ass. Searching all my hidden places.

They had wrecked my boat, and then they wrecked me. Those slick machines had left me choking, shitting, bleeding, puking. Sobbing. For all that wreckage and pain though, they hadn’t found one speck of sugar.

Because a little monkey I’d found floating in the middle of the gulf days before had looked at the empty horizon and told me the Coast Guard was coming.

“Ceegee assholes,” I said. “Course they’d rough a South Padre boy.”

“You want to rough them back?” Monkey’s eyes, glittering with starlight, met mine.

“How?”

Monkey curled his tail in and untied a thin white rope from it. “Haul this up.”

“The sugar?”

“Yes. Plus something I took from their boat while they were busy with you.”

“A gun?”

“Gun’ll just get you killed,” Monkey said. “Got you something better.”

The rope ended in my drybag, and I opened it up. Three sealed boxes of sugar. Illegal pharma, or nano, or data or who-knows. South Padre pirates just called it all sugar, and gave dumbasses like me boats and money to haul it. Something else nestled between the boxes, a thin tablet of glass and aluminum.

“What am I suppose to do with a ceegee computer?” I could feel the rawness in my throat, in my ass, the ache deep inside me from being helpless and naked and violated while that ceegee officer and her boys had watched. A gun seemed like a better gift.

“Rough them,” Monkey said. “I can teach you.”

I frowned, turning the thing in my hands, not sure. Just a computer, encoded, locked, useless to me, but Monkey gave me a grin.

Why should I argue with the magic talking monkey? He’d saved me from either being sent to a work camp by the ceegees or being crucified by the pirates back home. So I held the computer and listened to him talk, and slowly the hurt and fear curled up inside me into a knot tight enough to ignore.

Excerpted from the astronomy site, Constellation Prize:

Really? Unexplained astronomical phenomena? Possible supernova? Really?

Worst. Cover up. Ever.

Sure, most of the sheep don’t know. They’re too busy sucking off the media streams to notice anything, even lights in the fucking sky. But they’ll know soon enough. We’ll force those apes to look up for once.

We’ve got pictures of the flare, and the tracking data before and after. So what if the gubmint has shut the hell up? We don’t need their fancy toys for this. We’ve already plotted the flight paths for Bogies 1 and 2. We can watch them ourselves — Big Brother gets my telescope when he takes it from my cold, dead hands.

We just have to agree on the narrative. We know what’s happening — a ship is tearing ass through our system right now, and last night it fired something off in our direction.

We know that. We can’t be mealy-mouthed. Maybe it’s this, maybe it’s that, can’t be sure, yadda yadda fuck you. We know. Second guessing now is just helping the cover-up. (Yeah, and I know some of you guys in the comments are plants. Eat shit and die, federal sockpuppets!)

Possible supernova. Unexplained phenomena.

ALIENS, MOTHERFUCKERS!

We know.

How stupid do they think we are?

Well, I guess we did vote for them.

“Can I pet your monkey?” my sister Sophie asked, sitting on the balcony next to me, her back against the rust-rotted rail.

“He doesn’t like kids,” I said, but Monkey scampered down from my shoulder into her lap.

She smirked and ran her fingers through his fur. “See? He knows I’m not a kid, Cesar.”

I tapped the tablet in my hands, marking my place in the trojan wiki Monkey had me reading and set it down to stare at my sister. Thirteen, and scary tall all of a sudden, with unexpected girl curves rounding her skinny body. No, she wasn’t a kid anymore. That’s why she spent so much time in our rooms now, so the pirates down below wouldn’t notice her.

Hurricane Mindy had torn the south Texas coast to shreds, and only the newest and toughest of the resorts and condos on our barrier island had survived, broken teeth jutting from sandy gums that shifted and bled with every new storm. The mainlanders had given them up, and now they belonged to the squatters who’d refused to leave, like my mother, and to the pirates. With broken ships and garbage they had built a raft city between the towers, a port for the sugar trade, a rat hole where they could hide from the ceegee patrols circling out in the gulf.

It’d been rumored for years that the mainland would bomb us someday and send South Padres’ towers finally crashing into the sea. Looking at the gull-picked corpses the pirates had chained to the balconies of the Hilton across from us, I wondered if they’d ever bother. If the hurricanes didn’t finish us soon, the pirates would, and then they’d just eat themselves.

“You thinking about going out again?” Sophie said, her eyes following mine.

“No.” My cut from that sugar run would pay our squat rights for two more months. By then, Monkey said I wouldn’t need to risk my ass out on the ocean any more. Touching the tablet beside me, thinking of all I’d learned in the past few weeks from him and this little window into such a strange, wider world, I believed him.

“Good,” Sophie said. Then, “Mom worried.”

“Mom noticed?”

Sophie’s fingers traced Monkey’s back. “She cried.”

“She wouldn’t have had to, if she’d sobered up long enough to do her job and paid our rights. Then I wouldn’t have had to go.”

Sophie blinked back tears, and my throat went tight. “Christ,” I sighed, staring at Monkey. He stared back at me, big eyes innocent.

“What are you looking at, furball? You keep saying it’s almost time, well, I say it’s past time. Start talking. Teach her. She needs this.” Monkey stayed silent for a second, and I added, “You make me look crazy, and I’ll throw you out for the gulls.”

Monkey stuck his tongue out at me, but then he turned and faced my sister.

“Sophie,” he said, his voice too deep for his tiny body. “Would you like to be a doctor, like your mother?”

Sophie’s tough. She didn’t throw Monkey off her, though she snatched her hand away.

“What?”

“I can teach you. The way I’m teaching Cesar to work his computer,” Monkey said. “I can teach you to help people, the way your mom used to. You want to learn?”

Sophie looked at the little animal in her lap, eyes wide, lips starting to move, then the balcony door scraped open. Mom, red eyed and bleary, grimaced out into the bright daylight.

“Who the hell you talking to out here?”

“Cesar’s monkey,” Sophie said.

Mom stared at Monkey. “Rats with thumbs. Carry disease y’know. Should. . .” Her voice trailed away and she stumbled away from the light, back inside. The sound of plastic bottles rattled through the door, her searching for another swallow.

Sophie shoved the door shut. “What is he, Cesar?”

“Magic,” I said, shrugging. “Don’t know. Little bastard won’t tell me.”

“I’m telling you what you need, Cesar.” Monkey’s tail curled loose around Sophie’s wrist. “So you and yours can leave this place.”

“So we can be safe?” Sophie asked.

Monkey stared at me with his dark eyes, not answering, so I did.

“Not safe, Sophie. Strong.”

Excerpted from Constellation Prize:

Bogie 1’s leaving the system today. (Don’t start with the quibbles. She’s in the Kuiper belt, and that’s my finish line. Going as fast as she is, it’s not like she’s going to turn around.)

She came, popped her baby, slung around the sun, and now she’s off to boldly go wherever the hell she’s going next.

Which just leaves us with Bogie 2. Which is definitely headed straight at us, after those course corrections we saw it fire off last week.

So what the hell is it?

An instrument package? An ambassador? A bomb?

Maybe it’s a fucking fruit basket.

The answer is, we don’t know. And since both ships refuse to return our calls, we won’t know until it gets here. Frustrating, init?

Gosh, if only we could do something, like meet it half way, wouldn’t that’d be great? Oh, but to do that we would need a space program that wasn’t a complete fucking joke.

I know, we couldn’t afford it. Billionaires needed tax breaks and artists needed grants to paint their asses blue. I get that.

I’m just saying it might’ve been nice to have the opportunity to be proactive here, instead of just watching as Bogie 2 cruises in.

Because while it’s probably not a bomb, it’s not like we could do shit about it if it was.

I guess we’ll have to be content in knowing we spent our money on more important shit. Like winning the war on drugs, amiright?

Christ, we are such dumbasses. If it is a bomb, we deserve it.

The girl slammed the man down in our living room, scattering vodka bottles, screaming for the doctor.

I don’t know how she hauled him up all those stairs, big as he was. She had though, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to listen to me tell her the doctor was too hung over to help.

She yelled, I yelled, the man bled and groaned, then my sister shoved in.

“Shut up, Cesar, and hold him,” Sophie snapped at me, wiping blood away from the knife handle that protruded from the man’s belly.

Too confused to argue, I did what she said. The girl shut up too, staring at Sophie. I wondered why she didn’t protest about a kid taking charge, but shit, Sophie was doing something.

Her hands danced across the man, pressing and poking into his neck, armpits, and groin. He groaned once, then passed out. Sophie jumped up, ducked into her room, and bounced back before I could yell at her with a suture kit and drug vials.

“Thought Mom sold all her shit.”

“Not what I hid,” Sophie said. “Grab the knife.”

“Why?”

“Cause when I tell you, you’re going to pull it out.”

“What?”

“Do it, Cesar,” Sophie said, her voice taking that crisp tone our Mom’s used to get before she whupped us. “Do it just how I say, or he’ll bleed out. And if I lose my first patient cause of you, you’ll be my second.”

“Yes ma’am.”

Sophie gathered her supplies, paused to look at Monkey, who nodded at her. Then she started telling me what to do.

“Rest, clean water, and meat if you can get it. He lost a lot of blood.” Sophie sounded exhausted, but she stood straight as she explained to the girl what her father would need. I listened and spun the knife in my hand, wondering what the hell to make of my little sister.

“Thank you.” Lisa, the girl, she was about my age. “We owe you.”

I stilled the knife, looked at the anchor branded into the skin of the girl’s arm. “You’re fisherfolk?”

“Yes. We’ll get you fish, whatever you want.” For the first time I noticed her long braids, her rich red-brown skin and my tongue went all sideways.

“Fish. Well — ”

“What the hell’s this?”

Mom stepped into the room, ragged with involuntary sobriety. She looked at the man stretched across our floor, a row of stitches marking his belly. “Who the hell did that?”

“I did,” Sophie said, almost a whisper.

“When’d you decide to play doctor?”

“When you got too drunk to be one.”

Mom stared at her, red-rimmed eyes almost focusing for once, then she turned away, stumbling back into her room.

“Who was — ”

“Nobody,” I told the girl, my tongue free again. “You got a boat?”

“Course we do.”

“Good,” I said, “We’re going to need a ride, sometime soon.”

“That we can trade you, easy.” She smiled at me, and I smiled back, a little dizzy again. I looked away from her to catch my breath and caught sight of Monkey’s tail disappearing into Mom’s room.  

Excerpted from Constellation Prize:

A year’s passed since Bogie 2 blazed across the sky, broke up and dropped its pieces into the deepest parts of the ocean, and what’s happened?

Nothing.

So is that all the show our visitors planned for us?

Doubtful.

They’re down there, doing something. Spying? Colonizing?

Poking Cthulhu with a stick?

I have no fucking clue. None of us do. Us curious Georges gotta wonder, though. We stare at the waves and try to imagine what’s going on down there. What are they doing, what are the planning?

When are they coming out?

Because they will. They didn’t come all this way for nothing. Someday they’re going to surface, and then what?

In the comments, in my inbox, everyday, that’s the question, over and over. What are they going to do to us?

Christ, how the hell should I know?

All we can do is watch the sea and wait, and hope that maybe, if we’re lucky, they won’t fuck us over anymore than we’ve already fucked ourselves.

“Where you folk going?”

Samuel had a rough voice to go with his big body, but he treated me nice. He treated Sophie like a saint.

“New Orleans,” I said.

“Orleans? Why in hell would you want to go somewhere more messed up than South Padre, boy?”

Because a man waited there with three new US national ID cards, each of them tied to grey market credit lines flush with the money I’d drained from some private accounts last week. A certain ceegee officer and her boys were going to be wondering where all their money had gone, soon.

I just smiled. “No worries, Samuel. You get us there, we’ll be fine.”

The big man grumbled, but went back to his rigging, rubbing his hand over the raw pink scar on his belly. His daughter helped him, and when Lisa caught me staring at her she smiled.

“We should bring them along.”

Monkey’s whisper made me jump, but he clung to my shoulder easy enough, lips brushing my ear as he spoke. “We’ll need more people on the mainland.”

“What for?” I asked, turning to the rail, away from the fisherfolk.

“Getting stronger. Look.”

Following his arm, I could see something floating in the water. An old door, and on it —

“Jesus,” I swore. “One for each of us, right?”

“You’ll each need one. To learn, to grow.”

I stared at the little monkeys clustered on the makeshift raft, staring back at me. “Grow into what?”

“Something better.” Monkey shifted on my shoulder, and I realized how much I’d missed him being there these last few weeks. He’d helped me crack the ceegee’s accounts and arrange our documents, but he spent most of his time now with my mother, whispering in her ear. “We’re going to help you. All of you. There will be those, though, who won’t like that.”

“The people who make me and mine weak,” I whispered.

“It’ll change, Cesar. Your family will grow, and there are other families, all around the world, growing and learning like you. You’ll come together, someday, and it’ll all change.” Monkey dropped from my shoulder, starting towards the prow where my mother stood, staring out at the waves. Standing straight, clean, sober.

“What are you teaching her?” I called after him, not caring who heard, knowing it didn’t matter.

Monkey stopped and looked back at me, eyes shining with sunlight. “I’m teaching her about hope, Cesar. Hope, and God.”

Something thumped against the hull, and over the rail the new monkeys bounded, eager to teach.

About the Author

Gary Kloster is a writer, librarian, martial arts instructor, and stay-at-home father. Sometimes all in the same day, but seldom all at the same time. His work has appeared in Fantasy Magazine, Intergalactic Medicine Show, Baen’s Universe and Writers of the Future 25.

The Romance of Ruins

E. C. Ambrose

Little excites our sense of adventure more than an attractive ruin: a castle on a hill, a vine-clutched pyramid, a masonry wall sheltered in a natural cave. Ruins appear in a variety of roles in the fantasy tale — and it’s rare indeed to find a fantasy without them. Some are indelible settings for pivotal scenes, like J. R. R. Tolkien’s Weathertop. Others are destinations in themselves — fabled cities that hide secrets the protagonist must discover. Still others suggest a deeper truth to the story, a layer beneath the obvious reality: a ruined rocket at the center of an apparently medieval city.

What purposes do ruins serve in the fantasy story, short or long? What resonance do they create? How does this sense of history enhance the tale at hand? Looking at the history of European interactions with ruins provides interesting insight into how and why they appear in the realms of fantasy, and how characters respond to them.

[Heidelberg Castle, Germany, one of the most striking of European ruins.]

The origin for our fascination with ruins is likely found in the work of the medieval humanists associated with the Italian poet Petrarch, famed as an author and speaker even in his own time. Like many of his intellectual contemporaries, Petrarch disdained his own time as decadent, a dark period when men and morality had fallen from grace. Rather than look to the future for improvement, these early humanists instead took their inspiration from the works they translated and disseminated: the writings of ancient Rome.

Clearly, the Romans possessed wisdom and skills lost to their weak descendants, but it might be possible to reclaim that Golden Age. Especially in Italy, but also across much of Europe, the physical remains of the Roman Empire still loomed over their medieval counterparts. In some cases contemporaries incorporated the broken architecture of the ancients into their own structures, creating hybrid buildings with elements constructed a thousand years apart.

[A later period house built into part of the ruined abbey at Bury St. Edmund's, England.]

In places like Trier, Germany, this consumption was a deliberate act, with the former Imperial Palace transformed into a church, its awe-inspiring proportions and ingenious forced perspective harnessed to serve religion rather than state. Petrarch urged the popes, then residing at Avignon, to return to Rome, wresting it back from anarchy and using that rich landscape as the center of a new Golden Age. He even supported the military coup of the peasant Cola di Rienzo, an uprising that briefly succeeded at ruling Rome, only to degenerate into a Roman-inspired madness and collapse.

The landscape of Europe — the origin of many influential fantasy authors and the inspiration for many great fantasy works — grows thick with ruins. To the Italian humanists, Rome dominated the local imagination. Meanwhile, in the Celtic regions from France and Spain to Ireland, pagan tumuli, standing stones, and earthworks rise up as well, creating a palimpsest of history, tangible and mysterious. Ruins of all ages dot the maps of European cities, serving as literal playgrounds, open-air museums, and secret hideouts for the seminal authors who established the fantasy genre. Ruins formed the backdrop of their lives, creating a sense of the richness of history beneath every footstep, around every corner.

[Ruins in the garden at Bury St. Edmund's, England.]

It’s not uncommon in a fantasy novel to find ruins embedded in the landscape and essentially treated as part of the scenery. In the work of many lesser fantasists, scenes may take place in a picturesque ruin, but the ruin itself remains in the background, not drawing the characters’ or the reader’s attention — just as those ruins that spot the landscapes of Europe must become mundane for many who live there and pass them on a daily basis. And for authors like Tolkien and Lewis, whose works inspired not only generations of readers, but American writers as well, this deep history would be fragmented and layered yet again by the ruin of World War II.

In this way, the ruin can speak to the very heart of its world. David Farland echoes the sense of tradition being destroyed in the first volume of the Runelords series, when his characters are led by mysterious compulsion to the Seven Stones rumored to be the foundations of the world itself. They find most of the standing stones already toppled, and the last one breaks while they watch, foretelling great change, perhaps the destruction of all that they know.

The Victorians explored, exploited, and domesticated the ruins around them. Victorian gardens often feature mysterious pathways or broad vistas deliberately constructed to call attention to elaborate and artificial follies made after the fashion of medieval and ancient structures. Monasteries broken by Henry VIII became pleasure gardens and walking paths, and artwork featured delicate human figures dwarfed by the remnants of the past, even as the inhabitants devour the fruits of the present. Ironically, the Victorians turned for their own Golden Age to the very height of the medieval period that Petrarch despised.

[c. 1800 engraving from Trier, Germany shows the medieval church built into the Imperial Baths (artist unknown).]

Pre-Raphaelite painters created images of King Arthur and his knights in a process of both recovering and creating of the myths of chivalry that underlie so much fantasy fiction. The Arthurian tales beloved of the courts of 12th-century Europe were embellished with heroic values even then, and more so in England and America of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Little wonder that the generation of authors we now think of as fantasy’s founding fathers looked to the Middle Ages amidst the horror of their own time — a degraded and decadent age if ever there had been one. And they packed their fantasy realms with ruins, both inspiration and reminder of that brighter time.

The most obvious use of ruins in fantasy, then, is the evidence of that Golden Age when humans were greater and more worthy, often possessing nobility, wisdom, strength of arms, and semi-magical talents their descendants no longer have. Tolkien’s Middle Earth is rife with ruins of this kind, the symbols of the prior age. They serve not only as reminders of the fall, but also as hope for the future — that the True King, Aragorn, could return the land to its richness and glory. Indeed, the city of Osgiliath, introduced as a ruin, and the hills of Emyn Arnen, the traditional homeland of Gondor’s stewards, are given to Aragorn’s designated prince, Faramir, to be restored to prosperity.

C. S. Lewis, Tolkien’s friend, offered an interesting example of this conception of the Golden Age in the course of his Narnia series. The children crowned as kings and queens in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, reside in the fabulous palace of Cair Paravel, ruling over a prosperous, peaceful land. But when they return in Prince Caspian they find their beloved home now a ruin, their own age regarded as legendary. The structure of Lewis’s series allows the residents of the Golden Age to return and witness how the very adventure they participated in is elevated by time in the memory of those who are good and true — and despised by their conquerors. Lewis offers the same characters a rare chance to inhabit both the Golden Age and its fallen successor.

Other authors have taken this Golden-Age-ruin concept a few steps further, creating more deliberate echoes that question our understanding of history, confusing past and present. In The Shadow of the Torturer, the first book of Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun series, a city very medieval in feel is dominated by the curious Matachin Tower — residence of the torturers — which is subtly revealed to be an ancient rocket-ship. Does Wolfe want to reimagine our own time as the Golden Age? The modern ruins standing among a medieval-style society call to mind Petrarch’s obsession with ancient Rome, to the denigration of his own (now revered) time. Thanks to the presence of such clearly non-fantastic elements, The Book of the New Sun is often described as science fantasy, with its merging of fantasy tropes into a setting that must be our own far future, taking the dreams of its readership and mercilessly forging them into the ruins of Urth.

While the ruins in Middle Earth and Wolfe’s Urth alike are significant in the setting and in the mind of the reader, they are rarely so attractive to the characters. Even during Roman times, early tourism centered on the locations of great battles and other moments of legend and history. This enthusiasm vanished for centuries, as peace was overtaken by collapse and war, the Roman roads fell into ruin themselves, and travel became a difficult and dangerous pursuit. Religious travel remained important, but travel for its own sake emerged later on, with stability in local governments easing their way.

For the wealthy European, this often meant an expedition to an exotic locale, perhaps cruising the Nile River to view the pyramids of Egypt, or even mounting camels to cross the desert to the rock-cut tombs of Petra. As explorers and travelers ventured deeper into the unknown, the ruin became a tantalizing destination, a place of mystery and discovery, and the lucky tourist might even take home a mummy or chip off a bit of statuary as a souvenir.

In this role, ruins are often divorced from those who created them. They represent not some Golden Age of our own history that we might mourn or aspire to, but a strange realm already half-fantasy, now invaded, however benignly, by the blundering foreigner. In fact, some hypothesized that the most wonderful or challenging ruins could not have been created by the locals at all, but required the intervention of outsiders. Even today there are those who claim that wonders like the Great Pyramids were created by aliens (or at least with some extraterrestrial engineering expertise).

A new generation of authors, questioning the values of our own societies as well as the legacy of the early fantasy writers, bring a somewhat different approach to the ruin. David Anthony Durham’s The Sacred Band features the juxtaposition of these two views — a post-colonial take on the role of ruins — when a party of travelers composed of a wealthy prince and a few of those apparently fallen indigenous people stops outside a ruined city. The prince displays excitement, eager to explore and learn about this fascinating place, a perspective armchair explorers are likely to echo, wanting to get inside the walls. But to the native travelers, the ruin is a reminder of their former glory, a piece of their own history rather than just a pretty place.

The view of earlier peoples on discovering a ruin is often less positive, with the ruin serving as a source of corruption and superstition. In Europe, attitudes toward pre-Roman ruins reflected concerns about the pagan past. Standing stones and barrows did not represent the wisdom of a greater time, but rather the sinister lurking of a troubling past. The stone circle at Avebury presents a startling example. During a restoration effort in the 1930s, one of the stones was lifted to reveal the crushed remains of a medieval barber, apparently killed while engaged in the popular hobby of pulling down the stones to bury them as pagan artifacts. Dangerous magic may linger in places like this, places we no longer understand or relate to.

[Stonehenge at dawn evokes the mystery of the pagan monument, Salisbury Plain, England.]

Even the travelers in Farland’s work know to fear and respect the power represented by the stones at the heart of the enchanted forest, and do not tread there lightly. Carol Berg uses this charged atmosphere to shroud the ruins of a magical rift town in The Spirit Lens. Destroyed by the battles of a sorcerous family decades before, the place remains a bit outside of reality, where magic is more acute. The hero comes to grief while searching the ruin — even as his companion is tempted by the power that it represents.

Power lurks at the heart of ruins both real and fantasy. Though many visitors to ancient ruins are merely tourists, willing to take photos and stand in awe beneath the sublime destruction of the past, others come deliberately seeking knowledge — and willing to risk the dangers to acquire it. The discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 by Howard Carter revitalized the thrill of the ruin for many who followed the story: He opened a chink in the wall into a cave of gilded majesty. Just as familiar is the legend of the Mummy’s Curse, which then pursued Carter and his team, warning against the seeking of treasure and hidden knowledge.

There is, alas, no truth to the legend of the inscription said to curse the tomb-breaker (although such curses do exist elsewhere). But a tale combining extraordinary riches with great tragedy is sure to retain its appeal throughout the ages. While Berg’s travelers are searching for kidnap victims, the seekers in Daniel Abraham’s An Autumn War explicitly brave the dangers of the ruined city to bring back forbidden knowledge which they hope will help them to defeat magic once and for all. The reader does not witness the journey of General Balasar Gice and his men, only the terrible aftermath as the handful of survivors stagger back from the desert, successful, but forever haunted by what they experienced. The knowledge concealed by the foreboding ruin is dangerous, seductive, but often vital. In Tad Williams’ Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, the palace of men is built atop the ruined palaces of the conquered Sithi — similar to elves — but the voices of centuries of combatants linger in the shadows, distracting the unwary. Ultimately, it is only by respecting the ghosts of the past that the present struggle can be concluded.

A novella written by Charles Coleman Finlay brings our tour of ruins full circle, with a young man raised by trolls seeking refuge and rest in a mysterious ruined city. Like the fantasies in which the ruin’s history is never at issue, this story seems to present the ruin as a backdrop, as the character’s ignorance about the past and his own concerns distract from the ruin itself. The ruin becomes a source of fear — not because of what it inherently contains (as in the Berg novel), but because of the rival madness of its two other inhabitants, a troll woman wild with loneliness and a human searching for a jewel we never learn the meaning of. Finlay’s ruin escapes architecture and history into a realm more purely symbolic. This broken city stands in for the darkness, mystery, danger, and betrayal in the human mind, reflecting the hopes and fears of those who approach it — as ultimately all ruins do. The title of Finlay’s work is, of course, Abandon the Ruins.

[Tunnels beneath the Imperial Baths, Trier, Germany — a maze of darkness pierced by light.]

About the Author

E. C. Ambrose is the author of a new dark historical fantasy series about a medieval barber surgeon to start next year with DAW Books. E. C. spends too much time in a tiny office in New England with a mournful black lab lurking under the desk.

The Biker Chick Who Rides Her Own Bike: A Conversation with Nathan Long

Jeremy L. C. Jones

Jane Carver gnashes her teeth, shakes her head. Ol’ Dutch wants him “a piece.” Taunting, heckling. . . he’s more of a nuisance than an outright threat to Carver.

Besides, Carver’s got a record and doesn’t need another strike against her, so she throws a leg over her “fat-boy” motorcycle and smokes her Marlboro. She’s a self-professed “swamp-trash country girl,” a biker chick, tough as nails. She can take care of herself, thank you very much.

Then Ol’ Dutch goes too far.

“You can say all you want to me,” says Jane Carver. “Sticks and stones and all that, but no man, or woman for that matter, puts hands on me without invitation. It’s not a code or a creed or something I even think about. It just sets me off, and when I get my mad-on the world turns red and hot and Jane isn’t driving the bus anymore. I punch him once. Once.”

That single punch is more than enough to kill Ol’ Dutch and launch Jane Carver into a weird and wild ride that begins standing over a dead body on the sidewalk in front of a bar and leads to Waar, a planet where the sky is “Ty-D-Bol blue,” the locals are purple, and nothing seems quite right.  

Jane Carver of Waar is adventure fiction at its rowdiest. And it’s Nathan Long at his freest, loosest, and most wildly inventive.

Very much a voice-driven, character-rich narrative, Jane simultaneously pays tribute to and parodies Edgar Rice Burroughs’ iconic John Carter of Mars stories.

Long’s previous novels are set in the Warhammer Fantasy universe. His first trilogy features Reiner Hetzau and his band of criminals. The premise is simple: the Blackhearts are given the option of punishment for their crimes or they can complete impossible missions for Count Manfred. Fortunately for readers, they choose the latter. In 2006, Long took over as the writer in charge of William King’s iconic Warhammer duo, Gotrek and Felix. Most recently, he’s begun the novel-length tales of Ulrika the Vampire.

In the Warhammer universe, Long favors dark heroes, tight plots, gallows humor, and brutal action.  On Waar, Long eases up on the reins a little and really cuts loose.

Below, Long and I discuss Jane Carver, John Carter, and moving the plot along.

What do you enjoy about writing fiction in general and what did you enjoy about writing Jane Carver of Waar in particular?

In general, I love telling stories. I was an avid reader as a kid, but like a lot of avid readers, the kind that live the stories and want to disappear into the books, I didn’t just want to sit on the sidelines. I wanted to tell my own and pull people into my stories the way other had pulled me into theirs.

More specifically, I love plot and character, and how each generates the other. While I like world building and scene setting, what I really love is coming up with an interesting, engaging character, then figuring out how I can ruin their day with a nasty, twisty, plot. I like the puzzle box challenge of plotting, fitting all the elements of the story into a tight structure in order to make a balanced whole that also moves along at a brisk pace and comes to a satisfying conclusion.

With Jane, what I loved was her voice. So much of my fiction is set in pre-industrial fantasy worlds, in which I have to be careful to describe everything in ways that make sense with the setting. For instance, I can’t describe a charge of cavalry smashing into a wall of infantry like a freight train, because there are no freight trains in that world. With Jane, all that’s out the window. Jane is a modern gal sent to a pre-industrial planet, who has brought her modern vocabulary and idiom with her. If she wants to describe a striped, six-limbed alien as having the face of the MGM lion, or say that the flower of an alien plant was the pink of a hooker’s hot-pants, I don’t have to stop her. She can say whatever she wants.

To me, that’s one of the central gags of the book — taking the old fashioned scenery and situations of planetary romance and seeing them through the eyes — and the vernacular — of someone who doesn’t usually get to be the hero of that kind of book.

Where on earth did you find Jane Carver?

I came up with Jane because, while I loved John Carter of Mars and all its imitators, the heroes always bored the shit out of me. They were always tall, square-jawed, stern-eyed men with no sense of humor and no self-doubt. Jane was my reaction to that. As I said above, I wanted to see what would happen if a different kind of person had the same kind of adventure John Carter and all his stuffed shirt buddies had. And Jane was about as different as I could think of.

I didn’t want to make her a typical adventure heroine either. I didn’t want Jane to start weak and powerless and grow strong through adversity. Nor did I want her to be the cold killer who has abandoned her femininity in order to fight injustice. I’ve seen those heroines too many times before. I wanted Jane to be a kind of woman I’ve met many times in real life, but rarely in books — the boisterous gal at the honky-tonk, the brassy broad at the ren faire, the biker chick who rides her own bike, and doesn’t need any help picking it back up again when she ditches, thank you very much. I wanted her to be woman who could take care of herself, but who too often let her appetites get her into trouble — both of which are ideal attributes for an action heroine to have.

What do you admire about Edgar Rice Burroughs’ fiction and his vision of the world?

Edgar Rice Burroughs was a master of invention. He created many fantastic worlds — Barsoom, Pellucidar, Tarzan’s Africa — and characters — John Carter, the Mucker, and of course Tarzan, who is perhaps the most recognizable adventure hero ever.

Burroughs was also a genius at coming up with monsters, races, places, machines, strange pseudo-science, and incredible situations. He is the great American father of genre. Science fiction and adventure fiction would not have been the same without him, nor nearly as fun.

What he was not so good at, however, was plot and character. As I said above, John Carter is a bit of a cardboard cut-out, and ERB’s other characters are the same. They are all pretty much interchangeable. Tarzan on Mars would be John Carter, and John Carter in the jungle would be Tarzan. His plots are fairly interchangeable too, all very linear and episodic across all his series. I hold neither of these things against him, however. He was self taught, and a man of his time and place, writing at the beginning of a genre and inventing it as he went along. If he were alive today, with the benefit of having read a century’s worth of the science fiction and fantasy that he helped invent, he would very likely write with more modern techniques and sophistication. Hopefully he would remain as original as well.

How’d you go about plotting Jane Carver of Waar? 

I am of the note card and three act structure school. Once I have a rough idea for a story and a firm idea of how it ends, I start laying it out in three acts, using the ends of the acts and the mid-point as markers for where my major turns should go, then filling in the scenes around them using post-its. Once I have all my post-its laid out, I pour over them a while, tearing some up and replacing them with others until everything makes sense and the scenes flow smoothly, and there are no continuity problems.

With Jane, I was not as careful with the plot as I normally would be. I would usually be a lot tighter and symmetrical, weaving subplots through and making sure that things at the beginning pay off neatly at the end, but I wanted the book to mimic the Barsoom books not just in spirit but in structure, and, as they were originally written as serial chapters that appeared in pulp magazines, they tend to be very linear and episodic. Dejah Thoris is kidnapped, John Carter races off to rescue her, but before he can save her, she is taken to another place, so he races off to rescue her again, but before he can save her, she is taken to another place, and so on until he finally saves her at the end of the book. I wasn’t quite as linear as that, but I did let the story follow it’s nose, and play out in distinct episodes more than I normally would.

Can you talk a little about building Waar?

I’m ashamed to say that, just like the plotting, I was not as careful with Jane as I have been with other books. Indeed, I basically just made it up as I went along. I had some basic concepts before I started. I knew I wanted Waar to have a very hide-bound, honor-bound society. I knew I wanted there to be parallels to a lot of the races and animals that appeared in the Barsoom books, but I didn’t want to make it a one-for-one recreation. I deliberately didn’t re-read the John Carter books before I started writing. I wanted Jane to be fueled by the memories of what the Barsoom books felt like to read when I was a kid, not how they actually were.

Is there a part of Waar you’d most like to visit? Least like to visit?

Hmmm. Good question. Of all the places in the book, I think I’d like to explore Ormolu, the capital city of Ora. I set a fair amount of action there, but there is so much more to explore — much more than there was space to mention in the midst of the plot.

As for the place I’d least like to go, I would pick the inside of the Temple of Ormolu, since it is said that, but for its priests, no-one who enters it ever returns to the outside world.

Any advice for writing action scenes?

Be briefer than you think you need to be. I have a tendency to overwrite action, and I really have to watch it. Blow by blow descriptions gets boring pretty quickly. Try to get the feeling of movement and danger into it too. An action scene where there doesn’t seem to be any risk or danger for your hero isn’t going to thrill anyone.

Also, an action scene has to move the plot along just like any other scene. If nothing has changed for your heroes at the end of an action scene, it probably wasn’t necessary.

Will we be seeing Jane Carver again?

Absolutely. I am hard at work on the sequel, Swords of Waar, as we speak.

And what’s next for you?

I’ve got quite a lot coming down the pike. In addition to Jane Carver of Waar, which comes out on March 6th, I have two Warhammer books debuting soon. First is the Gotrek and Felix Anthology, which comes out March 27th, in which I have one short story and one novella. After that is Bloodsworn, the third in the Ulrika the Vampire series, which comes out may 29th. Also Swords of Waar is supposed to come out later this year, but I don’t know the date yet, and I have a few under the radar projects which I can’t talk about yet, but which I’m really excited about. Stay tuned!

Any parting words of advice, encouragement, or mischief?

I’ll give you the advice I’ve been trying to give myself for the past few months: turn off the Internet once in a while. You’ll be able to concentrate more on your writing, you’ll see things first hand instead of on YouTube, and you might pick up a book by accident and read it. That would be a good thing, particularly if it was mine.

Thanks again for interviewing me. I had a blast!

About the Author

Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and teacher. He is the Staff Interviewer for Clarkesworld Magazine and a frequent contributor to Kobold Quarterly and Booklifenow.com. He teaches at Wofford College and Montessori Academy in Spartanburg, SC. He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006. Jones lives in Upstate South Carolina with his wife, daughter, and flying poodle.

Writing Is Magic: A Conversation with John R. Fultz

Jeremy L. C. Jones

Madness comes to the King “like a creeping fungus in the hollows of his mind.” The dark sorcerer returns. The Giants welcome the storm. A Prince must avenge his father’s death and take his rightful place upon a distant throne.

From page one, Seven Princes by John R. Fultz cracks open like teeth-shattering thunder and rolls through more than five hundred pages of adventure, dark intrigue, and incisive character development.

This is no flimsy first novel. Seven Princes has the heft of Tolkien’s fiction, the pacing of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter tales, and the character-rich complexity of… well, of a John R. Fultz novel.

“Is war an inevitable part of human existence?” asks Fultz in his debut novel. “Is vengeance worth its cost? What is the nature of reality and what are the keys to mastering it? Which is more powerful — love or hate? What do rulers owe to those who are ruled? How do you kill someone who cannot die? How does a Prince become a true and worthy King? What is the price of wisdom?” These are some of the book’s most prevalent themes.

Written in a simultaneously elegant and effortless style, Seven Princes swallows the reader into a world where the battle between good and evil is as complex as the human heart.

In the interview below, Fultz and I talk about writing as a form of sorcery, bringing characters to life, and the abiding philosophy that informs his work…

What do you enjoy about writing fiction in general and fantasy in particular?

As I tell my students, writing is magic. I don’t mean that in a metaphorical way; I’m quite literal about it. Art is a bridge between spirits, and writing is one of the most effective art forms to do this (another is music). Writing joins mind to mind, spirit to spirit, and it defies the restrictions of space and time. You can read Shakespeare or Poe and get inside their mindspace, share their visions, even though they’ve been dead for ages. You can read ancient texts and get fresh meaning and relevance from them. (When it comes to non-fiction, I recommend Marcus Aurelius and Lao Tzu.) Something you write today can be found and read in a thousand years and it will still make an immediate connection with the reader’s consciousness. This is magic.

The written word is the basis for our entire human civilization, and it stems from the ability to tell stories, which separated us from animals thousands and thousands of years ago. By telling each other stories we preserve and pass along vital information…the early myths of every culture evolved in this way. Modern fantasy is simply the latest evolution of those primal myths. In some cases, fantasy fiction is a literal throwback to those myths. Of course, the real difference between fantasy fiction and actual myths is that in a fantasy world myths aren’t metaphors, they are literal realities (as early peoples believed their myths to be). Fantasy speaks to something ancient and honest inside us all. It elevates us from our day-to-day existence into a realm of ideas, archetypes, universal consciousness, and boundless imagination, where the spirit can roam free and expand. When we finish a fantasy story or novel and return to our own reality, we are better for the experience.

In my view, fantasy fiction is a perfectly valid form of literature that can be as enlightening, truthful, and transformative as any “classic” literature. I also enjoy horror and sci-fi, but the fantasy genre has always been my first love.

What do you admire about Edgar Rice Burroughs’ writing? And in what does his influence show up in Seven Princes?

Burroughs is the Master of Adventure. They say Felix Faust (aka Max Brand) was the “King of the Pulps,” but I think that title would better be bestowed on Burroughs. His Martian Tales series really hit me hard as a kid. I read the first four or five books, beginning with his first novel A Princess of Mars. Those books just drew me in like magnets — especially with their gorgeous Michael Whelan covers. The Martian Tales starring John Carter (i.e. most of them) are the missing links between Western fiction and Sword and Sorcery. On Barsoom (Mars) you have swashbuckling, sword-slinging action alongside radium pistols, flying ships, ancient technology, and tons of monsters. John Carter is plunged from the post-Civil War Old West into the brutal culture of the red planet, and his adventures hearken back to the classic romances of earlier decades. As you can probably tell, I prefer Burroughs’ Martian Tales to his Tarzan work. I also love to point out that John Carter came before Tarzan. With the release of the upcoming John Carter movie, the character is finally getting his “moment in the sun.” I hope the movie lives up to the spirit of Burroughs’ work. From the two trailers I’ve seen, and the creative teams involved, I’m very optimistic. (For a more precise list of reasons why, check out my recent blog post on the subject.)

Burroughs had a taste for pure adventure that has rarely been rivaled. So what if he recycled plots — the guy wrote tons of John Carter and Tarzan books, so some repetition was inevitable. And they say that when you steal from yourself it’s called “style.” Burroughs inspired a generation of pulp writers who came after him, and his work continues to inspire writers today. It was only a matter of time until John Carter found his way to the silver screen. Especially since the Tarzan franchise has been reduced to a kids’ cartoon musical. Perhaps if John Carter is a success, we’ll see a revival of the true, visceral Tarzan character in a new series of movies. I think you can find almost anything you love about a Tarzan story somewhere inside the John Carter tales — and more. They are my favorite because they are full of wild imagination, bizarre aliens, swordplay, romance, and heroism. The very idea that Mars is covered with all of these ancient ruined cities, dried-up ocean seabeds, and lost civilizations is enough to get the imagination going.

I’m not sure if any of my Burroughs influence shows up in Seven Princes, but if it does it’s deeply embedded in the raw sense of adventure that erupts again and again throughout the novel. Of course, today we writers are more interested in three-dimensional characters who are conflicted and complex beings, whereas Burroughs worked more with clear-cut heroes, dastardly villains, and traditional casts of supporting characters. However, the breakneck sense of adventure that made Burroughs so beloved remains as strong as it was a hundred years ago.

Where did Seven Princes start — with an image, a character, something else?

It actually started with an idea called Child of Thunder, the story of “the Giant who was a Man and the Man who was a Giant.” This shows up in Seven Princes as the backstory of Vod the Giant-King. Vod’s story is a romance about a Giant who could take the form of a Man, and it serves as part of the vast backdrop against which The Books of the Shaper are set. Child of Thunder didn’t quite work as a novel…so I dove back into the world I had created and decided to tell the story of Vod’s heirs — the Princes Tadarus and Vireon, and the Princess Sharadza. The book also involves five other Princes from various kingdoms, some in more crucial roles than others. Some day I’d like to go back and tell Vod’s complete story as a graphic novel with the right artist. But to get at the heart of your question, Seven Princes started with a character. The character of Vod. All of my stories begin with character, and character is for me the driving force of the narrative. Plot, theme, and everything else comes from character. The old saying “Character is king,” really applies to the way I write. It’s rare that I find a writer who disagrees with this approach. If you have great characters in a great setting, and you listen to those characters, then you inevitably get a great story.

What goes into the creation of a compelling — or great — protagonist in general and a compelling fantasy protagonist in particular?

I think a compelling protagonist means a character that seems real in as many ways as possible. In fantasy, this can mean many different things, but in general the basic human factor remains the same. Even if you’re writing about a protagonist who isn’t literally human, he (or she) must have something that readers can embrace and identify as essentially human traits. Usually this means some kind of internal conflict or challenge, which accentuates and magnifies an external conflict. “Perfect” characters are boring, and the very nature of humanity is that we are imperfect beings. So imperfect characters are the most interesting. The current popularity of the “anti-hero” in our society is indicative of this idea.

In what ways are you and D’zan similar? Or is there a different character that more closely resembles you?

Actually, I probably identify most with Prince Lyrilan of Uurz. He is the Scholar Prince, a historian, an archivist, and a budding author. His initial goal is to chronicle the events of D’zan’s struggle. The written word is his domain, unlike his twin brother who is a born warrior. I don’t have a warrior twin, but I’m all about the written word.

I suspect we’ll be hearing much more from Lyrilan of Uurz in future books?

Lyrilan is one of the prime viewpoint characters of Book Two: Seven Kings. I can’t say much more about it for fear of giving spoilers, but he has an incredible character arc in that volume.

And how about Sharadza? Who is she, where’d she come from, and what makes her tick?

Sharadza is the daughter of Vod the Giant-King, and her brothers are three of the titular Princes. Her goal in the first book is to master the sorcery that her kingly father refuses to teach her, so she sets out to find her own way into the mysterious world of magic and spellcraft. She is the reader’s entry point into the Shaper’s mystical and mysterious world… Her growth as a woman and a sorceress continues throughout the series.

You mentioned the importance of a great setting. Can you talk a little bit about how you built the world of Seven Princes? What’s the relationship between character and setting in this novel?

I think they are so closely intertwined as to be practically inseparable. The environment in which we grow and thrive (or against which we struggle) tends to define us to a large degree. So all of these characters are products of their kingdoms, including the socio-cultural and moral aspects of these kingdoms. In some cases, characters influence the environment to the point of completely altering it — usually in the cases of great acts of sorcery. Vod had such an impact on the world more than twenty years before Seven Princes begins. Everyone is sort of living in his shadow, so to speak — especially his three sons and his daughter. Vod cracked the world, slew a desert, and brought Men and Giants together.

Throughout Seven Princes you embrace tropes while somehow stripping them of cliche. Is this novel Sword and Sorcery? Epic fantasy? Something else altogether?

Thank you for the compliment; this was a primary goal of mine. You really can’t get away from fantasy tropes when you write fantasy, so instead you have to embrace them and do something new with them. People have referred to my work as “Sword andSorcery” for years, but I don’t put that label on myself. Readers are free to call it what they will, and publishers need labels to market and sell books, so genre labels are handy tools. I think Epic Fantasy is probably closer to the mark with Seven Princes, but then again there are no “hard and fast” definitions for either S&S or Epic Fantasy. The second often involves elements of the first. When I write, I simply create stories that are meaningful to me, the stories that I would like to read. I don’t worry about what genre I’m writing in. I go where my passion takes me, which if you ask me is the key to all good writing. These days it seems like the term “Sword and Sorcery,” which used to be fairly derogatory, has been given fresh life and revived as a viable sub-genre of Fantasy. When I was in a rock band, people used to say “What kind of music do you play?” and it was always a hard answer to give because musicians, like writers, don’t want to limit themselves. If people want to call Seven Princes “Sword and Sorcery” I’m fine with that — just as I’m fine with “Epic Fantasy,” “Heroic Fantasy,” “Dark Fantasy,” and “High Fantasy.” It all falls under the broad Fantasy category, so it’s all good.

Seven Princes is dedicated to Darrell S. I’m assuming the “S” stands for “Schweitzer.” What influence has he had on you?

Yes it does, and you’ll find Darrell’s full name listed among my acknowledgments in the back of the book. Darrell began as one of my favorite writers, then became a longtime mentor, and ended up as one of my dearest friends (who is still one of my favorite writers). I first discovered the genius of his short stories when I read “Mysteries of the Faceless King” in Marvin Kaye’s anthology Weird Tales: The Magazine That Never Dies way back in 1988. (This was also the book that turned me on to the brilliance of Tanith Lee, thanks to her wonderful story “The Sombrus Tower” in that same collection.) “Faceless King” led me on a search to find any more Schweitzer stories that I could…and there are hundreds of amazing tales to discover, as he is a master of the form. I did the same thing with Tanith Lee’s stories from that time onward. I was in college at the time, and I soon discovered the legendary Terminus run of Weird Tales magazine (famously edited by Schweitzer and the late George Scithers). I immediately began sending stories to Weird Tales, and I immediately got several rejections, as any young writer must.

However, every rejection carried priceless writing advice from Darrell. I kept on writing, and I kept on reading, and I followed Darrell’s great work through the intervening years. Throughout the 90s his stories of Sekenre the Sorcerer set a new bar for Sword and Sorcery fiction and Dark Fantasy in general. After 15 years of attempting to write a story worth of publishing in WT, 15 years of polishing my craft, striving to apply the principles of good writing I continued to learn from Darrell (as well as the many other writers I studied — from Dunsany to Silverberg to Lee to Ellison, etc.), I finally did it. Darrell bought my first pro story, “The Persecution of Artifice the Quill,” and published it in Weird Tales #340, one of the last issues he and Scithers edited. This was a major breakthrough for me, and it inspired a dozen other tales that soon followed.

After corresponding with Darrell for nearly two decades, I finally got the chance to meet him and his wife in person at the 2006 WorldCon (where he introduced me to the great Harlan Ellison — I was tongue-tied). Since then I’ve made it a priority to meet up with Darrell at the World Fantasy Convention every year. It was Darrell who told me a few years ago that the next phase of my career should be writing novels. As in so many other cases, he was right. This is only one example of the tons of great advice he’s given me over the years. I’m known far and wide for singing the praises of Darrell’s fiction, which deserves far more attention than it gets. His Mask of the Sorcerer novel is a great place to start reading if you haven’t experienced his work, as are any of his short story collections. He is without a doubt one of the world’s greatest living fantasists.

Are teaching and writing similar?

Well, both require an intense passion for what you’re doing. Teaching is a calling, not a job. It’s the same with writing. Writers write because they have to write. The same may be true for teachers. Certainly nobody gets into teaching for the money. And while most writers would love to be financially successful, it’s not a prime motivation to start writing. If you want a lot of money you get into accounting, finance, or some other profession that provides those kinds of rewards. In some ways you have to be a very impractical person to be a writer…there are any number of things you could do that are easier and more materially rewarding. The same is true of teaching. I tried the corporate route and was delighted to leave it behind in favor of teaching young people to read, write, and think. One thing that happens when you teach literature is that the lessons you learn from teaching a great story, novel, or poem tend to creep back into your writing. Appreciating, analyzing, and enjoying great works of literature is something that all writers should do, and teaching those works as part of my daily living can often be very inspiring.

What are some of the things your students have taught you about writing?

They’ve taught me to be patient, which is a crucial lesson for a writer (as well as a teacher). Publishing moves at a glacial pace. Sometimes the writing itself also moves incredibly slowly. You can’t rush it. And you can’t rush kids to learn… you can lead them, but they have to follow you willingly. They’ve also taught me time and again that the best stories are those that connect to readers on a basic human level. Readers (of any age) respond to characters that seem real and believable to them. So I try to create characters that readers can relate to, even when they are characters you love to hate.

What’s next for you?

Right now I’m working on the Third Book of the Shaper, Seven Sorcerers. It’s going to be massive. The second book, Seven Kings, is nearly finished; once again the great Richard Anderson has done an amazing cover. I’ve also got the PRIMORDIA hardcover graphic novel coming from Archaia this month (with amazing artwork by Roel Wielinga) and a great “weird history” story called “The Gnomes of Carrick County” appearing in the new issue of Space & Time magazine.

Any parting words of advice, wisdom, or mischief?

I just want to thank the amazing Orbit Books team for bringing Seven Princes and The Books of the Shaper to fantasy fans all across the globe. Orbit is truly a class act and it’s humbling to be a part of their terrific lineup.

About the Author

Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and teacher. He is the Staff Interviewer for Clarkesworld Magazine and a frequent contributor to Kobold Quarterly and Booklifenow.com. He teaches at Wofford College and Montessori Academy in Spartanburg, SC. He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006. Jones lives in Upstate South Carolina with his wife, daughter, and flying poodle.

And Now for a Few Short Words from our Editor

Neil Clarke

It wouldn’t be appropriate to end this issue without sending congratulations to E. Lily Yu and Catherynne M. Valente for their respective Nebula Award nominations for Best Short Story and Best Novella. We’re quite pleased to see “The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees” and “Silently and Very Fast” on the ballot. Good luck! We’ll be rooting for both of you!

A word of advice to our book collector friends: the signed limited edition of “Silently and Very Fast” that was published by WSFA Press is nearly out of print. You might want to grab one while you can.

In other good news, thanks to the continued growth of our Kindle and Weightless Books e-subscriptions, we will be rolling out some more non-fiction features over the next few months. The first of these is scheduled to debut in our April issue. If you’d like to see Clarkesworld continue to grow, please help us spread the word about our subscription options. Details can be found at http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/subscribe/.

Thanks, as always, for your continued support!

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.

Clarkesworld Magazine

Issue 67

Table of Contents

Fragmentation, or Ten Thousand Goodbyes

by Tom Crosshill

Draftyhouse

by Erik Amundsen

The Womb Factory

by Peter M. Ferenczi

The Latest Apocalypse: Popular Music and the End of the World

by Brian Francis Slattery

Passing Through Each Other: A Round-Table Discussion of Speculative Fiction and Academia

by Jeremy L. C. Jones

Suitably Strange: A Round-Table Discussion of World-Building

by Jeremy L. C. Jones

Another Word: Reading as Performance

by Daniel Abraham

Place to Ponder

Art by Steve Goad

© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2012
www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

Fragmentation, or Ten Thousand Goodbyes

Tom Crosshill

Every day, Mom says goodbye to me for the last time.

I need to go to the office or meet Lisa at the airport or pop out for some milk. I’m lacing my shoes in the hallway when I hear the tap-tap-tap of her heels. I freeze for a moment, then rise to meet her.

Mom stands in the door, elegant in a simple dress. No matter the silvery hair. No matter how her skin, once a smooth dark brown, wrinkles over her bones. You’d never guess she has lived a century. She has no titanium knees, no vat-grown veins, no concession to modernity inside her.

If only her mind were as strong.

“Mom.” I smile at her.

“Rico.” She smiles too, uncertainly. “Must you go?”

“Just for a minute.”

Her breath catches. She reaches for me with one trembling hand. Halts when I wince. Her fingers linger mid-air, gnarled and stained with ink.

She’s been drawing in her upstairs studio. She’s been drawing with the door locked, her work a secret to the world and her agent and me.

I haven’t pried. What might I find, if I opened her sketchbook — scribbles, blotches, scrawls? Proof that her time is up?

Ashamed of the thought, I take Mom’s hand — bony and warm and strong. “I’ll be right back.”

She steps close and presses her face into my chest. Her shoulders tremble. I feel her tears soaking through my shirt.

“Lo siento, Rico,” she whispers.

Every time Mom says goodbye to someone, it’s for the last time. She thinks — no, she knows — that she’ll never see them again. Not the mailman. Not her best friend Abby. Not me.

It’s no tumor, no disease — we’ve run all the tests. Her reasoning is strong as ever. She can tell you how the milkshakes tasted in Miramar, before Fidel came down from the mountains and she left on the Peter Pan airlift. But deep within her mind, something has begun to fail.

And I can’t fix it.

So I pat her back and murmur reassurances in her ear, and try not to think what she’s feeling. Try not to imagine how I would feel, if I knew that I’d never see her again in my life.

This happens every day.

Still I delay what I must do.

“Just build the habitat. You’ll feel better.”

Lisa packs shirt after lopsided shirt into her green Samsonite. After three decades of marriage, the sight is comforting. Lisa’s only happy when in motion. Even her business suit has a space age streamlined look, the collar chic-asymmetric.

“It seems too. . . permanent,” I say. “Like I’m giving up on her.”

“It’s hard, I know. But what if she strokes tomorrow?”

Lisa’s right, of course. The habitat’s a contingency. I won’t have to use it until it’s that or the crematorium.

But can I watch Mom suffer day after day, once there’s an alternative?

“You’re giving her a gift,” Lisa says. “You of all people should know that.”

Me of all people.

I walk to the viewport in the north wall. It sits mounted in a steel band like a ship’s porthole. Below it, a brass plate reads “George Dieter — Captain, Husband, Father. 1960-2049.”

Dust covers the screen. Has it been that long? I reach up to wipe it clean.

Blackness flickers into life.

A turquoise sea laps against a stretch of sand. The beach glares blinding white, studded with regal palms. Beautiful.

I could grab my immersion headset, feel the heat of the sun, hear the breeze coming off the water. But then I’d have to face the man on the sand.

He lies in the shade of a thatched beach umbrella. Perhaps thirty, his body lean and muscular, tanned bronze. Arms stretched out at his sides, eyes closed, face relaxed.

George Dieter. First habitat upload in the world.

“Hi, Dad,” I whisper.

It’s been long since I said those words. Long since I descended into the world Lisa and I built two decades ago. I miss Dad — it’s not that. But every time I went to see him, I didn’t find the man I was looking for.

“Mom’s drawing again,” I tell Lisa. “She won’t, after.”

I offered to give Dad a ship, after he uploaded. I offered to give him virtual seas to sail, cargo to carry, battles to fight. He only told me, “I’m tired, son.”

I learned that lesson well, those early years before our IPO. Maybe it’s the lack of biochemical stimuli, maybe it’s a shortcoming in the iterative neural matrices — uploads just don’t care.

Lisa zips her suitcase and comes to me. She slides between me and the viewport, wraps her arms around me. “Come with me to LA. Emily and I, we’ve got miracles to show you. There are breakthroughs coming down the pipe that—”

“Breakthroughs?” I pull back without meaning to. “Every month, heck, every week we get some breakthrough. We all rush to try it and blog it and show it off. Aren’t you scared we’re losing our humanity?”

“Oh, but we’re not human anymore! We’ve fragmented into a thousand different species. With every new technology we choose to adopt — or not — there are more of us.”

“You’re spouting Emily again.”

Lisa turns away, goes back to her suitcase. “She’s a brilliant woman.”

“She’s our competitor.”

“Should we miss out on a chance to change the world again, just because Emily works for the wrong corporation?”

On the screen, Dad gets up on his elbows and watches someone approach. A lithe figure and beautiful, strikingly dark against the white sand. A simulacrum of Mom as she once was. The thing can’t even hold a conversation, but Dad doesn’t seem to mind. He reaches out a lazy hand and grasps her, and draws her down atop him.

The screen blurs.

I turn away. “I never wanted to change the world. I wanted to preserve it.”

Lisa seems not to have heard. “I’ll call you from LA.” She wheels her suitcase to the door.

Before she can open it, a knock comes. We jump, both of us. “Come in,” I call.

Mom enters. “Rico, I—” She sees Lisa. “I. . . I thought you left already, dear.”

“Hello, Alina.” Lisa keeps her gaze on the floor. “I’m running late.”

As Lisa walks past, Mom parts her lips in a silent cry. She reaches for Lisa’s shoulder. Pulls back as if scalded.

Just like that, Mom lets Lisa go.

I watch the tear that rolls down her cheek. I watch it, my eyes dry as they have ever been. I envy her.

I’m a coward that night. But the next day I call Mom from work.

“Mom.”

A faint draw of breath in my cochlear. “Rico.” Pause. “I’m glad you called.”

I wait for more, but nothing comes.

“Mom, I’ve been thinking. Your house in Miramar. The one with the grand patio and those big old doors. What color were those doors?”

Silence. “What’s this about?”

“You showed me those photos a thousand times. I close my eyes, and I see that house. But I got to thinking I never knew the colors.” When Mom says nothing, I add, “That’s the place you were happiest, isn’t it?”

“You’re building me one of your things.”

Your things. That’s all she calls the habitats, ever since she saw what Lisa and I created for Dad.

“Must you do that?” she asks me.

I press my face against the window, look across Northwest Portland to home. The tiles of our roof shine red amidst the trees of Nob Hill. I imagine Mom on the veranda, the question in her eyes.

“We need to prepare,” I tell her. “Before you. . . Before it’s too late.”

“. . . okay.”

“Okay? Really, you’re fine with this?”

“This has nothing to do with me,” she says.

“I don’t want to lose you, Mom.” The words come out hard and fast. “Does that make me a bad person?”

“The doors were green,” she says, after a while. “Green like bananas not yet ripe. We had the greenest doors in all of Miramar. They stood out from blocks away. On the last day, when my father drove me to the airport. . . I looked back at the end of the street and saw only a glimpse of green. I knew that I’d never see those doors again.”

“You’ll see them again.”

I stand there by the window, listening to Mom breathe. Waiting for some answer, question, request. Anything to let me believe this is an actual dialogue, a real conversation between two human beings.

“Rico?” she asks at last.

“Yes, Mom?”

“Don’t hang up.” Her voice catches. “Stay on the line for a while, will you?”

I do. For a while.

I go home late — late enough to be sure Mom’s asleep. Lisa calls as I close the door behind me.

“Rico!” she chirps in my cochlear. “Check the mail.”

I scan the shelf by the door. A cardboard box. I recognize Lisa’s cursive on the label. “What’s this?”

“Something Emily and I cooked up.”

Emily again? I tear open the box and extract an immersion headset — a thin gray headband, with the initials LE etched on the outside. “Tonight’s a bad time for toys, Lisa.”

“Put it on. Trust me, honey.” I can hear her smile. “Just get yourself comfortable first.”

Perplexed, I move into the living room and sink into my reading chair. A heavy leather recliner, it’s the only piece of furniture in the whole house older than a decade. I had to fight Lisa to keep it when we moved up to Portland.

I put on the headset. “Okay.”

“Meet you there!”

One by one my senses disconnect. The world quiets. I can’t feel the leather under my fingers. I notice the faint scent of Stumptown Organic — Mom’s favorite coffee — just as it evaporates. Black falls across my vision.

Then, immersion.

Warmth envelops me.

My toes curl on cool glass.

Nighttime. I look out over a golden city. Ten thousand towers lit up bright, far below. New York revolves stately around me.

No, it’s not New York that revolves, but I. A glass box of a room surrounds me, suspended at the end of a lever from the top of the Chrysler Building. The lever turns, and the streets of Manhattan float past below.

My breath comes fast. Dizzy, I brace myself against the glass wall.

“It’s a Bocelli design.”

Lisa stands behind me, at the side of a gigantic mahogany bed covered in white satin. She too wears white — sheer silk pajamas that cling to her skin. Her perfume caresses me delicately.

I struggle to resist, but I feel myself stiffening inside my own pajamas. This place. . . I note the clear glass shower booth in the corner. The mirror centered in the ceiling.

“Really, Lisa? You know I don’t go for this stuff.” We tried immersion sex, early in our marriage. It never felt any better than dream sex — than mental masturbation.

“This is different,” Lisa says. “We’ve hit on something.”

She gestures, a flick of her wrist. Her clothes melt away, as do mine. She stands before me naked and beautiful — and real, so very real. No glorified avatar, this. I see the stretch marks on her thighs, the slight flab of fat on her midriff, the wine-stain birthmark on her left breast.

She smiles, a slight upturn of her lips.

Blood pounds in my ears. I’m hard as I’ve ever been, the brush of cool air tantalizing against my skin.

“So you got modeled for textures,” I manage to force out. “That doesn’t mean—”

“It’s more than that.” Lisa steps forward, reaches for my cheek. “This is me, Rico. Genetically. Chemically. Truly.”

Her fingers make contact.

There’s no faking her touch. No faking the bolt of electricity down my spine.

I embrace her. Pull her close, shivering at the wonder of her skin against mine.

We fall onto the bed and cling tight to each other. My body recognizes the whole of her pressed against me — her heat, her scent, her strength, and so much more.

With a hunger I’d forgotten I possessed, I slide into her. She arches against me. We gasp as one and slip into an urgent beat. I kiss her lips, kiss her nose, kiss her sweat-slick brow as we climb the slope to climax. She smiles at me and cries out my name.

When the end comes, some wonderful minutes later, I convulse against her and think — this is better, this is better, this is better than the real thing. . .

After, I lie on my back, her hand in mine, and listen to my heart calm its beat. “We’ve got to put this in our habitats.” What if Dad could feel this real? What if Mom could? Might it make a difference?

“I’ve already started negotiations. Emily’s offering us a joint venture.”

“Oh. That’s great.” I pause, uncertain. “Lisa? I’ve missed you.”

She smiles. “Me too, Rico. I want to be there for you. With this new tech, we can see a lot more of each other.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“You should hear what Emily’s got in mind,” she says. “Once you’re capturing genetic makeup, it’s a single step to information transfer. Immersion induced pregnancy.”

“. . .pregnancy?”

“Procreation is the only limit to our fragmentation as a species,” Lisa says. “But procreation is just information exchange. Theoretically, I could mate with a piece of software.”

I gape at her.

Lisa pats my cheek. “Don’t worry, I won’t. Not with a stud like you around. Now I’ve got to go. Say hi to your mother from me, will you?”

Before I can answer, she disappears.

The living room snaps into reality around me as my teeth click together.

Lisa’s voice reverberates inside my skull. Can you imagine. . .?

I sit there alone, covered in sweat. Somewhere in the house, a clock ticks the seconds away. Cold sperm dries on my leg.

“. . . it’s like she sees another person in me.” I pick at my omelet. “Like we disagree on who I am.”

Mom sips coffee and draws in a sketch pad with her free hand. She glances up at me once in a while. Hers is an artist’s gaze, all-encompassing.

She used to draw me every morning, while I ate before school. The price of my breakfast, she called it. I pretended to mind, but I kept all the drawings. A thousand penciled sketches of a teenager slurping down rice and beans.

That was long ago. Today, it feels right that Mom should draw me. I need her to look at me. I need her to see me as I am and reassure me.

She only says, “Your father gave me black soles.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I saw the home you built for him. The beach. The palms.”

“That’s what he asked for.”

“I saw the girl,” Mom says. “He asked for her too?”

“Dad didn’t want to be without you. You can have a companion too, in your habitat.”

Mom stops drawing. “Why would I want that?”

“I thought. . . you loved Dad, didn’t you?”

“I’ve said my goodbyes,” Mom says, “even if he hasn’t.”

“What do you mean?”

Mom sets her pen aside. “George was a good man. He loved me well. But understand, Rico — I was more than a woman to him.”

“You were the love of his life.”

“Yes. The black love of his life.”

“Mom, I don’t think—”

“I left Havana in ‘62. Two hundred miles between Miramar and Miami. You know what else was two hundred miles? The distance between a Cuban and a nigger.”

Mom speaks the word nonchalantly, without anger, but I flinch even so. “Dad. . .did he. . . I mean, he never called you. . .?”

“Of course not,” Mom says. “Your father gave up three jobs over me. He fought big men for me. Once he got stabbed for me. So what if he wanted me to meet all his Waspy friends? So what if he wanted the whole world to know I was his? I loved him, and thought he loved me.”

“Didn’t he?”

“So he told me. He always told me sweet things.” Mom smiles. “One day he said I was God’s only perfect creation.”

“I’m sure he meant it.”

“A few days later, we were messing around by the pool. He grabbed my foot and held it up. ‘Here!’ he shouted. ‘Proof that God screws up!’” Mom gestures grandly, the motion eerily evocative of Dad. “I was beautiful and perfect to him — except for the pale undersides of my feet. Like God poured a bucket of brown paint over my head, and forgot about my soles.”

“He was joking.”

“I’ve seen the girl he’s got, on the beach you gave him. The girl who looks like me. I’ve seen her soles.”

Could it be? I rack my memory. Did Dad tell me what to do? I wouldn’t have made a mistake like that, would I?

“Don’t glare like I’ve spit on his grave,” Mom says. “George loved me. I know that. Just as I know that Lisa loves you, even if she sees a man in you that you don’t always recognize. Our lovers are never the people we love, not exactly.”

It happens a week later, as I’m leaving for a client dinner.

Mom catches me in the hallway and wraps me in her embrace, and weeps on my shoulder. She clutches her sketchbook in one hand. Its edge digs sharply into my ribs.

I pat her back and murmur assurances, thinking ahead to the evening’s negotiations. Then Mom twitches and gasps, and collapses.

For some moments I stare at her. I’m shocked, and surprised that I’m shocked at this most expected of events. Then I start CPR and dial the office. Within minutes we’re in an ambulance, screaming across Portland. An oxygen mask on Mom’s face, her sketchbook still locked in her grasp.

Severe heart attack, my team tells me. No repairing the damage.

They rush her into OR One, and strand me in the marble-and-gray-leather waiting room. I watch through the wall as a dozen figures in scrubs fight to stabilize her for upload. With all my practice at saying goodbye, I should be calm, but I can’t breathe.

At some point in the next hour, Lisa comes. She hugs me and kisses me and does her best to console me.

I stare at her head. She has shaved it bald since this morning. It gleams in the sterile light from the OR.

“I’m getting a port installed,” she explains. “It’s for this new crossfire app. . .”

I let her words drift past me. When she falls quiet for a moment, I speak into the silence — because speaking is easier than thinking.

“What if every goodbye is really the last one we get?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You talk about fragmentation. Every time you stuff a new gadget into your brain, you fragment away from the human race, right?”

Lisa shrugs. “Sure.”

“I don’t think you need a gadget. Every time you leave the room, you come back a different person. Ten times a day you fragment away from me. A hundred times. Every time you walk out the door, I’ll never see you again.”

A thousand times I should have said goodbye to you. A thousand times, as I lost the woman that I loved.

“That’s great, Rico.” Lisa chuckles. “We’re human fractals, huh?”

“Yes.”

Loosely coupled fractals — that’s what we are. We split and divide, hoping that the near-random walk of our fragmentation will bring us close enough to interact. To procreate. To love.

Once Mom is conscious and ready for upload, I ask Lisa to leave me with her.

“I’ll see you at home,” she tells me.

I’m not sure she will.

Mom lies entangled in wires and IV lines. She was never a small woman, but the operating table dwarfs her. She looks out of place and powerless and scared.

But a faint smile curves her lips as I approach. “Today’s the day, huh?”

I sit down by her side and take her hand and tell her the truth. “I’m not ready to let you go.”

“I know.”

“See what I built for you, Mom.” I press a few buttons, and the circular walls of the OR light up.

A house with an elegant colonnade, its doors a rich green. An indoor patio lit by a soaring skylight, with dark wooden rocking chairs and a blinding white canvas stretched on an easel. A bedroom with tall windows that look out on the sea — they hold no glass, only wooden shutters to close against the evening chill.

Wonder touches Mom’s eyes. “It’s beautiful, Rico. Just as I remember it.”

I get to my feet, my heart pumping fast. “You want to go there, Mama?”

“This house belongs to the girl I was.” Mom sighs. “That girl is gone.”

“But Mom, you love this house—”

“Don’t you give me black soles!”

My hands drop to my sides. “I’ll do whatever you decide, Mom. I want you to be happy.”

“I am happy. A little bit afraid, but happy. I’ve got no more goodbyes to say but one.” Mom smiles. “You can keep me in that house if you like. It won’t be me, not really — but you know that, don’t you?”

“I need you.” I blurt out the words before I can stop myself. Then I stand there, my face flushed, as vulnerable as I have ever been.

“Where’s my sketchbook?” Mom asks.

“It’s outside. It’s not sterile.”

“What does that matter?”

So I bring it in. Mom gestures for me to open it. With trembling fingers, I flip the cover.

I stare for long moments at the drawing that faces me. Then I turn the page. And another.

I leaf through the sketchbook in a confused daze. This is what Mom’s been working on?

“I draw what I see,” she says.

What she saw was a hundred figures. A hundred middle-aged men. In t-shirts and business suits and bathrobes and beach shorts. Some tired, some eager, some angry, some sad.

All of them me.

I recognize none of them.

That’s fragmentation too. It’s not just the people around you who change.

I’m not the boy who loves Mom’s rice and beans.

I’m not the guy who loves Lisa.

I’m the man who can’t let go.

“I loved every one of you,” Mom says to me.

I cling to those words like a lifeline. Here’s one constant throughout all my splintering changes. It’s not fair that I must give that up.

“I said goodbye to every one of you,” Mom says to me.

I stare at her for moments. I stare at her for a long time, even as her breathing grows labored and her heartbeat uneven.

The decision races at me full speed.

Can I give her up?

Can I keep her bound? Constant, unchanging from year to year in her virtual prison, while I fragment and break and splinter away?

Will she love me if I do?

Will I love her?

Or will I let dust gather on the screen of her viewport?

I only know this:

In a while, Mom will take her final breath.

In a while, I’ll make a decision.

And then, whatever that decision, I’ll say goodbye to her for the last time.

About the Author

Tom Crosshill’s fiction has been nominated for the Nebula Award, and has appeared in venues such as Intergalactic Medicine Show, Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Lightspeed. In 2009, he won the Writers of the Future contest. After many years spent in Oregon and New York, he currently lives in his native Latvia. He’s a satellite member of the writers’ group Altered Fluid. In the past, he has operated a nuclear reactor, translated books and worked in a zinc mine, among other things.

Draftyhouse

Erik Amundsen

Shenroos is a lucky man. He can relax at a fireplace in green velvet on the moon. He is lucky because he has solitude. Eight days, he has been the sole inhabitant of Draftyhouse. Just him, the Bridgeway, a well-stocked cabinet of floral liquors in every shade between green and purple and all the matching flavors of intoxication and a hundred million places where the air is leaking from the great stone mansion into the void. The man in the moon is having a private party, celebrating his eviction, six days overdue but not yet enforced by the Colonial Army. There is a three-hundred-year-old ghostwood coffee table in front of him, his marching orders open on it, a coaster for his collection of glasses and empty bottles.

Draftyhouse gets like this. Lonesome but never alone. No one has come to take his place, so Shenroos feels justified in squatting. There must be someone here to mind the spiders and husband the flies.

The spiders work by instinct trained into their line over many generations. They are sensitive to the places where the air seeps out and driven to spin webs there. Feeding the spiders falls to the flies, and feeding the flies falls to the carcass of an elk brought over the Bridgeway in Shenroos’ wheel-barrow, upended into the crackling room with its slats like the exposed ribs of the carcass, named for the obvious.

Hauling the carcass of an elk must fall to an astronaut, therefore a gentleman. Common folk aren’t fit for outer space and so, in leathers and a helmet and bearing a cart full of ripe elk, comes Shenroos: twenty-eight years of life and twenty-one spent in the walls of this house with the Bridgeway supplying food and water and air. He owns seven rooms of Draftyhouse. Lord of the manor by three rooms and by noble obligation, the only one who sticks around.

Draftyhouse is larger than some sublunary villages, encased in tall blocks of angled stone. There are a scattering of luxurious, dangerous windows, like arrow-slits from the ancient castles, poured thick with distorting glass. The house breathes a long sigh, exhaling the air that flows across the Bridgeway into space. Every change in that stirring of air registers in the hairs on Shenroos’ neck. A breach would slam the great door shut, sever the Bridgeway and abandon Draftyhouse to Mother Moon. Drink does nothing to dull that sense of doom, nor sleep, nor any task.

Shenroos is a lucky man because he is aware of death in every twitch of his every nerve, every division of every cell. The surface of the moon is littered with many other places so abandoned and walkers who go outside sometimes come back from those places with the remains of foreign outposts and foreign dead to decorate the house. Shenroos’ ancient wheelbarrow has brought more bones than just elk into Draftyhouse.

Shenroos, when he stirs, presses his hand or his ear to the walls, places carved with mottos and poems, bas-relief and pattern. There are no walls in Draftyhouse not in the work of astronaut hands or old hunting tapestries for the privacy of the spiders beneath, weaving, listening. They all listen to the slow language of the walls, the drone of earthy consciousness, telluric current pulsing in the stone like sap through a slow, ancient tree. It is that current which keeps Shenroos close to the floor and his limbs the proper weight. The attraction weighing him and anything it touches down, the shared circulatory system of a composite entity.

Shenroos studied the principles and equations behind it, not for scholarship but self-discovery. You do not jump in Draftyhouse, unless you like a close view of the vaulted ceilings. When you sleep, you sleep on the floor, like a monk.

Shenroos reels through the chambers of Draftyhouse when he is not reading ghost stories. He’s drunk and uninspired. Shenroos has composed stillborn, premature poems, bitten off at their cords and his mouth is rusty at the corners from the birthing. Epics in old traditional styles about hunters tracked by ghosts across snowy hills, priests giving prophecy, their sleeves and pockets stiff with gore. Then he finds the ghost. He has been looking for words worth carving into these walls and a place to carve them. There are places, spaces, nooks and crannies accreted over the place like luster on a pearl, some well hidden. None untouched. Shenroos is looking over those overlooked corners when the ghost rides through, slouched on the spectral body of an elk in the leathers and helmet of an astronaut.

Shenroos mistakes its scratching for the sound of a rat. Wise rats do not come to the moon, foolish ones get hunted by all present in grand affairs that go on from the first sighting of the little animal until its death. The thought of a rat of his own to hunt and stalk is enough to perk his sodden sensibilities. His eyes seek out movement in the dim of the house, pale glow of the cold-lighting, but what they see isn’t movement, just an image that Shenroos’ brain wants to make into a shadow of a curtain and the silhouette of a hunting trophy. This is not what his brain wants there to be. The ghost becomes clear.

The ghost does not look at him; the elk does. Not one of the slate-furred animals of Shenroos’ native forests. This one is the color of an old scab, the color of a priest’s trailing sleeves. Shenroos knows better than to trust his eyes, the hour, or anything else but his feet. They are bare against the cold stone of the floor, and through them, he feels a thing, light, but present in the telluric current, in front of him, a thing moving, a thing with mass.

The ghost’s arms are tangled in the beast’s antlers, the head, a half-grinning, jawless skull nods in the helmet, the lines and ink of the astronaut’s facial marks transferred from the flesh to the bone. The flesh resolves between those markings, an astronaut family that Shenroos does not know, and the skull beneath.

When he was the only little boy on the moon, Shenroos learned to read lips. This puffy mouth, chapped with frost crystals, the swollen tongue, they ask a question before elk and rider vanish like a shape in fast-moving clouds.

Shenroos kneels, putting both hands to the slate of the floor to feel the current of the house. His hands come up black with a thing that bothers him more in its inexplicable presence than a ghost astronaut mounted on a spectral elk.

Shenroos puts his tongue to the pad of his hand and does not like the taste or the cloy of the stuff. This is not a residue of the house, this is novel, and novel is another word for lethal when one lives a few inches of always-more-porous-than-you-think stone away from the void. Shenroos tries very hard to explain this as a thing that one might see on the sixth day of hard drinking, an argument that he would find persuasive, but for the movement in the current.

Shenroos can tell his eyes they do not see a shook from the snowy forests of the afterworld bearing some poor bastard astronaut off to the cold hells on the moon. Shenroos cannot tell his current-sense, his house-sense anything. It tells him.  

Shenroos is in no position to listen. He drags toward his room and checks again that the current did register something besides him, somewhere in Draftyhouse did, in fact move. It did. Shenroos vomits and the moon spins. He checks again.

The astronaut has not been sleeping these last few days so much as losing consciousness. Shenroos is not surprised to find himself in a snowy forest. Shenroos is covered in blood and his feet are numb, but the blood isn’t his, so he goes forward, the pull of dream-necessity is too strong to recognize or fight.

The blue spruces and black pines give way to the mountains and mares of the moon, but the snow continues to fall and those red elk, the shook, are following, bellowing soundless cries in the vacuum, smelling the blood all the same.

In the ghost stories, shook have a bite like a tropical lizard; their stink gets in your blood and they can follow you anywhere. Shenroos is wearing his astronaut leathers, all treated and sealed against the void, but there is snow melting in his hair. His helmet is off. Shenroos can’t tell if he is breathing, if his blood is boiling, if his heart is beating out a futile rhythm against nothing. He is in the house and the snow is falling. The dead astronaut comes to him.

“What is the purpose of the Draftyhouse?” That was the question on the ghost’s lips. The snow falling in the house is ash and soot. Shenroos loses the dream to sleep and then sleep to dull pain and cold. He wakes, soot on his bedding.

Shenroos celebrates his return to sobriety with the last and best of his non-alcoholic rations. Tomorrow would normally bring food to the Bridgeway for the next week or so. The day after, they would check to see if it has been taken, and, if not, the third day would bring a party. Untouched supplies usually meant a suicide, something that happens when a lone astronaut stays to mind the house. Hanging has always been popular in Draftyhouse; the trick is to understand the length of your rope and make sure your toes are touching at all times.

No one in the history of Draftyhouse has ever just gone outside.

Shenroos repeats the ghost’s question; a popular question in the sublunary. Shenroos pulls out his family’s sounders, feels a stab of guilt at the dust on them and begins to set up an experiment. There is almost nothing left for him to discover with the antiques he fits together, nothing that he cannot learn just by walking barefoot in the chilly place, putting his hands to the stone. Shenroos has lived so long dependent on the Bridgeway and the telluric current-augmented gravity for light and air, water and the weight of the earth keeping his limbs and lungs strong, he is sensitive to it. Most marriages do not last so long.

Since the astronaut families first arrived, the moon has been tried out for many purposes but everything man puts here eventually fails. Draftyhouse will be no different; each creak of the wood fixtures, each shift of the stone tells Shenroos of the doom of this house, the mottos and poems in the stone will one day sit in airless cold darkness.

Covered in soot. Shenroos is finding it on all surfaces he checks; fine, greasy, streaks in odd places in the rooms that fall under his titles. Other places are almost coated and his sensibilities tell him that there is more weight inside the house. Something new has arrived, bringing ghosts.

There are only four uses that mankind has found for the moon. The first is for storage of things that benefit from no light, no heat and no air. Draftyhouse’s operation is based on the proceeds from the archives, vaults and tombs kept behind air doors and umbilicus hook-ups.

The second is for storage of things that cannot safely be kept on earth; residue of mankind’s unhealthy flirtations with fissiles, wastes of societies enlightened enough not to pretend that they are forever buried or drowned. The third is for astronomy and telescopy, particularly here on the dark side, but resources are elsewhere these days.

The last is for the Bridgeways themselves, telluric tunnels that would ignite the atmosphere around them if left unattended, and may one day bring more distant spheres under man’s dominion. Assuming man manages to get past the hurdle of distance that keeps the moon their only destination. Some idiots look for ways to make the Bridgeways into weapons, too, because what’s a sphere in the dark worth if you are not its sole owner? The man on the moon laughs at the notion. Shenroos’ people did attempt to fight on her surface, twice. History cannot record what kind of disasters they were, it would have required someone survive.

Shenroos hooks all the equipment to the vacuum generator, a long, thin tube lined with turbines and occultations that lead, eventually, outside. Shenroos sits next to the intake for a moment, listening to the artificial quietus of his home while the equipment begins to power up. Then he begins to hunt for ghosts.

Flies land on his ledger. A few of them go into the intake only to be swallowed up. Flies are always attracted to the outside. The air doors are always full of their carcasses.

Shenroos has had enough sleep and enough sobriety to doubt his eyes, but never does he the kinesthetic connection between his body and his big, inefficient monument to faded vainglory. The telluric current speaks to the base of the survival instinct, the egg at the root of the tree of his life. Shenroos is a lucky man; Shenroos knows to listen and knows how to listen. The instruments are out today only so that he can have his senses recalled and validated.

The moon is silent and dead inside, but large structures do settle, and this is one of the reasons why so many places end up derelict and shut off from sublunary. A shift can bring the joining of a place off true; there are some cracks that chemical sealants and spiders cannot patch. There are meteor strikes; man has learned that even the tiniest speck can strike with a force that no bullet can match. Some stations have been blown wide open. The readings do not bear a strike, and they don’t bear settling, either. The readings don’t bear anything in records at all. Only that several tons of matter have silently invaded the house and Shenroos is not nearly as drunk as he needs to be.

What is the purpose of the Draftyhouse? Others, over brandy, shadows thrown by the great fireplace, passed the question over and over like a mid-point pennant in some ancient joust.

“Pride. We could make Draftyhouse when no one else could. We can keep it operating for two hundred and forty-three years when no one else can keep a structure half the size open for half the time.”

Shenroos is the man on the moon, so he finishes his thought.

“We might have to look up at their flag and salute it, but everyone looks at the moon.”

Down in the sublunary, the barometers will register that Shenroos has used the generator. That’s bound to get someone’s attention. At this point only a blindfold and a bullet are going to save face down there. So be it.

So be it. Shenroos is exhausted from the calculations and the readings, but he is vindicated. There is something in the Draftyhouse besides him, something moving. Whether it is an astronaut ghost on a shook, Shenroos can’t bring himself to care. His eyes are heavy. His body is still thirsty, and the cabinet is close to hand and close to full.

The ghost comes to visit Shenroos by the fireplace when the fire is out. Shenroos last remembers putting a log on it and sitting back down on his father’s favorite chair, and here he is, right where he left himself. It’s cold. There is more soot in the house when he wakes. The webs in the corners of the rooms are black. The Bridgeway helps the house retain some heat, but anyone who has ever come here from the sublunary, all they do is huddle by the fire and complain about the cold. Even his people, their northern latitudes and high altitudes, grey-elk and heavy furs, they shiver.

Shenroos has fallen asleep still slightly drunk and dressed as an astronaut. He doesn’t remember putting the suit on, but it was possibly his last chance to disgrace the uniform, and he’s jumped.

Shrunk inside of his leathers, the ghost is not wearing his gloves or his helmet. His face is transparent to the bone below, his hair sun-faded, dry. He sighs at Shenroos and turns away. The house smells of sweet soot, now. Shenroos’ leathers are stained with it.

Shenroos feels it, the palpitation, dearer than his heart, in the current. Ghost forgotten, Shenroos drops from the chair to his knees. His hands tear the rug aside and splay out flat to the stone of the floor.

The house has not breached. The spiders still spin in their crevices, the gods are in their heavens, Draftyhouse is not moments away from shutting itself to the sublunary forever. There is movement in every corner of the house. Invisible weight; Shenroos feels the deliberate tread in numbers he only imagined in the days when the Draftyhouse’s ballroom still held functions.

Shenroos can see the soot in the air, settling.

Shenroos begins to stagger, stopping every few steps to press his cheek to the stone of Draftyhouse’s walls. Twenty-one years of living in constant contact with the current has made his body the almanac, all the instruments he needs.

Shenroos’ lips are black from the soot, cheeks smeared over his astronaut marks. The ghosts start arriving.

They don’t appear to his eyes at first, but then a young girl is before him in her backcountry garb, her hair plaited in seven pigtails. Shenroos presses his lips to the wall and feels the weight of her little feet. He passes the crackling room. Flies land at the corners of his eyes, iridescent blue, frustrated; all this death and none of it to eat. The spiders have come out. He sees them on every wall, scuttling, confused. Shenroos wants to tell them something, but Shenroos cannot talk, not to the ghosts or the flies or the spiders or the flickering current of his home; he can only listen.

Shenroos’ leathers are stained almost black. His hair is sticky. Ghosts pass him, holding their transparent arms to hug their insubstantial ribs. Shook, some skeletal and some still in ghostflesh, prance in the halls. The moon was supposed to be a hell in the old days; priests sermonized on the terrors mankind would bring to the earth by opening Bridgeways.

The Bridgeways.

There is something in the soot on the wall where Pigtails’ gaze fell. Shenroos wipes it off with a finger and looks closer. Hair, half burnt, too long to be his.

What is the purpose of the Draftyhouse?

Shenroos feels another flicker in the current, a jerk from the far end, in the sublunary. The air pressure increases, the spiders scuttle away from their webs. Shenroos feels the arrival of more cold, frightened souls through walls of his house. Draftyhouse is an exhaust vent. It is a chimney for a crematorium, opened instantaneously, anywhere. A stable Bridgeway whose other end opens and burns all it touches. The ultimate weapon, the reason no one has come to get him. No one assumed that Shenroos would survive the first test. No one assumed that the air drawn each time the weapon deployed would sustain the one man stupid, stubborn and drunk enough to stay behind. What is the purpose of Draftyhouse? The blindfold and the bullet; so be it.

No. Unacceptable.

Shenroos shouts at the atrium to the Bridgeway, screams, though the effort breaks his head like a quail egg. A haze of soot answers, floating through the halls. Flies land and taste everything; some get stuck to the walls and some get borne down with the sticky soot. The spiders abandon their webs. Shook trot through Shenroos’ solid body. Shenroos feels the added weight of hundreds, but the air does not move with the breath of lungs, the rooms do not heat with the warmth of blood. Pigtails can almost see him when Shenroos concentrates on her and calculates, in his head, the weight of a lost soul.

Ghosts are crying out in growing numbers. These people don’t belong to the cold hell of the moon. The moon belongs to Shenroos. Soot is caked in Shenroos’ hands. It coats the inside of his mouth and nostrils.

Another flicker, gout of soot; the dead astronaut rides by, empty sockets expectant. The living astronaut pulls himself away from the walls.

Shook track their quarry by their blood.

Warmth comes in the waves of soot. Tiny flakes of ash fall from the ceiling like snow, ghosts cluster like fog where the shook gather them. What is the purpose of Draftyhouse?

Pigtails is here, standing next to him, near the lunar terminal, where the crackling room is. Shenroos kicks open the cabinet doors, drags the carcass out with a cloud of flies and a scattering of shed maggots. The shook notice, but don’t seem to care.

It would be too easy. Shenroos holds out his hand in front of the spectral muzzle of the dead astronaut’s mount. The shook draws back.

“Bite me. Poison and follow me. Lead these people home. They don’t belong here.”

The dead astronaut shakes his head.

“This is my house, and I want you all out.”

Shenroos reads lips. It’s harder when they aren’t much more substantial than the translucent teeth beneath them.

“Shut the door.”

Shenroos opens his mouth. Closes it. Opens it again. “They’ll just open it somewhere else,” he says, but those are the words that convince him. Somewhere else. Not here.

“So be it,” Shenroos says. “You know the way home, across the Bridgeway?”

No response.

“This is why Draftyhouse isn’t open to the public.” Shenroos grabs a broken slat, ancient wood splintered and sharp.

It takes him a few tries. Even with the ghosts and the shook and new arrivals coming, a few tries. But Shenroos is an astronaut; he splashes his blood across the threshold, the place where the moon and the earth meet. He stares at the wound in his wrist, throws the slat across the threshold to earth, to the long hallway lined with gaunt men, likenesses of the astronauts who first took rockets in the long ago to place the beacons for the Bridgeways on the moon.

Shenroos puts on his gloves. The left fills with blood, but it stays inside the suit, where it won’t mislead the shook herding the ghosts off the moon. The dead astronaut remains.

“You can stay. I’ll see you here when the big door closes, if you do.”

Shenroos is a lucky man; the Draftyhouse belongs to him and always will. He is the man on the moon. Shenroos puts on his helmet and heads for the airlock doors.

About the Author

Erik Amundsen has been removed from display for being zoologically improbable and/or terrifying to small children. He has been sighted in Weird Tales, Fantasy Magazine, Not One of Us and Jabberwocky but his natural habitat is central Connecticut.

The Womb Factory

Peter M. Ferenczi

Mei stood, hand on her swollen belly. Her stomach rumbled with the hunger that woke her each morning. Four steps took her and her burden to the window, which slid up scant centimeters before hitting bolts ensuring it went no further. The opening allowed air into the room, but no girl, not even Nuan with her misshapen skull, could have fit her head through the slot. The nets to discourage jumping, installed when the industrial park was a city unto itself and the window bolts hadn’t yet been added, hung in tatters at the first story.

Mei put her face sideways to the opening. The breeze that morning carried the chemical tang of Shantou away from her, and the air smelled relatively pure.

The bell for first breakfast, second group, rang in the corridor, and Mei heard the bustle of girls emerging from their rooms though her thin door. Eight short steps took her into the line shuffling in slippers towards the eating room at the end of the hall.

The attendant, in her white uniform with the brown stain Mei had noticed a week ago, stood at the door. As the girls filed by, she touched the front edge of a tablet against their bellies. In most cases, the tablet chirped. The attendant would fish around a multi-pocketed pack at her thick waist and wordlessly hand over a small plastic disk.

Mei accepted the press of the tablet against the bulge under her smock with downcast eyes. Nothing good came of antagonizing the attendants, she’d quickly learned. The tablet chirped, corresponding with the thing inside her.

When she’d first arrived, before they put the egg inside her, the tablet had been silent, and the attendant had given her a white disk. This morning she got a purple one. It had been red at dinner the night before.

She entered the room, with its light green peeling paint, the single long table and bench seats. She took her disk to a low window in one wall and slid it across the counter there. A hand snatched it and a tray emerged with a purple bowl full of the usual gelatinous substance, something that tasted vaguely like congee. It came with a spoon and a cup of weak tea.

Mei took her breakfast and moved toward her end of the table, where the misfit girls clustered like a flock of awkward sheep. She sat next to chubby Fen Hua, who was attacking a bowl with her habitual total focus—she seemed to be the only girl whose body refused to relinquish its fat stores to the thing growing inside it. Crooked, simple Nuan mechanically spooned food into her mouth a little farther down, the occasional drop falling back into the bowl for recycling.

As Mei began to bury her hunger under the glop, a new girl sat down across from her. Mei had noticed that many new arrivals gravitated to her end of the table, perhaps sensing the lack of threat. Most graduated out to one clique or another soon after.

She looked very young, skinny in the shapeless gown they all wore. Her face was pale and her posture telegraphed fear.

Mei kept her gaze averted. She didn’t need to talk to the newcomer to know her story. She would be from a small village somewhere in the provinces surrounding Shantou. Her family would have faced privations, debts, deaths caused by flu and/or the domino fall of diseased crops.

A man would have appeared in the village, driving a clean truck. He would have had tea with the girl’s father or eldest brother and discussed something in low, urgent tones. And depending on the particulars of her family, her father or brother would have looked at her with calculating or desperate eyes. She would not likely see the sheaf of bills that passed from one hand to another. There would be a tearful parting, or not.

There were no tears when the man offered to take away the extra mouth that had befallen Mei’s uncle. She was the troublesome daughter of his city-living brother who’d died, along with his wife, during the flu season two years earlier.

“I will keep your share for you, for when you are finished,” he told her in farewell.

She knew he lied, but in her ignorance was cautiously excited to escape the resentfulness of his family, to make her own way. That feeling didn’t last long.

The new girl was still frozen in front of her bowl. Mei was halfway through her own.

“You should eat,” she said in a low voice, modulated to just carry over the murmur of conversation in the room. The attendants didn’t like a ruckus.

The girl didn’t seem to hear.

Mei nudged her slippered foot under the table. The girl’s vacant stare shifted up from the bowl. Mei pointedly shoved the western-style spoon into the mush and brought it to her mouth.

“Eat,” she said.

The girl hesitantly began to eat from her small, white bowl. It was the kind for newcomers and girls in their rest period, formulated to feed one, not two.

“It’s not so bad, see?”

She got no answer.

Back in her room, Mei settled herself in her chair. It was hard compared to the one in her old bedroom, but it was better than anything in her uncle’s small hut, with its thin mats on a packed earth floor. Sitting made her gravid state a little more bearable.

She turned on her tablet and listlessly flicked through the games. The attendants called the tablets a privilege, but Mei intuited that without them, the girls’ crushing boredom could become a problem for the operation.

In her case, the thing wasn’t much help anyway. She didn’t even bother with the video selection, mostly ridiculous state-approved soap operas. The games never changed. She settled on go and placed virtual stones on the board as the app’s limited AI tried to outwit her.

A car door slamming pulled her out of the game: comings and goings were rare for the derelict dorm complex. She went to her window and looked down at the cracked parking lot that fronted the building, sensed other girls in other rooms doing the same.

It was the bright orange Changfeng that appeared every two weeks or so. The usual young man, wearing dark augmented sunglasses and a leather jacket, carrying a small white and blue cooler. He trotted up to the entrance of the building, batting aside a skein of netting. Faintly, she heard him speaking into the intercom.

In the girls’ unchanging world, the young man’s arrival always inspired discussion—his appearance, his purpose, his eligibility. None had ever seen him closer than from their high windows in the otherwise empty building, but most had theories about his personality and his attitudes towards the princesses locked in their tower.

Mei didn’t follow their gossip. The man was an element of the factory, her enemy.

Her stomach was growling again when the bell rang for second breakfast. She knew it was the thing in her belly that absorbed all the energy, but she was the one who felt the hunger.

In the hallway, she found herself walking next to the new arrival, who surprised her by murmuring, “My name is Jia Li.”

“I’m Mei.”

They were scanned by the attendant, received their disks. Mei collected another large purple bowl, while Jia Li was given a white cup. They sat next to each other.

“It is too early for lunch,” observed Jia Li.

“There are six meals a day here. This is second breakfast,” said Mei.

Jia Li poked at the glop in the cup.

“We have not even started to work yet. Why so much food?” she asked.

Mei glanced at her.

“You don’t know what this place is.”

Jia Li stared at her cup.

“A factory.”

“A womb factory,” said Mei. From the silence, she guessed that the girl didn’t understand. “We make things inside us. Like babies, but not babies.”

Jia Li’s cup froze on the way to her mouth.

“Father said I was going to work in a factory,” she whispered.

“You are. But not with your hands.” Mei thought of the young man and his delivery. She was sure it was a new batch of eggs.

“Soon you will start. Don’t be afraid,” she said, thinking of her own terror when, ten weeks ago, the attendant had entered her room, shown her the white oblong shape and said, ‘Relax and this will be easier.’

“An attendant will put a small thing inside you. It doesn’t hurt. It will grow. In three months, the cycle will be finished, and you will rest for two weeks.” The girl would find out eventually that “rest” really meant “heal,” she thought.

“But. . . what. . . what are we making?” asked Jia Li.

“Have you heard of biobots?”

“What? No.”

“Well, it’s like a toy. But alive.”

Mei remembered the commercials she would see for something called a FurryBuddy while browsing on her tablet, when her parents were alive and the world still made sense. There was a boy, perhaps eight years old, sitting on a couch in a sunlit room. Next to him was a smaller creature, covered in golden fur, like a cross between a monkey and a dog. Its oversized brown eyes shone in a face covered with short hair. Plush-toy limbs, stubby fingers. The bottoms of its feet, visible as it sat on the couch with its legs too short to bend at the knee, had dog-like pads on them.

It held an old-fashioned book on its lap and told a story in its high-pitched voice. The child squealed with pleasure. In another scene the pair frolicked in a field. In another they walked along a sidewalk in a prosperous neighborhood, with the creature calling out in English the names of objects they passed.

She’d asked her father for one, and he’d smiled thinly.

“Those are too expensive for a professor’s salary,” he’d said. He’d ruffled her hair, as if trying to brush away her disappointment. “You’re better off using your imagination to make your dolls talk.”

Jia Li was speaking. “I don’t understand,” she said. “What is it?”

Fascinated by them, Mei had learned all that she could, even if she couldn’t own one.

“It is like an animal with a computer in its head,” she said. “It’s like a pet that talks. It plays games, teaches things, languages. . .”

“But, how can we make a computer?”

“The computer, they put inside us. We grow the animal around it.”

Jia Li digested that.

“Then it goes to school to be a teacher?”

Mei pictured a classroom full of the furry creatures and couldn’t suppress a grim smile.

“No, the important stuff is already in its computer.”

Back in the room, playing games, waiting for the lunch bell. Her attention wandered, as it often did, back to the tablet itself. It looked just like the one the attendants had, but only ran a few programs, distractions for the girls. There was, of course, no Internet access, no way to get messages out. Not that most of the girls would make a stink even if they could—any trouble would quickly find their families, which might mean that they had nowhere to return to at the end of their two-year contract.

Mei didn’t care too much about that.

The tablet was tantalizingly similar to one she’d been issued in school. It, too, had been restricted to certain functions, but plenty of kids knew that pushing an unfolded paperclip through a small hole in the back of the device while holding down two buttons made the tablet ask for an unlock code: because the school had never changed it, it was “00000.” Then you could play all the games you wanted.

If Mei could unlock this tablet, she had imagined a thousand or more times, she could do something other than play games. Maybe she could reach out for help.

She was certain that the operation was illegal. Real biobots like FurryBuddies were made in fancy bioengineering factories by big companies, not by little groups of girls hidden in abandoned worker dormitories. But it must be cheaper to grow something almost as good in people, just like the phones made in illegal backcountry factories were almost as good as the ones made by the big brands.

The problem was that this tablet wasn’t quite like Mei’s old school-issued device: it had no pin hole in the back. She’d tried every possible combination of button presses, but all she’d managed to do was freeze the tablet a dozen times. If there was a workaround, it would be online—meaning it might as well be carved on the dark side of the moon.

She was trapped by the lack of some trivial thing, and that lack would cost her two years in this place.

A sudden fury uncoiled in her chest. Before she realized what she was doing, her hand swept the tablet off her lap. As it spun through the air, she was seized by a child’s terror. She was misbehaving, and she would be punished.

But by the time it clattered to a stop on the linoleum floor, she’d mastered the feeling. She was already in hell. Whatever this exercise of will cost her, she would pay it.

She tottered over to the dark tablet, stooped with a grunt, and picked it up. The casing flexed and she saw that the front and back halves had come loose in the impact. At least the screen wasn’t cracked.

She was about to try snapping the split halves back together when a thought froze her. There had been no hole for the paper clip. Now, there was a hole of a sort.

Gently, she pried the two halves further apart, until the back suddenly popped free. Inside was the usual green plastic with metallic traceries, a gray block that was likely the battery.

And right where the hole in the case of her school-issued tablet had been was a tiny white circle. She pressed on it with her finger nail and it clicked in. Release, and it popped back out. The paperclip switch.

The lunch bell rang.

Mei mechanically packed the food paste into her mouth, trying to speed up time. She hadn’t felt hope like this since. . . she blinked. Since before her parents got sick. Part of her tried to rein in that feeling, but it was impossible.

She looked up, and realized that Jia Li had asked her a question.

“What?” She didn’t mean to sound irritated, but knew she did. The other girl looked down.

“I was just wondering why we have to spend so much time alone. In our rooms,” she said softly.

“Oh. It has to do with the eggs. They can connect to things from inside us, like what happens with the tablet when the attendant checks you in for a meal. They keep us apart so that they don’t interfere with each other.” Mei had overheard this from girls who had been there longer, and it seemed believable as anything.

“It’s lonely,” said Jia Li.

“It’s better than having to deal with that lot,” said Mei, cutting her eyes toward the other end of the table.

“They aren’t nice?”

“Well, they can be pretty mean to Nuan there, or fat Fen Hua. And if you aren’t careful, they may decide they don’t like you, either,” said Mei, unable to keep the bitterness out of her voice.

“And you? Why don’t they like you?”

“Can’t you hear the city in my accent? They can, and that’s all the reason they need.”

But she knew that wasn’t all of it. The others seemed to accept that this place was their lot, that it was what their families needed of them. Sure, they had been scared, but for the most part they’d settled into it, made friends.

But Mei couldn’t. She could try to help Jia Li understand what was happening, but she couldn’t relax and make small talk about something else. In her mind, this was an ongoing violation, and pretending otherwise would be acquiescing to it. So the others mocked her city background, but she knew that was just shorthand for their resentment of her resentment.

Jia Li didn’t say anything for a while, and Mei half figured she’d decided against aligning herself with a pariah and was plotting her way into the safety of a clique. But she finally spoke.

“Well, they must be quite stupid.”

Mei couldn’t help but smile.

After the eternity of first lunch, the door was closed behind her again. She carefully took up the tablet, and lifted the back cover away. Pursing her lips, she held down the two buttons on the front and pressed the little circular switch.

The screen went blank. The China Telecom logo came up. And then a dialog for entering an unlock code.

Holding her breath, Mei touched the “0″ key on the onscreen keyboard five times. The screen blanked for a moment, then came back. . . unchanged. The same request for a code. Failure.

A harsh bark of frustration escaped her throat and she stared unbelievingly at the screen. She had been sure. It had to work. And it had not.

I can guess it, she thought, it’s only five numbers. . . but she knew she couldn’t. After a few tries, the tablet would lock itself entirely, become useless.

Mei took a deep breath. There was a number. If it wasn’t random, she had a chance of figuring it out. But she was still clueless when the bell for second lunch rang.

First dinner. Second dinner. A night of twisting dreams and fragile sleep. She woke once to screams leaking from the delivery room: one of the girls in the chair. She briefly wondered who, then realized she didn’t care and drifted back into nightmares before the sounds stopped.

First breakfast. Second breakfast. First lunch. The bells, the bowls, newly unendurable.

I let myself hope, she thought. So much worse than not having hoped at all.

She was peripherally aware that Jia Li was sitting next to her. Had asked a question. She tapped Mei’s shoulder softly, which stirred memories of tentative taps during other recent meals. As then, Mei fixed her with a flat stare, wanted to say they could talk later, but speaking seemed far too difficult. She turned back to her food, and Jia Li remained silent.

“. . .number. . .”

The word landed on Mei’s mind like a leaf on water, drifting out of context. She shook herself alert. A conversation down the table. Two girls, part of the clique headed by Ai Bao. Mei’s concentration bored into their words, barely audible above the murmur of conversation in the room.

“He must have connections,” said the first girl.

“Or money.”

“Or both!”

“How much do you think a car like that costs?”

It sounded like gossip about the young man with the Changfeng. But could it be linked. . .? She turned to the girls.

“Excuse me, what number were you just talking about?”

The pair turned and glared, and Mei realized that in her excitement she’d stepped out of place.

Ai Bao noticed.

“Hey city girl,” she said with quiet venom, “our business isn’t yours.”

Mei looked down, choking on her frustration, her heart hammering. In her peripheral vision, she saw Jia Li stand with her tray and walk down toward the other girls.

“Can I sit with you?” Mei heard her say. “I’m from Yangtouqui.” A village tiny enough that Mei had never heard of it.

“My cousin married a man from Bianshan, not far away,” said one of the girls.

“I know it, I have an aunt who lives there,” said Jia Li. “Who is he?”

Mei, now ignored by the other girls, stared at her bowl and struggled to keep back tears. She had been alone before, and now she was again. She should get used to it.

Meal times flashed by. She’d tried “12345″ on the tablet but didn’t dare guess again.

She was getting green bowls now, meaning she was due within two weeks. She’d known despair when her parents died, but this was different, open-ended, extending to the horizons of her being.

It had been four days since her failure to guess the code when Jia Li again sat next to her at first breakfast.

“The number they spoke of is the license plate of the Changfeng that comes here,” she said. “It is a very auspicious number. They think he must have bribed someone, a lot, to have gotten it.”

The droning static of hopelessness in Mei’s mind was suddenly quiet.

“Do you know it?”

“They say it is A99988. Though they also say in a week, he should be back again.” With more eggs.

Mei looked at Jia Li, her face flushing as she realized how unfairly she had discounted the girl.

“Thank you. Thank you.”

“It woke you up. I guessed it was important. Why?”

Mei hesitated, not wanting to give hope and then take it away.

“It could be useful,” she said quietly. “I’ll tell you more when I can.”

Jia Li nodded. Mei noticed that her bowl was now blue, no longer white.

“The attendant came to you. . .”

“Yes.”

“Are you. . .?”

“I didn’t like it. But there are many things I don’t like,” said Jia Li. “Ai Bao, for example, is cruel. Her friends are frightened. But you are angry. That is better, for being here.”

“Maybe. But it’s hard.”

“I know.”

Back in her room, Mei keyed in 99988. The tablet’s start page flashed up, offering many more options than before. She shook with excitement, and felt an extra thrill as she saw the local and wide area connectivity icons at the top of the screen. . . but it began to waver as they remained transparent. No connection. Jiggering settings didn’t help.

She took a deep breath. She wouldn’t accept that her progress had been towards a dead end. She tried the browser, the various pre-installed messaging apps, but always ended up at the same error message: “No Internet connection found, please check settings and try again.”

She felt despair hovering around her, waiting for her to weaken so that it could retake her.

Almost idly, not allowing herself to consider the death of hope, she browsed through the rest of the newly available apps. Mostly, it was basic stuff—the usual calendar and note-taking kind of thing. But then she found an unusual subfolder.

Brightleaf Biomanagement.

She worked straight through the first night. The applications were configuration interfaces for biobots. At first they seemed impossibly complicated, but by poring over the help and scrutinizing the embedded tutorials, she built a rudimentary understanding. She became adept at identifying what she could ignore so she could focus on the relevant elements.

At first breakfast, Jia Li looked at her with concern.

“You seem tired. . . is it. . .?”

Mei smiled, and Jia Li hesitantly smiled back.

“I’m tired, but it’s OK. It’s not that that’s keeping me awake. It’s. . .”

She wanted to tell her everything, how she’d figured out that the tablets were linking to the biobots in the girls, fine tuning their development. How Mei could now interact with the thing inside her, could control some aspects of it. But with the attendants, the other girls, who knew what ears listening, she couldn’t. She shook her head.

“Insomnia. It’s just something that happens to me sometimes.”

The day seemed to move in fast-forward. She buried herself in the programming apps, and during meals her mind churned furiously over the latest setback, often finding a solution by the time she finished eating.

Jia Li sat next to her at each meal. The two exchanged brief smiles, but her new friend seemed otherwise content to let Mei focus inward, and she was grateful for it.

At second dinner, Mei noticed that Jia Li was among the last to arrive. She looked pale.

“Hey, are you OK?” she asked.

“I don’t feel too good.”

“If you’re really sick, you can tell the attendant,” said Mei. “But don’t bother her if you don’t need to, you know.”

Jia Li nodded. “I’ll see. Maybe.”

Mei turned to her food, let her mind drift back to programming problems.

That night she fell asleep while working with her tablet, and woke with a start in her chair. She rubbed her eyes, disoriented, with the vague sense that she’d heard something.

Then a girl’s scream echoed in the corridor. It froze her, sent her pulse racing. She heard the murmur of voices as well, receding, and sobbing. More screams, now muffled behind the delivery room door. She wondered whose turn it was, and the dinner table with its colored bowls flashed in her mind’s eye. She tried to visualize who had a yellow bowl, the last color. She couldn’t.

Mei didn’t realize she was looking for Jia Li until the door to the dining room closed. The last girls were getting their trays. Jia Li wasn’t among them. Nor was she further down the table. Mei craned her neck, just to be sure.

Maybe she overslept, since she had been sick. Maybe they let her stay in her room.

She looked up from her bowl to see Nuan staring at her from across the table. The shy, slow girl looked down, but Mei kept watching her, and after a few seconds she looked up again.

“The white truck came last night,” she said softly in her nasal voice.

“What?” There was a white truck that dropped off supplies sometimes, but Mei had never seen it come at night.

“At night, it takes girls,” said Nuan.

Mei felt ice run down her spine.

“What do you mean?”

“It hears the screaming, sometimes. It comes.”

Mei couldn’t speak. A bit farther down the table, Fen Hua had stopped chewing.

“Some girls get sick from the egg,” Fen Hua muttered to her bowl. “Makes bad problems. Screaming. They go. Nobody sees.”

Mei took a shuddering breath, then plunged her spoon back into her bowl. She forced her mind back to the programs, felt like she walked a tightrope over despair.

When her time came, it was bad. As she was led to the reclined chair with its stirrups, she was seized by an image of Jia Li writhing there in agony, her body rejecting the thing that had successfully taken hold in Mei’s womb.

Then the pain drove the image away, but it couldn’t dispel the sense of her body out of her control, enslaved to this creature that now wanted out and demanded her participation. And out it eventually came.

She kept her eyes squeezed shut as the attendant cut the cord. She heard its first mewling squeals, high pitched like a kitten’s. A morbid curiosity opened her eyes and she glimpsed it as the attendant carried it away, much smaller than a human baby, wriggling and pink and red.

It was bad. But it would have been so much worse without the knowledge that she’d made her mark on the little beast, that it was in a way her servant as well.

“Would you like to hear a story?” asked Doodles.

It had been a week since Karin’s mother had bought her the creature, in one of the little shops down on Canal. It was cute, but despite its soft, warm fur and the fact that it could speak, there was something about it that made her uncomfortable. Watching it daintily opening a pack of the dense, hard biscuits that it ate, the fact that they had to leave a bathroom door ajar because it couldn’t reach the knob, the bottle of antibacterial gel it fastidiously used next to the toilet. . . it was like having a pet that was also a house guest. Yet it seemed to have less personality than her cat Sandy—it was too chipper, too much like the annoying guide AIs that popped up alongside new apps to “help” you use them.

It wasn’t even a real FurryBuddy, though Karin didn’t have the heart to tell her mom that. It was glitchy, sometimes spouting garbled nonsense or freezing in place for a minute or more before popping back to life as if nothing had happened.

But sometimes the stories were fun. Weird fairy tales, or stuff about monsters and aliens. It was as if someone had just dumped the text of a bunch of old books into the thing’s memory—which was actually pretty likely, given its knock-off status, she thought. As it told the stories, its emphasis and pauses were sometimes off, its body language often out of sync, but not enough to ruin them.

“OK,” said Karin.

Doodles nodded, but it seemed to pause longer than usual before saying, “This story is in a Cantonese dialect. Would you like me to translate it into English?”

“Uh, sure.”

The creature smiled vacantly and swayed gently back and forth, a sign that Karin knew meant the computer in its head was chewing over something.

Then it stopped moving and looked at her. Karin had never seen the expression it wore before: flat, no hint of a smile, eyes hooded rather than brightly wide. It began to speak in an affectless voice, arms at its sides, staring straight at her.

“Hello. My name is Mei Feng. I made this toy. I did not want to. This is my story. . .”

About the Author

Peter M. Ferenczi has written extensively about technology for national magazines and the web, sometimes as a cheerleader, sometimes as a catcaller and concerned citizen of the world. He writes speculative fiction in the hope that he may infect others with the bone-deep reading addiction thats plagued him since he resolved the alphabet into words.

Born in California, he’s drifted east, living in North Carolina, New York, England, and now France. Along the way he acquired a couple of degrees, a love of photography and a taste for travel. He lives in Paris with his wife.

The Latest Apocalypse: Popular Music and the End of the World

Brian Francis Slattery

American popular culture—science fiction and otherwise—feasted on the Cold War’s stew of paranoia, incessant competition couched in terms of progress, and threat of mutually assured destruction right up until the tension could, without a doubt, be declared over with the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. In retrospect, it’s pretty amazing that Soviet-phobic films like The Day After (1983) and Red Dawn (1984) got made when they did. In the ’80s the Soviet Union wasn’t nearly the threat that it had once been. By the time the U.S.S.R. was in obvious decline, we’d been treated to four decades of apocalypse and post-apocalypse, in movies, television, books, and even music. Bill Haley and the Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock”— the 1954 song often credited with putting rock ‘n’ roll on the map—was first issued as the B-side to “Thirteen Women (and Only One Man in Town),” which tells the story of a man who has a dream similar to what happens to Burgess Meredith’s bookworm bank-teller in the Twilight Zone episode “Time Enough at Last,” except that instead of books he’s left with after the bomb drops, it’s women. And his glasses don’t break.

Just in case you’re the last person on earth who doesn’t know what a double entendre is, the music of “Thirteen Women” clues you in to what the lyrics are talking about: The saxes are swinging, the fingers are snapping, and the guitar makes catcalls. Not to be outdone, Dinah Shore re-recorded the song with a Cuban pulse as “Thirteen Men,” and Ann-Margaret recorded Dinah’s version as a cocktail number. Also equating the split atom with sex (and also from 1954) is Fay Simmons’s “You Hit Me Like an Atomic Bomb.” In addition to its flagrant metaphors, it has one of the most shameless—read: shamelessly terrific—organ parts ever heard. By 1957, the metaphor had been used often enough that it started to get kind of meaningless. The Five Stars’ “Atom Bomb Baby” of that year uses the couplet “Atom bomb baby, little atom bomb / I want her in my wigwam”—five times in the same song.

It’s easy to understand how the atom bomb got sexy. The musicians of the time were working in new, popular genres that were genetically engineered to party, and those artists were trying to make money. Sex sold then as well as it sells now, and people have never liked to pay for bad news. But it’s also confusing. If you’re trying not to upset people, why mention nuclear destruction at all? The reality of what nuclear war was—what it could be—was pretty fresh in 1954. Our atomic attacks on Japan were only nine years in the past. A year after that, John Hersey’s Hiroshima, an account of that city’s devastation, was a bestseller and was broadcast over the radio. Three years later the Soviet Union began testing its own nuclear weapons. People knew what was going on. So if the songs were jokes, they were dark ones, following a tradition that may have been started by Slim Galliard’s “Atomic Cocktail” in 1945.

“Atomic Cocktail” is small-combo jazz with an easy swing, the sound of skilled players relaxing in the conventions of a genre over thirty years old. And where Bill Haley is all gee-whiz-can-you-believe-my-luck energy and enthusiasm—he and the Comets recorded “Rock Around the Clock” in the same studio session that produced “Thirteen Women”—underneath Galliard’s cool delivery lurk some pretty knowing, sinister lyrics: “When you see it coming, grab your suitcase / It’ll send you through the sky like airmail—BOOM—atomic cocktail.”

Issued by the record company Atomic, Inc., the record’s blood-red label features what looks a lot like an explosion on the upper half, which then sends black lines sweeping along the inside curve toward a tiny human figure on the bottom. Arms outstretched, hands up, the figure might be partying; it might also be on fire and disintegrating. The same dichotomy is in the song: The music tells you to take it easy, but the lyrics tell you to run for it. You could say “Atomic Cocktail” charted the landscape for how popular music could deal with the atom, and if Bill Haley and Fay Simmons, representing rock ‘n’ roll and lounge, went all in for the party, other artists—and other, older genres—took a look at what they thought the future might hold. And they weren’t so quick to laugh.

The fight about whether the ’50s-and-’60s folk revival was really folk—which is really a fight about what the word folk means—is never going to end. But the gist of that genre’s narrative is hard to argue with: Starting in the late ’40s, a bunch of people started to get interested in the music that poor Americans had played a generation before them. These revivalists both resuscitated that music and wrote their own songs harkening back to those styles as best they could. They shouldered for themselves the weight of history that came naturally to blues, jazz, country, and gospel, and under that heavy load, simple partying was impossible. Sarcasm wasn’t, though, as Bob Dylan’s 1963 “Talking World War III Blues” attests.

In the song, Dylan’s approach is less “Thirteen Women” and more “Atomic Cocktail”—or even The Crown City Four’s 1960 excoriating barbershop quartet-meets-marching-band cut “Watch World War Three (on Pay TV).” The conventions of an older musical genre gave Dylan the sarcastic tools he needed to approach his subject head on. But the young Dylan couldn’t escape the sheer anxiety, either. According to the liner notes for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” was written in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Dylan is quoted as saying that “every line in it is actually the start of a whole song. But when I wrote it, I thought I wouldn’t have enough time alive to write all those songs so I put all I could into this one.” And Dylan, of course, was his generation’s genius—maybe the genius for multiple genres that came after him, despite his dire fortunetelling.

Folksinger Bonnie Dobson was humbler than Dylan. Still, her “Morning Dew,” also from 1962, employed the same trick as “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall”: to make a serious treatment of annihilation listenable. “Morning Dew” turned out to have legs; it captured what so many people liked about the music of the folk revival and has since been recorded 32 times (and counting) by other artists, from hippies like the Grateful Dead to noiseniks like Einstürzende Neubauten. The lyrics are oblique enough that you could listen to the whole thing without knowing that it was heavily inspired by Nevil Shute’s 1957 post-apocalyptic novel, On the Beach—but Dobson is on record as saying that is indeed the case. If so, she made a smart aesthetic decision. The lyrics’ opacity is probably what saved the song. And made it a minor classic of nuclear-paranoia folk.

For a foil to “Morning Dew,” consider “Fallout Shelter,” yet again from 1962. The song is credited to Billy Chambers, who sang it. But it was written and produced by Bobby Braddock, who told Cold War-nostalgia website CONELRAD, “To be very candid, I was a musician going through serious psychological problems due to an overdose of speed at the time, and I was quite paranoid; I had tried to talk my parents into having a fallout shelter built.” He was also inspired by a Twilight Zone episode titled “The Shelter,” which is about a small town torn apart by a false alarm of an impending nuclear attack.

Braddock, who went on to be an immensely successful Nashville songwriter and was recently inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, now humorously disowns his work on “Fallout Shelter.” Musically, he’s being a little hard on himself. The song’s Spanish-tinged rock is reminiscent of Roy Orbison, and the music’s quite pretty. It’s the lyrics that justify Braddock’s harsh judgment. The premise is as timeless: Two teenagers want to be together, but their parents won’t let them. Tragedy ensues. That story shows up everywhere from the traditional American song “Katy Dear” to Romeo and Juliet, but somehow exporting it to the context of nuclear annihilation fails. In the song, all the bombs fall, and the narrator, a young man, begs his parents to let him bring his girlfriend with her into their fallout shelter. The parents refuse, saying there isn’t enough room for her, and the boyfriend decides to stay outside with his true love so they can die together. By the time the narrator gets to the money line—”You hold my hand, I understand / The sickness has begun / And if we live or if we die / Our hearts will beat as one”—you’ve probably checked out. Braddock, working in what was then a new flavor of rock and country, couldn’t get at the terror of the subject without putting people off. It was more weight than the young musician—and a young music—could bear.

The straight-up country music of the Cold War era though, knew exactly what to do. It had deep roots in Appalachian ballads and hymns, and it had been viable commercial music since the ’20s. In 1927, The Carter Family sang that “God gave Noah the rainbow sign / No more water, but fire next time,” so for country musicians, writing about atomic power was easy. Next time meant now. Hawkshaw Hawkins’s 1947 song “When They Found the Atomic Power” understands the A-bomb as a divine sign that we’d better stop fighting. The Buchanan Brothers’ “Atomic Power” from 1946 considers Little Boy and Fat Man—the codenames of the bombs dropped on Japan in 1945—as “brimstone fire,” judging that “Hiroshima and Nagasaki paid a big price for their sins.” But lest we think the United States is off the hook for fiery repentance, there’s Fred Kirby’s “When the Hell Bomb Falls.” That song, like Hank Williams’s “When the Fire Comes Down” and Jim Anglin’s “This World Can’t Stand Long,” implicates all of us: “He gave us all this blessed land, and this I cannot understand / A weapon of destruction to destroy us, everyone.”

According to country music’s diagnosis, we’re all in trouble. The Buchanans, however, make a pretty interesting last move in “Atomic Power” that starts to get past even the cohesive narrative of atomic power as God’s wrath: “But on that day of judgment when comes a greater power,” they sing, “we will not know the minute and we’ll not know the hour.” That’s where gospel picks up, and gospel has some even deeper sources to tap. By 1945, gospel as a marketed genre was over twenty years old. And like country music it had stayed relatively close to its roots in spirituals, which went back a few centuries. The tradition encompasses and draws strength from a history of unbelievable hardship, including the Middle Passage and the immense, horrific legacy of slavery.

That perspective makes “Jesus Hits Like an Atom Bomb” a pretty unique thing. It began life as a country song, written by Lee McCollum. As recorded by Lowell Blanchard and the Valley Trio in 1950, it’s a bit of a novelty number, easy to take none too seriously. But gospel groups latched onto it and made it theirs. The Soul Stirrers—which would include a pre-fame Sam Cooke over the years—recorded it the same year. Then the Pilgrim Travelers did it in 1951. Both of them changed the song’s tone, from jokey to celebratory, from declamatory to comforting. In doing so, they turned the country narrative about the atomic bomb inside out. For them, the threat of nuclear war isn’t a big deal; like the Buchanans suggest, it’s the Second Coming that we really need to watch out for. But where the Buchanans see menace, the gospel singers see hope. They’re looking forward to the day Jesus brings them home, and they accomplish in two lines what all the other above-mentioned songs never quite do: They defuse the bomb.

“Jesus Hits,” in the hands of gospel musicians, transcends the bomb’s threat of complete annihilation. Yeah, it’s bad, gospel says. But gospel has seen bad. And its audience—which has been wronged, over and over, and carries the wisdom of that from generation to generation—has already seen a catastrophe or two. They’ve already witnessed the ruination of peoples, nations, and continents. Rock ‘n’ roll tries to go crazy and party that away. Country tells us to be afraid for what we’ve done. Jazz tells us to take it easy; there’s nothing we can do about it anyway. But “Jesus Hits” goes further. It tells us that nuclear war is just the latest apocalypse; when the threat of it subsides, there will be another apocalypse waiting. And the biggest one is always coming, until the world really ends and begins again.

The gospel singers were right. For all the decades of obsession with nuclear annihilation—which shaped everything from politics to science fiction to music—after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the threat of death from atomic weapons turned out to have been a false alarm. But it’s too easy to make that point now, in hindsight. Maybe it’s possible to render the threat of global thermonuclear war quaint because it had a single cause—the U.S.S.R.—compared to our current era of multiple catastrophes: terrorism, economic hardship, political chaos, climate change.

Culturally speaking, it’s hard now to point the finger, to color the map, to place what’s going on into a tidy context that makes it all easier to understand. But we can feel it. We see it in the news. We absorb it from books, the movies, TV, and, yes, music. And maybe all the worry is justified; on some level we comprehend what’s up, even if we can’t articulate it as a coherent concept or give it a name. But maybe we’re missing the signs of something bigger that pulls it all together—signs, perhaps delivered in song form, that will seem obvious generations from now. If that future comes, will we wonder why we worried so much about everything else? And what will we listen to then?

About the Author

Brian Francis Slattery is a freelance editor, musician, and author of Spaceman Blues, Liberation, and the newly released Lost Everything, completing a kind of trilogy about what happens when everything collapses. He lives with his family outside of New Haven, Connecticut.

Passing Through Each Other:
A Round-Table Discussion of Speculative Fiction and Academia

Jeremy L. C. Jones

What do Julianna Baggott and Paul Levinson have in common? Or, how about James Enge and Joan Slonczewski? Nnedi Okorafor and Brian Evenson? Ekaterina Sedia and Jeffrey Ford? For one thing, they all write speculative fiction and they all teach at a college or university.

Below, these eight authors discuss the interrelationship of speculative fiction and academia from the point of view of writer/professors. The questions I posed to them grew out of my work at Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that I co-founded with Jeff VanderMeer at Wofford College in Spartanburg, SC. Shared Worlds, in turn, grew out of my having used speculative fiction in a high school English class and seeing how powerful an effect it had on students.

Yet, as historian W. Scott Poole, a professor at the College of Charleston and the author of Monsters in America, points out, “Speculative fictions are seldom seen as a central part of a traditional liberal arts curriculum. In fact, such works tend to be relegated to special topics courses in [English departments], seen as the special province of those, usually, postmodern leaning profs, who jump back and forth across the line between popular and so-called ‘High Culture.’”

My experiences as an adjunct professor in higher education are similar to those mentioned by Poole. At the three colleges where I have taught, I have met numerous colleagues who read speculative fiction, a few who teach it, and one that writes it. But I also have been told, in essence, “We don’t teach that here.”

However, Poole suggests that “[s]peculative fiction and higher education share some of the same goals. Both build worlds. Both are amalgams of art and science that endeavor to open up the mysteries of nature, history and culture by hypothesizing speculative universes of meaning.”

I bet that many of the professors and administrators involved in Shared Worlds might agree with Poole on that!

As a student, I was lucky. My undergraduate creative writing teacher, Madison Smartt Bell, told me point blank, “Read anything and everything. It will all teach you something.” In workshops, he never balked at speculative stories.

Similarly, in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, no one ever forbade me from writing or discussing speculative fiction. Yet, I do not remember ever discussing speculative fiction or reading any speculative fiction manuscripts in workshops. Even so, a few years after graduating from the program, my close friend and classmate, Robert V. S. Redick, sold an epic fantasy trilogy, The Chathrand Voyage, to Gollancz (UK) and Del Rey (US).

(When we were in school, I didn’t even know he read fantasy, let alone write it. I don’t think he was hiding a “dirty secret” . . . it just never came up.)

In what follows, eight authors talk about the purpose of higher education and the purpose of speculative fiction. They brush on the topics of snobbery, technology, the future of education, and what happens when everyone plays well together. I find the topics infinitely fascinating, in no small part because I live, somewhat, in both worlds and find myself crossing their perceptual borders on a regular basis. And crossing borders is never a simple matter.

All in all, I very much agree with Nnedi Okorafor when she says, “It’s a complicated thing for me.”

What is the purpose of higher education? What is the purpose of speculative fiction? In what ways do the two purposes coincide and/or collide?

Julianna Baggott: Higher education should both broaden the worldview and prepare students for the future. Speculative fiction looks into the future and primarily tells cautionary tales, even when describing utopias. So they collide in their lens set on the future, in some ways. Should they collide in the classroom for every student? No. Speculative fiction is one of many ways of looking toward the future. I think one extremely important way of looking to the future is learning the past, for example, carrying that past with you into the future.

James Enge: I wouldn’t say anything as broad-based as higher education has a single purpose. For many, it’s job training for certain types of career. This may be the least interesting part of a university education to some observers, but it’s always been there: the medieval universities existed to grant people degrees in law and medicine, among other things. And with the hideous cost of an undergraduate education in the USA these days, these practical questions need to be addressed. What is a college education for? Is it worth the price to the people who are buying it?

But I’d say that, essentially, a university exists to preserve, increase and extend the cultural legacy. SFF is part of the cultural legacy, so their purposes are not necessarily in conflict.

Universities are institutions, though, and art doesn’t necessarily flourish in institutions. Think of the relationship between a bug-collector and bugs. The bug-collector has an intense and particular interest in capturing and studying bugs—cutting them up, mounting them on cards, working on them in labs, etc. But the bug may be more interested in just surviving and being a bug.

Brian Evenson: For me, higher education should be able to provide students with a series of tools that make critical thinking possible. I don’t think it should be about the dissemination of knowledge (or if so only secondarily), nor is it about establishing a particular worldview, nor about positioning oneself in a particular way in regard to employment or a field. At its best [higher education] provides tools for thinking and teaches students how to use them in a way that allows for unexpected and sometimes startling results. I think speculative fiction is a place in which that critical thinking is brought to bear in a very unique and particular way, in which imagined worlds and imagined models end up allowing us to t-hink about our own world in a particular way, but also allow us to approach philosophical and ethical questions differently, and sometimes with a great deal more clarity. I don’t see that as a purpose exactly, but more as a mode. I think at their best, both higher education and speculative fiction dovetail into each other. They collide at moments when higher education becomes too insistent on doing something other than providing a series of tools and begins telling people exactly how those tools should be used. It’s particularly problematic when higher education becomes a kind of gatekeeper for maintaining the status quo and keeping certain genres and ideas “in their place.”

Jeffrey Ford: Higher education teaches you how to answer questions; speculative fiction teaches you how to ask them. They don’t so much collide as pass through each other.

I’ve met a lot of teachers, administrators, students who were SF/F/H readers. A lot of the teachers use speculative works (film and text) in their classes. In a college writing class I taught for students with learning disabilities, I decided I was going to show them a film and have them write a review of it. This student, Antony, volunteered to bring in a movie. I was leery of this. Antony, although never malicious, acted a little wacky at times.

I told him, “Nothing too out there.”

“I got a good one,” he said.

The next week he brought in the movie and handed me the DVD case. I couldn’t believe it. He picked Eyes Wide Shut by Kubrick. My first thought was I’d have been better off if he’d brought in Hostel. Some of the students in that class couldn’t sit still for 15 minutes at a time. Forget three hours plus of sturm und drang. I could just picture how long they’d put up with Cruise emoting before they revolted. I saw the flick in the theater when it came out and thought it was confusing and slow; a big fizzle. I didn’t have anything else to show, though, so I put it on and settled in.

From the minute it came on, you could hear a pin drop. They were so engrossed by it that it kind of spooked me at first. Then I somehow started seeing it the way they were and got into it. Even that stuff in the mansion at the end, the corny chanting, the naked women in masks, the old dudes in robes, seemed to work. It was deep.

When it was over, we discussed it and they were full of insights about what to mention in their reviews. I couldn’t figure out what had happened. More than a few of them described the movie as “Like a fairy tale.” Others, “Like a dream.” I never saw the film as a speculative piece, but that was their portal into it. Something weird transpired in that classroom. The intersection of speculative fiction and education. Don’t ask me to quantify it. I’ve since seen the film again a couple times on cable, and both times it bored the crap out of me.

Paul Levinson: Some of my critics have said that my scholarly work about the evolution of media is fiction, and my science fiction has so much philosophy and media theory that it reads like a scholarly tract. But that aside: The purpose of higher education is to imbue knowledge and means of learning, with entertainment being a good appetizer and dessert for that. And the purpose of speculative fiction is to entertain, with imparting a thirst for knowledge as a significant chaser. The two therefore have a lot in common. They collide only in the minds of the intellectually rigid and feeble.

Ekaterina Sedia: I would guess that the purposes of the two are mostly orthogonal to each other, not to mention that the purposes are perceived very differently by different people. To me, higher education should be focused on providing the students with a set of higher level skills—critical thinking, information synthesis and integration, along with the usual acquisition of facts and perspectives. For speculative fiction—I wouldn’t say that its purpose is terribly different from fiction in general, since even speculative fiction is still mostly about human condition. So perhaps speculative fiction should challenge the readers by talking about people in impossible circumstances.

So I suppose one could argue that both fiction and education really are about widening and challenging the subject’s frames of references.

Joan Slonczewski: In my book The Highest Frontier, student-athletes go up to Frontera College on a space station, and discover how to save the world through science. An excellent adventure, with lots to think on—that’s the purpose of speculative fiction.

The purpose of education is to explain and to inspire. To explain how the natural world works—and to inspire students to discover new worlds. Unfortunately, much of today’s science education fails at both. Explaining things requires good storytelling, so that the student remembers how a sugar molecule breaks down and why it’s of compelling importance. Yet the average textbook makes the topic both boring and incomprehensible.

Scientists don’t realize how much of what we teach is fictional illustration, such as the ball and stick model of a molecule. If we have to teach that much story, why not teach more?

Do you encounter snobbery from either realm toward the other? If so, why do you suppose that is? And how does it manifest itself?

Julianna Baggott: I really don’t know many sci-fi/fantasy/speculative fiction writers. I know many academics. And, yes, there is snobbery. Not just snobbery, I get end-of-year evaluations and I’m told the kind of work of mine that my colleagues would want to see more of. My fantasy work is never suggested. Pure is not on my academic CV, and neither will be the sequels. I’m writing the Pure Trilogy—which I think of as dystopian fiction instead of falling into the strict boundaries of sci-fi—for myself. I don’t see them as part of my creative scholarship and I don’t want to put my colleagues in the situation of evaluating them for promotion. I have plenty of works that I create that fit more neatly in the academic environment.

James Enge: I haven’t gotten any snobbery from academia towards my sword-and-sorcery. Most of my colleagues at my university were unaware of my fantasy-writing until I was nominated for the World Fantasy Award a year or two ago. And a lot of people were genuinely, I think, excited by it. My novels are now proudly on display in the faculty publications display case, alongside much more serious work.

Sometimes I sense some—I don’t know what to call it—anti-snobbery from the other direction. When someone at a con learns that I teach college, they may get anxious, as if I’m about to assign them homework or give them a failing grade in Somethingorother 101.

And often I see fans waxing hysterical online about academia and its lack of respect for genre. It’s clear to me that those guys don’t have the faintest clue what they’re talking about. I would give them an A in Strawman-Fighting and an F in Reality-Dealing, if I had the power to do so.

Brian Evenson: I’ve mainly encountered it on the part of academics. It manifests sometimes as a kind of embarrassment on the part of academics that I’ve done not only “literary” work, but work that is “genre”-related. They see it as a kind of shameful secret, like a heroin-addicted uncle or something. But I love my heroin-addicted uncle. The worst was someone who felt he had to draw me aside and explain to me that I was wasting my time by not doing strictly literary work and that it would ruin my reputation. That felt intensely snobbish. Then again, lots of academics find it interesting that I cross that line and are supportive of it and me.

Jeffrey Ford: I guess somebody’s got to be a snob. As far as I’m concerned, though, they can gladly have the mantle. The position seems too stressful to me. There are so many different kinds of readers with so many different tastes that it would be a job and a half to come up with standards that might encompass all those minds in their idiosyncratic engagements with text. Less is more when it comes to standards. You’ll head for the territory if you have any sense. To be fair, Snob’s a tough job because you have to keep giving a shit long after nobody else does. How does it manifest itself? Obeisance to the Precious.

Paul Levinson: I’ve seen a touch of snobbery from both sides. In academe, it comes from a narrow view that learning has to be difficult, and too much joy in anything may make it suspect. In speculative fiction, it comes from a suspicion of anything that inhabits a classroom. In both cases, again, the snobbery is a sign of a shaky mind.

Nnedi Okorafor: I’ve encountered both. But I’ve encountered the snobbery more in academia. I think it’s because a lot of academics have not read good speculative fiction. They are basing their snobbery on cliches and stereotypes. That’s not good research. It manifests itself on syllabuses. Professors won’t put speculative novels/stories on them. It manifests itself in the absence of speculative novels/stories in the literary canon. It manifests itself in the stipulations professors impose in creative writing classes. And let’s not ignore the major literary prizes that snub their noses at speculative fiction.

Ekaterina Sedia: In my experience, some individuals from popular fiction writing circles conceive of academia as beret-wearing snobs who read Joyce just to torture themselves. This concept often co-occurs with claims of “it’s all about the story” and “I read (or write) to be entertained (or to entertain).” It seems to be a defensive reaction, claiming that SF gets no respect because of academic snobbery. Of course, it does get plenty of respect (and then stops being shelved in the genre section of the bookstore, but that’s another story). I also suspect that there are academics who look down on all sorts of popular fiction, I just haven’t met any.

Joan Slonczewski: Checking the science is an important part of assessing science fiction. But ultimately what matters is, how does the work make us think? In H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, the science is all a century out of date. But the essential questions he raises remain: Could the human species diverge? And would we still be human?

What’s it like when these two worlds—academia and speculative fiction—coexist? When they play well together?

Julianna Baggott: I’m sure there are universities that do embrace all of it. In fact, I’ve heard that one of our nanobiology specialists teaches science fiction at the end of his own course in the sciences. You know what helps? People like Margaret Atwood. Academics can wrap their heads around the literary importance of her work.

James Enge: SFF now has a cultural legacy long enough that it needs some tending and preservation. That’s what academia does best. Mur Lafferty wrote a brief squib a while ago (”My Problem with Classics”) about how unpleasant some of the older work in the field was for her. Blogospheric squawking ensued, but I think she raised a very real issue. Some of this older stuff, written as popular fiction and meant to speak directly to a contemporary audience, no longer works as intended because the audience has changed. The marketplace that produced this work is likely to discard it in favor of things more likely to make money nowadays. But universities provide a place for this stuff to be preserved, studied, appreciated, interpreted—independent of the harsh and shifting currents of the fiction markets.

Brian Evenson: Well, I think if you can get students past the kind of resistances that academia has developed for them between so-called serious and so-called non-serious work, the interchange can be very productive. Speculative fiction has a lot to teach students. As someone who is less interested in being considered either a literary or a genre writer and who is more interested in crossing through various territories and no man’s lands to try to find whatever it takes to make the writing as strong as it can be, I think they play exceptionally well together. I’m very Rabelasian in the way I think about influence. As a teacher of fiction writing, I try to get students to realize that everything and anything can be potentially important and useful to them.

Jeffrey Ford: A good example would be the International Conference of the Fantastic in the Arts held every year in Florida. I went this past year. Scholars, writers, students, and fans. Saw friends, heard some good readings, listened to some interesting academic whim-wham, drank and laughed. What more need be said. Check it out if you can.

Paul Levinson: They certainly played well together in the mind of Isaac Asimov—the best science fiction writer in history, in my view, and a professor of biochemistry. Beyond that, you have the Nobel laureate in Economics, Professor Paul Krugman, who says Asimov’s Foundation series is what inspired his work in neo-Keynesian economics. And there are the scientists—like AI-specialist Marvin Minsky, who, come to think of it, credits Asimov’s robot series as inspiration. Also, in my own life’s work, I’ve found science fiction an inspiration for a lot of my media theory, and my research in evolution and technology a great source of material for my science fiction.

Nnedi Okorafor: I am product of university creative writing programs. I discovered my skill and love for writing fiction in the first creative writing class that I took (in my sophomore year). My very first story was speculative in nature, though based on a real life moment. The fantastical elements were a result of the way that I view the world. Nevertheless, in that first class and just about every creative wring class I took after that (through two master’s degrees and a PhD), I was taught by professors who were anti-science fiction and fantasy. Let me be clear: I learned the craft of writing from professors who had no respect or understanding of science fiction or fantasy. Some of them were the best professors I ever had. It’s a complicated thing for me.

In that very first class, my professor said, “No science fiction or fantasy.” Flat out stated this. Regardless, as the years rolled by, my fiction got more and more fantastical. I took other classes where this was stated. I wasn’t bothered, offended or worried. I have a way of ignoring those kinds of rules. Those stipulations simply went in one ear and right out the other, for me. I’ve always had to write what comes to me. I can’t pick and chose. In the critical moments when I submitted the stories, I just called them “magical realism.” That made everything ok. Also, as my professors saw what I was writing, I think several of them changed their minds about science fiction and fantasy or at least made exceptions for me.

I am also a product of the Clarion Writers Workshop. I learned to openly call myself a fantasy writer at Clarion (I started writing science fiction later). I went to Clarion after I had finished my first master’s degree in journalism from Michigan State.

Somewhere along the way I learned to combine/reconcile my academic and speculative fiction sides. They’ve never been in conflict. It’s very similar to the way I have fused my Nigerian and American sides. These are two aspects (my speculative fiction and academic sides) of who I am as a writers that are necessary and vital. I cannot do without either. I take from both. I’ve learned from both.

Ekaterina Sedia: In my case, they largely coexist—my academic career is a separate entity, except for when I occasionally teach a writing course. But my literary hobby hasn’t got in a way and my colleagues have been wonderfully supportive. On the other hand, being a scientist in a real life, I can convincingly fake science for literary purposes.

Joan Slonczewski: Frank Herbert’s Dune is one of the more interesting works that I teach in my course, “Biology in Science Fiction.” Dune depicts an ecosystem in surprising detail, much of which is consistent with actual ecosystems. But there is a big hole, where do the organisms get their energy? Students get the message; and they appreciate what it means to “get something wrong.” They are also impressed by the amazing amount of ideas that Herbert imagined ahead of his time, such as global climate change, energy-harvesters, and drone warfare.

How has technology changed the way we learn?

Julianna Baggott: That’s a vast question. I’ll narrow down to something simple. Memorization isn’t as important a skill set as it once was. Those who had brains that stored information like computers were thought to be brilliant and were deeply useful. Now, people don’t have to memorize. We have to know how to access. The downside is that much of what we learn doesn’t have to burrow down deep and so it doesn’t. Our brains practice skimming and lightly retaining more than they practice deep excavation.

James Enge: In some ways a lot. I do a lot of teaching about the physical culture of the ancient world, for instance, and getting the visual evidence for that stuff in front of students used to be quite a chore. In a modern multimedia classroom, it’s almost too easy. And interactive software has been a boon for helping people develop basic skills in math and language.

In some ways, not a damn thing has changed. People have to read; they have to think about what they read; they have to talk with someone about what they’re reading and thinking. I guess it was James Garfield who described education as a log with a teacher on end and a student on the other. (Insert double entendre here.) That’s what it still is, and will always be.

Brian Evenson: I think different technologies have had a definite impact on the way we think and the way we write. I think, for instance, that computer word processing programs, which allow you to delete vast blocks of texts very quickly without leaving a record and in which you can move things from page 1 to 100 without much effort have changed the way we think about the structure and the integrity of a narrative. I think the way we text—which has become one of my chief forms of communication—and the emotional shorthand that’s developed from texting and twitter has had a serious effect on our emotions in general. That’s partly generational, and is influenced by television as well. I don’t think of it as a good or bad thing—I think of it as an inevitable thing and as a very interesting thing. The tools we use work not only outward but inward, modifying our selves even as they modify the world around us. It’s like how when you have an old car you learn all sorts of procedures and modify your behavior to make it work. You know you have to jiggle the key in a certain way to make it work, know that you should pump the gas twice before starting but not three times or it’ll flood, etc. The object teaches you to adapt to it and soon you do so without thinking about it. That’s doubly true with technologies that are connected to writing, in that they modify not only our bodies but the very structures of our thinking.

Paul Levinson: The digital revolution, which I examined most recently in my New New Media (2009), has given everyone access to increasing amounts of information from anywhere and everywhere in the world. The classroom has become, if not an afterthought, a place where knowledge increasingly obtained elsewhere can be discussed and analyzed. Of course, the same can be done, ever more easily, online.

Nnedi Okorafor: So much more information is right at our fingertips. It’s glorious. If my daughter asks me some crazy off the wall question, nine times out of ten, I can find the answer online. I can show her YouTube videos to illustrate points I’m trying to make. Sadly, this also means that just as much misinformation is also right at our fingertips. Now, people also need to learn how to read information. There are many factors to consider. The source, the timing, the type of information, the biases and agendas, etc. Learning has to be more active. Also, I think people suffer from staying inside to learn about something as opposed to going out an seeing it for themselves. Example, if you are researching grasshoppers, why not go out and catch one, as opposed to looking it up on Wikipedia?

Ekaterina Sedia: Kids no longer have to learn to visualize concepts from written descriptions? Look, I still use blackboard and chalk when I lecture, so maybe I’m not the best person to ask about technology.

Joan Slonczewski: Adam Gopnik, in The New Yorker (”Get Smart,” April 4, 2011) argues that what we humans have done, for centuries, is to outsource our own intelligence. From the invention of writing and the abacus, to Deep Blue and SimOne, we build devices that do what humans do—then we define their achievement as inhuman. Whatever hurdles remain for machines to surmount, we define what remains as human—”not because it matters more but because it’s all that’s left to us.”

What will higher education be like in a hundred years? What will change and what will most likely stay the same?

Julianna Baggott: Oh, that depends on politics. Right now, those things are being chosen in legislative sessions, state by state. Some states will remain balanced and whole. Others will push solely toward degrees that get people jobs. The fact is, people create. The arts will endure. This skill set and that skill set will become obsolete; technology will continue to force great changes there. But the desire to create, to innovate and invent, to make use of our imaginations—those things will remain, but we might have to fight for them and be hungry for them for a while in certain regions.

James Enge: Higher education is likely to undergo a crisis in the near future, something like the crisis commercial publishing is experiencing now. Institutions may crumble, or adapt, but the storm is coming.

Information is now very easy to get. But the skills to use it, interpret it, understand it, make use of it: these are as elusive as they were in Socrates’ day. If institutions can provide these skills, and if people think they are worth paying for, universities will continue to exist. If not, then not.

Brian Evenson: I’m not all that convinced that America has another hundred years left in it, but I hope I’m wrong. . .

Jeffrey Ford: Forget the next hundred years. I’m more concerned with the next five years. Education is under attack. In this age of slashing budgets, education is one of the first things to go—hey, kids don’t vote. More teachers will be laid off, class sizes will increase, programs will be cut. The electorate has, through the work of the right, been convinced that education is somehow evil. The word is always that everyone wants education to be top of the line, but “we don’t want to just throw money at it.” Why not? This is what’s been done with the military for the past 60 years, at least, and we have the best military in the world. Go ahead, I say, throw money at it. That would be a good start.

To compete in the world, we’re going to need smart and imaginative people. A lot of the bullshit restraints to thinking should be lifted from education. Let’s put a stake through the heart of Creationism (dogma circumvents the need to think), or situations like the one in Tennessee where teachers would be unable to say the word “gay” in a classroom. Forget school voucher programs—they favor the well-off and do nothing for those in need. Let’s promise to build up the public education system to where it should be. Throw some money at it, so you can hire the best people. Reintroduce full-on music, art, and athletic programs. Get rid of the inanity of lock-step approaches to teaching a given course and let the experts, the teachers, choose the material and the approaches to a given curriculum. Only ignoramuses think that all courses in a given discipline should be taught the exact same way. This drive toward uniformity is a way to dis-empower teachers and make them merely mouthpieces for the status quo. Keep tenure—teachers have to be able to express a healthy disrespect for authority in order to act as an example for their students. A teacher who is limited to the status quo, and is unable to call bullshit when they readily see it, will only help to produce students who can only spout the status quo. Online education definitely can have benefits for students, but this shell game needs to be thoroughly investigated. Is it more about the students or about the bottom line? Make education not about getting a job—there’re no fucking jobs out there anyway—and more about helping young people to become imaginative free-thinkers who are capable of learning any job and have a clue as to what’s going on in the world around them. This is where the money should be going, especially now. The current grade school and high school education in this country now is basically a disgrace. Our colleges and universities are somewhat better, but they’re faculties and budgets are under attack. I’m not saying spend foolishly, or not to cut waste, but more money is needed overall. This is an investment that will pay off in the future.

I can’t think a hundred years in the future. The struggle is now. If we ignore this problem today, there won’t be an America in a hundred years.

Paul Levinson: There is something fundamental and irresistible about in-person presence—we are, after all, flesh-and-blood beings. This means that the physical classroom will endure—or at least, professors and students in the same physical space—but one hundred years into the future we’ll see much more information imparted online. And the learning online will be increasingly individual—meaning, people will study and learn what they most need—which is good, i.e., real progress.

Nnedi Okorafor: You mean after the Apocalypse? What will stay the same is that we will still need to do the work to learn. You can have all the information in the world available to you on many various gadgets and devices but you’ll still need to take it in and process it. you’ll still need to study. You will still need to think. What will change? That’s not so predictable. Things come and go. There are wild cards that no can possibly predict. I do hope touch screens go away as opposed to evolve. . . I loathe touchscreens.

Ekaterina Sedia: More administrators, fewer full-time faculty, more talk about education as product and students as customers, less quality. Oh, I’m sorry. Were you expecting something uplifting?

Joan Slonczewski: An unsettling consequence of online learning is that it makes it increasingly easy to narrow your world to those with whom you agree. For example, there is a growing fount of so-called biblical textbooks sold on the Internet. If you select their publishers—and there are many—you can feel as if you’re sampling many opinions, when in reality you never hear anything outside the circle. Which is the opposite of what happens in The Highest Frontier.

In The Highest Frontier, most of “higher education” has been outsourced to Toynet—a neural Internet device that, according to NPR reviewer Alan Cheuse, “makes the iPhone look like a Model-T Ford.” Students learn history by entering a VR world with Teddy Roosevelt, where they compare his imperialism with that of invading ultraphytes. But at Frontera, students still interact with live teachers. A new student reflects that for the first time she finds herself arguing face to face with a teacher she disagrees with—”breathing the same air.”

Julianna Baggott [www.juliannabaggott.com] is the author of Pure, The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted (as Bridget Asher, and 15 other books. She is also is an associate professor at Florida State University’s College of Motion Picture Arts.

James Enge [jamesenge.com] is the author of Blood of Ambrose, This Crooked Way, The Wolf Age, and the upcoming A Guile of Dragons. He’s also a lecturer in classics at Bowling Green State University.

Brian Evenson [www.brianevenson.com] is the translator of numerous works and the author of eight books, including The Open Curtain and Immobility. He is also the Chair of the Literary Arts Program at Brown University.

Jeffrey Ford [www.well-builtcity.com] is the author of ten books, including The Shadow Year and The Drowned Life. He also teaches literature and writing at Brookdale Community College.

Paul Levinson [paullevinson.info] is the author of more than a dozen books, including New New Media and The Plot To Save Socrates. He is also a professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University.

Nnedi Okorafor [nnedi.com] is the author of six books, including Akata Witch and Iridessa and The Secret of the Never Mine. She is also a professor of creative writing at Chicago State University.

Ekaterina Sedia [www.ekaterinasedia.com] is the author of five novels, including The House of Discarded Dreams and Heart of Iron. She is also an Associate Professor of Biology at The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey.

Joan Slonczewski is the author of seven novels, including Brain Plague and The Highest Frontier. She is also a professor of microbiology at Kenyon College.

About the Author

Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and teacher. He is the Staff Interviewer for Clarkesworld Magazine and a frequent contributor to Kobold Quarterly and Booklifenow.com. He teaches at Wofford College and Montessori Academy in Spartanburg, SC. He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006. Jones lives in Upstate South Carolina with his wife, daughter, and flying poodle.

Suitably Strange:
A Round-Table Discussion of World-Building

Jeremy L. C. Jones

Imaginary worlds offer readers a time and place that is different from the world they live in. Imaginary worlds offer a fresh perspective, a new POV—a slanted angle of vision. These settings, these places— secondary worlds or “the realm of fairy-story,” as J. R. R. Tolkien called them—come with their own rules, their own customs, and their own logic.

“The realm of fairy-story,” Tolkien writes in “On Fairy-Stories,” “is wide and deep and high and filled with many things: all manner of beasts and birds are found there; shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever-present peril; both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords. In that realm a man may, perhaps, count himself fortunate to have wandered, but its very richness and strangeness tie the tongue of a traveller who would report them. And while he is there it is dangerous for him to ask too many questions, lest the gates should be shut and the keys be lost.”

At their best, imaginary worlds offer an immersive experience. We enter, we are filled with wonder, and we are changed by the experience.

Imaginary worlds don’t just happen. They must be built—whether prior to or during the telling of the story. Builders of worlds seek coherence, consistency, feasibility, and that ever-important “cool factor.” World-builders are both creator and first explorers of their worlds, inspired by personal experiences, real world history, the mysteries of human evolution, or grandly conceived “what ifs.” They draw on African, Celtic, Greek, Native American, and Norse mythologies and landscapes, among others.

Below, Tim Akers, Mark Chadbourn, K. V. Johansen, Kay Kenyon, M. D. Lachlan, Justina Robson, and Joel Shepherd discuss their imaginary worlds and how they created them. These seven authors, all of whom publish with Pyr, write a wide variety of speculative fiction, from historical fantasy to science fiction to “steampunk and sorcery.” They’ve “thought-formed” worlds, “liquid-life-engines”, starfish-shaped universes, and worlds very similar to our own, except for a few crucial deviations.

Some of these authors started building their worlds by “reading and thinking and studying. ” Some planned ahead, while others allowed the world to grow with the writing. Some started with an “odd thought,” others with compelling characters—characters like a princess turned warrior, an archaeologist in the Otherworld, a caravan-guard fleeing madness, a star pilot grieving the loss of his family, or a synthetic human pursuing answers while fleeing for her life.

Whatever the method or starting point, the goal seems to be the same: a place suitably strange, yet somehow recognizable.

What’s something really cool about your secondary world that doesn’t show up in any of your novels or short stories?

Tim Akers: For the book I’m working on right now, there’s about four or five hundred years of history that I’ve sketched out, from migration patterns to wars to the establishment of three different religions, two of which are dead by the time the actual books start. I keep finding myself wanting to write those stories instead, or in addition to. I can really see how authors can fall into the temptation of interrupting a series to go write a prequel or something.

Mark Chadbourn: In my interlinked sequences that began with Age of Misrule, the secondary world is the mystical Otherworld of Celtic mythology, the home of gods, Fabulous Beasts, magic and mayhem. Every time a character crosses over from our own world, he or she sees different aspects of it, or it appears subtly altered. What is never stated is that it’s a thought-form world, completely fluid in nature, which is created and shaped by the mind and preconceptions of the people who visit it.

M. D. Lachlan/Mark Barrowcliffe: I write historical fantasy, so it’s our world but with the mythology taken literally. So, as I’m writing at the beginning of the Viking age, the gods do interfere in human destinies. Witches exist. Magic is taken directly from that described in ancient Norse poetry. The coolest thing is how strange history is—how differently people think and act to modern people. For instance, the size of the settlements. In Wolfsangel, Vali looks on the town of Haithabu as unimaginably large. It contains one hundred houses.

K.V. Johansen: Some of the history of the Old Great Gods and the devils is quite cool, I think. I know a lot more about the cold hells and the “heavens beyond the stars” in which the human storytellers place the Great Gods and devils than appears in the published stories. But I’m not going to talk about that yet! (Although people can probably figure a part of it out. In “The Storyteller” there’s a bit more about that than in Blackdog.) In general, though, because of the way I work, the world grows as I write. I don’t usually see much of what lies over the horizon until not too long before the story gets there. That’s true of both the physical landscape and the social/historical/cosmological landscape, the cultures and the systems of magic.

Kay Kenyon: My secondary world, called the Entire, is both a world and a universe. It is a landlocked universe that is shaped like a starfish, in that it has five geographic arms, or “primacies,” radiating outward from a central sea of impossible, vaguely oceanic matter. Things are so cosmically far apart that the only efficient way to travel is on the Nigh, a five-armed river fed from the central sea over which is suspended the Ascendancy where advanced beings dwell when they’re not up to no good.

Justina Robson: I guess you mean this secondary world I’m making right now. Animal-people, I’d have to say. I haven’t done those before. They’re biomorphs: life-liquid-engines. Haven’t entirely finished working on their true nature. It’s been very hard going. My imagination wants them to be one way and my scientific brain is telling me it’s all never going to work so. . . obviously imagination has to win eventually and I’m struggling towards that.

Where did you start building your secondary world?

Mark Chadbourn: I looked first at the old stories of Celtic mythology, and then at other mythologies—Norse, Greek, Native American, Chinese, African and more—searching for commonalities. The conceit is that this world is the source of all our stories, our myths, legends and folklore, our dreams, so it needed to be very much an ur-world that could speak to all cultures.

K.V. Johansen: I started with the landscape of the Turkmenistan desert and the idea of small, local gods. In Blackdog, the mountains, a combination of the Himalayas and the mountains of central Asia, came into it almost right away, with the Siberian taiga lurking in the northeast. In a way, the seed of the world is a book and a TV series, Realms of the Russian Bear, on the natural history of the former Soviet Union; both the BBC producer and the Russian host were biologists, so it’s a cut above the usual sort of nature documentary and the book is very detailed. I had a fascination with the landscape and natural history described in that for some time, and when the story began, with the idea of the character who became Holla-Sayan being possessed by the Blackdog, it just always seemed to have existed in that landscape.

Kay Kenyon: I started with the odd thought, what if you didn’t need space travel to get across the universe, but could instead sort of hoof it? What if you could walk to Alpha Centauri or the equivalent? And if you can walk, obviously there are no stars or space. So what is this place? It’s a tunnel. It burrows through our own universe. At this point you have to write the story to find out what the hell is going on.

Joel Shepherd: For me it always starts with the cultures, politics, belief systems, and languages of various parts of the world. And that is always driven by the dramatic requirements of the story. In A Trial of Blood and Steel, I wanted to tell a story largely driven by the conflicts between the different values that arise from different kinds of civilizations. My main character was a young woman, a former princess who renounced her heritage to become a warrior in the somewhat exotic style of distant Saalshen. I loved the dramatic conflicts that sprung from a main character, one who chooses to give up that status and privilege for something that suits her better as a person. But I needed to have a land where that would be possible, because in a lot of lands it wouldn’t be. And so I came up with Lenayin, a land of individualist warriors where the royal family has only very precarious power, and inherited title means little, because everyone worships achievements and skill more than family. Much of that creation of Lenayin was driven by my need to make my main character’s situation believable.

Once I had Lenayin, the other lands and peoples evolved at least in part as foils for Lenayin. For example, the main enemies or bad guys of the series turn out to be people who live in the more traditional European feudal system, which Lenays mainly detest because of the serfdom it forces most of the population into. And that clash of values is reflected in the beliefs of my characters, which then becomes the kind of personal, dramatic tension that makes stories work.

Tim Akers: Because of my particular background, religion and cosmology inform pretty much everything I do. So I always start with the gods, the religions, the hidden powers that work beneath the world. That informs culture, which informs history, which in turn informs plot and character. I tend to start big and work my way down into the specific. Of course, that reveals a lot of my weaknesses as a writer, too. I’m good at the grand patterns, but I’m still learning how to craft the perfect character.

In what manner did you develop the secondary world from the original seed?

Justina Robson: By reading and thinking and studying a lot of social-science material, anthropology, and daydreaming. This was all very distracting from the real development of the story, but I wanted a credible base layer, even if I never actually write about it directly. It has to make a kind of sense to me in terms I am content with. So I’ve been trying to figure out realistic and necessary conditions for everything that the story has. Unfortunately this has sometimes made me attempt to “answer” the mysteries of human cultures, their evolution and possible biological origins, trying to separate necessary things from chance and memetic accretions. . . a totally impossible Gordian knot. So now I’m down to choosing where I cut the knot and what statements about the present I’m really trying to make. But I’m often distracted and also dismayed that many of my observations are so damning. I’m trying to dig my way out of Western, Christianized, secular, liberal, and capitalist culture and. . . ugh. . . it’s nearly impossibly hard and manic, like some kind of Whack-A-Credo. You get one, and four more pop up from your unconsciou But it’s worth a stab at something a little bit more than just a reactionary OMYGODWUT.

Kay Kenyon: Once I had the tunnel idea and knew that an advanced civilization created the Entire, I started asking questions like, who would live there? How like or unlike humans will they be? What technologies do they have? If this universe is a tunnel, what mechanism creates day and night, if such exists? Each of these answers constrains and/or influences the answer to the next question, and so forth, until you begin to find a coherent world, suitably strange, but with anchors to human experience. At times this process is exhilarating and sometimes you expect it to collapse like a house of cards. Not the least of the challenges is how to make such an improbable place coherent yet mysterious, strange but somehow recognizable.

Tim Akers: For my second book, The Horns of Ruin, I developed a story about three gods who were brothers, and who ended up betraying each other until only one of them was still alive. Then I imagined the church that would be built on that kind of history, and then what a society based on that church would look like. The tone of that kind of theocracy is going to flavor everything, from your architecture to the way the three churches interact, to why people would choose to serve a god who was dead, or a god who murdered his brother. Again, I built from the large (gods killing each other!) to the small, and then built a plot around that.

M. D. Lachlan/Mark Barrowcliffe: I started with research into the Viking age. This meant I read a general historical text on the Vikings, some of the sagas and also the Eddas. The Eddas are the 14th-century poems written by an Icelandic historian, Snorri Sturluson. He collected oral poems and wrote them down. These form the main plank of our knowledge about Viking myth. At that point I started writing. It’s always better to start writing sooner rather than later. If you find out, or decide, that the deck on your longship isn’t as extensive as you first wrote, you can always change it later. I then research as I go along—reading books on Viking ships or arms and armor, for instance and getting information from the many great web resources. If I were in a completely invented world I wouldn’t have to bother with all this and would just start writing immediately after I had the idea for the story.

K.V. Johansen: The local gods, which are such a vital part of the Blackdog secondary world, grew out of the existence of the Blackdog. There he was; I had to find out why. The incarnate goddess who needed a guardian was the why, and the rules of the world grew out of developing a theology in which this limited, lake-bound goddess could exist. As the world developed, with its local gods and goddesses, the demons of the wild places, the Old Great Gods and the banished devils, the Blackdog didn’t seem to be quite any of them. I had that question in the back of my mind for most of the book: What, really, was the Blackdog? Wondering about that led to a lot of ancient history developing as an underpinning for his existence, which now seems such a foundation for the world that it’s a bit disconcerting to remember that none of that was there when I started.

Once I had the idea of local gods who were very limited in their powers, it seemed to make sense that there wouldn’t be very many large kingdoms or empires; the limited gods would lead to limited tribal regions. Geography shapes culture, so there are larger groupings of peoples linked by common culture and language, but a person’s emotional attachment is to a much smaller idea of place, and the political units are also usually centred on individual gods or goddesses. There are certainly kingdoms containing more than one god, but they’re usually not great monolithic nations, which prevent their kings being absolute monarchs. Only a few empires have ever existed.

Setting the story along a caravan route meant that I could explore the different cultures linked by that road. It’s the sort of world where you could get a lot of isolationist, mistrustful cultures, but instead it turned out to be one where this river of trade and travel means there is a constant flow of cultural influence and language. As Holla-Sayan travelled, I had to keep developing new gods and places, which meant looking at new interpretations of the basic idea of a god limited in territory and influence.

Mark Chadbourn: The danger of creating an ur-world was that it would be too familiar, filled with too many tropes that we’d all seen played out in books, films, and TV over the years. Once I’d identified the elements that spoke to many disparate cultures, I needed to twist them, turning archetypes into elements that were three-dimensional, rich and unique. Part of the process included re-naming some concepts—for instance, dragons—to prevent readers bringing a bagful of preconceptions to the story. By the time the reader had figured out what the things are, I’d had space to imprint my reading upon it.

Do you ever get bogged down in the world-building process?

Justina Robson: Endlessly. I use it as an excuse not to write the story or to stop writing when I feel very anxious and. . . well. . . as an excuse for everything really. I keep coming up against my inner demon which tells me I have to be right or I can’t go on. I have to solve it. I have to solve everything, or I’m unjustified in making whatever flaky claim my story is trying to make in the face of a relentlessly nitpicky universe. I escape by reading romances and novels by people who are smart enough never to care about this stuff. I realize it’s starting to sound like I think world-building is pointless. I don’t. But for me, story is first. If the world is going to get in the way because of some notion that I am writing SF and therefore it has to make a literal sense, it doesn’t want to make because it is really all metaphors then metaphors must win. Every time. All the time. I never give two hoots for anyone else’s cruddy world-building if their story blows my mind. I might potshot at it later, and god help them if the story blows. But if it’s good, I don’t care at all. I am in it for the trip, not the brochure.

K.V. Johansen: Possibly—if by bogged down you mean distracted, so that the world-building takes over and the adventure gets sidetracked. “This is getting interested, let’s keep going and see what that’s like. Oh, wait, that has nothing to do with this particular story.” There’s a southern continent across an ocean channel which has trade with the Five Cities. The Five Cities aren’t in Blackdog either, but they’re there, Nabbani colonies east and south of Marakand. And the early history of Marakand, the city where the eastern and western caravan roads meet, is really fascinating and can distract me from the more immediate history that is the story in hand. But name a place Marakand, which is fairly obviously derived from Asmarakand, which became Samarkand, and it’s crying out for a mysterious, romantic past, isn’t it? And I can start hunting for books from which to develop some small detail and end up with a stack of six histories, reading for background on something that’s going to be a tiny presence in the story itself. I guess I like things to have roots. (Also, it’s an excuse to add to my library, of course.) It’s really important for the world not to end at the edges of the map and for there to be a past before the story begins, a foundation for everything, but sometimes I can end up knowing more about the past of something than its present, and have to step out of it a bit and refocus on the story’s here and now. I don’t work out things like that in advance, though. They unfold, or I go chasing after them, as I get to them, and then I can end up with pages I have to cut out and stash in another file because it’s not part of the story; it’s just stuff that I have to know so the story can go on.

Tim Akers: I can spend too much time on world-building, because it’s the part that makes me tick. I started as a designer of roleplaying games, and I still have a great deal of affection for the tabletop dice. In fact, if it were possible to just make a living creating and deploying hyper-deep worlds for people to explore, that’s probably what I would be doing. I suppose I could make a go of it in the computer game industry, but I’m focused on honing my craft as a writer. Plus I love words, I love language, and I love story. I’m not sure you can practice all of that in that industry.

Joel Shepherd: [I don't get bogged down] really, but there are times when I feel the story becomes bogged down if I haven’t sufficiently developed the world. The characters, and therefore the story, must interact with their environment in a way that enriches the story. If the world isn’t sufficiently developed, sometimes I’ve felt there just isn’t any energy happening between the characters and their world, much the same as a relationship between characters that lacks energy or excitement. So I have to go away and think for a bit about what’s missing from the world, and what would liven up the experience.

M. D. Lachlan/Mark Barrowcliffe: If I were writing a traditional fantasy, I wouldn’t bother about very detailed world-building at all before I started writing. I’d just have a character in an interesting dilemma and start making it up from there. It’s a complete distraction for a writer to take thousands of notes on his or her invented world before sitting down to write. Stories are about people—from The Lord of the Rings through Earthsea and Moorcock to modern day fantasy. The world is essentially a setting for people to do things in. No one comes to a book to read about the exact appearance of a Black Rider. They come to the book to share Frodo’s terror, to marvel at his bravery and ingenuity in escaping the dark forces. So my advice would be to make it up as you go along. When I wrote the character of Loki in Wolfsangel I didn’t map him out beforehand. He appeared in the story and I heard him start to speak. I didn’t realize my witches were using a magic system based on bodily denial and self-inflicted torture before they actually appeared. I started writing the character of the witch queen in a scene where she had had a premonition of disaster. The way she went about her magic just appeared on the page.

Kay Kenyon: I favor complicated worlds. There are days when I think I’m going too far, but can’t seem to help myself. The distortions of the mundane world may be too much fun; they can threaten, by their very detail, to sink the premise. The only way out of this snarl is to start writing. Plot and character are a great discipline to me; they force me to focus and sometimes simplify.

Have there been any cataclysmic events in your secondary world? If so, how did it change the world?

Justina Robson: The shapeshifters developed weapons of mass destruction, and now there’s an arms race. But really, that’s a side issue. The cataclysm is a very slow one: the shapeshifters evolving faster, smarter, and encroaching on the “human” ground.

K.V. Johansen: In the Blackdog world, the first war involving the devils happened so long ago that it’s not really remembered well in human stories, and is described as a war of wizards by some characters. The gods of the empire of Tiypur (and the empire itself as a political entity) were destroyed, so the region of Tiypur is now a land without gods. What that means for the world, that lack of any divinity there, is something that will come up later as the story, I hope, goes on. People from that part of the world, like Thekla in Blackdog, worship a memory of gods they know are dead, pray to gods they know can’t hear them. That’s an interesting state of mind. If the gods of your world are real and other people of other folks (or tribes or lands) can interact with their gods, and you and your people can’t, because you know your gods are dead, where do you find your focus, the core of your identity as a folk? What might end up filling that emotional vacuum for people? One battle of that war also had a physical effect further east, in the blighted landscape of the eastern shore of the Kinsai’av in Blackdog; there’s a region all along the river that’s still a wasteland because of it.

In The Shadow Road, the fourth book of my Warlocks of Talverdin series about the Nightwalkers, a lot of the action takes place in a world suffering a supervolcano-induced ice age, not unlike that nuclear winter that we all thought might be coming when I was a teenager once WWIII came along. The supervolcano was triggered by misuse of a particular and not fully understood magic as much as by natural processes. The population of the planet has been pretty much wiped out, many in the initial disaster but most of the rest in a slow decline as the climate changes; it’s reached the point when the story happens that glaciers cover much of the world and civilization, in the true meaning of the word, has ended. One of the heroes is living in what she thinks is probably the last settlement of people alive in the entire world.

Kay Kenyon: My world has had short geologic ages during which it was formed and then populated by degree, in a process of copying life forms from “our” universe, the Rose. But this creation period is in back story, not brought on stage. Aside from that, the story contains a cataclysmic event in one of the “minorals” or offshoots of a “primacy.” It’s an event that demonstrates the ruling class ruthlessness and contributes to an uprising.

What goes into the development of a magic system?

K.V. Johansen: Some research and lots of (desperate) inspiration! In world of Blackdog, each region has its own forms and rituals of magic. Coming up with these and having them evolve as the story moves from region to region is challenging, sometimes. They all have to have some common ground, too, as the magic underneath is all the same. Sometimes it’s just something that leaps out as a neat idea while I’m writing, like the Grasslander cat’s-cradles, and sometimes it involves a lot of thinking about similar cultures in the primary world and what they believed had power.

Tim Akers: Again, a lot of my experience with this comes from my time in RPGs. Personally, I need to figure out power sources, the strict rules of the powers, the costs and benefits and dangers of them. But on top of that you have to figure out how these things fit into the culture. Especially when religion gets involved, you can really end up with some complicated societal effects to magic. What roles do belief and faith play in world where there’s manifest arcane and divine power all around? In what ways have dogma impacted the culture’s understanding of magic and its application? Those kinds of questions really drive my construction of the magical systems in my worlds. What fun is making up dogma if you can’t make up heresy?

M. D. Lachlan/Mark Barrowcliffe: Like all writing, the development of magic comes from what you already know and a desire to do something new—and in my case an irritation with the tropes of traditional horror and fantasy.

Reviewers have commented that they haven’t seen a magic system like mine in fantasy before. I found this surprising, because it’s the magic that people practice in the real world. My magic is based on starvation, pain, denial of sleep, drowning, and freezing. It’s a magic of ordeal, and you can see it used in everything from Inca death rituals to Yoga, the desert retreats of Christian mystics, the sweat lodges of the Native Americans, the consumption of hallucinogenic mushrooms, the dances of the Dervishes. I have a good grounding in myth and real world magic—although I don’t believe in its literal truth—because I’ve been interested in magic and witchcraft since I was a child. I’ve done a lot of reading, so I have a lot to draw on.

I came to the specifics of my magic system through two ideas. The first is an extract from the Edda, in which Odin gives his eye for knowledge of the runes. The second was when I read that Norse mystics would seat themselves on a high chair to perform their prophecies. It occurred to me that this might be to deny themselves sleep. From there I needed an idea of the runes and I just envisaged them as living things that root in the mind of the sorcerer, sustained by her rituals and starvation. I took that, I think, from a misreading of the Poetic Edda. There’s this beautiful verse which describes Odin’s sufferings for magic:

I know that I hung on a windy tree
nine long nights,
wounded with a spear, dedicated to Odin,
myself to myself,
on that tree of which no man knows
from where its roots run.
No bread did they give me nor a drink from a horn,
downwards I peered;
I took up the runes, shrieking I took them,
then I fell back from there

This verse is the key to everything that happens in the Wolfsangel books. The misreading was of the “shrieking” (screaming in some translations). I originally read it that the runes were shrieking, not Odin. This gave me the idea that they were living things. Magic is solely a female preserve in my world. Men regard it as effeminate and beneath them, something you’d only resort to if you were too weak to fight. Again, this comes directly out of the Norse myth. The gods practice magic, but Norse gods are quite a gender-bending bunch.

My werewolf came from the idea of getting rid of the normal werewolf tropes that Hollywood invented. There’s no changing with the full moon, no silver bullets, no separation of the wolf and human identities. It always annoyed me that a 150-pound man could turn into a two-ton wolf within an hour. I know we’re dealing with magic, so anything is possible. But that always struck me as contrary to the laws of physics. Matter is coming from nowhere. My werewolf changes slowly, over a period of about a year. He puts on weight by eating people. My werewolf’s transformation is one-way—no changing back—and the wolf is consuming his personality from the inside. The idea of linking it to the myth of the Fenris wolf arrived about half way into the writing of the book. Again, I didn’t plan on or let it worry me that I hadn’t got every last detail worked out. The feel of the story was right and that was all that mattered.

If I were designing a magic system for a pure fantasy novel I’d avoid fireballs or “six-gun magic”—that is, magical effects that could just be a replacement for a gun or a laser pistol. It’s important in any writing to avoid cliché. The only thing you need to do is come up with something new, that is, if you want to write something really memorable. If you just want to churn out another genre standard, then you can embrace its clichés. That said, you should always strive to do something new in some way. Otherwise why not just read the stuff that’s already out there, and save yourself the bother of writing? You might write a bestseller by adhering to the genre’s clichés, but that’s not what writing’s about. If you’re in it to make money, become a banker. Writing—and fantasy writing in particular—is about striving for something unique and resonant.

Justina Robson: Far-future technologies in my case. Or, as it is also known, “pseudoscientific jargon.” Magic is either incomprehensibly useful technology that allows you to write a story in a certain way or it is a straight metaphor for creativity and charisma. In either case it has to hold water convincingly and logically. Someone has to pay somehow. Nothing is free.

Mark Chadbourn: My stories are split between our own world and the Otherworld, and I needed a magic system that would not jar too much with our contemporary existence. I went back and researched the occult systems of magicians—from John Dee to Aleister Crowley to modern chaos magicians—and identified what would fit in my cosmology.

When it comes to world-building, what are you good at and not as good at? How have you taken advantage of the strengths and compensated for the weaknesses?

Tim Akers: I touched on this before, but I think it’s important for writers to not just compensate for their weaknesses. We need to meet them head on. It’s easy to use our strengths as a crutch to cover up our weaknesses, but we’d be better off as artists and craftsman to actively engage our weaknesses and improve them. When I first started writing I was terrible at dialogue. That’s just a matter of craft, so I really studied language, the way people talk, the way they communicate, and now dialogue is one of the things that I’m good at. When it comes to world-building, my strengths lie in religion, in magic, and in backstory. The larger the scale, the better I do. My weakness is character. So I push myself to make characters that make me uncomfortable, that stretch my admittedly simple boundaries. There’s no way for me to get better if I don’t. And while I’m not good enough to produce truly revolutionary character tropes, I resist the urge to fall back on the comfortable, simple character tropes that permeate so much of fantasy.

Kay Kenyon: I think my strength is sense of wonder and depth. When I take on a particularly bizarre world, one of the things I work hard at is believability—that is, creating verisimilitude despite unlikely claims. Part of the job is not to rely over much on explaining, but using point of view and character to soften/authenticate strangeness. One aspect of world building that I admire in others and don’t accomplish to my satisfaction is alien language—that is, creating an intriguing a lexicon. I minimize the use of foreign words.

Joel Shepherd: I’m good at cultures and civilizations on the broad scale. I enjoy the complexities—not because I’m addicted to needless complexity, but because complexity exists everywhere in the real world, and I’ve always found it fascinating. I’m also good at politics and political science broadly (I’m currently writing an international relations PhD), and those kinds of struggles form a lot of the motivations of my characters.

Not so good at? Making it simple. Some people like simple. My work’s probably not for them. I like reading stuff myself where I have to work a little bit, because that’s the experience of the real world. If you ever travel to some foreign nation, getting accustomed to the language and customs and so forth always takes some work. That’s the fun of it. If I don’t get that from a story, it doesn’t feel real to me. I can only imagine the readers who don’t like to work are people who don’t like to travel much either. I’ve had to work at keeping my story structure as simple as feasible, to explain the world in ways that are dramatically interesting, so don’t feel at all like reading an encyclopedia. That’s always the danger.

Character or world? If you had to give up one or the other, which would it be?

Tim Akers: Sadly, character. I’m a world-builder first. Again, it’s a personal weakness, one that I’m trying to overcome. Writers need to learn to clearly identify their weaknesses and go after them, rather than trying to prop them up with their strengths. But I don’t know that I could write a book that was just a character study. I’m not to that point in my development as a craftsman just yet.

Joel Shepherd: Easy: Character is everything. Worlds are only interesting to the extent that there are interesting characters to populate them. It’s very much like the line about “If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is there to see, did it really fall?” What is a world without characters to experience it, vicariously, on the behalf of the reader?

M. D. Lachlan/Mark Barrowcliffe: Characters exist only in their world. You can’t have one without another. A ninth-century Viking is a very different person than a 21st-century teenager. The world shapes the character, and the world only comes to life through the character’s eyes. The mines of Moria would look very different if you were describing them from the point of view of an Orc. That said, I’m not very interested in traditional fantasy world-building, at least as a writer. It’s very hard, this far into fantasy’s evolution as a genre, to come up with anything new or interesting.

I believe this is why people like George R. R. Martin and Joe Abercrombie have steered clear of worlds packed with monsters and magic and alien races. In fact, I’d argue that the weakest part of Martin’s work is the traditional monsters. I found the Others pretty dull and I love A Game of Thrones. Martin’s strength is in his brilliantly realized characters.

To me, another race of elves, another beast man, or another bird woman is much less interesting than the interplay of characters. I’m not interested in how your dwarves smelt their gold. I regard that as a decoration to the story. I’m more interested in how your dwarf thinks, and how that affects his or her interaction with your main characters. This is why I chose historical fantasy. The world-building’s done for you, though, of course, you still have to come up with your interpretation of both the history and the myth. Then uou can get on with telling the story.

Justina Robson: [Character and world] are inseparable. Actions are meaningless without context. Character creates their world and vice versa in an eternal round.

Mark Chadbourn: All stories are about characters. [A world without characters] would be like have a theater stage with no actors on it. I know some people get whipped up with enthusiasm in their world-building, but the world should really be devised to underpin the themes the author wants to discuss. The themes come out of the characters.

K.V. Johansen: The characters are shaped by their world and can’t exist without it. If I put Holla-Sayan and Moth into another world, they wouldn’t be Holla-Sayan and Moth anymore; they’d have to be different people shaped by that world, whatever it was.

Kay Kenyon: In a forced choice, I would give up world-building. I would be terribly disappointed, but after all, stories are about people. Flat characters can’t (for me) provide enough horsepower for a great read.

Do you have any parting words of advice, encouragement, or mischief for fellow world-builders out there?

Tim Akers: Think big; write small. You can have the most awesome, mind-breaking idea for a world that anyone has ever seen, but if it isn’t populated by interesting characters that engage the reader—doing things that are interesting in locales that are interesting—you’re going to lose your audience. It doesn’t matter how cool your idea is. You have to execute on every stage of the writing process to pull it off.

Joel Shepherd: Travel.

M. D. Lachlan/Mark Barrowcliffe: Don’t build worlds. Write. The world that emerges as you do so will be far more complex and interesting than anything you dryly invent separately to your characters and the story. Mapping out the city of the Night People is just an excuse for not writing. The Lord of the Rings is “a tale that grew in the telling.” Over-planning can kill writing. This isn’t to say that the enchantment of a well-thought-out world is unimportant. It’s just secondary to the characters. Get them right, and everything else falls into place. And use a light touch with the details of your world. One well-chosen sentence or metaphor is preferable to ten pages of detailed description. No one cares that your tree folk use hammocks made of vines. They care that your hero finds them uncomfortable to sleep in.

Justina Robson: Have fun!

Mark Chadbourn: Choose the overarching story you want to tell first, then decide what kind of characters you need to play it out. Only then start putting together the kind of world that will best illustrate all the elements of your story. Otherwise you face the danger of a wonderfully lavish world populated by characters with nothing to say.

K.V. Johansen: Read lots of nonfiction. You never know what apparently random seed is going to take root and grow into something interesting.

Kay Kenyon: Anchor your world to some familiar things so that you don’t ask too much of the reader. I think SF/F readers will do half the work of imagining, but you can’t ask them to share an opium dream. Also, don’t explain everything. It can undermine your world rather than justify it. As encouragement: Only science fiction and fantasy will allow you to have so much fun being the god of a world. Enjoy the act of creation!

Mischief: Never kill a dog. I did that in one book, and it sold the worst of all of mine.

M. D. Lachlan/Mark Barrowcliffe: You don’t need a wodge of notes about your world. You’re a writer—write, and make it up as you go along.

Tim Akers (shadoth.blogspot.com) is the author of The Horns of Ruin and The Burn Cycle.

Mark Chadbourn’s trilogies (www.markchadbourn.net) include The Age of Misrule, The Dark Age, Kingdom of the Serpent, and Swords of Albion.

K. V. Johansen (www.kvj.ca/blackdog) is the author of Blackdog, as well as such series as Torrie Quests, The Cassandra Virus, and The Warlocks of Talverdin.

Kay Kenyon’s (www.kaykenyon.com) The Entire and the Rose series began with Bright of the Sky and has continued to the fourth installment, Prince of Storms.

M. D. Lachlan/Mark Barrowcliffe is the author of Wolfsangel and Fenrir, as well as Girlfriend 44 and The Elfish Gene under his real name, Mark Barrowcliffe.

Justina Robson (justinarobson.blogspot.com) is the author of Mappa Mundi, Silver Screen, and the Quantum Gravity series.

Joel Shepherd is the author of a science fiction series about Cassandra Kresnov and the fantasy series A Trial of Blood and Steel.

About the Author

Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and teacher. He is the Staff Interviewer for Clarkesworld Magazine and a frequent contributor to Kobold Quarterly and Booklifenow.com. He teaches at Wofford College and Montessori Academy in Spartanburg, SC. He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006. Jones lives in Upstate South Carolina with his wife, daughter, and flying poodle.

Another Word: Reading as Performance

Daniel Abraham

My main complaint, and reason my interest flagged, was that both the characters and setting seemed flat.
—SF Reader on A Shadow in Summer

. . .an imagined world of this quality: for a city as graceful and fascinating as Saraykhet, and for such persuasively human characters.
—Strange Horizons on A Shadow in Summer

One of the things that my wiser friends and acquaintances told me when my first book, A Shadow in Summer, came out was not to read the reviews. The bad ones would hurt my feelings and the good ones would swell my head. Seriously, it’s a dumb thing to do.

So yeah, of course I did it. Still do. Terrible habit.

The thing that confused me then, and for several years since, is how often thoughtful intelligent, committed, professional readers can bring their best critical faculties to a book and come back with totally incompatible reports. The world-building is great, or it’s strictly paint-by-numbers. The characters are fascinating and complex, or they’re cardboard. The plot is full of well-crafted surprises, or it’s all telegraphed from page one.

I came to the same conclusion that all authors reach: the reviewers who liked me are intelligent, deep-souled bastions of wisdom, and the ones who didn’t are a bunch of weak-brained punks. Mystery solved.

But here’s the thing. Once the initial emotional rush plays out and my amygdala calms back down to its natural state, I start to think that maybe something else is going on here. That maybe I’ve misunderstood what reading is.

There are two equally serious reasons why it isn’t worth any adult reader’s attention. The first is that it is dull, dull, dull in a pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion. The second is that it is repulsive.—The New York Times on Lolita, 1958

Technically it is brilliant, Peter-De-Vries humor in a major key, combined with an eye for the revealing, clinching detail of social behavior. . . one of the funniest and one of the saddest books that will be published this year.—Also The New York Times, also on Lolita, also in 1958. Seriously. WTF, folks?

On one level, everyone knows this. Every reader brings their own experience to a story. How you read something depends on who you are. I’ve had that experience myself. I tried four times to read Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose and couldn’t get into it for love or money. Then the fifth time, I fell into it and read the whole damn thing in three sittings. I’ve had books that I loved at one point in my life, and reread only to discover that the suck fairy had come and left great big piles of ohmigodthisisawful. It’s one of those things that we all tacitly understand, usually without thinking too much about why it’s true or what it means.

So let’s talk about your neocortex for a minute.

There’s this fairly brilliant book called On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee that talks about a model of brain function that gets the shorthand of memory-prediction. I’m not going to dive very deep into it here, but if you get the time, it’s seriously interesting stuff. The one point that I want to borrow is that many times more neurons come into the visual neocortex from deeper in the brain than do from the eyes.

The theory Hawkins puts forward (and I find it fairly persuasive) has it that most of what triggers activity in the visual neocortex is predictive information from other parts of the brain. Or, more loosely translated, most of what we see, we evoke. And that also matches my experience as a reader.

I remember one time in late high school or early college, reading a book that was particularly working for me. I’d been in it for hours, picturing the action, hearing the voices, listening to the narrator’s voice. When I put the book down to go make dinner, it was physically disorienting. I had been chasing the villain through a ruined castle, and now I was halfway to my kitchen. It felt dislocating. It felt like still being halfway in a dream.

I’ve always heard the idea of reading as evoking a “literary dream” attributed to Damon Knight, but I suppose he may have gotten the phrase from someplace else. The thing that it’s taken me decades to figure out is that the phrase isn’t a metaphor. If I’m right, the mechanism that lets me look at a white sheet of paper with black inked letters on it and see the Balrog pulling Gandalf into the pit is the same one that lets me close my eyes at night and see my old elementary school filled up with bats or whatever my brain is handing up to my visual centers. And the same holds true for other aspects of my reading experience. The sounds I hear, the scents I smell, the emotions I feel are all being drawn up from deep inside of me and experienced just the way they would be in a dream.

A really objective review of a book would be about a book as. . . well, as an object. “I find the use of a sans serif font problematic, and the thick bond of the paper gives the book a weight that exaggerates its true word count.” Or, you know. Whatever. Point is, it wouldn’t be useful.

I don’t want an objective review of a book. I want an idea of what kind of subjective experience I’m likely to have when I read it. I’m assuming that’s what most readers of reviews are looking for too. As an extra added bonus, it would be nice if the review added some insight or depth that would help me experience the story in a way that was even more compelling and involving than I would have managed on my own. But hey, no pressure.

In that light, the reason that two reviewers can come to the same text and come back totally dissimilar reports is pretty clear. They aren’t describing the same experience.

I’ve seen three productions of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The first one was in high school, and as I recall most of the right words were spoken in more or less the right order. The second was at a Shakespeare festival, and it was a much better, much more interesting play. Same words, same order, but a different company and director and just plain all-around better. The third one was on Broadway with Patrick Stewart as Prospero, and a lot of really interesting and deeply non-period production and design decisions that made the play into a comment on race relations and the legacy of American slavery. Each time it was the same script, the same story, but the variations in the performance made it utterly different.

And that’s the thing. When we read, we’re performing. We read a sentence like “Wet cobblestones glittered in the sudden sunlight like a thousand golden coins,” and maybe we see a wide street glowing in pointillist yellow-white. Or maybe we picture a couple dozen cobbles and a picture of goldwork we saw in National Geographic once. Or maybe we just agree that the rain stopped and it got sunny before skip ahead to the sword fight coming up next.

With every story, every book, we are the acting troupe and the director and the props and special effects folks. How well we are able to evoke a dream from the words on the page—what decisions we unconsciously make, what experience and history we have to draw from, how comfortable we are with the style of the writer who gave us the story — is going to vary. Some acting troupes do really great comedy but they’re only so-so for drama. Some have actors who can really embody a tragic character, but seem wrong when doing a song-and-dance bit. When we pick up a book, we’re like that too. Some books we’re ready to read. Some we’re suited for. Others, not so much.

That doesn’t mean that the text doesn’t matter. It does. Some writers are brilliant at guiding us through a dream, evoking sensory detail and drawing out emotions and weaving in philosophical and aesthetic abstractions in ways that make everything in the story seem deeper and more profound. Some write cool sword fights, if that’s the kind of thing you’re into. Some aren’t very good.

When a reviewer sets out to tell us what they thought, the experience they’re talking about is their private—can we call it intimate?—performance. It’s never something we can really share, and it may or may not be decent predictor of the experience we’ll have if we pick up the same book. Every review is like the description of a production of The Tempest put on once, for an audience of one, not repeated and not repeatable. Every story any of us read is the same.

For me, reading reviews of my stuff, this model of what it means to read pulls some of the sting. A bad review is disappointing, but it isn’t an indictment. There isn’t a perfect and certain judge of literature looking down from the bench and condemning me and my little offering now and forever. It’s more like a date that didn’t go well. Still sad. A little heartbreaking sometimes, if it’s someone whose opinion I care about. But it’s always something quiet and personal that happened—or didn’t happen—between the two of us, and that makes the failures a little more humane.

About the Author

Daniel Abraham is a writer of genre fiction with a dozen books in print and over thirty published short stories. His work has been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Hugo Awards and has been awarded the International Horror Guild Award. He also writes as MLN Hanover and (with Ty Franck) as James S. A. Corey. He lives in the American Southwest.

Clarkesworld Magazine

Issue 68

Table of Contents

Prayer

by Robert Reed

Synch Me, Kiss Me, Drop

by Suzanne Church

All the Things the Moon is Not

by Alexander Lumans

The Fairy Tale in the TV Age

by Alethea Kontis

Straightforward & Unadorned Adventure: A Conversation with Michael J. Sullivan

by Jeremy L. C. Jones

Another Word: Dear Speculative Fiction, I'm Glad We Had This Talk

by Elizabeth Bear

From the Editor's Desk

by Neil Clarke

Sci-fi Farmer

Art by Jessada Sutthi

© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2012
www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

Prayer

Robert Reed

Fashion matters. In my soul of souls, I know that the dead things you carry on your body are real, real important. Grandma likes to call me a clotheshorse, which sounds like a good thing. For example, I’ve always known that a quality sweater means the world. I prefer soft organic wools woven around Class-C nanofibers—a nice high collar with sleeves riding a little big but with enough stopping power to absorb back-to-back kinetic charges. I want pants that won’t slice when the shrapnel is thick, and since I won’t live past nineteen, probably, I let the world see that this body’s young and fit. (Morbid maybe, but that’s why I think about death only in little doses.) I adore elegant black boots that ignore rain and wandering electrical currents, and everything under my boots and sweater and pants has to feel silky-good against the most important skin in my world. But essential beyond all else is what I wear on my face, which is more makeup than Grandma likes, and tattooed scripture on the forehead, and sparkle-eyes that look nothing but ordinary. In other words, I want people to see an average Christian girl instead of what I am, which is part of the insurgency’s heart inside Occupied Toronto.

To me, guns are just another layer of clothes, and the best day ever lived was the day I got my hands on a barely-used, cognitively damaged Mormon railgun. They don’t make that model anymore, what with its willingness to change sides. And I doubt that there’s ever been a more dangerous gun made by the human species. Shit, the boy grows his own ammo, and he can kill anything for hundreds of miles, and left alone he will invent ways to hide and charge himself on the sly, and all that time he waits waits waits for his master to come back around and hold him again.

I am his master now.

I am Ophelia Hanna Hanks, except within my local cell, where I wear the randomly generated, perfectly suitable name:

Ridiculous.

The gun’s name is Prophet, and until ten seconds ago, he looked like scrap conduit and junk wiring. And while he might be cognitively impaired, Prophet is wickedly loyal to me. Ten days might pass without the two of us being in each other’s reach, but that’s the beauty of our dynamic: I can live normal and look normal, and while the enemy is busy watching everything else, a solitary fourteen-year-old girl slips into an alleyway that’s already been swept fifty times today.

“Good day, Ridiculous.”

“Good day to you, Prophet.”

“And who are we going to drop into Hell today?”

“All of America,” I say, which is what I always say.

Reliable as can be, he warns me, “That’s a rather substantial target, my dear. Perhaps we should reduce our parameters.”

“Okay. New Fucking York.”

Our attack has a timetable, and I have eleven minutes to get into position.

“And the specific target?” he asks.

I have coordinates that are updated every half-second. I could feed one or two important faces into his menu, but I never kill faces. These are the enemy, but if I don’t define things too closely, then I won’t miss any sleep tonight.

Prophet eats the numbers, saying, “As you wish, my dear.”

I’m carrying him, walking fast towards a fire door that will stay unlocked for the next ten seconds. Alarmed by my presence, a skinny rat jumps out of one dumpster, little legs running before it hits the oily bricks.

“Do you know it?” I ask.

The enemy likes to use rats as spies.

Prophet says, “I recognize her, yes. She has a nest and pups inside the wall.”

“Okay,” I say, feeling nervous and good.

The fire door opens when I tug and locks forever once I step into the darkness.

“You made it,” says my gun.

“I was praying,” I report.

He laughs, and I laugh too. But I keep my voice down, stairs needing to be climbed and only one of us doing the work.

She found me after a battle. She believes that I am a little bit stupid. I was damaged in the fight and she imprinted my devotions to her, and then using proxy tools and stolen wetware, she gave me the cognitive functions to be a loyal agent to the insurgency.

I am an astonishing instrument of mayhem, and naturally her superiors thought about claiming me for themselves.

But they didn’t.

If I had the freedom to speak, I would mention this oddity to my Ridiculous. “Why would they leave such a prize with little you?”

“Because I found you first,” she would say.

“War isn’t a schoolyard game,” I’d remind her.

“But I made you mine,” she might reply. “And my bosses know that I’m a good soldier, and you like me, and stop being a turd.”

No, we have one another because her bosses are adults. They are grown souls who have survived seven years of occupation, and that kind of achievement doesn’t bless the dumb or the lucky. Looking at me, they see too much of a blessing, and nobody else dares to trust me well enough to hold me.

I know all of this, which seems curious.

I might say all of this, except I never do.

And even though my mind was supposedly mangled, I still remember being crafted and calibrated in Utah, hence my surname. But I am no Mormon. Indeed, I’m a rather agnostic soul when it comes to my interpretations of Jesus and His influence in the New World. And while there are all-Mormon units in the US military, I began my service with Protestants—Baptists and Missouri Synods mostly. They were bright clean happy believers who had recently arrived at Fort Joshua out on Lake Ontario. Half of that unit had already served a tour in Alberta, guarding the tar pits from little acts of sabotage. Keeping the Keystones safe is a critical but relatively simple duty. There aren’t many people to watch, just robots and one another. The prairie was depopulated ten years ago, which wasn’t an easy or cheap process; American farmers still haven’t brought the ground back to full production, and that’s one reason why the Toronto rations are staying small.

But patrolling the corn was easy work compared to sitting inside Fort Joshua, millions of displaced and hungry people staring at your walls.

Americans call this Missionary Work.

Inside their own quarters, alone except for their weapons and the Almighty, soldiers try to convince one another that the natives are beginning to love them. Despite a thousand lessons to the contrary, Canada is still that baby brother to the north, big and foolish but congenial in his heart, or at least capable of learning manners after the loving sibling delivers enough beat-downs.

What I know today—what every one of my memories tells me—is that the American soldiers were grossly unprepared. Compared to other units and other duties, I would even go so far as to propose that the distant generals were aware of their limitations yet sent the troops across the lake regardless, full of religion and love for each other and the fervent conviction that the United States was the empire that the world had always deserved.

Canada is luckier than most. That can’t be debated without being deeply, madly stupid. Heat waves are killing the tropics. Acid has tortured the seas. The wealth of the previous centuries has been erased by disasters of weather and war and other inevitable surprises. But the worst of these sorrows haven’t occurred in the Greater United States, and if they had half a mind, Canadians would be thrilled with the mild winters and long brilliant summers and the supportive grip of their big wise master.

My soldiers’ first recon duty was simple: Walk past the shops along Queen.

Like scared warriors everywhere, they put on every piece of armor and every sensor and wired back-ups that would pierce the insurgent’s jamming. And that should have been good enough. But by plan or by accident, some native let loose a few molecules of VX gas—just enough to trigger one of the biohazard alarms. Then one of my brother-guns was leveled at a crowd of innocents, two dozen dead before the bloody rain stopped flying.

That’s when the firefight really began.

Kinetic guns and homemade bombs struck the missionaries from every side. I was held tight by my owner—a sergeant with commendations for his successful defense of a leaky pipeline—but he didn’t fire me once. His time was spent yelling for an orderly retreat, pleading with his youngsters to find sure targets before they hit the buildings with hypersonic rounds. But despite those good smart words, the patrol got itself trapped. There was a genuine chance that one of them might die, and that’s what those devout men encased in body armor and faith decided to pray: Clasping hands, they opened channels to the Almighty, begging for thunder to be sent down on the infidels.

The Almighty is what used to be called the Internet—an American child reclaimed totally back in 2027.

A long stretch of shops and old buildings was struck from the sky.

That’s what American soldiers do when the situation gets dicey. They pray, and the locals die by the hundreds, and the biggest oddity of that peculiar day was how the usual precise orbital weaponry lost its way, and half of my young men were wounded or killed in the onslaught while a tiny shaped charge tossed me a hundred meters down the road.

There I was discovered in the rubble by a young girl.

As deeply unlikely as that seems.

I don’t want the roof. I don’t need my eyes to shoot. An abandoned apartment on the top floor is waiting for me, and in particular, its dirty old bathroom. As a rule, I like bathrooms. They’re the strongest part of any building, what with pipes running through the walls and floor. Two weeks ago, somebody I’ll never know sealed the tube’s drain and cracked the faucet just enough for a slow drip, and now the water sits near the brim. Water is essential for long shots. With four minutes to spare, I deploy Prophet’s long legs, tipping him just enough toward the southeast, and then I sink him halfway into the bath, asking, “How’s that feel?”

“Cold,” he jokes.

We have three and a half minutes to talk.

I tell him, “Thank you.”

His barrel stretches to full length, its tip just short of the moldy plaster ceiling. “Thank you for what?” he says.

“I don’t know,” I say.

Then I laugh, and he sort of laughs.

I say, “I’m not religious. At least, I don’t want to be.”

“What are you telling me, Ridiculous?”

“I guess…I don’t know. Forget it.”

And he says, “I will do my very best.”

Under the water, down where the breech sits, ammunition is moving. Scrap metal and scrap nano-fibers have been woven into four bullets. Street fights require hundreds and thousands of tiny bullets, but each of these rounds is bigger than most carrots and shaped the same general way. Each one carries a brain and microrockets and eyes. Prophet is programming them with the latest coordinates while running every last-second test. Any little problem with a bullet can mean an ugly shot, or even worse, an explosion that rips away the top couple floors of this building.

At two minutes, I ask, “Are we set?”

“You’re standing too close,” he says.

“If I don’t move, will you fire anyway?”

“Of course.”

“Good,” I say.

At ninety-five seconds, ten assaults are launched across southern Ontario. The biggest and nearest is fixated on Fort Joshua—homemade cruise missiles and lesser railguns aimed at that artificial island squatting in our beautiful lake. The assaults are meant to be loud and unexpected, and because every soldier thinks his story is important, plenty of voices suddenly beg with the Almighty, wanting His godly hand.

The nearby battle sounds like a sudden spring wind.

“I’m backing out of here,” I say.

“Please do,” he says.

At sixty-one seconds, most of the available American resources are glancing at each of these distractions, and a brigade of AIs is studying past tendencies and elaborate models of insurgency capabilities, coming to the conclusion that these events have no credible value toward the war’s successful execution.

Something else is looming, plainly.

“God’s will,” says the nonbeliever.

“What isn’t?” says the Mormon gun.

At seventeen seconds, two kilometers of the Keystone John pipeline erupt in a line of smoky flame, microbombs inside the heated tar doing their best to stop the flow of poisons to the south.

The Almighty doesn’t need prayer to guide His mighty hand. This must be the main attack, and every resource is pulled to the west, making ready to deal with even greater hazards.

I shut the bathroom door and run for the hallway.

Prophet empties his breech, the first carrot already moving many times faster than the speed of sound as it blasts through the roof. Its three buddies are directly behind it, and the enormous release of stored energy turns the bathwater to steam, and with the first shot the iron tub is yanked free of the floor while the second and third shots kick the tub and the last of its water down into the bathroom directly downstairs. The final shot is going into the wrong part of the sky, but that’s also part of the plan. I’m not supposed to be amazed by how many factors can be juggled at once, but they are juggled and I am amazed, running down the stairs to recover my good friend.

The schedule is meant to be secret and followed precisely. The Secretary of Carbon rides her private subway car to the UN, but instead of remaining indoors and safe, she has to come into the sunshine, standing with ministers and potentates who have gathered for this very important conference. Reporters are sitting in rows and cameras will be watching from every vantage point, and both groups are full of those who don’t particularly like the Secretary. Part of her job is being despised, and fuck them. That’s what she thinks whenever she attends these big public dances. Journalists are livestock, and this is a show put on for the meat. Yet even as the scorn builds, she shows a smile that looks warm and caring, and she carries a strong speech that will last for three minutes, provided she gives it. Her words are meant to reassure the world that full recovery is at hand. She will tell everyone that the hands of her government are wise and what the United States wants is happiness for every living breathing wonderful life on this great world—a world that with God’s help will live for another five billion years.

For the camera, for the world, the Secretary of Carbon and her various associates invest a few moments in handshakes and important nods of the head.

Watching from a distance, without knowing anything, it would be easy to recognize that the smiling woman in brown was the one in charge.

The UN president shakes her hand last and then steps up to the podium. He was installed last year after an exhaustive search. Handsome and personable, and half as bright as he is ambitious, the President greets the press and then breaks from the script, shouting a bland “Hello” to the protestors standing outside the blast screens.

Five thousand people are standing in the public plaza, holding up signs and generated holos that have one clear message:

“END THE WARS NOW.”

The Secretary knows the time and the schedule, and she feels a rare ache of nervousness, of doubt.

When they hear themselves mentioned, the self-absorbed protestors join together in one rehearsed shout that carries across the screens. A few reporters look at the throng behind them. The cameras and the real professionals focus on the human subjects. This is routine work. Reflexes are numb, minds lethargic. The Secretary picks out a few familiar faces, and then her assistant pipes a warning into her sparkle-eyes. One of the Keystones has been set on fire.

In reflex, the woman takes one step backward, her hands starting to lift to cover her head.

A mistake.

But she recovers soon enough, turning to her counterpart from Russia, telling him, “And congratulations on that new daughter of yours.”

He is flustered and flattered. With a giddy nod, he says, “Girls are so much better than boys these days. Don’t you think?”

The Secretary has no chance to respond.

A hypersonic round slams through the atmosphere, heated to a point where any impact will make it explode. Then it drops into an environment full of clutter and one valid target that must be acquired and reached before the fabulous energies shake loose from their bridle.

There is no warning sound.

The explosion lifts bodies and pieces of bodies, and while the debris rises, three more rounds plunge into the panicked crowd.

Every person in the area drops flat, hands over their heads.

Cameras turn, recording the violence and loss—more than three hundred dead and maimed in a horrific attack.

The Secretary and new father lie together on the temporary stage.

Is it her imagination, or is the man trying to cop a feel?

She rolls away from him, but she doesn’t stand yet. The attack is finished, but she shouldn’t know that. It’s best to remain down and act scared, looking at the plaza, the air filled with smoke and pulverized concrete while the stubborn holos continue to beg for some impossible gift called Peace.

My grandmother is sharp. She is. Look at her once in the wrong way, and she knows something is wrong. Do it twice and she’ll probably piece together what makes a girl turn quiet and strange.

But not today, she doesn’t.

“What happened at school?” she asks.

I don’t answer.

“What are you watching, Ophelia?”

Nothing. My eyes have been blank for half a minute now.

“Something went wrong at school, didn’t it?”

Nothing is ever a hundred percent right at school, which is why it’s easy to harvest a story that might be believed. Most people would believe it, at least. But after listening to my noise about snippy friends and broken trusts, she says, “I don’t know what’s wrong with you, honey. But that isn’t it.”

I nod, letting my voice die away.

She leaves my little room without closing the door. I sit and do nothing for about three seconds, and then the sparkle eyes take me back to the mess outside the UN. I can’t count the times I’ve watched the impacts, the carnage. Hundreds of cameras were working, government cameras and media cameras and those carried by the protesters. Following at the digitals’ heels are people talking about the tragedy and death tolls and who is responsible and how the war has moved to a new awful level.

“Where did the insurgents get a top-drawer railgun?” faces ask.

But I’ve carried Prophet for a couple years and fired him plenty of times. Just not into a public target like this, and with so many casualties, and all of the dead on my side of the fight.

That’s the difference here: The world suddenly knows about me.

In the middle of the slaughter, one robot camera stays focused on my real targets, including the Secretary of Fuel and Bullshit. It’s halfway nice, watching her hunker down in terror. Except she should have been in pieces, and there shouldn’t be a face staring in my direction, and how Prophet missed our target by more than fifty meters is one big awful mystery that needs solving.

I assume a malfunction.

I’m wondering where I can take him to get his guidance systems recalibrated and ready for retribution.

Unless of course the enemy has figured out how to make railgun rounds fall just a little wide of their goals, maybe even killing some troublemakers in the process.

Whatever is wrong here, at least I know that it isn’t my fault.

Then some little thing taps at my window.

From the next room, my grandmother asks, “What are you doing, Ophelia?”

I’m looking at the bird on my window sill. The enemy uses rats, and we use robins and house sparrows. But this is a red-headed woodpecker, which implies rank and special circumstances.

The bird gives a squawk, which is a coded message that my eyes have to play with for a little while. Then the messenger flies away.

“Ophelia?”

“I’m just thinking about a friend,” I shout.

She comes back into my room, watching my expression all over again.

“A friend, you say?”

“He’s in trouble,” I say.

“Is that what’s wrong?” she asks.

“Isn’t that enough?”

Two rats in this alley don’t convince me. I’m watching them from my new haven, measuring the dangers and possible responses. Then someone approaches the three of us, and in the best tradition of ratdom, my companions scurry into the darkness under a pile of rotting boards.

I am a plastic sack filled with broken machine parts.

I am motionless and harmless, but in my secret reaches, inside my very busy mind, I’m astonished to see my Ridiculous back again so soon, walking toward the rat-rich wood pile.

Five meters behind her walks an unfamiliar man.

To him, I take an immediate dislike.

He looks prosperous, and he looks exceptionally angry, wearing a fine suit made stiff with nano-armor and good leather shoes and a platoon of jamming equipment as well as two guns riding in his pockets, one that shoots poisoned ice as well as the gun that he trusts—a kinetic beast riding close to his dominate hand.

Ridiculous stops at the rot pile.

The man asks, “Is it there?”

“I don’t know,” she says, eyes down.

My girl has blue sparkle eyes, much like her original eyes—the ones left behind in the doctor’s garbage bin.

“It looks like boards now?” he asks.

“He did,” she lies.

“Not he,” the man says, sounding like a google-head. “The machine is an It.”

“Right,” she says, kicking at the planks, pretending to look hard. “It’s just a big gun. I keep forgetting.”

The man is good at being angry. He has a tall frightful face and neck muscles that can’t stop being busy. His right hand thinks about the gun in his pocket. The fingers keep flexing, wanting to grab it.

His gun is an It.

I am not.

“I put it here,” she says.

She put me where I am now, which tells me even more.

“Something scared it,” she says. “And now it’s moved to another hiding place.”

The man says, “Shit.”

Slowly, carefully, he turns in a circle, looking at the rubble and the trash and the occasional normal object that might still work or might be me. Then with a tight slow voice, he says, “Call for it.”

“Prophet,” she says.

I say nothing.

“How far could it move?” he asks.

“Not very,” she says. “The firing drained it down to nothing, nearly. And it hasn’t had time to feed itself, even if it’s found food.”

“Bullshit,” he says, coming my way.

Ridiculous watches me and him, the tattooed Scripture above her blue eyes dripping with sweat. Then the man kneels beside me, and she says, “I put the right guidance codes into him.”

“You said that already.” Then he looks back at her, saying, “You’re not in trouble here. I told you that already.”

His voice says a lot.

I have no power. But when his hands reach into my sack, what resembles an old capacitor cuts two of his fingers, which is worth some cursing and some secret celebration.

Ridiculous’s face is twisted with worry, up until he looks back at her again. Then her expression turns innocent, pure and pretty and easy to believe.

Good girl, I think.

The man rises and pulls out the kinetic gun and shoots Ridiculous in the chest. If not for the wood piled up behind her, she would fly for a long distance. But instead of flying, she crashes and pulls down the wood around her, and one of those very untrustworthy rats comes out running, squeaking as it flees.

Ridiculous sobs and rolls and tries saying something.

He shoots her in the back, twice, and then says, “We never should have left it with you. All that luck dropping into our hands, which was crazy. Why should we have trusted the gun for a minute?”

She isn’t dead, but her ribs are broken. And by the sound of it, the girl is fighting to get one good breath.

“Sure, it killed some bad guys,” he says. “That’s what a good spy does. He sacrifices a few on his side to make him look golden in the enemy’s eyes.”

I have no strength.

“You can’t have gone far,” he tells the alley. “We’ll drop ordinance in here, take you out with the rats.”

I cannot fight.

“Or you can show yourself to me,” he says, the angry face smiling now. “Reveal yourself and we can talk.”

Ridiculous sobs.

What is very easy is remembering the moment when she picked up me out of the bricks and dust and bloodied bits of human meat.

He gives my sack another good kick, seeing something.

And for the first time in my life, I pray. Just like that, as easy as anything, the right words come out of me, and the man bending over me hears nothing coming and senses nothing, his hands playing with my pieces when a fleck of laser light falls out of the sky and turns the angriest parts of his brain into vapor, into a sharp little pop.

I’m still not breathing normally. I’m still a long way from being able to think straight about anything. Gasping and stupid, I’m kneeling in a basement fifty meters from where I nearly died, and Prophet is suckling on an unsecured outlet, endangering both of us. But he needs power and ammunition, and I like the damp dark in here, waiting for my body to come back to me.

“You are blameless,” he says.

I don’t know what that means.

He says, “You fed the proper codes into me. But there were other factors, other hands, and that’s where the blame lies.”

“So you are a trap,” I say.

“Somebody’s trap,” he says.

“The enemy wanted those civilians killed,” I say, and then I break into the worst-hurting set of coughs that I have ever known.

He waits.

“I trusted you,” I say.

“But Ridiculous,” he says.

“Shut up,” I say.

“Ophelia,” he says.

I hold my sides, sipping my breaths.

“You assume that this war has two sides,” he says. “But there could be a third player at large, don’t you see?”

“What should I see?”

“Giving a gun to their enemies is a huge risk. If the Americans wanted to kill their political enemies, it would be ten times easier to pull something out of their armory and set it up in the insurgency’s heart.”

“Somebody else planned all of this, you’re saying.”

“I seem to be proposing that, yes.”

“But that man who came with me today, the one you killed…he said the Secretary showed us a lot with her body language. She knew the attack was coming. She knew when it would happen. Which meant that she was part of the planning, which was a hundred percent American.”

“Except whom does the enemy rely on to make their plans?”

“Tell me,” I say.

Talking quietly, making the words even more important, he says, “The Almighty.”

“What are we talking about?” I ask.

He says nothing, starting to change his shape again.

“The Internet?” I ask. “What, you mean it’s conscious now? And it’s working its own side in this war?”

“The possibility is there for the taking,” he says.

But all I can think about are the dead people and those that are hurt and those that right now are sitting at their dinner table, thinking that some fucking Canadian bitch has made their lives miserable for no goddamn reason.

“You want honesty,” Prophet says.

“When don’t I?”

He says, “This story about a third side…it could be a contingency buried inside my tainted software. Or it is the absolute truth, and the Almighty is working with both of us, aiming toward some grand, glorious plan.”

I am sort of listening, and sort of not.

Prophet is turning shiny, which happens when his body is in the middle of changing shapes. I can see little bits of myself reflected in the liquid metals and the diamonds floating on top. I see a thousand little-girl faces staring at me, and what occurs to me now—what matters more than anything else today—is the idea that there can be more than two sides in any war.

I don’t know why, but that the biggest revelation of all.

When there are more than two sides, that means that there can be too many sides to count, and one of those sides, standing alone, just happens to be a girl named Ophelia Hanna Hanks.

About the Author

Robert has had eleven novels published, starting with The Leeshore in 1987 and most recently with The Well of Stars in 2004. Since winning the first annual L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future contest in 1986 (under the pen name Robert Touzalin) and being a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer in 1987, he has had over 200 shorter works published in a variety of magazines and anthologies. Eleven of those stories were published in his critically-acclaimed first collection, The Dragons of Springplace, in 1999. Twelve more stories appear in his second collection, The Cuckoo’s Boys [2005]. In addition to his success in the U.S., Reed has also been published in the U.K., Russia, Japan, Spain and in France, where a second (French-language) collection of nine of his shorter works, Chrysalide, was released in 2002. Bob has had stories appear in at least one of the annual “Year’s Best” anthologies in every year since 1992. Bob has received nominations for both the Nebula Award (nominated and voted upon by genre authors) and the Hugo Award (nominated and voted upon by fans), as well as numerous other literary awards (see Awards). He won his first Hugo Award for the 2006 novella “A Billion Eves“. He is currently working on a Great Ship trilogy for Prime Books, and of course, more short pieces.

Synch Me, Kiss Me, Drop

Suzanne Church

When my nose stopped aching, I smiled at Rain. She had snorted a song ten minutes before me, and I couldn’t quite figure why she waited here in the dark confines of the sample booth.

“Rain?” I said. “You okay?”

“Do you hear it, Alex?” she said, not really looking at me. More like staring off in two directions at once, as though her eyes had decided to break off their working relationship and wander aimlessly on their own missions. “It’s so amaaazing.”

She held that “a” a long time. I should’ve remembered how gripping every sample was for her, as though her neurons were built like radio antennae, attuned to whatever channel carried the best track ever recorded. I needed to get her ass on the dance floor before I got so angry that I ended up with another Jessica-situation. I still had eight months left on my parole.

“Do you hear it?” Rain nudged me, hard on the shoulder. “Alex!” Her eyes had made up and decided to work together, locking on me like I was the only male in a sea of estrogen.

“Yeah, it’s awesome,” I lied. For the third time this week, I’d snorted a dud sample. My brain hadn’t connected with a single, damned note.

Beyond the booth, the thump, thump of dance beats pulsed in my chest. Not much of a melody, but since they’d insisted I check my headset with my coat, I couldn’t exactly self-audio-tain.

I grabbed her arm, feeling the soft flesh and liking it. Loving it. Maybe the sample was working on some visceral level beyond my ear-brain-mix. “Let’s hit the dance floor.”

“In a minute. Pleeease.”

Over-vowels were definitely part of her gig tonight.

“Wait for the drop,” she said, stomping her foot.

“Right.” I watched her sway back and forth, in perfect rhythm with the dance music coming from the main floor. The better clubs brought all the vibes together, so that every song you sampled was in perfect synch with the club mix on the speakers. When the drop hit, everyone jumped and screamed in coordinated rapture.

I would miss the group-joy here in this tiny booth, with this date who was more into her own head than she would ever be into me. If I could get Rain out on the floor, I could at least feel the bliss, whiff all the pheromones, feel all those sweaty bodies pressed against mine, soft tissues rubbing together.

“Yeaaaah!” She shouted and grabbed my hand, squeezing it. Harder. Her eyes pressed shut, her mouth wide open, she leaned her head way back.

The drum beats surged, and then, for a fraction of a second they paused. Everyone in the club inhaled, as though this might be the last lungful of air left in the world and then…

Drop.

But drop doesn’t say it all. Not even close. Because when it happens, it’s like the most epic orgasm of all time and pinching the world’s biggest crap-log at the same moment.

Rain opened her eyes and pressed her hand against the side of my cheek. Lunging with remarkable speed for a woman who over-voweled, she kissed me. Her tongue pressed against my lips.

I tasted her. Wanted her. An image of Jessica popped into my head: the look of terror on her face when I accidentally yanked her under.

The euphoria gone, I closed my mouth and turned away from Rain.

“Whaaat?” she said.

For a second, I thought about explaining what I had done to Jessica. Spewed on about how the drop isn’t always built of joy. Instead, I went with the short, obscure answer. “Probation.”

Rain looked at me funny, like she couldn’t quite figure out how the judicial dudes could mess with our kiss-to-drop ratio. Finally, she smiled, and said, “Riiight.”

Desperate to avoid another over-vowel, I shouted, “Let’s dance!” This time, when I grabbed her arm, she followed along like a puppy.

Scents smacked at us as we pushed our way through the seething mass on the floor. This week’s freebie at the door was Octavia, some new perfume marketed at the twenty-something set. It was heavy on Nasonov pheromones, some bee-juice used to draw worker-buzzers to the hive. When the drug companies cloned it, the result was as addictive as crack and as satisfying as hitting a home run on a club hook-up.

My nostrils still ached from snorting a wallop of nanites, but scent doesn’t only swim in the nose. The rest is all neurons, baby, and I had plenty to spare. Apparently so did Rain, because she was waving her nose in the air like a dog catching the whiff of a bitch in heat. The sight of her made me want to take her and do her right there on the floor.

But Conduct was a high-end club. The bouncers would toss us both if they caught us in the act anywhere on the premises, so I kept it in my pants. I still had another two hundred in my pocket. Enough for three more samples. Maybe I’d pick up a track from an indie-band this time. Top forty drivel never seized my brainstem.

Unlike Rain.

The beats were building again. This time, with a third-beat thump, like reggae on heroin. I could feel the intensity from my fingertips to my teeth to my dick. Even if I couldn’t hear more than the background beats, I anticipated the drop. Rain opened her mouth again, raised both her hands in the air with everyone else, like a crowd of locusts all swarming together.

Pause.

Drop.

My date kept her eyes closed, her hands on her own breasts as she milked the release for all it was worth. Any decent guy should’ve watched her, should’ve wanted to, but I caught sight of a luscious creature, near the high-end sample booth, in the far right corner of the club. The chick was about to slip between the curtains, but she caught me staring.

Her eyes glowed the purple of iStim addiction, reminding me of Jessica.

She had grown up in the suburbs, her allowance measured in thousands not single dollars. The pack of girls she hung with had all bought iSynchs when they first hit the market. The music sounded better when they could all hear the same song at the same time. For the first time in more than a hundred years, getting high was not only legal, but ten times more amazing than it had ever been before. We all lived in our collective heads, the perfect synch of sound and sex.

I should’ve turned away from the sight of the purple-chick, should’ve reached out to Rain and kissed her again. Close tonight’s deal. Instead, I approached her swaying body, and next to her ear shouted, “Back in five.”

She nodded.

Fueled by fascination, and the two hundred burning a hole in my pocket, I headed for the high-end booth.

One of the bald bouncers with tribal tattoos worked the curtains. Yellow earplugs stuck out of both ears, so conversation, or in my case, pleading, wasn’t an option. Feeling in my pocket for the two hundred, I scrunched the bills a bit, trying to make the wad appear larger than its meager value, then pulled out the stack in a flash. I had never dealt with this particular bouncer. Conduct was more Rain’s club than mine, so I hoped the bills would get me past. The guy didn’t even acknowledge me, as though he could smell my poverty, or maybe my parole. His eyes stared straight ahead.

My head scarcely came up to his bare chest, so I was uncomfortably close to his nipple-rings, but I held my ground, and pointed at the curtains.

He remained statue-like. More boulder-like. Then a woman’s cream-colored hand with purple nails ran from the guy’s waist to his pecs and he turned to the side, like a vault door.

Purple-chick stood in the gap between the curtains. Her black dress was built of barely enough fabric to meet the dress code. Her hair stood on end like a teenager’s beard, barely there and oddly sexy. She must have dyed it every night, because the stubble matched her eyes and nails. A waking wet dream.

“Come in.” She pointed beyond the curtains.

“In what?” I mumbled to myself.

“Very funny.”

“You’re not laughing.”

My body neared hers as I moved past into the sample booth. I carried my hands a little higher than would have passed as natural, hoping to cop a feel of all that exposed flesh on my way by. But she read me like a pheromone and dodged back.

A leather bench-seat lined the far wall of the booth. Three tables were set with products in stacks like poker chips. The first was a sea of purple, tiny lower-case “i’s” stamped on every top-forty sample like a catalog from a so-called genius begging on a street corner for spare music. The second was a mish-mash of undergrounds like Skarface, Audexi, and Brachto.

The third table drew me like fire. Only one sample. The dose was pressed into a waffle-pattern, which was weird enough to make my desire itch. But the strangest part was its flat black surface that sucked light away and spewed dread like mourners at a funeral.

Purple-chick watched me stare at it, waiting for me to speak. My mouth kept opening and closing, but I couldn’t find words.

Expensive. Dangerous. Parole. All perfectly legit words that I couldn’t voice.

I had forgotten my two hundred. My palms must have been really sweating, because what had once been a quasi-impressive stack, now stunk of poor-dude-shame.

With practiced smoothness, she liberated my cash and said, “The Audexi works on everyone.”

Distracted from the waffle, I said, “How’d you know I couldn’t hear the last track?”

“Your throat,” she said. “You’re not pulsing to the beat.”

My fingers felt my pulse beating like a river of vamp-candy. Her observations were bang-on. I wanted to illustrate my coolness, or, at the very least, my lack of lameness, but all I could manage was, “Oh.”

She laughed.

My eyes wandered back to the waffle. I licked my lips.

Grabbing my chin, she forced me to look at tables one and two. “Your price range.”

“What’s the waffle?”

“New.”

“Funny.”

She didn’t laugh. “Far from it.”

“Addictive?” I asked, staring at the purple on the first table. How this woman could work the booth without Jonesing for her own product made me rethink her motives.

“The absolute best never are,” she said.

“No black eyes allowed in the boardroom, huh?”

She nodded. “Precisely.”

I remembered Rain. By now, she’d have noticed my absence.

Purple-chick still held my two hundred. Her eyes locked on mine. “Try the Audexi. You won’t be disappointed.”

Like a Vegas dealer, she shoved all of my money through a hole in the wall, selected an Audexi sample from table two, and held it in front of my nose.

I probably should’ve reported her. All of the clubs had to be careful not to push products hard, end up drawing the cops in to investigate. But my money was long gone and Rain wouldn’t wait much longer.

I exhaled. The moisture turned the poker-chip-shaped disk into a teeming pile of powder-mimicking nanites, and I snorted. For several blinding seconds, my nose felt as though a nuclear bomb had blown inside. I could feel Purple-chick’s hand on my arm, making sure I didn’t wipe out and sue the club. Then the song erupted in my mind.

Sevenths and thirds. Emo-goth-despair. Snares and the ever-present bass, bass, bass. Music flowed like a tsunami through a village, grabbing ecstasy like cars and plowing through every other thought except for the sweet tweaks of synths and the pulse-grab of the click-track. The song was building, and all I could think about was finding Rain before the drop.

Rain and I danced in nanite-induced harmony until the early dawn. Exhausted and covered in sweat and pheromones, we grabbed our coats and carried rather than wore them outside.

The insides of my sore nose stuck together in the frigid air, a wake-up call for the two of us to don our coats or end up with frostbite. I didn’t want to, I was so damned hot and pumped, but I figured I should set a good example for Rain. And the way our night was progressing, I wouldn’t have much time to scan my barcode at the parole terminal before curfew.

Jessica’s fucking choice of words would be killing my buzz for eight more months.

That fourth of October had been hot as hell. After clubbing, we both stripped and headed into the lake for a skinny dip. Except she wasn’t skinny and I wasn’t much of a dipper. She’d called me over to the drop and I thought she meant for the lingering song, not the drop-off hidden in the water. When the drop blissed me, I lost my footing and plunged over my head.

“Shit, it’s cooold,” said Rain.

I snapped back to reality. “Still with the vowels?”

“Screw you.” She pushed me away and called a cab with the same arm-wave.

“Don’t be that way, baby.”

“Now I’m your fucking baby? After ditching me for a dozen drops while you plucked that purple fuzz-head.”

“You saw?”

“Who didn’t?”

“Sorry. But you gotta admit, you and me, we really synched after.” I nudged her, maybe a little too hard. “The last sample I snorted was worth it. Right?”

A cab squealed a U-turn and stopped in front of Rain. She started to climb in and then looked up at me.

I shook my head. Shrugged. “Tapped out.”

“Fine.” She slammed the door in my face and the cab took off up the street.

I stood there, watching my breath condense in the air, its big cloud distorting her and the cab. The cold clawed its way into me, sucking away my grip on reality. The shivering reminded me to at least wear my coat.

As I stuffed my arms into the sleeves, I sniffled, feeling wetness and figuring the cold was making my nose run. But then I noticed the red drops on the ground and the front of my coat. I wiped with one finger and it came back a dark and bloody mass. Dead nanites, blood, snot, all mixed together. Two shakes didn’t get it off my finger, so I rubbed the mess in a snow bank and only managed to make it worse.

The nearest subway was blocks away. I should’ve kept my mouth shut, shared the cab with Rain and then stiffed her for half the fare. But I’d hurt her enough for one night. Hurt enough women for one lifetime.

Jessica had been the closest thing to a life preserver, so I grabbed on. Tripping on the samples, her brain couldn’t remember how to hold her breath, or at least that’s how my lawyer argued it at the trial.

As I trudged for the subway, I concentrated on not slipping and falling on my ass. I found the entrance, and headed down the stairs, gripping the cold metal handrail, even though my warm skin kept sticking to it. The Audexi sample still pulsed through my system and I couldn’t walk down in anything but perfect synch. The song was building to another drop, and I had to make the bottom of the platform before that moment, or I would be another victim of audio-tainment.

The platform was nearly empty, save for a few other clubbers too tapped out to cab their way home. Octavia hung in the air, the Nasonov-pheromone-scents calling us all home like buzzers to the hive. Much as I loathed their company, I couldn’t resist the urge to huddle with the others in the same section while we waited for the train.

Off to our right I caught sight of Purple-chick. She wore a long, black faux-fur coat. The image of her here, slumming it with the poor, was as wrong as a palm tree in a snow bank. She belonged in some limo, holding a glass of champagne.

I tried to break the pull of the scent-pack, but couldn’t step far enough away from my fellow losers to get within talking distance of Purple-chick. When the train arrived, I watched her step inside, then waited until the last second before I climbed aboard, to make sure we were both on the same train.

The cars were so empty that I could see her, way ahead.

Standing near the doors, she held a pole while she swayed back and forth. I couldn’t figure out why she didn’t sit down, especially after a long night at the club. The rest of us were sprawled on benches, crashing more than sitting.

I considered the long trek up to her car, but I didn’t trust my balance. Instead, I watched her. Waited until she stepped in front of the doors, announcing her intention to disembark.

Once again, I waited until the last second to leave the train, in case she decided to duck back on without me. I could tell that she knew I was watching. Following.

Okay, stalking.

She hurried up the stairs. Either she was training for a marathon, or her samples had all worn off, because I couldn’t keep up. When she reached the top, she turned around and said, “What?”

Instead of rushing off, she stood there, at the top of the stairs. Waiting.

Her eyes were blue.

Not purple.

I hurried until I stood in front of her, nose to nose. “You took the waffle?”

She nodded.

“Tell me.”

She shook her head. “Can’t.”

“Figures.” I turned away.

“But I can show you.”

“Yeah?”

“Kiss me,” she said.

I sure as hell didn’t wait for her to change her mind. We shared it all: tongues, saliva, even our teeth scraped against each other, making an awful sound that knocked my sample completely out of my head.

What filled the void wasn’t the pounding of my heartbeat. Or hers. Or any song that I had ever heard. Instead, I could hear her thoughts, as visible as a black blanket on a white sand beach.

“Wow,” I said.

Isn’t it?

Her words, not spoken but thought into me. They reverberated around my skull like noise bouncing in an empty club.

I lost my footing and fell. Down. In. Far away. Suddenly I was six years old and my father leaned over and hauled me back up onto my skate-clad feet. We skated together, him holding me, his back stooped over in that awkward way that would make him curse all evening.

“Find your balance, Alex. Bend your knees. Skate!”

I had forgotten how much I loved him. Forgotten what it felt like to be young and innocent, to enjoy the thrill of exercise for its own sake, and feel a connection that didn’t cost the price of a sample.

“I love you.” But when I looked up at him, he had morphed back into Purple-chick, now Purple-and-blue-chick. She held me, preventing my crash down the stairs.

“Cool, huh?” she said.

“A total mind-fuck.”

“That’s why it’s so expensive.”

“How much? I mean, you’re on the subway, so if I save—”

“In my experience, those who ask the price can’t afford it.”

“Why me?” I said.

She smiled. “Marketing.”

I needed a better answer, so I listened for her thoughts. All I sensed was the wind from another subway, blowing up the stairs at me.

She turned and hurried for an exit.

“Wait!” My head buzzed, confused by the difference between waffle and real, trapped by the synch-into-memory-lane-trip that lingered on my tongue like bad breath.

Her boots stopped clapping against the lobby of the subway station, but she didn’t look back. I was glad of it, because my memories were still swimming in my head. I wanted her to be Dad.

Not Dad. Rain. My former date’s cute outfit lingered in my synapses, replacing nostalgia with guilt. I wondered if Rain had made it home okay in the cab.

Then naked Jessica filled my head, and it was October again.

“I didn’t mean it,” I said aloud, my voice echoing against the tile walls. “The high confused it all. I’ll do another year of parole. I’ll spend my sample money on flowers for your grave. Please, forgive me?”

Still with her back to me, and in a voice that sounded eerily like Jessica’s, she said, “What about Rain?”

I shook my head, even though she couldn’t possibly see me. “She’ll understand.”

Far ahead, Purple-and-blue-chick turned to face me. I saw her as them, she had somehow merged with Jessica, the two of them existing in perfect synch, like a sample and the club music stitching together; twins in a corrupted womb. They both saw me for what I was, a lame guy who would always be about eight hundred shy of a right and proper sample. Whose love would always be shallow, too broke to buy modern intimacy.

“You’ve got less than ten minutes to clock in your parole.” She started walking again, and I watched her leave, one synched step at a time until she exited the station and disappeared along the ever-brightening-street.

Drop.

Only this drop, waffle-back-to-real, felt like nails screeching on a blackboard. I wasn’t in my usual subway station, and I had no idea where to find the nearest parole scanner. The station booth was empty, too early for a human. The only person in sight was an older woman with the classic European-widow black-scarf-plus-coat-plus-dress that broadcast, Leave me alone, young scum.

So I did.

I hurried onto the street, and looked towards the sun. It was well above the horizon now, but mostly hidden behind a couple of apartment buildings.

“Fuck,” I told the concealed ball of reddish-yellow light. “How’d it get so late?”

The judiciary alarm buzzed inside my head.

For a moment, I could feel a drop, the biggest, most intense and amazing drop I would ever experience. The sort of nirvana that people pursue ineffectually for a lifetime. Or two.

I had less than ten minutes until the final warning.

Rushing for the nearest, busiest street, I tried to wave down car after car, hoping someone would point me to the nearest scanner. Or maybe they had a portable one, the kind I should’ve brought with me, had I been thinking about more than getting into Rain’s pants when I left.

People ignored me.

Shunned me.

I smelled of trouble. Which, technically, I was. But I didn’t mean to be. It wasn’t my fault.

It was never my fault.

One cab slowed, but didn’t stop. The driver made eye contact, and then rushed away.

“Hey!” I considered swearing at him, but I didn’t want to draw the cops.

I’m not sure why the cabbie stiffed me. Maybe he read my desperation. Maybe he was Rain’s cabbie and he knew I was broke. In any case, he probably broadcast a warning to his buddies, because the next cab that got remotely close made a fast U-turn and took off.

Choosing a direction, I took off down one street, then hung a right at the next, jogging, skidding, almost falling on my ass. Every direction felt wrong.

I didn’t see a single person. No one. Not even a pigeon for fuck’s sake. All I needed was a phone.

With one hand on a pole, I leaned over, trying to catch my breath. To think.

My heart was pounding now, no synch in sight. The song was long gone, the link to Purple-chick disconnected. No one had my back.

I turned in a circle, then another, scanning far and near for anything of value: an ATM, a phone booth, a coffee shop, a diner, any place where I could access the judicial database. Plead my case.

The final warning buzzed.

“Fuck!” My spit froze when it hit the ground.

I hit full blown panic. My heart tripped like the back-bass before the drop. Only this time, the other side was built of misery not ecstasy.

If only I had paid my cell bill. If only my father was still alive, to catch my sorry ass. If only I had lied to Rain, shared her cab. If only Jessica hadn’t called it a drop.

When you’re panicked, it’s tough as hell to keep any rational sense of time. I figured I was cooked. So I closed my eyes. But when the pain didn’t come, I sat down on the cold curb, and felt the chill seep through my clothes.

I bit my lip. Tasted blood.

The first jolt ripped through my body. I wanted to writhe in pain on the sidewalk, but my body was stuck in shock-rigor. An immobile gift for the cops.

I imagined Rain beside me.

“You’re an asshole,” she said.

“Sorry.”

She morphed into Jessica, her purple eyes wide with fear. “I’m lost,” she said.

“Take my hand.” I wanted to reach out, but I couldn’t move. My fingers looked nearly white in the cold. Her fingers seemed to shiver around mine, as though they were made of joy, not flesh. Then she touched my hand and I knew in that moment that life existed outside of stimulation, in a place where reality wasn’t lame or boring. Life danced to an irregular rhythm that couldn’t synch to any sample.

She let go.

The judiciary pulse jolted again. I flopped to the pavement, distantly aware that my skull would remind me for a long time after about its current state of squishage.

The parole-board must have lived for irony, because the jolt lasted for so long that I welcomed the release. A pants-wetting, please-make-it-stop, urgent need for the end.

Drop.

About the Author

Suzanne Church lives near Toronto, Ontario with her two teenaged sons. She is a 2011 and 2012 Aurora Award finalist for her short fiction. She writes Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror because she enjoys them all and hates to play favorites. When cornered she becomes fiercely Canadian. Her stories have appeared in Cicada and On Spec, and in several anthologies including Chilling Tales: Evil Did I Dwell; Lewd I Did Live and Tesseracts 14.

All the Things the Moon is Not

Alexander Lumans

A call comes over the vidchannel: “Murph, you sitting down?”

“Always.” At the moment I’m standing in my darkened cabin at base camp in Mare Nubium. By headlamp only I carve a chess piece—a knight—out of moon rock. I’d crushed one earlier after Tchaikovsky called me out on a dumb move.

The screen and radio cut out. I switch channels, then switch back to hear: “Get up. You need to see this.” Tamsen sounds serious. She always sounds serious. It’s one of the things I like most about her.

“I’m busy.” I keep sanding the knight’s head. When no response follows, just space static, I give in. “What is it?”

More static, then: “The Russians.”

I blow on the knight. Moondust reels through the headlamp’s beam. I think it beautiful. I’d carved this set my first month here on the moon. The dust I compare to stars. The space between them, too, is beautiful. And the same old lines are running through my head—Goodnight room, goodnight moon—the ones I’d read in bed to my daughters. I grab the mic: “Tell Tchaikovsky he needs to ready his Nastoyka supply.”

Tchaikovsky is a mold pirate, the one thing we have in the way of a rival. But he’s also a good chess player. He studied his masters. Knew openings I’d never heard of. He’s the only distraction here that keeps me honest. Down on earth, who has the calm or the fire for chess anymore? Since our four-man crew arrived late last August to harvest the Dreammold!, I’ve been in two modes: defend and defend again. Whether it’s harvesting, carving, or playing, give it 98%. I’ve always been one to open my games with the tried and true; Sicilian Defense all the way. Only recently have I begun to wonder if this is the right way to go about it. Tchaikovsky and I have an unfriendly wager: loser ponies up a bottle of their nation’s choicest liquor. By my count, I’ve handed over seventeen handles of Maker’s Mark. And he? Not a drop of vodka.

In four weeks the transport will be here to take us home. I want to win, for once. I want things to go my way.

“We found their ship.”

“There’s plenty of mold out there,” I tell her. “Let the little cosmonaut stake his claim.” I’ve given up playing moon ranger. A year in one-sixth gravity and white rooms and the company of little love does that to good intentions.

This time, not even static.

“Tamsen.” I set the knight on d5. “Tamsen?”

“—the problem.” I only catch this last part. But I am busy. A good kind of busy. In eight moves, I’ll have the Russian mated—Rg2++—even after losing my queen early on. And now Tamsen, with whatever problem there is, has carved that good feeling out of me.

In Buggy 2, I zoom south to her position at the edge of Tycho Crater. It’s where we go for the best mold harvesting. I can throw a rock into the crater and watch the moldripples go on for miles: yellowyellowyellow. “Twenty-eight days,” I remind myself.

Tamsen’s standing by Buggy 1, big gloved hands on her big suited hips. She’s radioed the rest of the crew too. Bouncing around in our suits, the four of us resemble primitive undersea divers with portholes for masks and twin oxygen tanks. Spitzer’s busy poking the mold. When I used to hear the Rockies’ announcer describe a batter with “warning track power,” I didn’t realize I was imagining Spitzer. Long-limbed and morally impulsive, he’s always asking me, “When do I get to stab the flagpole into something?” Vinegar Tom—he’s just staring into the crater. I’m thankful for our helmets. Yesterday, I’d walked in on him and Tamsen fucking in her room—they didn’t see me—and now I don’t want to look him in the face for the rest of the mission. Not out of shame, but because he got to her first, because it made me realize I’ve always hated this planet. Him. His copy of Desperate Passage: The Donner Party’s Perilous Journey West that he intently flips through in the mess hall like he’s studying one of the buggies’ operation manuals.

Tamsen taps her helmet. I tap mine back. The vidchannel and radio have been fritzing. We haven’t talked with mission control since Tuesday and we don’t know what’s wrong with the transmitter. All we hear back is fuzz.

Beyond her and the others, at the crater’s edge, I see Tchaikovsky’s ship. And I see the mold; that is the problem. What had been his illegal operation is now covered in the Dreammold!, utterly and completely. It’s as if Tycho burped up some fantastic wave that came crashing down mid-ops. The scene reminds me of Denver, the day after.

I draw a finger across my neck, point at the Russians’ ship, and then shrug. We bounce over to it and pry open the bay door. The vessel’s guts are clogged with as much yellow gunk as the outer shell is coated.

A flash in me of something Tchaikovsky’d said after taking my queen: “Ze bigger zey are, Afraham Lincoln, ze more it rains rats and clogs.” He was forever butchering Americanisms, but sometimes I had to admire the results. They made as much sense on the moon as anything else did back home.

Fifty feet from the Russian’s ship, Tamsen’s waving me over. She stands calf-deep in mold on the crater’s rim. At her feet is a single set of boot-tracks. It leads from the ruined ship out into Tycho’s depths.

Back at base camp, I stare at the same game from before.

“So the mold is moving,” says Vinegar Tom from behind me. His voice always sounds surprisingly nasal; surprising because he’s missing his nose. It makes his bucked teeth stand out all the more. “Now we don’t have to drive as far to get it.”

I’m too preoccupied to respond and too besieged to care.

“You had your games with the Commie, I know. It’s terrible. A bad way to go. But we’ve all seen terrible things on the news.” I can hear the smirk in his voice, smell the vinegar on his breath. He’d quit the space program to be a butcher in Ohio, but when The Drought killed that industry, he came trudging back to Cape Canaveral. “Though I suppose some of us have seen it up close,” he goes on. “Been able to smell the terrible.” He reaches around from behind me and flicks over the white king.

“That’s my king, asshole.”

“I know.”

After I finish wiping the blood from Vinegar Tom’s lip off my elbow, I say, “Touch my game again, see what happens.”

He looks down at the board, then at me, as if considering it. He’s short and brash and sporadically clean-shaven. Exactly the kind of man I can picture behind a meat counter. The skinfolds where his nose should be remind me of how the Rocky Mountains look on military raised-relief maps. “If we have to eat each other at some point between now and the 30th,” he says, “I’m going to make you eat me.”

An hour later, I set the white king upright. Eight moves: 37. Qb3 Rd1+ 38. Kg2 Rd2+ 39. Kg3 Ne3 40. Qxe3 Rg2++. I pick up my newest knight. The jawline is clean, the eyes sharp notches. Calmly, I hurl it at the cabin wall. It hits hard and slowly fragments.

I imagine the conversation at NASA went something like this:

“Sir, the moon is shiny.”

“It’s always been shiny.”

“No, sir, there are shiny parts.”

“Today is not April Fool’s Day.”

“Telescope Two picked them up.”

“Shiny parts?”

“We thought it was silver.”

“Moonsilver. That has a good ring to it.”

“It’s not silver.”

“Okay. Mercury, rhodium, zinc, what isn’t it?”

“Telescope Two is a very good telescope.”

“Moonsilver.”

“First, sir, it’s important that we keep this a secret.”

“I agree. Everyone likes jewelry. Everyone’s a magpie.”

“That’s not what we mean.”

“Tell me already. You’re killing me here!”

“It’s water.”

“Is water shiny?”

“We found shiny water. On the moon.”

“Shit.”

“That’s what we’re supposed to say: ’shit.’ We said you wouldn’t say that.”

“Who knows about this?”

“Everyone. Everyone’s a magpie for this kind of news.”

“And you’re sure it’s not April Fool’s?”

“We’re sure it’s not silver.”

“Shit.”

By then, The Drought had settled in, five long years and still holding strong. Ice, Aquafina, and public pools were all things of the past. The U.S.’s initial investigative moonlanding found plenty of water. And it found what was growing in the water, too: the mold. We sampled it, brought it to Florida, found it useful. So the U.S. pushed through amendments to the TRIPS agreement to include protections for other planets’ resources. And they shipped the four of us up here to harvest it for a year until the next round of crewmen arrives.

We know it’s been almost a year because of the calendar in the mess hall. Each month features a new war poster.

“Ten fingers good! Eight claws bad!”

“Use your thumbs! Recycle your scrap metal and keep the MegaHun at bay!”

“When you live alone, you live with Megafauns.”

Vinegar Tom says they’re invigorating. I’m sick of them. But there’s little else to focus on between sleeping and eating and sporing and fighting and fucking. And work.

The word Dreammold! once summoned in me the image of a fantasyland of iridescent clouds. Now I can’t think of a less suitable name. It’s this terrible yellow, with the look of cauliflower heads but the consistency of dry, packed snow.

Our only tools: large meat cleavers, T-handle baling hooks, and what’s essentially a giant George Foreman. Everything’s run solar, even the powercyclers that pump out our CO2. I’d be thrilled by the technology if I thought it’d actually save me.

Step 1: Cut four by four squares out of the moldline.

Step 2: Hook the square on both sides and lift free.

Step 3: Place in grill box and seal shut.

The box broils the mold and compresses it. These hard pancakes go into storage until the semi-monthly unmanned cargo capsule arrives. Then we unload the capsule’s supplies (dried food, Maker’s Mark, oxygen tanks) before stacking the pancakes in its bay and sending it back to be fashioned into fuel, fixodent, and firearms for the Megafaun War.

The hordes hit Denver three days before I was scheduled for liftoff. I was there. Home with my family, eating chocolate chip waffles. The first wave struck late that morning. Wild pigs with mammoth tusks and armor plating. The ground shook. The South Platte sewage flowed backward. Then the rest of the Megafauns streamed out of the mountains, as if they’d been hiding there for centuries, breeding, tripling in size. So thirsty and fast. The winged kind broke into the top floor of the CenturyLink Tower. Fifty-point elks and shaggy aardvarks nested in INVESCO Field. Horned bears with snouts shaped like ice cream scoops covered the suburbs in blood and fur. They came for my family—wife, daughter, younger daughter, youngest daughter, our fox terrier Ralph, me—but we hid in the basement. I thought we’d be fine with a barricaded door. Before dark, I went upstairs for food with Ralph on my heels. Only, he bolted through the doggy door. I found myself chasing him down the street, imagining my daughters’ streaming faces if I had to tell them I lost Ralphie. A block down, heavy grunts sounded from someone’s garage. I had to run home empty-handed. But when I came back down into the basement, arms full of consolation Fruit Roll-ups and Zebra Cakes and no dog, all I came back to was this big hole. Taken, and not even with a loud crashing I could replay in my head. Just nothing nowhere forever. It must have only taken seconds. I sat down on the stairs. I only thought I heard barking. I ate three fruit Roll-ups. I ate six Zebra Cakes. I waited. And when they didn’t come back, I slept in my youngest daughter’s bed, saying, goodnight nobody.

In the mess hall, Tamsen and Spitzer are seated on the floor by the powercycler vent. Contact with mission control is still nil. On the calendar, the 30th is circled in red. This month’s poster: a picture of a salivating mastodon-wolf looming over the caption: “The world cannot exist half-slave and half-food: Fight for Freedom!” Vinegar Tom sits backward on a chair, slouched forward and smiling wide at me. It doesn’t help my already sour mood: no more chess, no more liquor, even the prospect of shipping off-planet seems impossibly far away, as if we wouldn’t survive each other’s company another day. The three of them pass around foil stripped from an air duct and a twin-pronged nosetube and a lighter rigged from the grill box’s heatcoils.

“Keep sporing,” I say as I crouch between them, “and you’ll sour the meat.”

After Spitzer discovered you could freebase the mold—”sporing,” he named it—I opted out. How do you go 98% while spun on fungus? It’s practically a Class-1 drug, complete with four-hour euphoria, hallucinatory episodes, tingling. It also had a nasty tendency to gum up Vinegar Tom’s intestinal system if he didn’t take the right precautions. Yes, people need outlets.

“Can we go claim some mountain in the name of us?”

“Can I please plant the flagpole?”

“Can we sleep together now?”

Sporing also does wonders for the skin. The three of them are tinted gold, Tamsen the deepest. She has dark blonde hair to match, arms and legs that I’d only assumed were well-toned until recently, and a small tight face I started wanting to kiss too late. She sprinkles more spores onto the foil strip, clicks the lighter until the coils at its tip redden. Then, positioning the tube in her nose, she inhales deeply. These are the only times I ever see her relax. Relaxed people—lazy people—worry me.

Tamsen looks straight into my eyes and says, “You’re a lovely man.” This has all the meaning in the world, and none of it. “Has anyone ever told you how lovely you are?” I try to forget her moans, the image of her body thrusting under Vinegar Tom’s. How she could go for a guy without a nose was beyond me. “I mean it, Murph. You’re glorious.” She passes the foil to Vinegar Tom and leans back against the wall. “Like a baby’s mobile. The kind with the lights and funny animals.”

Spitzer laughs at her. I want her to go back to being serious. My wife was serious.

“You want to hear something fucked up?” asks Vinegar Tom.

I don’t.

“When the Donner Party got stranded in those mountains, they say they only fed the body parts to the youngest children. The youngest children, like three-year-olds. They did it even though they knew help was on the way. Isn’t that fucked up?”

Tamsen kicks his chair, but not hard enough to knock it over. “Has anyone ever told you how morbid you are?” Her eyes are lit up, her face radiant with spores.

Spitzer clucks his tongue and swings his arms together like a batter. “Another moon shot for Noseless Tom Jackson.” He, too, is shining.

The air vent kicks into a louder second powercycling stage. It sounds like a roar coming from the drooling, tusked wolf on the wall. I feel my lungs squeeze in. After a year, even the canned oxygen has begun to taste stale.

“That Dreammold!’s something else,” Vinegar Tom finally says. “All that canary yellow.” He reaches under his chair for two bottles: one of industrial-grade white vinegar and one of Pepto-Bismol. The vinegar kills the spores in his stomach; the pink stuff keeps the vinegar’s acid from eating more holes. He takes chugs from both bottles and grimaces after each.

Tamsen says, “It’s mustard, if anything.”

“Mustard?” Spitzer throws up his arms. “It’s gamboge. Pure gamboge yellow.”

I say, “I always thought it looked like cheese.”

They stare at me—”Cheese.”—they shake their heads.

“It’s goldenrod.”

“No, it’s a mix of lemon and sunglow.”

“Call it Peridot.”

“In some language somewhere, it means ‘precious’ and ‘ripe.’”

“Freedom yellow.”

“Yellow-bellied coward.”

“Macaroni and cheese,” I amend.

Vinegar Tom claps me on the back. “Like Tamsen says, you’re a lovely guy, but the moon ain’t made of cheese.” Everyone but me exchanges chuckles between spore passes. They take solace in this negative definition: it’s not cheese.

I stand up. They watch me with big pupils, sclera yellow at the corners. Tamsen says to stay, holding out the foil and lighter. On the calendar, the 16th, today, is already crossed out. Fifteen more days of what? With Tchaikovsky gone, they’re all I have. “Hell,” I say, crouching back down and reaching for Tamsen, “I am lovely, aren’t I?”

I take out Buggy 2. I tell the others I’m going for a drive through Hell’s Half Acre. I tell myself, if I can cut through the mold inside Tchaikovsky’s ship, there might still be some vodka left to sip on. I’m sporing like fuck.

The moon looks dead and nothing and grayscale, all everywhere forever. Rilles, ash cones, dark-halo craters, basaltic lowland seas, a deep regolith of iron and magnesium. The whole Oceanus Procellarum. It’s enough to lie down and never get back up, but not right now. Right now, there’s all this water, inside the moon, where we can’t even see it. And this mold, canary or freedom or piss yellow, is growing out of it, growing right now! I drive straight toward Tycho, fast. Leave it all behind. I drive and lean back in my seat and am satisfactorily lightweight because instead of thinking about the moon, I’m thinking about what’s gone. Denver. Donner Pass. Nights in winter. I’m reciting lines over a defunct vidchannel: “Goodnight clocks and goodnight socks, goodnight little house and goodnight mouse.“

I daze out. My eyes close while I speed across an ancient seabed. Crystal clear, I remember lying in their bed, the nightlamp warming my face, their cold feet crowding around mine. My wife comes in to check on us. I don’t need her to smile to know that if the world ended at that exact moment, there’d be nothing she’d change. When I open my eyes, all thoughts go, like air through a crack in my helmet.

There’s the moldline, as sick and as yellow as ever.

The latitude’s all wrong; the Russian’s ship is still four miles south. But here, at the edge of that advancing fungal bloom, stands Tchaikovsky.

It’s him all right. Not flesh and silver and Kevlar; instead, he’s made of mold, completely and utterly.

Mold: Jesus.

After I climb out of the buggy, I don’t know whether to ask him for the secret of sustainable water or cleave him to pieces.

“Ve vant to vin,” he says in a gurgling version of his accent. How I can hear him with the radio out, I am at a loss to explain. He opens his fist to reveal a toppled king piece carved of mold. I think of Vinegar Tom knocking over my own king and that dredges up all the ire the sporing had anchored down.

“You’re not going to vin this time,” I say. “No hallucination could, cosmonaut or not.”

“No hallucination.” He pounds his inflated chest once with a fist that could easily be mistaken for a cheese wheel. “Ze cosmetic is ready!”

“That’s what a hallucination would say.”

He shrugs.

I don’t have the patience for this kind of high. My eyes itch, my sinuses suddenly burn. I tilt my head back until it passes. All across the sky, stars flash. In-between them don’t flash millions of other stars, dark, as if forgotten or not even there. Below, the Earth looks painted on space. Out of the blue, I miss things. Afternoon thunderstorms. Playgrounds and fruit snacks. Creaky wooden stairs.

The euphoria’s already slipping. I find myself unable to walk away without asking, “What’s happening? What’s the Dreammold! doing?”

“It grows, vhat else?”

“But you. It. I don’t know.”

“I, zis part.” He flashes a peace sign before he joins the two fingers. “It is me.”

I look down at where his feet should be: only mold. “Do you still have all that vodka on your ship?”

“Does ze sleepy dog lie?”

“Great,” I say. “You’ve got seven moves to win.”

When the Russian laughs, the whole sea of mold ripples behind him. “Zis is good, Afraham Lincoln,” nodding his helmet as he goes on, “Free ze slaves, you can. But do not beat zer kitchens before zey are handbaskets.”

I have no idea what that means. But where his mix-ups were once amusing, now they’re sad, screwy lessons. More than ever, I wish I was standing in front of my wife.

He raises his arm to pound to his chest again, but then stops. Sometimes, even Tchaikovsky knows he’s made a mistake. “Zis, no, I am meanings somezing else. How you say, every cloud has dead horse.”

I taught my wife chess before she was my wife. It was a struggle at first. She wanted to flirt and I wanted her to be quiet. “You’re getting better.” I told her this when she wasn’t. But when I made the offhand wager that if she ever beat me I’d marry her, then she caught on quickly. She was always black. She favored the horsies. “Chess,” I once taught her, “is about all the moves you don’t make.” Sometimes we’d leave the game for the morning, having found each other’s feet under the table and then our clothes on the floor. One night she told me, “I think it’s more about the moves you can’t make anymore.” I said, “Maybe, honey,” to which she answered, “They tell you the next move.” I didn’t argue; instead, I tried thinking her way for once. That night she beat me for the first time.

When I return to the moldline with the chessboard, Tchaikovsky is gone and I’m missing my only knight. Vinegar Tom, I’m sure. When I get back to base, I’ll dump out all his Pepto-Bismol. For now, I don’t have any tools to carve a new piece. But there’s the mold, of which I grab a handful. I measure out the perfect size.

“You ever seen one up close?” Spitzer asks.

The four of us are north of Tycho, cutting mold squares and tossing them into the grill box. With the base radio still dead, we’ve had to break out the two-way walkie-talkies in our emergency kits. Thankfully, with a week to go, this is our last harvest load.

“I’ve seen pictures,” says Tamsen.

“The Megafaun Wars,” Spitzer says between strokes. “Sounds so far away.”

“One kissed me on the nose before I chopped it off.” I’ll believe a butcher on this.

I keep cleaving into the mold. Every fifth chop I wipe down the bladeface.

“Murph?”

I throw down my cleaver and I take up two baling hooks and I lift the mold square with a heavy grunt.

“He’s seen them all right,” says Vinegar Tom as he wipes off his own cleaver. “Old Murph had them over for breakfast one morning.” I picture his bucked-tooth grin in the darkness of his helmet. “Thing was, those Megafauns didn’t like his wife’s cooking. They sent it back; they wanted something fresh, something—”

The mold square in my grip doesn’t hit the ground before I’m already lunging for the bastard, ready to broil him in the grill box. As my head bangs into his chest, we both lose our footing. We hit the mold in a slow freefall—me punching his kidneys with the T-hook handles and him beating down on my back with the cleaver’s butt. Our suits are so thick we can’t really feel it, but it feels good to punch what’s soft and alive. Tamsen and Spitzer shout. Vinegar Tom slams my helmet with his and I pin his arms down in a bearhug. Then something tackles the both of us. We go rolling. Deeper into the mold, we punch and roll until we can’t anymore. Now all I can see is Tom’s name patch and all I can feel is something moving underneath us, then not. Tamsen keeps shouting.

We bury Spitzer in his suit. It was strange how we hadn’t even heard him gasp when the T-hook cracked his helmet. It only took seconds, I imagine.

I lock myself in my cabin. I flick off my radio. The walls are too close to pace more than four steps. I can’t sleep. Don’t want to eat. Don’t want to be near anybody but the Russian and even that sounds like an ordeal. I sit down at the same old chess game and plan the same old moves. Rd1+, Rd2+, Ne3, Rg2++.

I flip the game board into the air. The pieces scatter. I carve whatever pleasure I can out of stomping and grinding and smashing them until I’m surrounded by a gray haze. At this point I turn off the light, switch on my headlamp, and imagine my body atomizing in space, all everywhere forever.

A knock at my cabin door.

Tamsen: “You want to spore?”

Ten minutes later, I’m calm, cool. Tamsen’s yellow eyes glaze over as she sits on the bed opposite me. She cried while we buried Spitzer. I told her over the radio to pull it together, get serious. I’m sure she blames me. But there’s no sign of it now. I have to hand it to her, she would make a lovely lady to share a house and a family and a pet with. “Has anyone ever told you…” but then I don’t know what I’m trying to ask.

“Told me what?”

Rising moments of sheer ecstatic nothing. Then: “Do you know any stories?”

“Only the worst.”

“I remember one, that’s all.”

“Better be a good one.”

“Goodnight comb and goodnight brush.“

Tamsen sprinkles more spores onto the foil strip. “Weird beginning.”

“Goodnight nobody and goodnight mush.“

Tamsen burns the spores, inhales, hands it off.

“Goodnight to the old lady whispering—” With the next toke, the sinus burn fades into this raincloud adrizzle inside my face. It’s a slick, puffy kind of high. I can’t remember the rest. Instead: “I saw you and Tom.”

Tamsen goes into a loud coughing fit.

I shrug a little. “It’s fine. We’re all leaving soon.”

After she recovers, there’s this look on her tinted face that says all the things I haven’t thought of yet: that she already knows, that she’s sorry it happened this way, that if this wasn’t the moon and the earth wasn’t dry and the animals down there weren’t huge and thirsty, we wouldn’t be up here, we wouldn’t even be us. I lean over to hand her the foil and lighter, but then I stay close. There is a place, on her jaw, that is still colored a fine peach, a place that I am now kissing, it and only it.

Another knock on the door.

Vinegar Tom comes in, Desperate Passage in hand. His skin practically glows. “You don’t look so hot,” I say, my voice catching on my lips still shaped around the kiss.

He looks from me to Tamsen then back to me. If he had a nose, it would have twitched with suspicion. Instead, there’s just a ripple in the folds. He’s in shorts and a muscle shirt. “I feel goddamn hot.”

Tamsen says, “Lay off the spores then.”

I can feel his eyes boring into me. “What are you two doing?” He looks worried.

“I never know,” I say. “Whatever we’re supposed to be doing.”

“Hatching a plan on where to bury me next, no doubt.”

“No doubt,” Tamsen says. “Debating how to cook you.”

“What parts to eat for dessert,” I add.

He reaches into his pocket. For a knife, no doubt, or an ice scream scoop. Defending myself is the last thing this tingling body’s ready for. Instead, Vinegar Tom throws something small at me. It hits my shoulder and lands in my lap: the black knight. “Left this in Buggy 2,” he says, “and we’re out of Pepto.”

Tamsen tells him there might be some in Buggy 1. He gives her another eyeful, says without looking at me, “Remember, Murph, if it was cheese out there, this’d be a whole different ball game,” then leaves without shutting the door.

Tamsen stands quickly, saying she ought to help him.

“Wait.”

She does, but the look from before has vanished. Now it’s just yellowyellowyellow again. Even the spot on her jaw. “I killed Spitzer, didn’t I.”

“Would I let a killer kiss me?”

“You’d leave one here by himself.”

“You’re right,” she says. “I would.”

The day before the transport’s arrival, I take another ride toward Tycho. By habit I bring the chessboard and the one knight with me. The moldline’s only ten miles from base camp and traveling upward of a mile every twelve hours. More and more I’ve decided that when the transport comes, I’m not going to get on it.

There’ll be the ride back with Tamsen and Tom, them sporing, maybe them trying to fuck one last time in zero-G, the life they’ll probably lead together if the vinegar doesn’t eat his insides, and then my house in Denver, the hole in my basement, no Ralphie. It’s death to stay up here, sure, but no different down there.

At the moldline, before I even climb out of Buggy 2, there’s Tchaikovsky. Something about that yellow makes him look exceedingly jolly, one capable of cartoon physics. “Come, come, let finish vhat ve began.” I expect him to burst into soapbubbles or grow nine feathery tails.

“Can’t. Lost all the pieces.”

“But you have not lost your hands, no?”

On our knees, we mold a new set together.

I lose.

Not because I was wrong about mate in eight moves—that’s entirely true.

I lost because he had me in seven. Because in the penultimate step, I moved my only knight and opened up the diagonal for his queen to slip in: Qf7++. He knew my plan all along.

I flick over my black king. “Checkmate.”

He nods.

“I’m going to stay here.”

“Ah, yis, more game.”

“No,” I say. “When the transport comes, I’m staying.” I feel overwhelmingly important.

Tchaikovsky sighs. He plays with one of his pawns. “You have heard Laika, no?”

A little.

“Laika you know is happy pioneer, big star.” He sweeps his hands over his head. Then he points at the earth. “Real Laika?—she vas stray. Real Laika vas picked off streets of Moscow and put cage. No one vanted zis dog back, not after space. She vas flash in pan, already wodka under ze cake. Real Laika vas meant to die.”

“That’s terrible.” The flatness of my own voice unnerves me. I don’t want to talk.

“Is fine. She vas stray, no? Stray is hard life. Space death: very zimple.” He starts setting up the board again; I don’t have it in me for one more loss. “But it is day ’til launch. Real Laika ready. Ze stray is ready! Then scientist take Laika home. He let Laika play with childs. Scientist say, ‘I vanted to do somezing nice for her.’ Childs laugh. Laika love.”

“So she had a good last day; so what?”

“Only good day, Afraham Lincoln. Vithout zis day, she is happy pioneer to beyond. But now she knows.” Tchaikovsky twists his finished pieces so they all face forward, face me. “Childs. Toys. Laughs. Laika vants to come back to zis one good day.”

The chessboard’s empty spaces, Mare Nubium and the sea of yellow mold, the earth above the horizon like a cheap sticker on a tinted window—a man stands practically weightless in all these gravities, remembering only how his daughters once asked him if dogs knew human words.

“It’s not a place I want to go back to.”

“But it is place,” Tchaikovsky says, pushing his king’s pawn to e4. “And ze moon—ze moon is not.”

I sit down in front of the board. I pick up my black knight. Its slope and eye-notch, this craftsmanship, all are meticulously fine, each one better than the last carving’s. Instead of pushing the bishop’s pawn forward—c6—in the Sicilian Defense, I swing my knight out first.

Rubbing his hands together like big paws, Tchaikovsky looks pleased with my decision. “You are getting better.”

About the Author

Alexander Lumans graduated from the M.F.A. Fiction Program at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. His short fiction has been published in or is forthcoming from Brain Harvest, Story Quarterly, Blackbird, The Normal School, Cincinnati Review, American Short Fiction, Surreal South ’11, and The Book of Villains, among other magazines and anthologies. He was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the 2010 Sewanee Writers’ Conference and he won the 2011 Barry Hannah Fiction Prize from The Yalobusha Review. He also recently completed a fellowship at the MacDowell Colony. He now lives and teaches in Boulder, CO. His very first short fiction publication was in Clarkesworld over five years ago.

The Fairy Tale in the TV Age

Alethea Kontis

Call them folk tales, wonder tales, or fairy stories: Fairy tales have a history of adaptation that was born long before some Italian wrote one down on paper in the 1500s. They have celebrated renaissance, preached religious values, and outlined basic moral behavior, with a little adventure, magic, and witchery thrown in for entertainment value. Perhaps they were once teaching fables or urban legends—they have been shaped and molded by and for so many societies that the world will never know for sure. (The Brothers Grimm, not the first and certainly not the last to celebrate the fairy story, modified their own works quite heavily over the course of forty years in no fewer than seven editions.) Though we will never discover their true origins, two opinions about fairy tales seem universal among academics: Fairy tales were not originally meant for children, and fairy tales are a guaranteed source of revenue.

Whether or not you believe that fairy tales should be adapted for public consumption (Bruno Bettelheim was against adaptation in all forms; J. R. R. Tolkien hadn’t seen anything that impressed him and called it a lost cause; Jack Zipes appreciates it but draws the line at Disney), fairy tales have been popping up on our television screens for over fifty years. Based on a recent surge in popularity, they appear to be here to stay. Of course, adapting tales for media automatically calls for alteration. Ratings and awards add a whole new level of hurdles that serve to change the stories even further. The key is not losing the essence of the tales and the character archetypes when all is said and done and the end credits roll.

I’d love to know Zipes’s opinion of the portrayal of fairy stories in the “Fractured Fairy Tales” shorts from the animated classic Rocky & Bullwinkle (1959-1964). There was definitely a 1960’s, progressive-woman message behind most of these tales, yet the prince was always a short, mustachioed, smarmy used car salesman type, and the female lead was often a lazy, self-centered, and materialistic girl with a thick Jersey Shore accent. Beneath this trampy, proto-hippie tribute, the overarching theme of the Grimm tales was not compromised: Sometimes the devious main character got away with his or her schemes, and sometimes he or she did not. Only in “Fractured Fairy Tales,” it was a lot funnier.

More recently on the animated front (and much more out of left field) is The Fairly OddParents (1998-2001). While these short cartoons only touch on one recurring character archetype appearing in fairy tales, they do deal with possibly the most common theme: Be Careful What You Wish For. Though I’m sure Timmy Turner’s adventures with Cosmo and Wanda would have had Bruno Bettelheim rolling over in his grave… if only to turn down the volume.

I would wager that Bettelheim, given the chance (and life after death), would have had no problem plopping his kids in front of the far more subdued Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre on a Saturday morning. Inspired by her many talented friends, her love of fairy tales, and a show from the late ’50s called Shirley Temple’s Storybook, Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre ran from 1982 to 1987 and was specifically geared toward children. Duvall herself introduced every episode (à la Masterpiece Theatre), telling a little bit about the tale, the theme, and sometimes why it was personally special to her.

A couple of the episodes were directed by Tim Burton and Francis Ford Coppola, and some of the scenery was inspired by famous fantasy artists like Maxfield Parrish and Arthur Rackham. While there was a healthy dose of camp administered with each episode, the fairy tales did stay pretty true to the storyline and sometimes even took it a bit further. (How does a princess explain to her father that she went to bed with a frog and woke up next to a naked prince?) This series was made with a lot of love and some seriously high quality for the time. It was also cited by Zipes as a prime example of a big time money-making venture.

Beauty and the Beast—the show from the late ’80s with a cast (Ron Pearlman! Linda Hamilton! Delroy Lindo!) and writing crew (George R. R. Martin!) that most producers would give their right arm to have today—is the quintessential fairy tale that springs to mind when discussing such fantasy television. Zipes called Beauty “a good example of the fairy tale as representation (and legitimation) of elite bourgeois.” The show brought the original tale into a contemporary setting but took the “beast” element quite literally, further stressing the similarities and differences between the upper and lower classes of society. Above and beyond this deeper meaning, just seeing the premillennial New York City skyline in the romantic opening credits is the epitome of “once upon a time” in its own right.

The original fairy tale was taken more literally (and indeed, pushed over the top) by the 1997 made-for-television film Snow White: A Tale of Terror. Ah, the Evil Queen: suddenly one of the most highly sought-after roles in Hollywood. But long before Charlize Theron (Snow White and the Huntsman) and Julia Roberts (Mirror, Mirror), there was Sigourney Weaver as Lady Claudia. Fairy tales are quite often cited among influences of the horror genre, but this is not so much a horror movie as defined by today’s standards. Set in the fairy-tale world (despite an offhand mention of one of the miners having survived the Crusades), it does stay true to the darkness, if not quite the plot, of the Snow White fairy tale. Of course, once Lady Claudia loses her mind, it becomes more of a watch-Sigourney-Weaver-go-crazy movie and far less of a traditional fairy tale. Which, in true Hollywood fashion, earned Weaver an Emmy nomination.

Realistically, how can one stay true to any source material when one is encouraged to include all the fright and fireworks required to garner award attention? In their shorter forms, fairy tales are often used to invoke happy endings, but these longer, newer incarnations concentrate more on their dark and subversive nature. Twisting the original tales and pushing the limits both visually and emotionally for ratings, reviews, and media attention has become far more of a driving force than staying true to Messrs Grimm and Andersen.

Another show to achieve Emmy award-winning fame is the cult favorite Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I admit it’s a bit of a stretch to list Buffy as a whole without commenting on Supernatural, Doctor Who, or all the other paranormal/fantasy TV fare on the small screen, but Buffy Summers truly embodies the archetypal “Jack” of so many fairy tale legends, and in doing so became a unique legend herself. Jack is the überhero, voluntarily or not, who must use his wits and whatever little skill he possesses to best giants and beanstalks and talking animals and fair-weather fairies. Buffy faced off with the original Hansel and Gretel, but she was also forced to conquer the Grimm-inspired child-eater Der Kindestod and the The Gentlemen of the dialogue-absent, Emmy-winning episode “Hush.” So many fairy and folk tales were successfully woven into the genesis and storytelling of Buffy over the years that it’s really impossible to separate the two.

Possibly the most successful weaving of fairy tales into contemporary storytelling is the 2000, ten-hour miniseries The 10th Kingdom. Of all the shows on this list (though Faerie Tale Theatre was probably truest to the Grimm tales, and the jury is still out on today’s Once Upon a Time), The 10th Kingdom stands out as the best. The series begins in contemporary New York, but the fairy tales are not modernized: The premise is that there are nine kingdoms in the storytelling land of fairy. The real world as we know it, accessible only through a magical mirror portal, is merely the tenth.

Despite its poor ratings, The 10th Kingdom did win great reviews and ultimately an Emmy for (if only for Outstanding Main Title Design). It’s interesting to wonder how the reception might have differed if this miniseries had premiered today, in a world far more ready to welcome fairy tales with open arms. (There are rumors that a sequel called House of Wolves was planned; it would have been great to see the cast together again, but it would also have been hard to stand up against the original.)

Another show in the running for Best Contemporary Fairy Tale has just been made available in the U.S. (thank you, Syfy): Lost Girl. Our scholars must set aside the basic Grimm and Andersen stories here and look to the old Celtic tales of the Sidhe. Lost Girl is the TV show you’ve always wanted to see, one based on that mass-market, urban-fantasy adventure series you love (or loathe), with the hot chick with a sword and a tramp stamp on the cover. In Lost Girl, there are werewolves and sirens on the police force and dwarves running underground pubs, and every fey who comes of age must choose to ally with the Light Fey or the Dark. The titular heroine, an orphaned succubus named Bo, allies herself with no one, choosing her human friends over strange fey. It’s the lovely hero myth and allegory of the outcast that weaves itself through these plots. The heaping spoonful of sex that comes with it may be an example of how to make fantasy shows more palatable for the masses, but as seeing as how that’s presented as an integral part of the heroine’s lifestyle, it’s slightly less gratuitous than, say, an HBO series.

It was good timing that Lost Girl, a Canadian series, was given a chance in the U.S. market, right when many gave up on Grimm. The concept of Grimm is awesome: Police investigation of fairy tale murders and a man with a monster-fighting destiny. But too much exposition—and spooky hand-wavium—weighed the storyline down in the first few episodes like a ten-ton anchor, saved only by the divine comedy of the Blutbad Monroe. Excessive amounts of excitement and too little useful information left the watcher as clueless as the character of Nick Burkhardt himself—the original fairy stories may have been tedious at times, but they were not quite so obtuse. But that same monster-of-the-week formula that kept Buffy fans coming back for more has served Grimm well as the season went on, and it’s given the characters a chance to settle into their roles. My hope is that when the writers decide to return to the larger arc, it’s a bit less we-made-it-up-as-we-went-along.

The one show that seems to have appeared on the scene and become the belle of the ball from the first episode is the aforementioned Once Upon a Time. Unfortunately, ABC is owned by Disney, as anyone who watches Once Upon a Time will be constantly reminded. Neither the Grimms’ nor Charles Perrault’s versions of the Snow White tale had the characters of Pongo or Maleficent, nor did they include subtle nods to the TV show Lost. (It’s also a little tough to see Jennifer Morrison and not wonder if Hugh Laurie is hiding behind a curtain somewhere.) I tend to agree with Zipes on many of his anti-Disney points, and I do hope this series doesn’t fall into the same ridiculous, gumdroppy-sweet, misguided holes as the Snow White films. All this aside, Once Upon a Time is a pretty darn successful TV show so far, in both ratings and storytelling execution.

Fairy tales became popular throughout history because they could be passed along via the oral tradition, a benefit in a world where the uneducated masses could not read. These days, those masses mostly choose not to read—and turn on their televisions instead. They will find wonder tales on that small screen, and beast tales, and fairy stories of all shapes and sizes, both new and old. But I hope that the popularity of these shows fuels a desire in these audiences to seek out the original tales—be those origins Italian, French, German, Dutch, or other—and experience them firsthand. After all, it’s not a retelling if you’re hearing it for the first time. And the jokes for those of us in the know are much, much funnier.

About the Author

New York Times bestselling author Alethea Kontis is a princess, a goddess, a force of nature, and a mess. She’s known for screwing up the alphabet, scolding vampire hunters, turning garden gnomes into mad scientists, and making sense out of fairy tales. Alethea is the co-author of Sherrilyn Kenyon’s Dark-Hunter Companion and penned the AlphaOops series of picture books. She has done multiple collaborations with Eisner-winning artist J.K. Lee, including The Wonderland Alphabet and the illustrated Twitter serial “Diary of a Mad Scientist Garden Gnome.” Her debut YA fairy tale novel, Enchanted, will be published by HMH (Harcourt Books) in 2012.

Straightforward and Unadorned Adventure: A Conversation with Michael J. Sullivan

Jeremy L. C. Jones

With The Riyria Revelations, Michael J. Sullivan wrote the books he wanted to read: fun adventures about loyalty and friendship. He wrote all six installments of the series before releasing the first through a small press, and he later self-published the rest at six-month intervals. His readership grew steadily, and by the fourth or fifth novel it was clear—in many ways, including financial—that the series was a hit. Lighthearted and rollicking, Sullivan’s “buddy tales” are set in a world of betrayal and injustice, relaying the adventures of a thief named Royce Melborn and a mercenary named Hadrian Blackwater.

“Royce and Hadrian form the two sides of my personality,” says Sullivan. “Imagine the angel and devil on your shoulders. That’s them. Most of the time I am Hadrian, dreaming of being the hero, of achieving something worthwhile. I believe in the inherit goodness of people. If given the chance, they’ll rise to the occasion. However, in serious situations, it’s Royce that comes out, as we are both very protective of the ones we love. I try to keep him at bay, and Royce can be a difficult person to befriend. You have to prove yourself to him, but once you do, heaven help the person who threatens you. Luckily, I get to be Hadrian most of the time. Even Royce doesn’t like to be Royce.”

Sullivan’s prose, as he says below, is “straightforward and unadorned.” His plotting is remarkably consistent over the course of the whole series. He employs traditional fantasy tropes but never takes them too seriously. His world is gritty but never glum, realistic but still wondrous. Perhaps most importantly, his is a world of both humor and hope—the books were written for his daughter first, and general readership second.

In November of 2011, Orbit began releasing The Riyria Revelations over a three-month period as Theft of Swords, Rise of Empire, and Heir of Novron. Each volume contains two novels. With the exception of some line editing, they scarcely deviate from the originals. Below, Sullivan talks about the Big Three of craft —character, plot, and setting—as well as the arc of his career.

In what ways have your children influenced your writing life?

In many ways you can say that they enabled my writing. When we had our first child, my wife and I decided that one of us should concentrate on raising her. Seeing as how Robin’s electrical engineering career made significantly more than my commercial artist work, the logical choice was for me to be the one to stay at home. One of the side benefits was that I had time on my hands while Rebecca napped. Since early childhood I had enjoyed writing, so I used my free time to pursue creating novels as more than just a hobby.

Later, after years of rejections, I had given up on writing. My children had grown up and were now in school, so I had returned to commercial art and started my own advertising agency. My then thirteen-year-old daughter had been having difficulty reading—she’s dyslexic—so I decided to write something specifically for her. As she preferred to read stories in book form, rather than typed double-spaced manuscript pages, she prodded me into considering publishing again. The rest, as they say, is history.

What’s the fun part of writing fiction for you?

This question suggests that there’s a portion that isn’t fun, but I’ve yet to encounter that. So I’ll just mention the part I enjoy the most, which is creation. I love inventing things. One of my favorite school assignments had been a sixth grade geography project. I had been given a blank piece of paper and asked to draw a map of an island and inhabit it with whatever I wanted. I drew mountains, rivers, forests, and valleys, then I developed various tribes of people with different traditions and histories. I had a blast, but I think I scared the teacher. She got far more than she had been expecting.

So, yeah, the ability to create worlds and characters and put them into impossible predicaments and seeing how it affects them is pretty darn cool. They say some physicians have god complexes, but as a writer I actually get to play god. Can there be a better job?

Where does a novel usually start for you: image, plot, character, historical event, somewhere else altogether? And how do you develop the novel from there?

Each novel is different. In some cases it might be a single question that begs to be answered, such as, “What would you do with unlimited power?” Other times I may have a character or several that I really enjoy, and I’m just looking for the right setting and predicament to place him into. Creating isn’t a science; it’s random.

For the most part I’m inspired by a lack of something I want to see or read. That’s kind of how I got started with The Riyria Revelations. Because my books have many traditional elements, I’ve heard some people say they are not new or original. I wish that were true. I would love it if I could go to any bookstore and pick up another series just like it. Only I can’t. I know of no other series that is a fun adventure aimed at an adult audience (but not littered with profanity, gruesome violence, and pointless, gratuitous sex) that is easy to read with endearing characters set in a world that is as often pleasant as it is frightening. Rowling’s Potter books comes the closest, but those are young-adult. Tolkien comes next, but his aren’t nearly as easy to read or as fast-paced. So while the elements in the story are as familiar as a gun in a detective thriller, or poison in a murder mystery, The Riyria Revelations are unique as far as the books I’m familiar with.

Can you talk a little bit about building the world of Elan? Where did you start? How did you develop it?

I probably shouldn’t admit this, because in fantasy sometimes the world-building is placed on center stage, but for me I look at this aspect as the least important of the three pillars: character, plot, and setting. That being said: As most fantasy authors do, I have created an extensive background to my world. It actually goes back 8,000 years, but for the most part it is the proverbial iceberg, and only a very small portion is ever exposed.

I’m a lover of history—I read it all the time—so I start by developing the timeline. I’m sure that many readers are tired of worlds with multiple races. But for me, the dynamic is a classic one, and I utilize it: men, dwarves, elves, and goblins. My world has its own creationist mythology, including gods that represent each major race. As is often the case, there have been wars between the various nations. When you start reading the books, you’re in a world where men dominate. Elves are akin to Jews in the 1930s. Goblins are a boogieman story told to keep children in line. And dwarves are segregated from one another, lest they gain an upper hand.

But such was not always the case. There was a great war between men and elves, and it was only by the hand of the demigod Novron, the patron of mankind, that men were saved from total elimination by elven-kind. This aspect really is only hinted at in early parts of the book, but it is the entire impetus for the series as a whole. And men and elves eventually conflict again in the final volume, Percepliquis.

What part of Elan would you most like to visit?

Why, Percepliquis, of course. This is the ancient capital of the original empire that was destroyed and lost over a thousand years ago. It holds great secrets into mankind’s past, including many related to the war (and the end of the impending truce) spoken about above. It represented the height of civilization in the world of Elan. When it fell, much was lost, including magic and the great fighting techniques of the Teshlor. It is the dream of nearly every adventurer in Elan, and it’s strictly forbidden to even search for it. I’m a big fan of adventure, for going places where I’m not allowed, so how could I not want to visit there? I’m glad I did eventually get to go and could bring others along with me during its exploration.

And what part would you least like to visit?

There are actually two, and interestingly enough both are prisons: Gutaria and Manzant. Manzant is where one of the main characters, Royce, was imprisoned for years, and it’s highly regarded as the foulest place in Elan. Royce is a strong character, hardened by years of betrayal and having to make his way on his own. But even he nearly lost all hope while there. The other prison, Gutaria, is known to only a few, but it is even worse. Built during the time of the original empire, it was constructed with the use of magic. Time does not pass there. What’s more, those there are subjected to a dirge that dredges up their worst memory. Luckily for most, it was built to house just a single man, Esrahaddon, the wizard who has been accused of destroying Percepliquis. Having to relive the thing that you want to be forgotten the most, and being forced to endure it forever, seems like a fate worse than death.

Beyond the central characters. Royce and Hadrian, some of the most striking elements of The Riyria Revelations are the series’ tone and the style.

I read fiction—and fantasy in particular—for enjoyment rather than for allegories. I feel that the best fantasies are the ones that don’t take themselves too seriously, hence the humor that is found in my work. You can, and should, touch on emotional aspects of the human experience and strive to inspire or move people. That’s essential to any good writing. But for me, the number-one priority is to entertain, and I write books that I would like to read.

The style of prose I chose for The Riyria Revelations can best be described as straightforward and unadorned. My intention was to make the writing itself invisible to the reader and keep them focused on the characters and plot. In the past, I’ve written literary fiction where I placed a higher emphasis on the construction of each sentence. Reading that type of novel is like drinking a fine wine. It’s meant to be savored and read slowly, enjoying each sip. My hope for that particular piece is that the reader will often pause after a particularly well-crafted sentence. But I feel that style is best suited to stories with simple plots.

The Riyria Revelations, on the other hand, is a very plot-heavy book. A lot happens (it is epic fantasy after all), and my goal was to keep the reader turning pages. I didn’t want the prose to get in the way, so I went with a more simplistic style. I wanted the words to fall away and for the events to unfold much like a movie playing in the reader’s own imagination. To complete the food analogy, The Riyria Revelations should be like eating popcorn, where there is an unconscious hand-to-mouth motion, until you finally come out of a trance and realize you’ve just consumed much more than you had intended. I routinely apply this sliding scale between plot and prose complexity on a case-by-case basis. But since few have read my literary fiction, they may not be aware that I actually can utilize both sides of that coin.

As for tone, I wanted it to be light and fun. Sometimes I feel that in pursuit of drama, some writers forget that an important aspect of life is humor. We make jokes when we are happy, when we are nervous, and as a means for coping with fear or pain. Some medieval fantasies seem to take themselves too seriously, as if no one in the Middle Ages ever laughed. I’ve read books where the world is dark and morbid and filled with morose characters that are unpleasant to be around. I know that the intent is to be more serious or realistic, but for me, this has the opposite effect. I can’t help but think, “Okay, no world, no reality, can be this awful for everyone.” I personally find books with this perspective unpleasant to read. That’s not to say that they don’t have merit or a deserved fan base. It’s just that my preferred tastes run differently.

I was also striving to make the series an easy read, the kind of books that would be appreciated even to people who don’t generally read fantasy. For example, my dialogue has an intentionally modern style. I didn’t want an overly formal or archaic sound, which would stand as an obstacle to readers. Making a movie based in France for an American audience might be more authentic if subtitles were used, but I would find it annoying and distracting. Elan is an invented reality, and I can make people speak anyway I wish. If my goal was to create a sense of otherworldliness, then using archaic or invented language would make sense. But like I said, I wanted to remove all obstacles and let the story flow effortlessly. I should clarify, before some people take me to task, that I do have some invented words. Some of the spellings and pronunciations may seem overly difficult. But I’ve done that for specific reason in regard to plot. They are not arbitrary decisions.

One last thing I’d like to speak about with regard to style: The books are intended for adult audiences, but I do avoid scenes with sex or overtly graphic violence. This wasn’t done because of some kind of moral decision. I just didn’t see that adding such things would add to the story. I do like the unintended effect that it makes the books readable by people of varying ages, and I’ve enjoyed letters from parents that mention they and their children are able to have a shared experience.

How do you go about writing fight scenes?

I hate fight scenes. Not because I am particularly nonviolent, but because they are, oddly enough, boring. Making a fight scene interesting, rather than a series of physical movements, is tough. Every element in a story needs to be a story onto itself. A chapter is a short story; a scene has to have its own story arc. A fight scene needs to be its own mini-drama with a beginning, middle, and an end. This is what makes a fight interesting and memorable.

The role it plays in the narrative can be varied. It can reinforce that the story isn’t just fun and games—people die in these books. That fact helps ground the reader and reminds them that there are genuine dangers even though the story is a romp. A good fight scene can also as the payoff for many tension-builds. There are just some times when you really want to see some jerk get what’s coming to him.

Why do so many readers leap into the stories at word one and stay there till the end? Why do they keep eating the popcorn?

I think this is a question I should be asking the reader, but since I wrote the story to be tailor-made to my particular tastes, I guess I’ll talk a bit about what I was shooting for. When I looked at books that I have enjoyed most over the years, a common thread emerged. They were all good stories about characters I wished I were friends with in real life, which occurred in settings I wanted to actually visit or even live in. A lot of people really like Royce and Hadrian and the banter between them. They recognize a deep sense of loyalty between the two, and I think they would like to be a part of that.

One of the things I wanted to do is provide an escape into a place that is better than reality. One of my favorite TV shows is The West Wing. It may not be an accurate portrayal of what working at the White House would be like, but it showed a world that I wanted it to be. Especially in the early seasons where everyone was depicted as intelligent, hard-working, and striving to make a difference. I would have liked to have been a part of that and surrounded by those characters.

That’s not to say that I write worlds that are all sunshine and rainbows. Sure my books have serious moments, dark moments—you have to have these to create tension. There has to be a low point to provide contrast for joy. My characters have not led ideal lives, and I place many challenges before them. But through it all there is a current of optimism that runs through the stories. I think people enjoy being a part of their triumphs. Perhaps people stay glued because they really care about the characters and want to see what will happen to them.

One other element that I’ve heard is a big draw for people: Each of the six books has its own self-contained conflict and resolution, but it exists within a framework where there is an overarching story with mysteries that unfold a bit at a time. This could only be accomplished because I wrote the whole series before publishing the first book. I often would go back to an early novel and add a scene or two to further enhance a plot point that was occurring late in the story arc. Many books provide all you ever need to know about the world and the characters in the first book, and the rest are just “more of the same.” Because I had the freedom to work with a larger canvas, I could reveal the history of the world and the backstories of the characters a little at a time. There are things that I only initially hint at that eventually come to light. So I think a lot of people are seeking to find that next puzzle piece and see how it fits in place.

What makes for a compelling protagonist in general and a compelling fantasy protagonist in particular?

I don’t really see that genre has much to do with compelling characters. There are certain things that are universal, regardless of genre. Myron is often cited as a favorite in the series even though he has very little time on stage. For those that are early in the series: Yes, he comes back, but not until the last two books. I need to use my big guns sparingly. When I saw the movie WALL-E, I thought, “They stole Myron!”: unassuming, kind-hearted, and optimistic beyond reason. I think the single most important aspect of a likeable character is one that doesn’t whine. No matter how awful things get, they just don’t complain.

I also think people respect characters that take responsibility for their own actions—or for that matter even act at all. Likeable characters don’t sit on the sidelines and expect someone else to do what needs doing. They are men and women of action. If you want to make them even more sympathetic, place them in situations where they know they don’t stand a chance. Their deeds are further amplified if accompanied by people who remind them that they aren’t expected, or even supposed, to do anything that is not in their own self-interest.

What about an antagonist?

Antagonists are actually easy—much easier. You just have to put someone at odds against the protagonist, but give him a good reason for doing so. I find it works well to portray a protagonist as a determined individual with a very reasonable goal (sometimes even a noble goal). The problem arises because these people are short-sighted and pursue their desires regardless of the costs. They are the ones that console themselves with the notion that the ends justify the means.

It’s easier for people to be accepting of antagonists, as there are so many in the real world to use as examples. Heroes are rare, which is why people like reading about them. Most antagonists, while not evil, are often self-centered, misguided, and unsympathetic to others. No one ever thinks of himself as evil or bad. We all think we are the good guys. So an antagonist, in order to be believable, has to feel this way too, and be recognized by those around him as trying to do good. Being evil for evil sake is as unrealistic as a lack of humor.

Did you do much editing of the original tales in preparation for the Orbit editions? If so, did the chance to go back over them reveal anything to you about yourself and your writing? About the characters or the world?

Nothing frightened me more than getting back the changes from the editor. I had created a very intricately woven plot, and pulling on one thread could unravel an entire tapestry. I also constructed my series in an unusual way—that is, different than how most stories are created. I’m speaking about the timing of how I expose details about my characters and the world. To get published is so difficult. The first book has to be strong—really, really strong—and there is often a lot of front-loading, giving enough meat for the readers to really sink their teeth into. When I wrote the books, I had no intention on publishing. I doled out details slowly, over the course of the entire series. My audience had been myself, my family, and friends. I knew they would read the whole thing. But for someone else, they may find the first books lacking in detail and conclude it is because of poor writing skill—when in fact it was by design.

In any case, I thought that to make the books “marketable,” they might need major rework. What if Orbit had declared that “buddy tales” weren’t popular and wanted to make either Royce or Hadrian a woman? What if they wanted to add a love interest? What if they needed more revealed earlier in the stories? Any changes like those would have been a huge problem, and I’m not sure that I would have been willing to make such concessions.

Luckily my concerns turned out to be unfounded. Orbit loved the books just as they were, and they realized that the plot was already very sound. They didn’t find any holes that needed plugging (thanks to my wife Robin who had already taken care of them when they were originally published). Their only problem was that the book didn’t start with Royce and Hadrian; I had started the book with two minor characters, Archibald and Victor. Others who had read the series had had the same reaction, so it made perfect sense to change. For those that have read the original version, and who want to read the new opening, they can read the free sample of Theft of Swords from my blog (www.riyria.com). It’s there in its entirety. That really was the only major change.

The biggest revelation that the process unveiled was that I wasn’t completely delusional about the strength of the story as originally written. A lot of my insecurities had been alleviated by the high sales and positive reviews when they were originally self-published, but it felt good to know that professionals in the industry appreciated what I had written. On the technical side, I did learn a great deal by reviewing the numerous changes from the line editors, although I’ll probably always struggle with the placement of commas. Orbit has a great team of very detail-oriented copyeditors and proofreaders. I was constantly amazed at the things they found and embarrassed by some of the mistakes that were still present—even after more than a half dozen editors had worked on the books over the years.

From the time you penned your first Royce and Hadrian tale to the most recent, has much changed for you? Professionally and in terms of craft?

Having come from the “indie” world, a lot has changed for me in regards to income. When I started, and for several years after, I made little more than enough to pay for an occasional dinner out, assuming we didn’t buy any wine. It wasn’t until my fourth book was released that my income started paying some of the bills. And on the fifth book, I started making enough to match my wife’s income. Even before the series was bought by Orbit, I had graduated to earning enough money to be self-supporting, which I consider quite an accomplishment, since there are many traditionally published authors (some with multiple book releases) who haven’t reached that milestone yet and have to keep their day jobs to pay for bills or insurance.

My goals have definitely changed. When I started The Riyria Revelations, I had no intention on publishing. But now, one of my main goals is to continue to be able to write full-time. Whether I’ll be successful at that, it’s hard to say. Income can be so sporadic. Most writers don’t earn out their advances, and you get those payments only at major milestones. It can be months or even years between checks. I had socked away a lot of the money that I made from self-publishing, and I’m being cautious about spending the money made from the Orbit and foreign translations. I feel like I’m in a race to see what line is crossed first: depletion of my nest egg or the next book’s release. Still, I can’t complain. While I would hate for the financial freedom to be just a brief respite, it’s more than many authors will ever see, and I consider myself fortunate to have done it for any length of time.

As to the craft of writing, a great deal has changed. He who does not evolve dies, or at least he should. I’m always working on becoming a better writer. While it’s true that my entire series was written at once, the books still took me four and a half years. From what I can see, my voice and style has definitely improved over time. I hope I never get to a stage with my writing where I become too arrogant or inflexible not to continue to push for constant, incremental improvement. I do believe that writing is a craft, and it takes years to move from apprentice to master. Where on the scale am I? I’m not sure, but it’s a muscle that I’ll continue to strengthen the more I use it.

As to professionally, I guess the first thing that has changed is this: I now feel like I can say that I have one—a profession, that is. When you self-publish, even if you make significant money, there is still doubt in the back of your mind whether you’ll be chastised for applying the label “professional writer” to yourself. There is no doubt that I’m taken much more seriously now that I have the traditional stamp of approval. It’s manifested in all kinds of ways: requests to blurb other authors’ books, speaking engagement requests (I recently did a talk at the Library of Congress), the way my online interactions are taken, and requests from people to do interviews. When I was self-published, I always felt like I was standing with downcast eyes and my hat in hand when talking about my books. Nowadays I feel that I’m allowed to speak about them with my head held high, and that removes a lot of stress.

What’s next for you?

Going back to the last question, the only way to guarantee steady income is to keep writing. Since finishing the edits for The Riyria Revelations in June of 2011, I’ve been busy working on my next books. I have three written, and I’m about fifty-percent done with a fourth. Of course, I’m hoping that Orbit will pick them up as well, but I’ve not submitted anything… yet. The next project that will likely hit the street will be Antithesis: Two opposing individuals possess limitless magic, providing the universe balance. An unexpected death transfers this power to an unsuspecting bystander who is clueless of the consequences of his newfound abilities.

I tend to write my own “back of the book blurbs” or “elevator speech” and do so early on to help me articulate what a book is about. This is what I have so far:

Have you ever wondered how the world will end?

No? Well, don’t sweat it. Most people don’t, and the few that do expect the cause will be a dramatic change in climate, a pandemic, or mostly likely war. That’s what we’ve all been taught to believe, and we’re comfortable with rational explanations. But people weren’t always so quick to accept the facts provided by so-called experts. There used to be a time when we believed in myth and magic. Our minds were open to the idea of things that couldn’t be seen…the fantastical.

Having been that way myself, I can understand the propensity…but then I met Winston Stewart and learned to believe that there are other forces at work—not the least of which is fate. Fate is an amazing thing. It put Gandhi in South Africa, Nelson at Gibraltar, and Winston Stewart on that train in Alexandria, Virginia.

You don’t know who Winston Stewart is? You will.

I’m also keeping my ear to the ground about how The Riyria Revelations are being received and whether people want more. There are many ideas I have for prequels—or even sequels set in the far distant future. What I won’t do is tack on to Percepliquis, the last book. The series was carefully choreographed to end as it did. To extend directly to that story would ruin something that I feel is pretty special as it is. But Riyria existed for twelve years before the start of The Crown Conspiracy, and Royce and Hadrian had many exciting escapades that could be explored. Also, I could do a series of books about the original empire and the fall of Percepliquis, or go even further back in time to the original war between men and elves. I really like the idea that the religious beliefs that Elan holds in the days of The Riyria Revelations are actually myths that have been distorted over time. The “actual” events would have been much different than what they have been led to believe.

So I’m watching and waiting. I’m very conscious of not “milking the series.” I’m really happy with what I created, and I don’t want to be like one of those television series that stays around long past its prime. I think there are two ingredients that are required: first, have a compelling story to tell, and secondly, have an audience interested in reading it. I think I have plenty of the first, but I’m going to let the readers decide if there are any of the second. To that end, I do have a work-in-progress area of my blog where people can vote on which stories they would be most interested in. Bottom line: I don’t want to overstay my welcome in Elan. But if people want more, I’m more than happy to oblige.

Any parting words of advice, encouragement, or mischief?

Many readers of fantasy also feel like they have a book inside waiting to get out. To them I say, “Go for it.” Even if you write something only for your own enjoyment, you never know where that may take you.

As for life in general: I’m glad that I learned early on that life is too short to do something you don’t enjoy doing. I’m fortunate to have a wife that was willing to support me while I chased, and eventually caught, my dream. Without getting too Princess Bride on you, I do believe in true love, and if you can find yours, your life will always be spectacular.

As for mischief: I’m a rebel. I believe in doing things my way. I don’t mind bucking a system (or two or three). Know that you can be in complete control of your own life, if you only dare to step off the well-worn path. And last but not least, live by the immortal words of the classically trained and revered philosophers of Galaxy Quest: “Never give up! Never surrender!”

About the Author

Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and teacher. He is the Staff Interviewer for Clarkesworld Magazine and a frequent contributor to Kobold Quarterly and Booklifenow.com. He teaches at Wofford College and Montessori Academy in Spartanburg, SC. He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006. Jones lives in Upstate South Carolina with his wife, daughter, and flying poodle.

Another Word: Dear Speculative Fiction, I’m Glad We Had This Talk

Elizabeth Bear

Look.

I’m sitting down to have this conversation with you as a friend, as somebody who loves you. As somebody who’s devoted thirty-odd years of her life to you.

We’ve all made some mistakes. We’ve all had moments in our lives when we got a little self-important, maybe. Where our senses of humor failed us.

I’m as guilty as anyone of taking myself too seriously.

But for you, it’s become an addiction. You seem to think that nothing fun can have value; that only grimdark portentousness and dystopia mean anything. You wallow in human suffering and despair, and frankly—it makes me tired.

I remember when we were younger. You were so clever, so playful. So much fun. We had some good times. You could make me laugh and think at the same time. You made my pulse race.

But we got older and started understanding a little better how complicated the world is. How layered people’s motivations are. At first, you seemed to handle the moral complexity well. You’d give me something like The Forever War or The Left Hand of Darkness, and we could talk about it for hours.

I mean, I sensed your ambivalence. But I had some ambivalence of my own. That’s the thing about ambivalence—it’s a kind of tension. And tension drives a narrative, right?

And I don’t know if you got uncomfortable with the tension? Maybe you felt like you couldn’t live in limbo anymore, but you’d seen too much to believe in happy endings anymore. I’m guessing, I admit—but I wonder if you felt like had to find some way to resolve things. Get some closure. And escapism… just wasn’t open to you any more.

You started thinking you had to be cynical and mean to accomplish anything. You got wrapped up in your own history and your long-running arguments. You buried yourself in the seriousness of it all, and you forgot how to tell a joke. You even got—I hate to say it—kind of pretentious. Didactic, even.

The thing is, that kind of cynical pose is really just a juvenile reaction to the world not being what we hoped. We can’t have everything—so we reject anything. But it’s adolescent, darling, and most of us outgrow it. We realize that as much as the world can be a ball of dung, and horrible things can happen for no reason, there are positive outcomes too, sometimes. I’m not going to say things balance out, because of course they don’t—life is not fair—but it’s not just awful, either.

I’m not crying out for slapstick, here. You know that’s never done it for me. And I’m certainly not saying that I want you to be shallower.

If anything, I’m asking you to be deeper—to embrace more of the range of human experience. Not just the bad times. I mean, sure, we need to acknowledge the bad times, and I’ve deeply admired your recent willingness to explore new perspectives, to take on issues of race and gender and sexuality that once you would have shied from.

I have never doubted your courage.

But look at Terry Pratchett. (I know, we should all be Terry Pratchett. But then what would he read?) He manages to be incisive without being pretentious. He manages to be sharp and illuminating by being funny. Look at Neil Gaiman. Here’s a guy who can tackle some hard subjects and still have a good time. He makes people like him, and because they like him, they listen when he says hard, important things.

I almost hate to bring it up, but… J.K. Rowling? I know, you don’t take her seriously. She’s a woman, and she writes for kids, and in fairness some of the later books… could have used a closer encounter with the blue pencil. So it’s easy for you to dismiss her. But what you can’t dismiss is that she reaches people—and whether you agree with the way she discusses issues like class bigotry or not, the fact is, she does discuss them. Her awareness of them saturates her work, and it gets into people’s heads—because millions of people read her work.

I guess what I’m saying here is, look at Lenny Bruce. Look at George Carlin. The angrier they got, the less fun they got—and the less effective they got, because nobody wants to listen to an old man cat-yell at the kids on his lawn.

Oh, honey, I’m not saying you’re old. And I’m not leaving you. You’re a big part of my life, and I will always be here for you. I’m just trying to make sure that you’re always here for me, and sitting there in a toxic stew of your own bitterness… it’s not good for you. Look at you. When was the last time you left the house? When was the last time you read something because it was fun, not because you thought it was good for you?

Stern-lipped moral uprightness is not a literary value, darling. Sure, theme is. I’m not disputing that. But did you know that John Gardner talked about this thing he called “disPollyanna Syndrome?” He considered it a literary vice—the cynical fallacy that the real world is unrelievedly bleak—and he considered it as great a disservice to art as its opposite. And… he cited Harlan Ellison as a chief practitioner in this mode.

Oh, I heard you gasp. But the New Wave is one of the primary influences on the way we live our life and do our work today. And also, I hear you say, Harlan was popular! And funny!

Well, yes, he was funny. That’s why he got away with it. But you? I feel like all we have anymore is pus and severed limbs and the eschaton. And that’s not something we can build a future on, is it?

Kind of by definition.

I’m just saying that it’s right—and humane and morally correct—to harbor a deep and abiding concern for the world around you. And that it’s a perfectly normal—even laudable!—trait to express that concern and draw attention to problems by being savagely trenchant, witty, and sarcastic. Caustic, even. I want you to speak out. I want you to say what you mean.

But sometimes lately, spending time with you is like having my face pressed down into a trough of human misery until the bubbles stop.

You can have a sense of humor too. It’s okay. We’ll still like you. We’ll still take you seriously. We just think it’d be best for all of us if you could let yourself unbend just a little.

I know. It’s easier to get people to take you seriously when you’re all grit and pus and urban decay—or all gut wounds and bureaucratic incompetence, for that matter. It seems like a quick route to street cred. But the thing is, real people generally aren’t miserable all the time. Even in horrible situations, they find ways to take a little pleasure, to crack jokes. Dying people and homicide cops and soldiers are generally really funny.

I want us to have a little pleasure again too.

And maybe we’d have more friends if you weren’t such a downer to be around all the time.

About the Author

Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. This, coupled with a childhood tendency to read the dictionary for fun, led her inevitably to penury, intransigence, the mispronunciation of common English words, and the writing of speculative fiction. She has published nearly a hundred short stories and twenty novels, the most recent of which is Range of Ghosts from Tor (2012). Among her genre honors are two Hugo Awards and a Sturgeon Award. She grew up in New England and lived in Las Vegas for seven years. She now resides in central Massachusetts, where she shares half of an eleventy-two-year-old house with a giant ridiculous dog. She has no plans to leave the Northeast ever again, except on brief exploratory excursionsand regular visits to western Wisconsin, the domicile of her partner, notorious (and brilliant) fantasist, Scott Lynch.

From the Editor’s Desk

Neil Clarke

I don’t enjoy writing editorials. I much prefer to be behind the scenes, picking stories or artwork, but this month I feel obligated to say something. As you may have heard, last month, I was nominated for a Hugo Award in the Best Editor Short Form category. It blew my mind. Since Clarkesworld is my only editing job, this nomination can only come from you, our readers. I’m very overwhelmed by your support. Thank you! The honor is even more special to me as it is the first time an editor has been nominated purely on the basis of work done in a digital medium. As someone remembers when online fiction was considered second-class, this means a lot to me.

Clarkesworld is also represented in the Hugos by the fiction of E. Lily Yu (Best Short Story Nominee, “The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees”, April 2011) and Catherynne M. Valente (Best Novella Nominee, “Silently and Very Fast”, Nov-Dec. 2011). Furthermore, two articles originally published in Clarkesworld appear in Daniel M. Kimmel’s Best Related Work-nominated book, Jar Jar Binks Must Die… and Other Observations about Science Fiction Movies. While not officially a Hugo, the Campbell Award for Best New Writer is part of the Hugo ceremony. This year, we are very pleased to see E. Lily Yu among the list of very talented Campbell nominees. Our congratulations and best wishes go to all of them.

The Hugo’s weren’t the only good news for Catherynne M. Valente. She’s just sold two novels to Tor, one of which is based on “The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew” from Clarkesworld #35. Can’t wait for that one!

While I might not enjoy editorials, they are something I need to work on. Last month, I used our social networking presence on Twitter and Facebook to solicit some ideas for future editorials. The suggestions were all over the map, but a few homed in on the changes we’ve gone through over the years and data we’ve collected in regards to reading, writing and online fiction. That seems like a good theme to cover in our fifth anniversary year. Have you ever been curious about our readership, most popular stories, the slush pile or the trends we’ve observed? Now’s your chance to ask. Email me at neil@clarkesworldmagazine.com or leave a comment on our website and I’ll try to work those angles into next month’s issue.

Until next time, thanks for reading!

-Neil

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, owner of Wyrm Publishing and a 2012 Hugo Nominee for Best Editor (short form). He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Clarkesworld Magazine

Issue 69

Table of Contents

Immersion

by Aliette de Bodard

If The Mountain Comes

by An Owomoyela

You Were She Who Abode

by E. Catherine Tobler

Energizing Futures: How SF Fuels Itself

by Stephen Gaskell

Neither the Billionaire nor the Tramp: Economics in Speculative Fiction

by Jeremy L. C. Jones

Another Word: Assimilation, Multiculturalism, and Me

by Daniel Abraham

Editor's Desk: Clarkesworld by the Numbers

by Neil Clarke

Target Detected

Art by Max Davenport

© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2012
www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

Immersion

Aliette de Bodard

In the morning, you’re no longer quite sure who you are.

You stand in front of the mirror—it shifts and trembles, reflecting only what you want to see—eyes that feel too wide, skin that feels too pale, an odd, distant smell wafting from the compartment’s ambient system that is neither incense nor garlic, but something else, something elusive that you once knew.

You’re dressed, already—not on your skin, but outside, where it matters, your avatar sporting blue and black and gold, the stylish clothes of a well-travelled, well-connected woman. For a moment, as you turn away from the mirror, the glass shimmers out of focus; and another woman in a dull silk gown stares back at you: smaller, squatter and in every way diminished—a stranger, a distant memory that has ceased to have any meaning.

Quy was on the docks, watching the spaceships arrive. She could, of course, have been anywhere on Longevity Station, and requested the feed from the network to be patched to her router—and watched, superimposed on her field of vision, the slow dance of ships slipping into their pod cradles like births watched in reverse. But there was something about standing on the spaceport’s concourse—a feeling of closeness that she just couldn’t replicate by standing in Golden Carp Gardens or Azure Dragon Temple. Because here—here, separated by only a few measures of sheet metal from the cradle pods, she could feel herself teetering on the edge of the vacuum, submerged in cold and breathing in neither air nor oxygen. She could almost imagine herself rootless, finally returned to the source of everything.

Most ships those days were Galactic—you’d have thought Longevity’s ex-masters would have been unhappy about the station’s independence, but now that the war was over Longevity was a tidy source of profit. The ships came; and disgorged a steady stream of tourists—their eyes too round and straight, their jaws too square; their faces an unhealthy shade of pink, like undercooked meat left too long in the sun. They walked with the easy confidence of people with immersers: pausing to admire the suggested highlights for a second or so before moving on to the transport station, where they haggled in schoolbook Rong for a ride to their recommended hotels—a sickeningly familiar ballet Quy had been seeing most of her life, a unison of foreigners descending on the station like a plague of centipedes or leeches.

Still, Quy watched them. They reminded her of her own time on Prime, her heady schooldays filled with raucous bars and wild weekends, and late minute revisions for exams, a carefree time she’d never have again in her life. She both longed for those days back, and hated herself for her weakness. Her education on Prime, which should have been her path into the higher strata of the station’s society, had brought her nothing but a sense of disconnection from her family; a growing solitude, and a dissatisfaction, an aimlessness she couldn’t put in words.

She might not have moved all day—had a sign not blinked, superimposed by her router on the edge of her field of vision. A message from Second Uncle.

“Child.” His face was pale and worn, his eyes underlined by dark circles, as if he hadn’t slept. He probably hadn’t—the last Quy had seen of him, he had been closeted with Quy’s sister Tam, trying to organise a delivery for a wedding—five hundred winter melons, and six barrels of Prosper’s Station best fish sauce. “Come back to the restaurant.”

“I’m on my day of rest,” Quy said; it came out as more peevish and childish than she’d intended.

Second Uncle’s face twisted, in what might have been a smile, though he had very little sense of humour. The scar he’d got in the Independence War shone white against the grainy background—twisting back and forth, as if it still pained him. “I know, but I need you. We have an important customer.”

“Galactic,” Quy said. That was the only reason he’d be calling her, and not one of her brothers or cousins. Because the family somehow thought that her studies on Prime gave her insight into the Galactics’ way of thought—something useful, if not the success they’d hoped for.

“Yes. An important man, head of a local trading company.” Second Uncle did not move on her field of vision. Quy could see the ships moving through his face, slowly aligning themselves in front of their pods, the hole in front of them opening like an orchid flower. And she knew everything there was to know about Grandmother’s restaurant; she was Tam’s sister, after all; and she’d seen the accounts, the slow decline of their clientele as their more genteel clients moved to better areas of the station; the influx of tourists on a budget, with little time for expensive dishes prepared with the best ingredients.

“Fine,” she said. “I’ll come.”

At breakfast, you stare at the food spread out on the table: bread and jam and some coloured liquid—you come up blank for a moment, before your immerser kicks in, reminding you that it’s coffee, served strong and black, just as you always take it.

Yes. Coffee.

You raise the cup to your lips—your immerser gently prompts you, reminding you of where to grasp, how to lift, how to be in every possible way graceful and elegant, always an effortless model.

“It’s a bit strong,” your husband says, apologetically. He watches you from the other end of the table, an expression you can’t interpret on his face—and isn’t this odd, because shouldn’t you know all there is to know about expressions—shouldn’t the immerser have everything about Galactic culture recorded into its database, shouldn’t it prompt you? But it’s strangely silent, and this scares you, more than anything. Immersers never fail.

“Shall we go?” your husband says—and, for a moment, you come up blank on his name, before you remember—Galen, it’s Galen, named after some physician on Old Earth. He’s tall, with dark hair and pale skin—his immerser avatar isn’t much different from his real self, Galactic avatars seldom are. It’s people like you who have to work the hardest to adjust, because so much about you draws attention to itself—the stretched eyes that crinkle in the shape of moths, the darker skin, the smaller, squatter shape more reminiscent of jackfruits than swaying fronds. But no matter: you can be made perfect; you can put on the immerser and become someone else, someone pale-skinned and tall and beautiful.

Though, really, it’s been such a long time since you took off the immerser, isn’t it? It’s just a thought—a suspended moment that is soon erased by the immerser’s flow of information, the little arrows drawing your attention to the bread and the kitchen, and the polished metal of the table—giving you context about everything, opening up the universe like a lotus flower.

“Yes,” you say. “Let’s go.” Your tongue trips over the word—there’s a structure you should have used, a pronoun you should have said instead of the lapidary Galactic sentence. But nothing will come, and you feel like a field of sugar canes after the harvest—burnt out, all cutting edges with no sweetness left inside.

Of course, Second Uncle insisted on Quy getting her immerser for the interview—just in case, he said, soothingly and diplomatically as always. Trouble was, it wasn’t where Quy’s had last left it. After putting out a message to the rest of the family, the best information Quy got was from Cousin Khanh, who thought he’d seen Tam sweep through the living quarters, gathering every piece of Galactic tech she could get her hands on. Third Aunt, who caught Khanh’s message on the family’s communication channel, tutted disapprovingly. “Tam. Always with her mind lost in the mountains, that girl. Dreams have never husked rice.”

Quy said nothing. Her own dreams had shrivelled and died after she came back from Prime and failed Longevity’s mandarin exams; but it was good to have Tam around—to have someone who saw beyond the restaurant, beyond the narrow circle of family interests. Besides, if she didn’t stick with her sister, who would?

Tam wasn’t in the communal areas on the upper floors; Quy threw a glance towards the lift to Grandmother’s closeted rooms, but she was doubtful Tam would have gathered Galactic tech just so she could pay her respects to Grandmother. Instead, she went straight to the lower floor, the one she and Tam shared with the children of their generation.

It was right next to the kitchen, and the smells of garlic and fish sauce seemed to be everywhere—of course, the youngest generation always got the lower floor, the one with all the smells and the noises of a legion of waitresses bringing food over to the dining room.

Tam was there, sitting in the little compartment that served as the floor’s communal area. She’d spread out the tech on the floor—two immersers (Tam and Quy were possibly the only family members who cared so little about immersers they left them lying around), a remote entertainment set that was busy broadcasting some stories of children running on terraformed planets, and something Quy couldn’t quite identify, because Tam had taken it apart into small components: it lay on the table like a gutted fish, all metals and optical parts.

But, at some point, Tam had obviously got bored with the entire process, because she was currently finishing her breakfast, slurping noodles from her soup bowl. She must have got it from the kitchen’s leftovers, because Quy knew the smell, could taste the spiciness of the broth on her tongue—Mother’s cooking, enough to make her stomach growl although she’d had rolled rice cakes for breakfast.

“You’re at it again,” Quy said with a sigh. “Could you not take my immerser for your experiments, please?”

Tam didn’t even look surprised. “You don’t seem very keen on using it, big sis.”

“That I don’t use it doesn’t mean it’s yours,” Quy said, though that wasn’t a real reason. She didn’t mind Tam borrowing her stuff, and actually would have been glad to never put on an immerser again—she hated the feeling they gave her, the vague sensation of the system rooting around in her brain to find the best body cues to give her. But there were times when she was expected to wear an immerser: whenever dealing with customers, whether she was waiting at tables or in preparation meetings for large occasions.

Tam, of course, didn’t wait at tables—she’d made herself so good at logistics and anything to do with the station’s system that she spent most of her time in front of a screen, or connected to the station’s network.

“Lil’ sis?” Quy said.

Tam set her chopsticks by the side of the bowl, and made an expansive gesture with her hands. “Fine. Have it back. I can always use mine.”

Quy stared at the things spread on the table, and asked the inevitable question. “How’s progress?”

Tam’s work was network connections and network maintenance within the restaurant; her hobby was tech. Galactic tech. She took things apart to see what made them tick; and rebuilt them. Her foray into entertainment units had helped the restaurant set up ambient sounds—old-fashioned Rong music for Galactic customers, recitation of the newest poems for locals.

But immersers had her stumped: the things had nasty safeguards to them. You could open them in half, to replace the battery; but you went no further. Tam’s previous attempt had almost lost her the use of her hands.

By Tam’s face, she didn’t feel ready to try again. “It’s got to be the same logic.”

“As what?” Quy couldn’t help asking. She picked up her own immerser from the table, briefly checking that it did indeed bear her serial number.

Tam gestured to the splayed components on the table. “Artificial Literature Writer. Little gadget that composes light entertainment novels.”

“That’s not the same—” Quy checked herself, and waited for Tam to explain.

“Takes existing cultural norms, and puts them into a cohesive, satisfying narrative. Like people forging their own path and fighting aliens for possession of a planet, that sort of stuff that barely speaks to us on Longevity. I mean, we’ve never even seen a planet.” Tam exhaled, sharply—her eyes half on the dismembered Artificial Literature Writer, half on some overlay of her vision. ” Just like immersers take a given culture and parcel it out to you in a form you can relate to: language, gestures, customs, the whole package. They’ve got to have the same architecture.”

“I’m still not sure what you want to do with it.” Quy put on her immerser, adjusting the thin metal mesh around her head until it fitted. She winced as the interface synched with her brain. She moved her hands, adjusting some settings lower than the factory ones—darn thing always reset itself to factory, which she suspected was no accident. A shimmering lattice surrounded her: her avatar, slowly taking shape around her. She could still see the room—the lattice was only faintly opaque—but ancestors, how she hated the feeling of not quite being there. “How do I look?”

“Horrible. Your avatar looks like it’s died or something.”

“Ha ha ha,” Quy said. Her avatar was paler than her, and taller: it made her look beautiful, most customers agreed. In those moments, Quy was glad she had an avatar, so they wouldn’t see the anger on her face. “You haven’t answered my question.”

Tam’s eyes glinted. “Just think of the things we couldn’t do. This is the best piece of tech Galactics have ever brought us.”

Which wasn’t much, but Quy didn’t need to say it aloud. Tam knew exactly how Quy felt about Galactics and their hollow promises.

“It’s their weapon, too.” Tam pushed at the entertainment unit. “Just like their books and their holos and their live games. It’s fine for them—they put the immersers on tourist settings, they get just what they need to navigate a foreign environment from whatever idiot’s written the Rong script for that thing. But we—we worship them. We wear the immersers on Galactic all the time. We make ourselves like them, because they push, and because we’re naive enough to give in.”

“And you think you can make this better?” Quy couldn’t help it. It wasn’t that she needed to be convinced: on Prime, she’d never seen immersers. They were tourist stuff, and even while travelling from one city to another, the citizens just assumed they’d know enough to get by. But the stations, their ex-colonies, were flooded with immersers.

Tam’s eyes glinted, as savage as those of the rebels in the history holos. “If I can take them apart, I can rebuild them and disconnect the logical circuits. I can give us the language and the tools to deal with them without being swallowed by them.”

Mind lost in the mountains, Third Aunt said. No one had ever accused Tam of thinking small. Or of not achieving what she set her mind on, come to think of it. And every revolution had to start somewhere—hadn’t Longevity’s War of Independence started over a single poem, and the unfair imprisonment of the poet who’d written it?

Quy nodded. She believed Tam, though she didn’t know how far. “Fair point. Have to go now, or Second Uncle will skin me. See you later, lil’ sis.”

As you walk under the wide arch of the restaurant with your husband, you glance upwards, at the calligraphy that forms its sign. The immerser translates it for you into “Sister Hai’s Kitchen”, and starts giving you a detailed background of the place: the menu and the most recommended dishes—as you walk past the various tables, it highlights items it thinks you would like, from rolled-up rice dumplings to fried shrimps. It warns you about the more exotic dishes, like the pickled pig’s ears, the fermented meat (you have to be careful about that one, because its name changes depending on which station dialect you order in), or the reeking durian fruit that the natives so love.

It feels . . . not quite right, you think, as you struggle to follow Galen, who is already far away, striding ahead with the same confidence he always exudes in life. People part before him; a waitress with a young, pretty avatar bows before him, though Galen himself takes no notice. You know that such obsequiousness unnerves him; he always rants about the outdated customs aboard Longevity, the inequalities and the lack of democratic government—he thinks it’s only a matter of time before they change, adapt themselves to fit into Galactic society. You—you have a faint memory of arguing with him, a long time ago, but now you can’t find the words, anymore, or even the reason why—it makes sense, it all makes sense. The Galactics rose against the tyranny of Old Earth and overthrew their shackles, and won the right to determine their own destiny; and every other station and planet will do the same, eventually, rise against the dictatorships that hold them away from progress. It’s right; it’s always been right.

Unbidden, you stop at a table, and watch two young women pick at a dish of chicken with chopsticks—the smell of fish sauce and lemongrass rises in the air, as pungent and as unbearable as rotten meat—no, no, that’s not it, you have an image of a dark-skinned woman, bringing a dish of steamed rice to the table, her hands filled with that same smell, and your mouth watering in anticipation . . .

The young women are looking at you: they both wear standard-issue avatars, the bottom-of-the-line kind—their clothes are a garish mix of red and yellow, with the odd, uneasy cut of cheap designers; and their faces waver, letting you glimpse a hint of darker skin beneath the red flush of their cheeks. Cheap and tawdry, and altogether inappropriate; and you’re glad you’re not one of them.

“Can I help you, older sister?” one of them asks.

Older sister. A pronoun you were looking for, earlier; one of the things that seem to have vanished from your mind. You struggle for words; but all the immerser seems to suggest to you is a neutral and impersonal pronoun, one that you instinctively know is wrong—it’s one only foreigners and outsiders would use in those circumstances. “Older sister,” you repeat, finally, because you can’t think of anything else.

“Agnes!”

Galen’s voice, calling from far away—for a brief moment the immerser seems to fail you again, because you know that you have many names, that Agnes is the one they gave you in Galactic school, the one neither Galen nor his friends can mangle when they pronounce it. You remember the Rong names your mother gave you on Longevity, the childhood endearments and your adult style name.

Be-Nho, Be-Yeu. Thu—Autumn, like a memory of red maple leaves on a planet you never knew.

You pull away from the table, disguising the tremor in your hands.

Second Uncle was already waiting when Quy arrived; and so were the customers.

“You’re late,” Second Uncle sent on the private channel, though he made the comment half-heartedly, as if he’d expected it all along. As if he’d never really believed he could rely on her—that stung.

“Let me introduce my niece Quy to you,” Second Uncle said, in Galactic, to the man beside him.

“Quy,” the man said, his immerser perfectly taking up the nuances of her name in Rong. He was everything she’d expected; tall, with only a thin layer of avatar, a little something that narrowed his chin and eyes, and made his chest slightly larger. Cosmetic enhancements: he was good-looking for a Galactic, all things considered.  He went on, in Galactic, “My name is Galen Santos. Pleased to meet you. This is my wife, Agnes.”

Agnes. Quy turned, and looked at the woman for the first time—and flinched. There was no one here: just a thick layer of avatar, so dense and so complex that she couldn’t even guess at the body hidden within.

“Pleased to meet you.” On a hunch, Quy bowed, from younger to elder, with both hands brought together—Rong-style, not Galactic—and saw a shudder run through Agnes’ body, barely perceptible; but Quy was observant, she’d always been. Her immerser was screaming at her, telling her to hold out both hands, palms up, in the Galactic fashion. She tuned it out: she was still at the stage where she could tell the difference between her thoughts and the immerser’s thoughts.

Second Uncle was talking again—his own avatar was light, a paler version of him. “I understand you’re looking for a venue for a banquet.”

“We are, yes.” Galen pulled a chair to him, sank into it. They all followed suit, though not with the same fluid, arrogant ease. When Agnes sat, Quy saw her flinch, as though she’d just remembered something unpleasant. “We’ll be celebrating our fifth marriage anniversary, and we both felt we wanted to mark the occasion with something suitable.”

Second Uncle nodded. “I see,” he said, scratching his chin. “My congratulations to you.”

Galen nodded. “We thought—” he paused, threw a glance at his wife that Quy couldn’t quite interpret—her immerser came up blank, but there was something oddly familiar about it, something she ought to have been able to name. “Something Rong,” he said at last. “A large banquet for a hundred people, with the traditional dishes.”

Quy could almost feel Second Uncle’s satisfaction. A banquet of that size would be awful logistics, but it would keep the restaurant afloat for a year or more, if they could get the price right. But something was wrong—something—

“What did you have in mind?” Quy asked, not to Galen, but to his wife. The wife—Agnes, which probably wasn’t the name she’d been born with—who wore a thick avatar, and didn’t seem to be answering or ever speaking up. An awful picture was coming together in Quy’s mind.

Agnes didn’t answer. Predictable.

Second Uncle took over, smoothing over the moment of awkwardness with expansive hand gestures. “The whole hog, yes?” Second Uncle said. He rubbed his hands, an odd gesture that Quy had never seen from him—a Galactic expression of satisfaction. “Bitter melon soup, Dragon-Phoenix plates, Roast Pig, Jade Under the Mountain . . .” He was citing all the traditional dishes for a wedding banquet—unsure of how far the foreigner wanted to take it. He left out the odder stuff, like Shark Fin or Sweet Red Bean Soup.

“Yes, that’s what we would like. Wouldn’t we, darling?” Galen’s wife neither moved nor spoke. Galen’s head turned towards her, and Quy caught his expression at last. She’d thought it would be contempt, or hatred; but no; it was anguish. He genuinely loved her, and he couldn’t understand what was going on.

Galactics. Couldn’t he recognise an immerser junkie when he saw one? But then Galactics, as Tam said, seldom had the problem—they didn’t put on the immersers for more than a few days on low settings, if they ever went that far. Most were flat-out convinced Galactic would get them anywhere.

Second Uncle and Galen were haggling, arguing prices and features; Second Uncle sounding more and more like a Galactic tourist as the conversation went on, more and more aggressive for lower and lower gains. Quy didn’t care anymore: she watched Agnes. Watched the impenetrable avatar—a red-headed woman in the latest style from Prime, with freckles on her skin and a hint of a star-tan on her face. But that wasn’t what she was, inside; what the immerser had dug deep into.

Wasn’t who she was at all. Tam was right; all immersers should be taken apart, and did it matter if they exploded? They’d done enough harm as it was.

Quy wanted to get up, to tear away her own immerser, but she couldn’t, not in the middle of the negotiation. Instead, she rose, and walked closer to Agnes; the two men barely glanced at her, too busy agreeing on a price. “You’re not alone,” she said, in Rong, low enough that it didn’t carry.

Again, that odd, disjointed flash. “You have to take it off.” Quy said, but got no further response. As an impulse, she grabbed the other woman’s arm; felt her hands go right through the immerser’s avatar, connect with warm, solid flesh.

You hear them negotiating, in the background—it’s tough going, because the Rong man sticks to his guns stubbornly, refusing to give ground to Galen’s onslaught. It’s all very distant, a subject of intellectual study; the immerser reminds you from time to time, interpreting this and this body cue, nudging you this way and that—you must sit straight and silent, and support your husband—and so you smile through a mouth that feels gummed together.

You feel, all the while, the Rong girl’s gaze on you, burning like ice water, like the gaze of a dragon. She won’t move away from you; and her hand rests on you, gripping your arm with a strength you didn’t think she had in her body. Her avatar is but a thin layer, and you can see her beneath it: a round, moon-shaped face with skin the colour of cinammon—no, not spices, not chocolate, but simply a colour you’ve seen all your life.

“You have to take it off,” she says. You don’t move; but you wonder what she’s talking about.

Take it off. Take it off. Take what off?

The immerser.

Abruptly, you remember—a dinner with Galen’s friends, when they laughed at jokes that had gone by too fast for you to understand. You came home battling tears; and found yourself reaching for the immerser on your bedside table, feeling its cool weight in your hands. You thought it would please Galen if you spoke his language; that he would be less ashamed of how uncultured you sounded to his friends. And then you found out that everything was fine, as long as you kept the settings on maximum and didn’t remove it. And then . . . and then you walked with it and slept with it, and showed the world nothing but the avatar it had designed—saw nothing it hadn’t tagged and labelled for you. Then . . .

Then it all slid down, didn’t it? You couldn’t program the network anymore, couldn’t look at the guts of machines; you lost your job with the tech company, and came to Galen’s compartment, wandering in the room like a hollow shell, a ghost of yourself—as if you’d already died, far away from home and all that it means to you. Then—then the immerser wouldn’t come off, anymore.

“What do you think you’re doing, young woman?”

Second Uncle had risen, turning towards Quy—his avatar flushed with anger, the pale skin mottled with an unsightly red. “We adults are in the middle of negotiating something very important, if you don’t mind.” It might have made Quy quail in other circumstances, but his voice and his body language were wholly Galactic; and he sounded like a stranger to her—an angry foreigner whose food order she’d misunderstood—whom she’d mock later, sitting in Tam’s room with a cup of tea in her lap, and the familiar patter of her sister’s musings.

“I apologise,” Quy said, meaning none of it.

“That’s all right,” Galen said. “I didn’t mean to—” he paused, looked at his wife. “I shouldn’t have brought her here.”

“You should take her to see a physician,” Quy said, surprised at her own boldness.

“Do you think I haven’t tried?” His voice was bitter. “I’ve even taken her to the best hospitals on Prime. They look at her, and say they can’t take it off. That the shock of it would kill her. And even if it didn’t . . .” He spread his hands, letting air fall between them like specks of dust. “Who knows if she’d come back?”

Quy felt herself blush. “I’m sorry.” And she meant it this time.

Galen waved her away, negligently, airily, but she could see the pain he was struggling to hide. Galactics didn’t think tears were manly, she remembered. “So we’re agreed?” Galen asked Second Uncle. “For a million credits?”

Quy thought of the banquet; of the food on the tables, of Galen thinking it would remind Agnes of home. Of how, in the end, it was doomed to fail, because everything would be filtered through the immerser, leaving Agnes with nothing but an exotic feast of unfamiliar flavours. “I’m sorry,” she said, again, but no one was listening; and she turned away from Agnes with rage in her heart—with the growing feeling that it had all been for nothing in the end.

“I’m sorry,” the girl says—she stands, removing her hand from your arm, and you feel like a tearing inside, as if something within you was struggling to claw free from your body. Don’t go, you want to say. Please don’t go. Please don’t leave me here.

But they’re all shaking hands; smiling, pleased at a deal they’ve struck—like sharks, you think, like tigers. Even the Rong girl has turned away from you; giving you up as hopeless. She and her uncle are walking away, taking separate paths back to the inner areas of the restaurant, back to their home.

Please don’t go.

It’s as if something else were taking control of your body; a strength that you didn’t know you possessed. As Galen walks back into the restaurant’s main room, back into the hubbub and the tantalising smells of food—of lemongrass chicken and steamed rice, just as your mother used to make—you turn away from your husband, and follow the girl. Slowly, and from a distance; and then running, so that no one will stop you. She’s walking fast—you see her tear her immerser away from her face, and slam it down onto a side table with disgust. You see her enter a room; and you follow her inside.

They’re watching you, both girls, the one you followed in; and another, younger one, rising from the table she was sitting at—both terribly alien and terribly familiar at once. Their mouths are open, but no sound comes out.

In that one moment—staring at each other, suspended in time—you see the guts of Galactic machines spread on the table. You see the mass of tools; the dismantled machines; and the immerser, half spread-out before them, its two halves open like a cracked egg. And you understand that they’ve been trying to open them and reverse-engineer them; and you know that they’ll never, ever succeed. Not because of the safeguards, of the Galactic encryptions to preserve their fabled intellectual property; but rather, because of something far more fundamental.

This is a Galactic toy, conceived by a Galactic mind—every layer of it, every logical connection within it exudes a mindset that might as well be alien to these girls. It takes a Galactic to believe that you can take a whole culture and reduce it to algorithms; that language and customs can be boiled to just a simple set of rules. For these girls, things are so much more complex than this; and they will never understand how an immerser works, because they can’t think like a Galactic, they’ll never ever think like that. You can’t think like a Galactic unless you’ve been born in the culture.

Or drugged yourself, senseless, into it, year after year.

You raise a hand—it feels like moving through honey. You speak—struggling to shape words through layer after layer of immerser thoughts.

“I know about this,” you say, and your voice comes out hoarse, and the words fall into place one by one like a laser stroke, and they feel right, in a way that nothing else has for five years. “Let me help you, younger sisters.”

To Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, for the conversations that inspired this.

About the Author

Aliette de Bodard lives and works in Paris, where she has a day job as a Computer Engineer. In her spare time, she writes speculative fictionshe is the author of the Obsidian and Blood trilogy of Aztec noir fantasies, and her writing has been nominated for a Hugo Award, a Nebula Award and the Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

If The Mountain Comes

An Owomoyela

François and Papa were outside, discussing what to do if the water rose. I was in, scrubbing blood from the walls with a palmful of sand.

That was the summer Enah came to our village. He’d led a donkey, and the donkey pulled a cart with tools, a flowering lilac, and a barrel of fresh water. The barrel made Enah richer than the doctor, richer than the preacher. Richer than anyone but us, and he meant to change that.

I heard footsteps crunching the cracked earth outside, but I assumed it was a pumpyard guard until Papa went silent and his dogs went barking mad and I looked to see why. There they were, in the dry riverbed: Papa and François and the Rottweilers all glaring at Enah, who approached as though he feared nothing. He had skin as dark as François; he walked barefoot, and smiled. People weren’t in the habit of smiling at my father.

Enah and Papa exchanged a few words, then turned and came into the house with the dogs keeping pace. “Make us tea,” Papa said, and I was banished to the kitchen. I boiled the water and measured the leaves, and brought out the teapot and the cups, several of them chipped. I poured for my father first, then Enah. Enah didn’t say anything. Not even to acknowledge such luxury.

“In the next months, I’m going to sink my pumps another ten meters into the ground,” Papa was saying. “I can bring more water up and provide it even more cheaply to the people of this village.”

“The people of this village do not want to pay for something the world provides freely,” Enah said. Papa snorted, boar-like.

“Not so freely. My grandfather would have called this a drought; I call it the state of things. It rains perhaps thirty days a year. Your program might work where you’re from, but here, it’s foolishness.”

Enah shrugged. “There was a river here once,” he said, and sipped the steaming tea.

“That mountain to the east was a volcano once,” Papa said. “The world changes.”

“And we are often the ones who change it.” Enah shrugged again. “That’s what I’ve promised them, Mr. Wolfe: there was a river here once and there will be again.”

They sat watching each other for a moment, these two men, Enah small and strange with laughter lines around his mouth and forehead, Papa solid and strong with anger carved into his brow.

“There is a house here now,” Papa said. “A family. A dozen workers. Water pumps. You’d have us all vanish?”

“No, no,” Enah said. “I’d have you go up the bank, join the rest of your town. It must be lonely down here.”

It was lonely down there.

Ever since Mama died, Papa and I went around with a higher awareness of mortality. His mortality, mostly. Papa wasn’t a young man, and death was something we expected with half a head. Death was like rain — uncommon, but it would come.

So ever since Mama died, I had a bag packed, and I was ready to run away. I knew I couldn’t survive on the riverbed without Papa, though I didn’t know where I could go. Up to the village, if they’d take me, but what would I do? Set bones, or forage in the brush, or whore myself?

Or I could set off. See what lay beyond the horizon, and beyond the horizon beyond that. Water would be the problem — so heavy, so necessary, and something that unlike the people of the village I had never learned to go without.

The riverbed had been parched for as long as I could remember, its dirt cracked and peeling like thick and brittle plates. You could throw them toward the bank, and watch them burst into plumes of dust. Our family drilled deep and sucked water from the earth, and it was enough to keep us wealthy, by our own, dusty standards of wealth.

Papa sent Enah away. Then he went out to the pumpyard, and I ran out after our visitor. “Wait!”

Enah turned and looked at me. “We weren’t introduced,” he said.

“I’m Lena,” I said. “Lena Wolfe. You say you can bring the river back?”

He looked up and down the riverbed. The town was clustered on the bank, and my grandfather’s home and his father’s home connected the town and our farm like the dots of an ellipsis. My family had always followed the water.

“Let me ask you something,” Enah said. “Why is it you think these people don’t seek their fortunes elsewhere?”

I shrugged. “This is home,” I said.

He nodded. “It’s their home, and it’s still possible to live here. If it is possible to live, many will stay where they’ve buried their parents, and where they’ve dug the wells with their hands, and laid the cobblestones. And besides, the sun is hot everywhere. Water is precious everywhere.” He tapped the ground with one foot. “What is the name of this river?”

The name dried up when the water did. I think Papa knew it. I think it was written on the old maps, but we didn’t use the old maps. “It doesn’t have one.”

Enah turned to look at me, and his eyes were as sharp as a carrion bird’s. “That’s sad, isn’t it?” he said. “I’ve brought waters to desert arroyos, Lena. I can make this river flow again. And when the waters flow again, your town will name it.”

He reached out to touch my cheek, and I stepped back. Ordinarily, no one would touch me — I’d have a dog, like Papa’s dogs, to dissuade anyone from coming too close. Not then, though. Papa had killed my dog that morning.

“There will be enough water to grow hyacinths here,” Enah said.

“What are hyacinths?” I asked.

I went to the pumpyard to draw water to pay the guards’ salaries. I hated going to the pumps, but they were locked so the guards couldn’t draw their own. The men who guarded them, with old automatics and new machetes, looked at me as though only my father kept them from leaping on me like wolves.

Only my father. So much in my life was because of my father, or only my father. Because of my father, I would never die of thirst. Only my father aimed to keep life and death in a birdcage on his accounting desk.

When I’d filled the jugs and dragged the heavy handcart back to Papa’s office, I saw Papa yelling at François. Almost-yelling. Papa only barely raised his voice, but it felt like a shot from a cannon.

“By God, they won’t have their way!” Papa was saying.

François, a braver man than most, said “God is not always merciful to our needs.”

I’d never heard him speak back to Papa before.

“I don’t care about God’s mercy,” Papa said. “Who has mercy? He doesn’t. I don’t. And you least of all.” His voice became harder, like stone. “Go find whoever brought this troublemaker to our village. Make sure they don’t bring any more trouble our way.”

François stood with his jaw muscles bulging. He must have been biting down hard.

“Well?” Papa said, and raised his hand as though to strike him. “Go on! Go!”

François turned and walked outside.

Papa turned to me, and I stared at him. Then he sighed, and clicked his fingers twice. One of the dogs perked his ears, ready for commands.

“You should take Brutus,” Papa said, though neither of his dogs will obey anyone but him. “Jaime’s bitch is about to pup; we’ll train up another dog for you soon.”

“I’d rather have Mogul back,” I said.

Papa was not a man who showed sadness, but sometimes, I could catch a softness in his eyes. Only for me. “They never live once the bloody coughs start.”

“You never treat them,” I said.

“We are all dying, Lena,” he said, and started out past me. “If I kill them a week before their time or five years before their time, what does it matter?” He stopped at the doorway to touch my cheek. “You are the only one I will fight to keep alive.”

Papa would fight anything. Fighting was the only life he knew.

When my mother came down with the cough, he fought the doctors. He fought the dust which rolled in through the windows. He even fought my mother’s body. When she died, he seemed like a man who’d lost a public match — pride smarting, eyes burning, looking to prove himself back up.

By that summer, when the dogs were sick, he’d take a machete and lop off their heads. Maybe he thought it was winning if he didn’t watch them dwindle away.

I went to fill the drip-irrigators. I passed the side path leading to the gate, where François was sharpening his machete, his skin gleaming in the sunlight in contrast to my own. François was as strong and dark as Mogul once was, and I was as tan and useless as the dirt on the riverbed.

“Where’s your dog?” he demanded.

“He was sick,” I said.

François said, huh, and went back to sharpening.

“What did you mean,” I asked him, “that God is not always merciful?”

“You know what I meant. The world doesn’t work the way we’d like it.”

“But why did you say it?” I asked. “Why God?”

François shrugged one corded shoulder. “A saying came to mind. A story my parents told me.”

Papa never told me stories. Mama had, but Mama was gone. “Tell me,” I said.

François grimaced. I think he wanted to be rid of me. He didn’t speak much, and especially not to me. Still, my father paid him, and paid him twice as much as anyone else on the water farm, so he indulged most things.

“The Prophet Mohammed was told to prove the greatness of God,” François said. “He shook his fist at a mountain and said ‘Come here, mountain, so I may pray on you!’ The mountain didn’t come. The Prophet turned to his people and said ‘If that mountain had come, it would have crushed us. So you see, God is merciful. I’ll go to the mountain and thank God for sparing his foolish children.’”

I chewed on that. “So if the river comes, God won’t stop the water from flooding our home?”

François shrugged.

“Why aren’t you Muslim?” I asked. “You still remember those Islamic stories. Weren’t your parents Muslims?”

François put the finishing edge on his machete and stood up. “You’ll learn one day that you can’t always do what your parents want you to,” he said. He looked over at the edge of the river, up toward the village on the lip. “My parents would be disappointed in what I do. Besides.” He rested his machete on his shoulder. “It’s not right to profess what you don’t believe.”

I didn’t believe in a God, either. My father prayed, but never told me who he prayed to. Mama had been a Catholic from an old sect. I usually found François the most sensible of all of them.

I took two gallons of water, separated into quarts, up the bank to the market. The people there watched me, many of them angry, but not as hungry as the guards we kept sweating and rich on the farm. Papa said people resented the rich, and that it shouldn’t bother me.

François had followed me up and I wondered if my father had told him to be my dog until I had a new one, but then he went on his way and I put him out of my mind.

The noise of the market quieted as I passed by, and resumed again in pitched whispers, and the stares were more furtive. Because I didn’t have my dog, or because of Enah?

I found Jaime, who was at least kind to me, under a frayed sunshade, fixing small electronics. A rickety contraption of rods and wires with a metal dish in the middle was perched on the edge of his table, with a radio tied into it.

“What is that?” I asked, and he flashed me a grin.

“Listen to that,” he said, and turned the radio on.

There weren’t many stations nearby — there was the Christ Channel, and the staticky weather for a city climates away. And then there was this, a violin, a channel I’d never heard before.

I strained forward into the music. “Is it a new station?”

“Just far away,” Jaime said. “But with that antenna, I can focus in on it.” He turned up the volume as high as it would go. I closed my eyes and breathed it in.

The song ended, and someone spoke in a foreign tongue. “Papa says you have a dog ready to pup,” I said.

Jaime nodded. “Any day now. The best of my stock.”

“We’ll want to buy a boy,” I said. “If there’s one you don’t keep back for breeding, reserve it for us.”

He looked at me quizzically. “I noticed you didn’t have Mogul with you.”

He didn’t ask, What happened? And so I didn’t tell him, even as the words pressed on the back of my tongue. I didn’t say how his entire body had shaken when he sneezed, how blood had sprayed out from his nostrils to paint the living room walls. “He was sick,” I said. And they never live once the coughing starts.

Jaime understood. “Tell your Papa that these dogs are companions and workers, not pieces of equipment he can use up and replace.” There was no heat to his tone. We were his best customers, and sometimes his only customers for months at a time.

Beside him, the man on the radio stopped talking and a new song started up. “Jaime,” I asked. “Why don’t we make anything that beautiful?”

Jaime shook his head. “What do you mean? Don’t you see the soapstone carvings Elise does? Hear Luc singing to his rabbits? See the mats Camille weaves out of the grasses? There are beautiful things all over the village.”

“Yes, yes,” I answered, but my head was full of the violin, my mind’s eye captured by the curves of its wood. I had only seen pictures in old books. “But why don’t we make anything that beautiful?”

Jaime sighed. “Because beautiful flowers don’t grow on dry clay, girl,” he said, and I felt myself drop in his estimation. “When we’re not too busy scraping by, we’ll go to another city just to buy a violin. Or perhaps you should ask your father to buy one for you.”

The words stung, so I turned to leave.

I bought rabbit meat from Luc, and wild garlic and scrawny tubers from strange old Abed. Traded water for soap, for thread, for a tin of white paint to cover the blood I hadn’t been able to scrub away. Then I started back down toward the water farm, but Enah caught my eye.

He was sitting on the edge of his cart, at the lip of the river bank, leaning down to draw pictures in the dirt with a stick. He was surrounded by villagers, and all of them watched him like a prophet. I drew nearer.

“. . . and when that is done,” he was saying, “there will be water to last you between rains, and we can turn our attention to healing the river. We’ll dig percolation trenches, to let water return to the aquifer.”

By then people had noticed me, and they were muttering. I’d decided it was time to go when Enah looked up and motioned me forward.

“It’s all right,” he said. “Come up and see.” He looked to the villagers, and before they could say anything he said, “The water we’ll bring is for everyone; go ahead and let her in.”

“She’ll just tell her father,” one of them said. I didn’t look to see who.

“I’d tell him myself if he asked me,” Enah said. “Come up, Miss Wolfe.”

I looked around at the faces of the people who hated my family. They seemed foreign, and at first I didn’t know why; of course I had little interaction with them, but I knew their faces. I saw their houses on the hill.

Then it struck me. I had never seen the flicker of hope in their eyes, and now they watched Enah as though he were the word of God. I thought back to François, and felt that I was standing on the edge of a cliff. I stepped up.

“Have you ever heard the words ‘watershed management,’ Miss Wolfe?” Enah asked. I shook my head. “Do you know what a water table is? A kund?”

“I know the aquifer is drying,” I said. A rumble passed from mouth to mouth in the crowd.

“That’s because this place,” Enah said, and gestured over the village, “is designed to waste water. It rains, and the water evaporates again. With bunds and kunds and ditches, we can train it to go back into the aquifer, and capture it from this whole land surrounding your village—”

He was interrupted by screaming.

Enah seemed confused, but the villagers knew their screams. They broke and ran, ready to help someone bit by a snake or trapped under an ancient, crumbled wall, but what they found was Jaime, his wife crouched over him and keening, his radio smashed. My heart caught and I stepped forward, knowing what I would see — and I saw that his head was lying separately to his body, the two of them connected by a sweep of bright blood.

Then it was my turn to break away from them and run. It took the villagers a moment to work through why I was running away from them, and then a yell went up. I heard Enah’s voice, nasal and rising, and then a rock crashed into the ground by my ankle. I ran faster, down into the riverbed, to the safety of the guards and Papa’s dogs.

They came to the house in numbers that night, carrying fire. I could taste their anger on my skin. From the pumpyard the guards readied their weapons, unsure whether to run to the defense of the house or to protect the water, and Papa flogged the dogs to get them growling. “Where is François? That worthless man! He can put down what he’s stirred up or I’ll have his hide nailed to my wall!”

Something crashed against our window, and I jumped back. Papa grabbed his rifle and checked it, then made it ready to fire.

Papa had had people murdered before. We never talked about it, but there was no secret. When I was ten, he had François kill the bonesetter’s son, and everyone knew it was him. Papa had guards and dogs and Papa had the water; the whole village hated him, but no one dared cross him. Now they dared.

Outside the window, something was happening in the crowd. Enah ran in front of them, raising his hands. I couldn’t hear his words but the just his voice was beautiful, melodic like a violin, fanning the fires and banking the coals until the entire mob was singing their agreement with him, and the chant started up: Enah! Enah! Bring the river! Flood them out!

When the crowd was his, he turned to our house and waved his hand until I stepped up and opened the window.

“Mr. Wolfe,” he called. “It’s true that Jaime raised me on the radio, but you’ll have to do more than kill him to drive me off. You’ll have to kill me. And you’ll have to kill all the people I am teaching, and you’ll have to teach them not to kill you. Invite me in, Mr. Wolfe.”

Quite a thing to say, for someone who had just told my father to kill him. But Papa walked to the door, and — quickly, as though the doorknob was a snake — yanked it open. He invited Enah in.

No ancient and carefully-maintained gun from the crowd shot him. No fist-sized rocks came hurtling at his head. Enah approached and the mob behind him rumbled like a single, huge beast, with fire in its many claws.

Enah walked in, and Papa shut the door behind him.

They stood watching each other for a moment, these two men, Enah strange and unworldly with fire glowing on his skin, Papa holding his ground like the rocks on the riverbed. Then Enah spoke.

“All the corpses you’ve planted by your pumps,” Enah said. “How long, tell me, will it take them to bloom? Will they feed your family when they do?”

Papa frowned, confused. He wasn’t a good man to confuse — he got angry. But instead of striking Enah or taking him by the neck, he showed his hands.

“Why do you want to destroy me?” he asked. “I want to leave something for my daughter. I want to leave my wealth when I’m no longer here to take care of her.”

“You can leave her a better wealth,” Enah said, and gestured to the dry riverbed.

“It will dry up. You don’t understand this village; people don’t learn. If they’re given abundance, they’ll bleed it dry. If I control the water, everyone gets what they need; no one takes more than their fair share.”

“People learn when they are taught,” Enah said. “When they create with their own hands. They will love the river even as you love your daughter.”

“You are naive,” father said.

“And you are stubborn,” said Enah.

Papa brushed off his hands. “I would rather be stubborn,” he said, but there was a moment when he seemed to consider it. The costs, and the risks, and the damages. But Papa has never been one to back down. “I’m done arguing with you. With a word I’ll have my guards open fire on your mob. Get off of my land.”

Papa went into his office before Enah could say another word, and I caught Enah’s arm before he left our house. “Why hyacinths?” I asked. I kept my voice at a whisper, so Papa couldn’t hear.

Enah turned to look at me. “Because this,” he said, gesturing to the riverbed, “is fear in a handful of dust. Have you heard that poem? The Waste Land?”

I hadn’t, but if there was ever a wasted land, this was it.

“How much of that world we have forgotten,” Enah said, and shook his head. I understood why people crowded around him like a prophet: he promised beautiful things, and kept them in mind of how strange he was, how little they knew.

I followed him to the fence around the property, where he went out by the gate and faced the crowd. The mob watched, ready to burn me, but I felt safe in Enah’s shadow. A girl guided through a lions’ den.

“Those of you who’d see the river run,” he called. “Come at midnight to the highest part of the bank. We’ll gather there and begin: with your own hands and your native rock, we’ll build tanks and dams and bund walls. Little by little, the water will rise. We will name the first wall ‘Jaime’.” He turned, faced our house, and seemed to speak straight to Papa. “And the water will rise.”

He looked at me, and I ran back inside.

Papa must have heard him through the walls. He was sitting at his desk with his head in his hands, and his face — what I could see of it — was red.

He looked to me, eyes dry and veined. “If they gather I’ll have François and my boys cleave them apart,” he said. “It’s not right that they should try to take the river. There was no law here so our family made the law. May you never have to make such a decision.”

We were both silent for a while, and I said, “Hyacinths don’t grow on clay.”

Papa’s eyes bugged. “What is this?” he demanded. “What sort of nonsense have they put in your head? Hyacinths!” He stood. “I’ve raised a beautiful girl on this land, and by God I’ll leave my wealth for her when I die. Wealth is all you can ask for in a God-forsaken place like this.”

I bit my teeth. My mind was full of blood and flowers, and the back of my tongue was dry. Papa glared for a minute, then the heat went out of him.

“Apologize to me, Lena,” he said. “I’m only trying to protect you.”

I’d lived long enough that I knew there’d be no peace in the household until I did.

“I’m sorry.”

He nodded. For a while he stared out the window, into the distance, his dogs at his ankles.

“Water,” he said.

I went into the kitchen.

I pulled a quart down from the cupboard, and felt the clean weight of it. Wealth, here, sucked out of the dirty riverbed.

I brought it back to the office, and Papa drank like a man thirsty since the days of the Flood. I watched the water disappear into his body.

He set it down and looked at me.

“Lena,” he said. “Drink up and go to bed. Keep your eyes closed. I’m going to roust the boys.”

I went into my room and closed my eyes, and imagined blood sprayed across the riverbed. Papa went out to the pumps, and I could hear his voice, and then the rasp of stones sharpening machetes. I counted my breaths. Fifty, eighty, and the guards began to speak to each other, binding their resolve in boasts and quiet banter.

Then, I snuck outside.

The sky was dark, and the electric lamps from the pumpyard didn’t cast light as far as the door. The riverbanks reared high above me to either side.

I thought, What happens if the water rises?

But then, that wasn’t the right question.

What happens if the water never rises?

The ground cracks. Skin cracks. Bones crack.

On my birthdays I was allowed the extravagant gift of a bath. When Mama was alive, she’d sit at the side of the tub and wash my back. My entire body felt light, then. I think buoyant is the word — a word I had little use for. I wanted the river to roll down from wherever it was hiding, to catch me, carry me away. I wanted buoyancy.

I ran for the bank.

Not far from my door a figure stood up from the shadow of my fence. I stopped quick and saw François, silhouetted against the wide white light of the moon.

“François,” I said. My voice cracked. I wondered: if he hacked off my head, how long would my blood stain the riverbed? Would Enah bring the waters and wash it away?

François offered his left hand. In his right, his machete gleamed.

I took a step back, but I gathered my courage and looked toward the high part of the bank. I kept my eyes on the gathering lights there as I said, “Are you going to tell Papa, or just cleave me?”

François was silent for a moment. Then, “I said that my parents would not be proud of what I do,” he said. “Lena, I am not proud. God is not proud. I hardly know him, even when I want to pray.”

I swallowed. In all the years Papa had paid him, he had never called me by name. “I don’t have anyone to pray to,” I said.

He offered his left hand. Again, I hesitated.

“François,” I said. “What will happen if the water rises?”

“Life will return to the river valley,” he said. “And if I’m lucky, I will never again cleave off anyone’s head.”

My heart raced. “So you want the water to rise?”

He offered his left hand.

I stepped forward, this time. Close enough to see that his eyes were rimmed with salt, like the blood on Mogul’s nose.

Our blood will crack. Our tears will crack.

I ran forward and wrapped my hand in his.

His hand closed around mine, larger than mine, warmer, strong. “Your father will have us hunted,” he said. “If you’re afraid, you shouldn’t come.”

I was afraid. Of him, of the guards, of the villagers, of the flood. Of Papa, of Papa’s dogs, of being cut off from the pumps. Of dying like Mogul. Of dying like Jaime. But I went up on my toes and kissed François on the cheek, and he accepted it like a man made of stone.

Then he said, “Come,” and we walked up the bank. Toward the lights, where the wind scattered Enah’s lilacs, and I imagined hyacinths on the breeze.

About the Author

An Owomoyela (pronounce it “On”) is a neutrois author with a background in web development, linguistics, and weaving chain maille out of stainless steel fencing wire, whose fiction has appeared in a number of venues including Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed, and a pair of Year’s Bests. An’s interests range from watershed management and desertification to gender studies and nonstandard pronouns, with a plethora of stops in-between. Se graduated from the Clarion West Writers Workshop in 2008, and doesn’t plan to stop learning as long as se can help it.

You Were She Who Abode

E. Catherine Tobler

Cardee Findar dreams, but she’s wide awake.

She’s in the warzone, ashen walls rising around her in broken lines, but buttercream paint seeps through the gray. The pale yellow carries with it the scent of spring, a slice of blue sky, the slow curl of white curtains into a sunlit room. This place is far away; the ground shakes underfoot, rattling ash over paint, and she’s running, running with her heart in her throat and her hands wrapped around her rifle. Rifle pressed into breast the way Lottie should be. Seven strides to the alley—seven strides and she’s in, in and sliding down into the shadows. Her gaze latches on to Ginger across the street in another alley. Ginger prefers gunfire to silence; it tells them exactly where the enemy is.

“Mama?”

Cardee pushes the small voice in her head away. That voice is as distant as that calm yellow room. Ginger is in the here and now: Ginger and Bret and Stills, and the goddamned little shadow they’re chasing. Children in warzones aren’t a surprise, not now, but the first time she’d seen one, Cardee recoiled. They’re often lures, she knows; the urge to follow the small ones and haul them out of the wreckage is hard-wired. She wants to carry them somewhere safer. She doesn’t know where that might be.

Ginger breaks position to follow the kid into the tangle of narrow streets hung with paper lanterns from a long ago celebration. Blue, green, and—

“Gin—“

Cardee swallows the rest of her protest and at Bret’s snapped curse, runs. Runs across the street into the alley Ginger had occupied. Of the child, she has the impression of ratty clothes, bare feet, and knows the latter are the deal breaker for Ginger.

The first child they’d rescued had ruined feet from walking through the debris; Ginger spent days applying salve to them, only to have the doc tell them the feet couldn’t be saved. It makes the others harder—that kid hadn’t been a lure, he just needed out. He only planted hope inside Ginger when it came to every other kid.

The hardware store still stands, windows unbroken in their frames. Cardee draws up short, listens for Ginger. There is a sharp hiss and the thunder of retreating boots. She shoulders her way into the store, amid stripped shelves. Binned nails, hammers, and planks of wood stand in one corner but—

A slamming door erupts into flame a second later. The air is sharp with flying nails and hammers and Cardee drops to the floor, rolling until she’s under the nearest shelf. The shelf buckles with a second explosion and is shredded away with a third. Blood splatters the concrete floor amid the burning refuse, as if dripping from Cardee’s own face, but she can’t make sense of it.

“Mama.”

She gives in to the voice. “I know, baby.”

Cardee slides the warm cloth over Lottie’s temple, removing the haze of blood. Small brown face, so like her own. Wide black eyes blink up at her, tight sepia curls framing smooth apple cheeks. Cardee leans in to look at the wound.

“J-James d-dared me t-to jump,” Lottie whispers, anguished.

“Just a little scrape.” Cardee drops a kiss on Lottie’s forehead, reaches past her for the wipes and dermal sealer. She’s seen worse on the battlefield, but not worse on her daughter and though she forces a smile, the injury bothers her. Bothers her in a way she can’t quantify—

Nails, there were nails—

Cardee grits her teeth together, steadies her hands. This is now, not then, and Lottie flinches at the antiseptic wipe and then the cool flow of sealer.

“Green b-bandage?”

“You like all that green, don’t you?” But Cardee doesn’t protest her daughter’s choice. She presses the bandage over the wound, even though it’s not needed with the sealer already there.

“All that green, Mama.” Lottie’s smile ripples and through a haze of smoke, looks green in the corners. Cardee runs her thumb across it as Lottie lifts a hand to touch Cardee’s own temple where green lights pulse.

“Findar.”

That’s her name. She knows it’s her name, because she remembers stealing it from Ross. He thought he gave it to her on the lakeshore with the trees dipping low into the water and all their friends gathered close, but ten years on, she still feels like she stole it. Wood violets, wild roses, my black-eyed girls.

“Findar!”

Her fingers come away from the sky bloodied; they are snatched from her, tied against her side and she’s flying, airborne through the debris, away from Ginger and the small figure they were chasing. Cardee opens her mouth to tell Ginger the kid is there, just there beyond that pile of debris, and there’s another explosion. The world rocks and green sky tips then vanishes altogether as gloved hands draw her inside a warm, dark space, and she hears the chop-chop-chop of angel wings, as they arc high into the sky thirteen klicks from base.

Thirteen nails, doc says and drops the last into the basin. It falls with a clink, a fleck of blood, and Cardee sees faces in the red: Ross and the priest and if she closes her eyes she can feel Ross’s palm against hers. Palmers’ kiss was holy she had told him, but now there’s only the chatter of doc and his team and when these voices change, Cardee can’t latch onto why. The light takes on a clear quality, the smoke of the hotspot gone, and the bite of the stitcher is almost sweet as it crawls over her bare scalp. It tickles; the sensation tells her she’s alive.

The stitcher tiptoes over scalp while doc settles the VET into its place against the ruin of her hippocampus and he’s talking all the while, words that slide over Cardee’s consciousness and away. She knows he’s watching a screen while he talks, to see what her brain does with each word. Volatile, he calls the device. Like it might explode the way the hardware store did—

Ragged clothing and bare feet. Oh, bare feet. Cardee can feel the soft curve of Lottie’s toes against her chin.

Emotive transistor, doc says and his fingers are cool against her temple though warmth seems to sink into her skin, into her bones. Her left eye blossoms with sudden heat, the sting of salt.

Do that again, doc bids her.

Cardee doesn’t know what he means, but she thinks about Lottie’s toes, small and brown and sweet like sugar, and the salt stings her again as doc praises her. Good, good, he says, and Cardee swallows a sob. The green light floods his palm then fades as Cardee quiets. It won’t be perfect, he says, but—

—what is in this world, Ross says and his mouth moves over Cardee’s and she smiles, knowing neither one of them really wants perfection. They have always been a jumble and she’s content to stay that way. The idea that he would marry her when she means to serve their country is what sinks its hooks into her. That he would stay, no matter where they or she went, and when they go to the lakeshore all those years later and she tells him about the child, there is a quiet wonder in his eyes.

He is barefoot, jean cuffs rolled up and wet, and he tangles wild roses into Cardee’s hair. They’re pink like his tongue and later she presses these roses into a book which will sit on a shelf beside a box full of letters with different postmarks, all the places she has been. The book will sit until Lottie pulls it down at age three and scatters the flat, dried bundle everywhere. A year later, they still find bits of roses in the corners.

“Made it just the way you like,” Ross says, and leads Cardee to the corner where he’s placed her favorite chair with its worn arms and the quilt her grandmother pieced together. A tablet rests on the table beside an electric kettle which she knows holds Earl Grey. He helps her into the chair and she’s slow, like she can’t remember how to move, but the VET remembers for her, guiding her into the chair’s familiar hold.

A ring peeks out from Ross’s shirt collar as he moves, three strands of Irish gold braided together. His grandmother’s, but now hers, given to him so it couldn’t be taken even if her finger did feel bare without it. A thing to come back to he had joked, and as it slips free now he tucks it away before she can touch it. His brow creases. Don’t worry about that now, he tells her.

Ross’s hands are tentative as he settles her feet on the ottoman, as he pulls up the quilt and then reaches for her cup. The cup is sunrise orange and the tea floods it in a brown, steaming rush. Cardee draws in a breath and watches as Ross’s face is erased. The room seems to fold itself away under the rising steam and she’s in an alley again, watching a small, barefoot figure flit through the debris.

That was then, she tells herself, and tries to pull the walls of her room upright. Plaster and buttercream and not ash, but there’s only stone and choking smoke in this place. Stills presses a new magazine into her hand and she slots it into her rifle before running, running after Ginger through the debris, after the small barefoot form.

This is before, she knows. Before the hardware store. Three days? No—three months, months and this is the first kid, the one doc won’t be able to save.

Images shutter like an old film reel through her mind, guided by the VET in her temple. That was then but it’s also now, and Cardee follows Ginger over fallen stones that used to be walls that used to be houses that used to be homes.

There is a tall figure in a far door lifting a gun. Cardee lifts hers first and the figure crumples with a shriek, doesn’t move. Ginger is twelve steps from the kid, the boy, and Cardee knows she herself is twenty-five steps from the figure she shot down.

She will walk those steps, check the body, take the gun. She will. She already has.

Twenty-seven steps from the second figure who emerges behind the first, a young man in enemy colors, and he lifts his gun. Cardee takes him down too; he falls to his knees as if in prayer, then topples over.

Ginger tackles the boy, wrestles him to the ground and pins his arms behind him. Where are the others, she demands—where! And he says he doesn’t know—but he does and these kids just don’t want to go, don’t want to leave these streets that are home, home even though war has claimed them. Home, smeared into his cheeks and his bare, bloodied feet. Ginger hefts the boy, throws him over her shoulder, and they’re out, running as shells rain from the sky.

Cardee turns circles in wet grass. Don’t worry about getting wet, she tells Lottie, and they’re out, running as the rain pours from the summer sky. Lottie shrieks, like she might melt under the rain because she’s so sweet, but Cardee holds her hand and feels her daughter relax. The shriek turns to a laugh and Lottie is no longer worried about her dress, because it will dry on the laundry line when the sun comes out again. She twirls and Cardee watches those toes as they mash into the mud. Hot cocoa later, she thinks, but it’s already been later, that cocoa long drunk.

This is memory, Cardee tells herself, and pulls hard, hard enough to lift the walls of her room back into place. This was now. Her room, where nine year old Lottie now sits, bundled on the ottoman. Lottie watches everything and Cardee watches back. Lottie is taller than she remembers, all long arms and legs, her hair longer and worn pulled up on the top of her head with a mass of bright green and blue ribbons. A clumsy knot, her father’s work.

“Mama?”

Cardee offers her hand for holding. The hand Lottie offers is larger than Cardee remembers, long slim fingers. Palm to palm they sit until Lottie makes a sound, a sound like she wants to cry but is too old for such things now. Lottie curls into her mother’s lap, the way a nut curls into its shell, and she’s crying. Don’t w-worry about getting w-wet.

There was rain, Cardee thinks, rain like nails, and she lifts a hand to feel the line of her skull, whole now but still shorn, wrapped under a bright cloth. Lottie shudders and Cardee hauls her closer.

“It’s okay, baby. It helps mama remember.”

Lottie’s fingers press cool against Cardee’s temple, gentle over the soft light which flickers beneath the skin. Of course it was green. Lottie’s mouth lifts in a tentative smile at the sight and—

—it’s doc looking at her for the first time after the surgery, his face clear and sharp and framed by all that brilliant white light. Cardee stares the way she stared at Ross when he proposed, like she can’t understand or believe it. That was then, she tells herself, but doc tells her it won’t be perfect. It’ll run, but it’ll stutter, too, like a tank you need kick every now and then. Cardee doesn’t want it; Cardee can’t be Cardee without it, though. She understands that. The VET can reach pieces of her memory that she no longer can.

“Mama.”

That voice hauls her back to the yellow room with its curtains, with its small nut of a girl. Cardee doesn’t remember Lottie this way and the VET hums hard, as if trying to reconcile two different pieces of paperwork. The numbers don’t add up. Small Lottie waving goodbye in the driveway, Ross and Gamma at her side; this is the last image of Lottie the VET can give her. The Lottie who hasn’t outgrown the shoes that Cardee saw in the donation box as they came inside today. The Lottie who hasn’t yet flung herself off the swing at a friend’s dare.

“I’m here, baby.”

Always that: baby. Cardee clings to the word, the way she does to her daughter. She’s here, but she’s not. Part of her is still in those streets. The VET pulls up her most recent memory, running with it, because that’s what it does. Running—

Feet hit the ground hard as she and the fireteam seek another kid. There were two down here, two and—

Two kids emerge from the rubble, rifles cocked and drawn on the team. Cardee draws up, but doesn’t lower her rifle. These kids are taller, but still young. Eight, nine. Lottie’s age now, she thinks and something inside her turns over. This was not now, this was then, but something inside her hides its face.

“In-de-pen-dents?” one of the kids asks, drawing the word out into four hard syllables.

Bret strides forward, kicks up clouds of dust in the ruined street. “Co-a-li-tion,” he spits and the world erupts.

“Wrong answer!”

They don’t want to go, this band of kids, and they fight to stay. Cardee screams at Bret to back off, but it’s too late. She smells the blood, the gunpowder, and feels the sudden press of a knife against her side. Before her, the scene unfolds as it did before, the way she remembers, down to the taste of sweat on her lip. Only one of the kids gets away. Escapes to run and set a trap in the hardware store where nails— Where nails—

Memory stutters. Her mind goes blank.

“Mama?”

Cardee feels the touch of fingers on her face, pressing gentle and then with more insistence. She blinks and looks at the girl in her lap, but cannot recall her name. Does not know why she’s here. Bret would be here soon. Bret and Ginger and—

“Mama!”

But the only children she knows live in the streets. Rubble rats, sand kids, some used as weapons, others in need of rescue. This girl is whole and clean. A green bandage clings to her temple, but her feet are uninjured. Not bloody or cut and Cardee can’t process it. The girl pushes away. Those small feet thunder away.

“Da! Daaaaa!”

Cardee blinks, the room around her unfamiliar. She wanders, touching walls that should be made of ash. Why is there a ceiling and how can there be windows without cracks? Just when it seems the walls might crumble to ruin under her fingers, there’s another hand, this one drawing her own from the wall. Cardee whimpers because part of her wants to see these walls fall down. It’s what she knows, jagged lines against smoky sky.

There is mark upon one wall, where a frame used to rest. A frame that held a photograph, she thinks. Fingers trace this line, but there is no frame. Her eyes sweep the room and she’s moving past the man, rifling through drawers, careless with everything that isn’t the frame that belongs upon the wall. Careless until her fingers close around a bundle of letters. Handwritten, from far away places, they smell like ash and home both. Tears smudge the writing—before or after the sending and does it matter? Pushed to the back of the drawer, she thinks that is what matters. More letters and more and then at the bottom, the frame. The photograph.

It’s a face half familiar, dark and proud, and by her side there stands a man as pale as she is dark. That man, she thinks, looking up at him now, then back to the photograph. Behind them sprawls a lake and the shore is tangled with long grasses, willowed trees. Cardee lifts the frame and brings it to the wall, but there is no nail.

There were nails—

“Cardee. Beloved.” His hand covers hers.

“The team?” she asks.

He swallows hard. “Safe.”

A bright, striped flag across the length of a casket. The image is gone as quickly as it comes.

The man guides her toward the chair in the corner, with its quilt and tablet and cooling tea. “You’re home.”

Cardee shakes her head and a deep pain flares at her temple, burning down her spine. She presses the framed photograph into her lap. “Volatile,” she whispers. Explosive.

“Volatile Emotive Transistor,” he says, and there’s something in his eyes, something Cardee cannot name. His hand tightens on hers, shaking, and the line of a ring presses into her bones. His ring. His free hand lifts, to trace her temple where green lights have stilled.

Warmth and salt burn her eyes. “I should. . .” Her head comes up. Her attention narrows on the doorway. There should be a figure there and she should have her rifle, but there isn’t and she doesn’t. A tank needs kicking, she thinks, but doesn’t know why. She looks back to the man. “I don’t remember.”

He eases his hold on her, hand sliding down, around, so that palm presses to palm. Cardee’s breath hisses and fresh fire courses through her body. Old pathways blazing into new.

“Wood violets, wild roses, my black-eyed girls,” he says.

She smells the lake now and the willows brush her shoulders as they walk, hand in hand through the almost-cold grass underfoot. He offers her a tangle of violets and one of roses and then a braided ring, a ring that slides onto her finger as though it belongs. The way he slides it onto her finger now, warm from his own body.

“Palmers’ k-kiss is holy?”

There’s something else in his eyes now. Warmth and salt and everything he put away while she was gone. He smiles slow, and it’s like nothing Cardee has seen before. Nothing and yet everything she knows, and there comes the sound of small bare feet, thumping down the hall. Toward them. My black-eyed girls.

“Come from those streets, Cardee Findar. I will remember with you.”

About the Author

E. Catherine Tobler lives and writes in Colorado. Among others, her fiction has appeared in SciFiction, Fantasy Magazine, Realms of Fantasy, Talebones, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. She is an active member of SFWA and senior editor at Shimmer Magazine.

Energizing Futures: How SF Fuels Itself

Stephen Gaskell

Virtual worlds. Terraforming complexes. Star-spanning generation ships. Science fiction is chock-full of massive technological artifacts born of humankind’s desire to create, to explore. What do they all have in common? They all consume energy like black holes swallow stars. Computation, mechanization, acceleration. If the future’s getting faster, it’s certainly getting more energy intensive.

Even when SF is not envisioning these glittering futures, a growing Earth population living increasingly modern lifestyles means that our collective energy needs will inevitably rise, new technologies or not. One question that’s often not given much attention is: Where does this energy come from?

System Shock

Even after Kelvin and others developed the theory of thermodynamics in the mid-19th century, early works of SF paid little heed to the energetic considerations of their invented worlds. Although Copernicus and Newton had ushered in enlightenment thinking centuries earlier—and the heavens were no longer thought of as a Platonic realm of a different category of nature to that found on Earth—writers of this period struggled (or perhaps chose not) to engage with mechanical realities.

For example, the concept of escape velocity—the minimal speed an object must be projected to escape the gravitational attraction of the body on which it resides—was well known since Newton formulated his laws, but it did not filter into most writers’ thoughts. Locomotive means usually relied on mystical “will,” such as in Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker (1937), where the narrator travels the cosmos telepathically, or highly speculative technology, most notably antigravity devices. In Charles Curtis Dail’s Willmoth the Wanderer, or The Man from Saturn (1890), the alien protagonist traverses the solar system with the aid of an antigravity ointment smeared over his body, while in H. G. Wells’ First Men in the Moon (1901) the inventor Cavorite famously creates a gravity-screening substance by the same name.

Despite being scientifically unsound—no evidence for either gravitationally-repulsive matter or “mind over matter” ever having been found—both methods have remained popular for dodging the killjoy of physical law. Antigravity technology adorns the decks of most starships from the USS Enterprise to Battlestar Galactica, and mental gymnastics facilitate travel for everyone from Roger Zelazny’s Nine Princes of Amber to Neo of The Matrix.

One of the earliest fictionalizations of the seeds of a workable route off-world appeared in Achille Eyraud’s Voyage à Vénus (1865). Unlike Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, published in the same year, where astronauts were fired into space from a giant cannon, Eyraud had his adventurers lifted from the Earth by a water-based rocket propulsion system. Though he used the correct principle, if not the most efficient propellant, Eyraud’s novel went largely unnoticed, while Jules Verne’s became one of his world-famous masterpieces.

[An early vision of astronaut transport courtesy of Jules Verne.]

Despite Verne’s oversight on a cannon as a launching means, he carefully researched the scientific possibilities of the day, inventing many plausible technologies, and coming to understandings that were often remarkably prophetic. For example, he accurately described weightlessness in outer space, and inspired American submarine inventor Simon Lake with his tale Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Most importantly for the future of SF, Verne together with his fellow “Father of Science Fiction,” H. G. Wells, laid a framework for a new brand of SF where scientific truths, as much as they could, infused the fiction.

One of the chief consequences of this focus on scientific awareness, of course, was a renewed examination of how the myriad spacecraft, off-world bases, orbitals, etc. would be powered. Rather than expanding horizons, hard SF actually narrowed the wider genre’s remit, concentrating on places and journeys within our solar system. Here, writers could extrapolate from modern engineering principles, marrying this understanding with the knowledge of our increasingly well-charted interstellar backyard.

Arthur C. Clarke, arguably the greatest exponent of creating great sensawunda moments underpinned by scientific rationale, used the solar wind—the faint pressure of innumerable photons flung from the sun—to power solar yachts in his story “Sunjammer.” And in The Fountains of Paradise, Clarke describes the construction of a space elevator from Sri Lanka. Such an engineering feat, seriously considered by NASA among other groups, would make space exploration an energetically, and much more economically viable proposition. However, it is still reliant on the development of several technologies—including carbon nanotubes for the cable and electromagnetic propulsion for the transportation.

Perhaps tracking the optimism and successes of various space agencies, hard SF set in the local neighborhood probably attained its greatest popularity in the late ’80s and early ’90s, when Cold War paranoia was in its final throes. Classic texts such as Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy and Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix paint detailed pictures of how the solar system might be colonized. In Red Mars, the terraforming of the red planet is kick-started by “mohole” drilling to release subsurface heat; the detonation of nuclear explosions deep in the permafrost to release carbon-dioxide and other heat-trapping atmospheric gases; and the insertion of a geosynchronous asteroid to which a space elevator cable is tethered. These steps provide the foundation for the introduction of plant life in the sequel, Green Mars.

In Schismatrix Sterling posits a fragmented humanity, an Earth shattered from ecological collapse, and pockets of Shaper/Mechanist enclaves living in artificial habitats (often asteroids or small moons scooped of their interiors and spun to create artificial gravity). Energy is harvested in myriad ways utilizing biotech, solar collection, and nuclear fusion. Interestingly, although competition between the factions is intense, warfare is considered too horrifying to contemplate—not only because the memory of Earth’s demise is fresh in mind, but because the habitats are so fragile and easy to destroy. Space as an utterly hostile environment for human life is often overlooked in SF, a lesson not forgotten here.

Recent works—such as Duncan Jones’ film Moon, Jeff Carlson’s novella The Frozen Sky, and Joan Slonczewski’s novel The Highest Frontier—continue this tradition of scientifically informed, near-Earth exploration. In both Moon and The Frozen Sky, Jones and Carlson envision the off-world mining of fuels for nuclear fusion. In Moon, Helium-3 is harvested from the dark side of the moon to power an energy-spent Earth, and in The Frozen Sky, mecha-mine deuterium from the water ice of Europa to run a fusion “gas” station at the outer reaches of the solar system. In The Highest Frontier, by contrast, the cylindrical habitat of Frontera—orbiting above a climate-threatened Earth—draws power from an outer shell of photosynthetic microbes, piggybacking on research into hydrogen-producing bacteria.

[Not simply inspiration for Pink Floyd!]

Universal Power

Modern SF, of course, hasn’t only concerned itself with the exploration and colonization of places within our own solar system. Overlapping with the declining popularity of “space-race” SF through the latter part of the 20th century, new-wave space opera married the pulp adventures of the subgenre’s early days with extensive knowledge of the wider cosmos gleaned from astronomer’s increasingly powerful telescopes.

Seeing deeper and more up-close than ever before, writers such as Alistair Reynolds, Nancy Kress, Greg Egan, and Justina Robson have utilized the exotic playground of dark energy, pulsars, binary stars, exoplanets, nebulae, and black holes (among other phenomena) to depict human stories against the widest, most awe-inspiring backdrops. And the energy sources have often been equally spectacular.

Adam Roberts, in his first novel, Salt, begins with a 37-year starship journey powered by a captured comet: “Our comet, fuel and buffer, building speed slowly. Us, strung out along the cable behind, eleven little homes like seashells on a child’s necklace-string.” Not only does using a comet as fuel source remove the need to bring millions of tones of propellant up the energy-sapping gradient of the Earth’s gravitational well, but affixing it to the front of a starship also means the ship is ingeniously shielded from interstellar debris, which even in tiny clumps could be lethal when traveling at appreciable fractions of light speed.

But why take any fuel at all, when the interstellar medium is chock-full of ionized hydrogen anyhow? That was the astronomical fact that inspired an American physicist to conceive of the Bussard ramjet, a space drive powered by scooping up protons using powerful electromagnetic fields, fusing those protons in a fusion reactor, and using the exhaust like a conventional rocket. Despite both theoretical and technical challenges concerning the frictional force of the interstellar gas, insufficient cloud densities, and the difficulty of fusing hydrogen, Larry Niven immortalized the Bussard ramjet by using it as a staple in his Known Space universe, most notably as the engines of his eponymous Ringworld.

[Giant space jellyfish, er, Bussard ramjet, ahoy!]

If you really want a decent, innovative power source for your galactic civilization though, you’re going to want to move away from the relatively pedestrian concepts of combustion or fusion. Burning stuff has been old hat for millennia, and fusing nuclei for magnitudes longer, the domain of a trillion stars. Antimatter is one such candidate. With impeccable scientific credentials—theorized by Dirac and discovered by Andersen a mere four years later—antimatter packs a colossal energetic punch. Being the antithesis of normal matter in every regard except mass, any antiparticle can be combined with its particle sibling in an annihilation reaction that produces oodles of energy in accordance with Einstein’s famous mass-energy equivalence equation, E = mc2. Although Captain Kirk was exaggerating in the Star Trek episode “Obsession,” when he told an ensign that a pound of antimatter could destroy a solar system, the annihilation of fifteen pounds of antimatter is approximately equal to the energy that Hurricane Katrina unleashed in 2005.

As well as powering the warp core of the USS Enterprise, antimatter has a long history in the genre as an energy source. Back in 1942, Jack Williamson published his story “Collision Orbit” in Astounding Science Fiction, in which engineer Jim Drake struggles to exploit the energy of contraterrene (antimatter) asteroids. Most recently, antimatter can be found propelling the ISV Venture Star, the vessel that carried Jake Sully to Pandora in Avatar. What’s often not confronted in these stories is where this antimatter comes from. To this day, for reasons physicists still don’t fully understand, the universe seems almost entirely matter-dominant, with no sign of the vast gamma ray displays that would occur along the boundaries between matter and antimatter regions. And although antiparticles can be easily created and trapped in places like CERN, if you have to make the stuff in the first place, energy considerations render the idea a non-starter.

Making stuff up is, of course, meat and potatoes for SF writers. Dubious science (Asimov’s positronic brains, anyone?) has never been a barrier to speculative power sources, as Iain M. Banks readily admits in a passage in his famous essay “A Few Notes On the Culture”: “Between each universe [in Banks' Culture series] there is something called the Energy Grid (I said this was all fake); I have no idea what this is, but it’s what the Culture starships run on.”

Perhaps Banks’ Energy Grid is not as far-fetched as it initially sounds, given a patina of credibility by the concept of zero-point energy. ZPE, or vacuum energy, is the lowest possible energy state of a quantum mechanical system. It can be conceived as a vast reservoir of infinite energy sitting below the surface of reality. Doubts are high as to whether this energy can ever be used, but this hasn’t prevented ZPE making an appearance in plenty of SF. In the Halo universe, zero-point generators harvest energy from slipspace, while in Arthur C. Clarke’s Songs of Distant Earth, humanity’s last chance resides with the starship Magellan, which is powered by a quantum drive that taps the vacuum energy.

Another of nature’s most mystifying phenomena, black holes, have also been mooted as potential wells of vast amounts of energy. Mini-black holes as compact energy sources were featured in both Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, where the starships use them as drives, and John Varley’s The Ophiuchi Hotline, where prospectors hunt for ones that orbit the solar system. Unlike more massive black holes—which can be leveraged as energy sources via the emission of electromagnetic radiation from the infalling accretion disc, or through the theft of the holes’ angular momentum as in the Penrose process—reaping energy from miniature black holes utilizes a quantum-mechanical quirk that leads to the holes evaporating via Hawking radiation.

All this galactic back-and-forth probably gets a little tiring, and once a civilization has trekked around the cosmos, it’s probably going to want to take a rest and heat up from the warming fire of its destination star. This hasn’t escaped the attention of many SF writers. A whole cornucopia of Dyson spheres, bubbles, swarms, and shells have cloaked many a sun across the galaxy. In John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, an alien civilization use a sphere to power a planetary shield, while in Charles Stross’ Accelerando a swarm “of computronium forms a massive matrioshka brain around the sun, providing virtual space for trillions of uploaded human minds and corporate AI.”

The Stars Not Our Destination

Environmental destruction, the specter of peak oil, the increasing wealth gap, and a tarnishing of the dream to colonize space have led many of the latest crop of SF writers to abandon a vision of humankind’s expansion into the cosmos. Instead, they’ve been focusing on terrestrial concerns of resource scarcity, ecological collapse, and sustainability. Addressing these issues has led to energy sources playing a more prominent role in both the setting and the plot of many contemporary works.

In Paolo Bacigalupi’s post-oil-age novel The Windup Girl, megodonts— huge, gene-hacked animals seemingly related to the Indian Elephant—“tread slow circles around power spindles,” winding highly engineered kink-springs that can hold gigajoules of stored energy. Whether this makes energetic sense given energy wastage between the foodstuff to animal, and animal to spring steps, requires further analysis. But the presence of an energy storage device based on elastic potential is a rarity in literature.

An energy source not often given much stage-time—but which could become a critical component of the portfolio of renewables through the 21st century—featured in the recent Doctor Who episode “The Fires of Pompeii”. Geothermal energy, powered by the decay of radioactive materials in the heart of the planet, has its most spectacular manifestation in volcanic eruptions that spew lava far and wide, and in “The Fires of Pompeii” it’s aliens tapping Vesuvius for this energy that precipitates the Doctor’s involvement.

[Did Doctor Who cause the AD 79 eruption of Vesuvius?]

In Nancy Kress’ Beggars in Spain, energy is plentiful as society is powered by Y-energy, a form of cold fusion named after its pioneer, Kenzo Yagai, while in Lauren Beukes’ kinetic, urban dystopia Moxyland, one of the less narcissistic characters does up her home with “solar panels on the ceiling, a wind farm in the garden,” which suggests a world where energy generation is becoming an increasingly personal affair. Even more literary writers are getting in on the act. For example, the recent novel Solar by Ian McEwan is a black comedy about a morally bankrupt physicist who attempts to create artificial photosynthesis in an effort to stave off climate change.

Even when our best writers confront the very worst futures, envisaging dystopian societies borne of virus outbreaks, robot uprisings, solar catastrophes, or meddling with the fabric of space-time, the matter of fuelling up is never completely out of sight. Jeff Carlson begins Plague Year with the appetizing “They ate Jorgensen first,” while in Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse, Victor Gischler has indentured servants generating electricity by pedaling exercise bikes.

My personal favorite for vacuuming up the ergs at the end of the world, though, has to come from the pages of Frederik Pohl’s Gateway. In it, humanity subsists on vast vats of yeast grown underground from vile-smelling kerogen shales: “And the runoff heat from the extractors warms the culture sheds, and the oil grows its slime as it trickles through the shed, and the slime-skimmers scoop it off and dry it and press it . . . and we eat it, or some of it, for breakfast.” And remember, kids, if you’re ever caught up in an apocalypse, ants are a great source of protein!

About the Author

Stephen Gaskell is an author, games designer, and champion of science. In his recent novella, Strata, co-written with Bradley P. Beaulieu, he envisions Earth’s voracious appetite for energy being sated by vast solar-mining platforms circling the sun’s chromosphere. He runs the “science-behind-the-story” website Creepy Treehouse, and is currently finishing the first draft of a weird, ecological apocalypse thriller set in Lagos, Nigeria. He lives on England’s south coast with his partner, Eloise.

Neither the Billionaire nor the Tramp: Economics in Speculative Fiction

Jeremy L. C. Jones

I sat at a table full of professors and tried to explain the idea of world-building.

This was five years ago. Jeff VanderMeer and I (along with about a dozen others) were scrambling to put the final touches on Shared Worlds, a writing and world-building camp for teenagers at South Carolina’s Wofford College.

There was a math professor, an English professor, a few historians, and a mix of others from a mysterious world I think of as “The Sciences.”

I babbled on, trying to figure out how to bridge the “lingo” gap and get everyone to understand. (I mean, where do you begin to explain the notion to someone who doesn’t think about this stuff every day, all day?)

Of course, I didn’t really need to bridge anything. These people were smart, very smart, and they grasped the concept fast.

Then an Associate Professor of Accounting and Finance named Dr. Philip Swicegood spoke up.

“You should have a class on economics at Shared Worlds,” he said.

My first thought, I am ashamed to say, was, Eew! But I nodded, smiled, and waited.

“Economics!” Swicegood said. It was the way I might say, “Star Wars marathon!”

My expression, I’m sure, was somewhere between blank and horrified.

“Really,” he assured me, “economics. For instance, what does your character want, and what is he willing to do to get it?”

Swicegood would later explain, “Economics is about exchange and incentives.”

“Economic exchange and response to incentives can create a great angle for revealing motivation and clarifying values,” he said.

And later: “Realistic economic exchange implies that both parties think they are better off after the transaction.”

This went on for a while. I took notes.

Below, I speak with six speculative fiction writers about economics and speculative fiction. We discuss “sprawling cultural exchange,” markets, and other mechanisms of “arbitrating resource flows.” We talk about free will, personal sovereignty, and competing currencies. We talk about freedom of agency, personal integrity, and justice. We talk about Star Trek’s acutely capitalist Ferengi and “the diminishing marginal utility of money.”

And all of it comes back to fiction—character motivations, setting, and story.

Each of the six participants—Elizabeth Bear, N. K. Jemisin, Dani Kollin, Brian Francis Slattery, Charlie Stross, and John C. Wright—has a compelling interest in economics and does something interesting with the economies in his or her secondary world(s).

Elizabeth Bear is the author of The Jenny Casey Trilogy, The Promethean Age series, the Jacob’s Ladder Trilogy, The Edda of Burdens trilogy, The Iskryne series (co-written with Sarah Monette), and the New Amsterdam series. Her current series, which began with the novella Bone and Jewel Creatures and continued with the novel Range of Ghosts, “explore[s] the trade and economic situation of a vast, pre-modern empire.”

N. K. Jeminsin is the author of The Inheritance Trilogy and the forthcoming The Dreamblood duology. In the former, she’s created a Renaissance-level global economy; the latter takes place in a world where prosperity depends on fertile land, as well as “free healthcare and universal education.”

Along with his brother Eytan Kollin, Dani Kollin is the author The Unincorporated Man, The Unincorporated War, The Unincorporated Woman, and the forthcoming The Unincorporated Future, which is due August of 2012. With the Unincorporated series, the Kollins have created a world in “everyone cares about everyone else because it’s profitable to do so.”

Brian Francis Slattery is the author of Spaceman Blues, Liberation, and the recent Lost Everything. Slattery draws inspiration from the economies of poorer nations to create fictional, post-collapse worlds that resemble our own but that have been skewed sideways.

Charlie Stross has authored the Singularity Sky series, the Laundry Files, the Merchant Princes, and the Halting State series, as well as various collections and many standalone novels. “When writing fiction,” Stross says below, “work out what people value first—and what their role is in their society. The economics then emerge from the inter-personal relations, and enrich the background and characterization.”

John C. Wright is the author of The Golden Age, in which he has created “a libertarian near-utopia.” He is also the author of the Everness series, the Chronicles of Chaos, Null-A Continuum, and the recent Count to a Trillion.

How does the economy of your secondary world(s) work? What’s exchanged? What are the incentives?

Charlie Stross: Most of my fiction is set in worlds not greatly dissimilar from our own, at least economically. The media of exchange and the incentives are more or less identical to our own. In those that are more distantly related, I generally look at the underpinnings of economics from two angles: what’s in scarce supply, and what people want or need. Where you have supply and demand you either have a market, or some other mechanism for arbitrating resource flows. Even in those societies where material scarcity may be taken care of and everyone has enough food, housing, clothing, and starships to go round, there’s a scarcity angle to play: Human psychology tends to value being at the centre of attention, and so attention economies come into play.

Brian Francis Slattery: Rather than creating an entirely new world, I tend to take the world as I think I understand it and move it sideways. So the economic logic, I think, is pretty recognizable as our own, with much the same exchange systems and incentive structures. You know, money’s exchanged for goods and services, and when money fails, there’s barter. In my first book (Spaceman Blues), I didn’t even move the world all that far sideways: I didn’t want to play with New York City’s informal economy so much as find a working metaphor to depict it in an entertaining and hopefully also slightly informative way. Granted, I ran with that idea pretty far into the ludicrous, But I still think that one of the weirdest things about that book is how much of it is true.

N. K. Jemisin: In The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (The Inheritance Trilogy), the economy is global despite the world being at only Renaissance-level development or so. This is largely because magic is used to facilitate communication and travel, at least for certain goods or those with a certain amount of wealth and influence. The world is on a single currency, the meri—although this was done to make the economy easier for a single family (the Arameri) to control, not out of any particular economic interest.

Although the system is largely capitalistic, with the same incentives as any capitalist system—accumulation of wealth and power, avoidance of poverty—it’s by no means a free market. In fact it’s heavily regulated, in keeping with the world’s philosophical dedication to order; they believe an unregulated system invites chaos. And where conventional, legislative regulation fails, the Arameri are perfectly willing to use magic to manipulate the system. When wages fall too low, for example, the Arameri unleash a plague or two to reduce the population of workers. They also achieved all this by taking advantage of the apocalypse to reboot society to their liking, and periodically using magic to wipe out nations that disagreed with their economic policies.

Elizabeth Bear: One of my major interests in writing the Eternal Sky novels was to explore the trade and economic situation of a vast pre-modern empire. I think that modern people make two mistakes in thinking about travel in a medieval or Enlightenment-era society. We make it both too hard and too easy. The fact of the matter is that even in our own perfectly non-fantastic world, people did travel—and they mostly did it by walking, and they sometimes did it over vast distances. There were trade routes that stretched from Beijing to Stockholm, and Genghis Khan used Pony-Express-like tactics to get riders from one end of his empire to the other in under six weeks. There was trade, and cross-pollination, and exchange of ideas and goods along routes thousands of miles long. China’s famous porcelain was influenced by Indian and Arabic elements, and silk made its way west to the Atlantic. I’ve tried to reflect this sort of sprawling cultural exchange in the books in Range of Ghosts and its sequels. Nothing drives me crazier than worlds with no economies, where the technology and social structures never change. So I guess the question is, what’s not exchanged?

Brian Francis Slattery: In my second and third books (Liberation and Lost Everything), there was much more messing around with the economic system. In Liberation, the United States has suffered a very severe economic collapse. In Lost Everything, the ravages of war and climate change have made the U.S. economy as we know it pretty much moribund. But in depicting the effects of these things on people, and thinking about how people react, I turned to real examples in the present day—just in other parts of the world. In Liberation, the economic situation is based more or less on my understanding and experiences of life for the rural poor in Guatemala circa 2002, where things were very hard, but all around, I saw people constantly finding ingenious ways to get what they needed on the little they had. (Tragically, things there now are worse, and I am afraid for the people that I knew there.)

Dani Kollin: In the Unincorporated series what is exchanged are shares of people. The people work for credits. The more people earn the more the shareholders get. Everyone cares about everyone else because it’s profitable to do so¾a ruthlessly efficient incentive. In short, it’s a world where charity is profitable, materially profitable. If one were to take the Marxist doctrine of the labor exchange of value and put it on a transporter pad with Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand and then have a horrible accident in which the two were inadvertently mixed, you’d end up with the world of The Unincorporated Man.

N. K. Jemisin: In [the desert city-state of] Gujaareh (in the forthcoming Dreamblood duology), the economy is modeled on that of ancient Egypt, which gained much of its wealth from being the crossroads of trade for the ancient world. But within Gujaareh, prosperity rests on a few pillars: the first being the land, which is abundantly fertile thanks to the annual flooding of the river, and the second being free healthcare and universal education, which makes for a healthy, highly-skilled population that doesn’t lose much productivity to disease or short life-spans.

The healthcare and education are provided by the priesthood of Hananja, the goddess of dreams, in exchange for a moderate tithe from each citizen—including tithes of dreams (and sometimes lives), which are the source of magic in this world. But more magic is taken from the populace than is needed to keep it healthy. That leaves a surplus—and people being people, someone in Gujaareh is going to find a way to make money off this surplus, even though it’s essentially people’s souls. And just as the commoditization of faith has repeatedly torn apart the Catholic Church (and other religious institutions), it creates a huge problem in Gujaareh as well.

Brian Francis Slattery: Lost Everything is based more or less on my understanding of the Democratic Republic of the Congo during the Second Congo War (1998-2003). I didn’t experience any of it firsthand, which is why the word “understanding” is probably a vast exaggeration to describe what I think I’ve grasped about the DRC—but I learned as much as I could about it, through books and documentaries. Perhaps most harrowing was a movie called Kisangani Diary by Hubert Sauper (who also made Darwin’s Nightmare), about Rwandan refugees in the DRC during that time; it stands in my mind as a particularly unblinking account of human suffering that probably happens much more than those of us in the privileged world would like to think.

Charlie Stross: One novel I’m working on at present is a space opera, set in a universe with no faster than light travel. The one thing valuable enough to be worth trade across interstellar distances is the uploaded minds of people with specialized skills; and they have an entire currency system fine-tuned to handle incredibly slow interstellar exchanges, a form of digicash where transactions have to be digitally signed by banks separated by interstellar distances. Because, of course, if you’re selling goods that won’t arrive for decades, the last thing you want in return is a currency that is prone to bubbles and market crashes.

John C. Wright: Of my books, only The Golden Age, which was meant to depict a libertarian near-utopia (for libertarians, utopia is not an option) addressed any economic issues, and this because economics is at the core of libertarian thinking. Indeed, one is tempted to describe libertarianism as the attempt to apply free market principles to personal and political and other relationships outside the market.

The postulate of the Golden Oecumene was that all exchanges and interactions were voluntary, including the uses of technology that could rewrite a man’s own memory, personality, habits, and change his body and soul to suit himself. This was combined with a strict moral imperative of absolute personal sovereignty. No one could lay a finger on another man’s property, not one brain cell in his head, not one mote of his person or property, without his consent, no, not even to rescue him from self-destruction. This was your humble author’s attempt to carry a libertarian political principle to its logical extreme.

The society was also depicted as being immensely, unimaginably wealthy, as far above us in wealth as we Moderns of the Industrialized world are above even the wealthiest cattle owner of the Bronze Age. No matter how many tents and wives and head of cattle he had, the ancient shepherd-king could not afford an aspirin when his royal head ached.

In my book, the depiction was of a society that could accomplish nearly anything that was possible: ignite Jupiter to a second sun; put a greenhouse over Antarctica; take a vacation once every thousand years for a year, when all the world’s business stopped; tame the solar wind by building a structure of artificial energy-matter inside the photosphere of the sun. But since I wanted some realism in my unrealistic utopia, I enforced certain rules of economics which are built into the nature of reality, and which no social order, howsoever different from our own or enlightened above ours, can ever change: there will always be sacristy of resources. No matter how wealthy your society, there will always be tasks the imagination of man can conceive which has not the current resources to achieve.

There will always be conflict. In one scene, my protagonist Phaethon wants to re-engineer Saturn and abolish his distinctive rings. Since there is only one Saturn, certain machines who had filled up the interior volume of the core of that gas giant objected to the proposal, as did those for whom the glory of the ring system had a value beyond any economic value.

There will always be rich and poor. Even if the poor are unimaginably richer in utopia than the richest man of the modern day, equality of income is neither practical nor possible, since the nature of economic exchange presupposes an inequality of skills and goods, hence an inequality of the value your neighbors and customer will put on those skills and goods.

Whether the neighbor’s valuation is arbitrary or not is beside the point: I assume nearly anyone reading these words would be more eager to see a sequel of a new Star Wars movie than a movie made by an unknown? Even if the unknown movie was better, the brand name means something to most fans, because of the good will built up over decades, therefore the market, that is, the aggregate decisions of all the participants in their decisions to buy or refrain from buying, would value a new Star Wars sequel more highly than an unknown movie. Likewise, there will always be a need for market exchanges.

Again, even if all the members in a utopia are a rich as Croesus and King Midas combined, the less skilled of worker will find it to his advantage to do the work he does best and to specialize in it, even if, paradoxically, he lives alongside superhuman machines and artificial persons more skilled in all endeavors than he. A handyman who cleans a surgeons tools in two hours, which the surgeon, more skilled at tool-cleaning could clean in one hour, if the surgeon’s skill is worth $100 an hour, it will be worth it for him to hire any handyman who charges less than $50 an hour, not because he cannot clean the tools twice as well as the handyman, but because it is not worth the loss of his time that could be better spent doing what he is really good at.

In an extended society, this very inequality that promotes market exchanges creates an incentive for men to associate with each other beyond the range of their immediate emotional orbit of family and clan and friends. A civilization is possible. Without this, what you have is not civilization. No matter how technologically advanced you are, if you have no social relations, you are barbarians.

This is rather openly dramatized in the book by the portrayal of the Lords of the Silent Oecumene, whose society consists of a population of hermits who live surrounded by the super-intelligent machines which create for them their illusions of reality. At the core of their system is a black hole from which they can derive, in apparent contradiction of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, free energy in infinite amounts. But this situation eroded their need, and soon robbed them of the desire, to maintain civic social relations. Each man was a Lord, a lonely sovereign, almost a god—and, like the pagan gods of old, answerable to no one, needing nothing, and having no law or civilized customs. To answer, at long last, the question you asked: what did the utopian post-humans in the Golden Oecumene use for money?

Money in the real world is relatively stable in supply, keeps its value over time, is identifiable, hard to counterfeit or dilute, is always in demand, is fungible, and is divisible. Of all things in history, so far, gold and silver have best track record of satisfying these criteria. The artificial credit of nation-states has proved less successful, since it is vulnerable to inflation for political purposes. In the make believe world of the far future, I tried to pick a good that the happy folk of that day would always want and need, and could always identify. I said that they had three competing currencies: one was energy, measured by ergs; one was computer time, measured by seconds; and the last was gold. I mean, hey, they live in the far future, but it is allegedly our future they live in, so something of our customs and institutions would survive.

In sum, the economy there worked according to the same rules as the economy here. Economics is a science, after all, and a science fiction book, even if it is allowed to play fast and loose with speculation, is not supposed to violate any known laws of science. The laws of economics do not change any more than the laws of physics do. The same incentives were in place then as now.

What is the relationship between character and economy in fiction?

Dani Kollin: Tenuous at best. Think of Star Trek. The only economic characters that were dealt with in any detail were the Ferengi, portrayed mainly as the gnomes of Zurich. They were the slapstick race of the galaxy; good for a laugh but when things got serious you brought in the Klingons or the Borg. That’s because for most people economics is boring. This holds true in all fiction, not just the science variety. We all love to see the hero discover the mountain of gold. It’s fun and a great story. Has anyone ever written a compelling fictional narrative on what happened to the world economy when that found mountain of gold was introduced into international markets? Nope, and for good reason¾it would be pretty boring. You can explain an economic system as a backdrop and use it as a catalyst to move your story forward (as we did in The Unincorporated Man), but you’d better have a story to move forward or no matter how ingenious your economy, your audience will go home.

Elizabeth Bear: We have to work to eat, don’t we? And work is what gives our lives purpose—a calling, as it were. I think we get so divorced from the means of production in our modern society that we forget that for a half million years, creatures we would recognize as human have gotten by from day to day by growing things, hunting things, making things, harvesting things, gleaning things, trading things. Everything comes from somewhere: dinner does not materialize neatly in a plastic package under fluorescent lights at the supermarket.

Charlie Stross: I tend to use Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as a guide: We have basic needs that must be fulfilled in order to stay alive, and secondary needs in order to feel comfortable. So economic activities are always a necessary background detail of characterization. In roughly contemporary fiction, that usually means the protagonist has a salaried job (or equivalent), which puts constraints on their freedom of agency; used correctly it can be a very effective contrast medium for highlighting their personality.

Two signs of a somewhat lazy author: a protagonist who is independently wealthy, or one who is down-and-out and hasn’t got two cents to rub together. The former has freedom of agency, while the latter has no commitments and nothing to lose. Both of which are headaches the author now doesn’t have to worry about—neither the billionaire nor the tramp spend any time worrying about the boss phoning up at 9 p.m. on a Sunday to ask them to hold down a shift for a no-show on the Monday when they’re supposed to be having adventures! (See also the Bruce Wayne problem.)

Brian Francis Slattery: As I see it, for each character, the economy is a bit like the weather. It shapes the world they live in: Good weather presents opportunities to do things that are impossible in bad weather, and when really big storms come, initially the only thing to do is to try to survive it. After the storm passes, the characters’ individual worlds are changed, perhaps subtly, perhaps broadly—maybe, through some weird quirk, as much for the better as for the worse—and they must figure out how to do the best they can with what they have. So far, I’ve tended to write about what happens when things go bad generally—and this is revealing my own biases when I write novels—but at least in my case, I’ve tried to focus on people who survive, resist, and perhaps even overcome the hardships they face, because they’re hardy, clever, resourceful, or maybe just lucky.

Part of the pleasure in writing characters for me is in discovering how each individual reacts to the situation they face. I learn so much more about the characters, the kind of story I’m trying to tell, and the way the characters (as they often do) derail my original intentions. That said, I could very easily imagine a book about characters who can’t overcome the difficulties they face, and I can see how such a book could be really compelling. And I’m really interested in writing stories in which the economic environment changes a lot over time—where things are pretty volatile—to see what kinds of stories might emerge from that.

John C. Wright: In the utopian commonwealth of the far future depicted in The Golden Age, everything was for sale except for justice, honor, and personal integrity. It is the cost of not selling one’s personal integrity, however, which forms the point of the drama of the book. My hero was willing to give up everything, including his own memory, to keep it.

What is the value of the money in your world(s), and what can it be used to buy, etc.?

John C. Wright: In general, there is almost no relationship, unless you write a tale where the main point of the drama is an economic disaster like a depression or a strike. See Atlas Shrugged for a good example of how this can be done artfully and dramatically. Whether one agrees with the author’s theories or not, what Ayn Rand did in that book is instructive for any writer: She tied the moral code and hence the drama of the main characters into the economics of the events going on around her. In this way, the events were not about positive or negative cash flow (which is boring) but about good and evil (which is the most dramatic thing in the world, nay, the only dramatic thing).

Charlie Stross: It depends on the world in question. Sometimes it’ll buy you a better brain or a nicer lifestyle, or the chance to try and dig an entire nation out of a development trap. And sometimes all it buys you is a nicer seat on the train to the extermination camp, or a silk rope for the gallows. Money can only buy what’s for sale.

This raises the fun topic of the diminishing marginal utility of money; if I give you a $100 bill, it means less to you than it would were I to donate it to a homeless guy trying to live rough in a blizzard, and both of you would value it more than, say, Warren Buffett. Similarly, despite being a billionaire, Steve Jobs couldn’t buy a cure for his cancer at any price: It just didn’t exist. (He could afford to register for a liver transplant in three states, then keep an executive jet on 60-minute readiness for three months while waiting for a histocompatible organ to come up—but that pretty much exhausts the limits of what money can buy you by way of extra medical treatment, short of dropping a few tens of billions on cancer research ten years before you need it.)

Elizabeth Bear: The world of the Eternal Sky is not using fiat currency yet—it’s all hard currency and trade goods. And the control of the trade routes is a major driving force in the narrative. Trade is money, and money is armies, and armies are power—not to mention that trade is the ability to feed your people, and build aqueducts, and gain or maintain temporal power.

N. K. Jemisin: In the world of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms—a society whose guiding principle is order—money buys impunity from orderly rules and structures, up to a point. The movers and shakers in this world are exempt from all laws; in The Broken Kingdoms one character explains that the right to kill without consequence is the ultimate power claimed by those at the top of society.

Dani Kollin: Ours is a post-singularity world, so money can buy you trips around the solar system, perfect health for centuries, (rather cheaply too as everyone has a vested interest in keeping you working for centuries so they can milk you for earnings), huge houses with a robotized cleaning staff to keep it sparkling. Surprisingly enough the curse of rising standards still applies. Money can’t get you laid on a Friday night unless you are naturally good at that sort of thing, or can afford to pay for it. But remember, sex is a constant because it is a human need and remains a relatively consistent one. Money can’t buy you love (The Beatles were right in this regard). It can’t buy you friends, though it can buy you companions. Remember that money is both a lubricant of technological progress and the means to access the technology already produced, and does both at the exact same time.

N. K. Jemisin: Money [In The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms] also buys magic, which is technically restricted to those with the training to use it, though of course obtaining this training, or hiring those who possess it, is beyond the means of most people. But because magic has been commoditized, a thriving black market in illicit magic exists as well. The magic that poor people can buy is minor stuff—spells to heal chronic medical problems, occasional favors from local gods who are willing to sell their services, temporary conferrals of power sold by those gods as a magical narcotic. The wealthy can buy the sorts of “miracles” seen in our own technological world: the ability to travel across the planet swiftly, deadly long-distance firepower, instantaneous communication.

But the greatest power in this world—the greatest impunity—is priceless. This is possessed by the gods, who are exempt even from the laws of physics and nature. Since the Arameri have ownership of some gods’ slave labor at the beginning of the trilogy, they effectively control godlike power. This isn’t something that can be purchased; one must have the right combination of ethnicity, lineage, and luck.

Brian Francis Slattery: In the three books I’ve written, the best way to describe the value of money is variable or even volatile. Ever since I grasped the concept, the idea that money is a sort of convenient social fiction has never been too far from my mind—you know, because the paper notes are inherently worthless, and the value is really only in our minds—and I’ve gravitated toward stories where the characters are acutely aware of that fiction and thus only half buy into it.

I’ve once again taken my cues from my experiences in poorer countries, where, with multiple currencies and unstable exchange rates at play, the fiction about money’s worth is pretty shaky, and makes the value of everything much more negotiable than it is in a place like the United States. It can lead to some pretty horrific transactions: people willing to sell themselves, or even worse, being involuntarily sold, for what someone in the United States would pay for an air conditioner.

But the other side of that logic has people going about their day-to-day lives with, in some ways, more humor in it. If every transaction turns into haggling, the idea isn’t so much about parting fools from their cash as it is about arriving at an exchange that everyone’s reasonably happy with, which could mean a lot more social interaction at, say, the supermarket, than we in the United States are accustomed to. As someone who thinks more social interaction is generally a good thing, that particular aspect of haggling, of bargaining with mirth and with the intention of reaching agreement, is something I’ve really enjoyed whenever I’ve had a chance to do it, and I’ve tried to put as much of that into my books as I can.

N. K. Jemisin: In Gujaareh, money buys dreams and nightmares. But I can’t talk more about that ’til the duology comes out!

John C. Wright: Where economics might play a role is as backdrop. In a movie like Cindarella Man, the Great Depression shows the backdrop of the hero and lends drama to his prizefighting career, because he is boxing not for prize money but for milk money. When his child steals a salami from the butcher, it becomes a poignant, even triumphant, moment for the father to teach the child that hardship does not excuse wrongdoing—and a scene like that would lack drama had the child not been poor and hungry, and the father hungrier than the child. But, for all this, the Great Depression was a backdrop: the causes or cure of the Depression was never mentioned in the film, nor should it have been. Cindarella Man was melodrama, not SF, but the same rules of how to cobble a good story still apply.

Charlie Stross: In a science-fictional context, it’s the job of the designer of the secondary world to work out what items are available for sale, or unavailable at any price. Which in turn may have a big impact on your characters’ motivations.

Any parting words of encouragement, advice, or mischief for writers struggling with economics in their secondary worlds?

Brian Francis Slattery: Avoid ideology, which is not the same thing as avoiding politics.

Elizabeth Bear: Just remember that economics isn’t just some esoteric, high-level thing. It’s every lemonade stand and every ferryman and every wandering bard.

Charlie Stross: Don’t assume that capitalism is the only way to mediate exchanges of value. Even in the world today, by some estimates only around 25 percent of exchanges are mediated via the formal cash-based economy. The commonest economic unit around the world today is that bastion of Marxist communism, the family unit—within which everyone pools their assets and allocation is on the basis of need. It doesn’t scale up well, but between parents and children/siblings it generally works well. Again, there have been many gift-based societies, and others where status is determined by one’s ability to conspicuously destroy luxuries. Indeed, there’s a body of theory based on historical studies and sociology that suggests money was originally invented as internal tokens for accounting within Neolithic temple complexes, and predates barter (while the classical economic theory is that barter came first, and money was a formalization to permit exchanges of value between people with dissimilar goods to trade).

The way we do things in the developed western economies today is very weird by historical standards. So when writing fiction, work out what people value first — and what their role is in their society. The economics then emerge from the inter-personal relations, and enrich the background and characterization.

John C. Wright: One thing writers should avoid is this: writing about economics if you are an ignoramus. I read a book by an author whose name I won’t mention, and in an early chapter, as part of his future history, he depicts an economic catastrophe and the events leading to it. Because I was interested in economics, I was curious as to how this author would handle the economics involved. Because the author was a famous hard science fiction writer, known for doing his homework and getting his technical facts straight, I was not just curious, but eager to see him handle a science known to me.

The author proposed that a worldwide economic depression could be caused, not by government interference in the credit cycle, but by investors all over the world trading online turning their computers off at night so that one hemisphere was engaged in speculation while the other was not, creating a speculator’s bubble, which lead to a panic and a run on the banks. (This was written before the days of the Internet, you young whippersnappers, so the idea of a worldwide Wall Street connected electronically was shiny new SF speculation of the first water.) I can hardly suppress my groan of disappointment. A schoolboy with one semester of freshman economics could have set this author straight: Speculators do not cause a general depression of the prize of wages and goods. Only meddling with the money supply can do that, and speculators have no such power.

This hard SF writer, so well known for doing his homework, had the dog eat hit homework this time. The portrait of how economic concatenation works was about at the level of Karl Marx, which is to say, cargo-cult economics. Imagine reading a book where a rocketship is described as zooming up through the upper atmosphere to space and then finding itself helplessly adrift due to the fact that in space there is no air for the rockets to push against. The error of this writer was of that magnitude. If you are going to write economics into your SF, make it dramatic, and do your homework.

N. K. Jemisin: “Follow the money” is a political adage that I’ve found useful in world-building, because it helps me consider a society as a supply chain. I have to think about who’s on the receiving end of that supply chain; how and what systems work to transport wealth, concentrate it, and resist its loss to those who “aren’t supposed to” have it; and who/what is being exploited to provide it. Just thinking that through sets up most of your societal world-building right there. And one of the most useful things I did in coming up with the Dreamblood world was to study the economics of ancient societies. But it’s not the big stuff that reveals the economics, like monuments; what you really want to look at are the hair ornaments.

No, don’t look at me like that. Consider: Every human culture does stuff with its hair. So who makes the brushes? How does an ordinary person buy or make a comb, or a clip, or beads, or hair dye? How do they buy it, and how much does it cost—not just in resources but in time and labor? How can they afford the free time to do elaborate things with their hair, if they do? (Yeah, okay, so you might have a fantasy world full of bald people; I’m speaking figuratively, here. But if they’re bald, how do they get their scalp-polish?)

What I’m getting at is, economics are visible in the everyday. Nearly every major city has a museum that showcases art or artifacts that depict everyday life in various cultures—even the tiniest museums have that. So go look at the toothbrushes. Figure out how the clothes are made. What’s a luxury food, and what’s a staple, and how is either one obtained, and who gets to eat what? Looking at the little things did more to help me figure out the “big picture” than reading a dozen economic texts. But economic texts are helpful too. I really liked Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh’s Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor.

Dani Kollin: Don’t worry about it too much. Ours is very unique situation where economics was at the heart of the novel. Almost every other novel in the world will have [economics] at the periphery. If you have a great story and you don’t mess up the economics (to the point where it distracts), you can get away with being vague. Just deliver on the parts readers care about (sex, violence, love, betrayal, family, drama, humor, etc.) and they’ll forgive that you didn’t explain how ATMs work on a gas giant in the Andromeda Galaxy.

About the Author

Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and teacher. He is the Staff Interviewer for Clarkesworld Magazine and a frequent contributor to Kobold Quarterly and Booklifenow.com. He teaches at Wofford College and Montessori Academy in Spartanburg, SC. He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006. Jones lives in Upstate South Carolina with his wife, daughter, and flying poodle.

Another Word: Assimilation, Multiculturalism, and Me

Daniel Abraham

A few years ago, I was at a workshop with an author who I deeply admire and personally enjoy. We were talking about community, and what made up our community, and it became clear very quickly that we had completely different definitions of the word. She meant something like “people who mutually acknowledge themselves to be peers,” where I meant something closer to “whoever’s actually around.” By her definition, for instance, there aren’t any high school dropouts, drug dealers, or billionaires in my community. By my definition, of course, there are.

When I was young, my father read me a story about a man who stepped out of bed one morning and sank into the ground a little. Through the whole day, the man sank lower and lower until, at the end of the story, he was entirely underground. The last image was of him reaching up to touch the sole of his lover’s shoe as she stood waiting for him.

The story was by Enrique Anderson Imbert and wasn’t translated into English. My father was translating it to me as he read. Imbert became one of my favorite authors of weird stories—the one about the man who became so light that he had to be tied to his own bedpost until the line broke and he floated away; the one about the father who vanished in front of his family—even though, because of my ignorance of Spanish, I couldn’t read the stories for myself.

The stories were surreal and strange, and the recurring theme of disappearance had a sense of melancholy and threat that a kid like me fed on. When I started writing, Imbert was as important to me as Arthur C. Clarke or Robert Heinlein. It was years before I found out that Imbert was Argentinian and heard of the dirty war.

My parents read to me a lot and widely. John Bellairs and Lloyd Alexander and C. S. Lewis. I don’t think my parents took part in reading circles (does anyone actually have reading circles anymore?) out of poverty. It was just something they enjoyed, and because I was the kind of kid I was, I enjoyed them too. I remember walking about three or four blocks from our house to a friend’s. I can’t remember who the friend was or who was there, even though I still drive past the house almost every day when I’m taking my daughter to school.

But I do remember they were reading Maya Angelou. I was older than seven, younger than fourteen. I couldn’t put a year to this if you paid me. I remember a little bit of the floor plan of the house we were in. I don’t know who was reading, and I certainly don’t remember their voice or the words. I remember being Maya Angelou auditioning to be a dancer at a sleazy strip joint, not sure what to wear or what to dance to, intimidated by the sexuality of the other dancers, improvising to a song I hadn’t rehearsed to. I remember the sense of insecurity and humiliation and the profound relief bordering on gratitude of getting the job at the end. It was as heady and intoxicating for a preteen Anglo boy as anything I’d ever heard.

It’s three decades later. Before I wrote this essay, I went back to track that scene down. It’s short. Maybe two or three pages. It was exactly like I remembered it. I even remembered which song she danced to.

Not to speak ill of the dead, but after college, I worked at Borders Books and Music. Shelving books was part of the job, and there were four-digit codes that told us which section each of the books belonged in. The first digit showed the general section—art, for instance—and the next three narrowed it: single-artist coffee table book. Or psychology narrowed to self-help. Things that were generally related but not the same all got their own shelf space. In fiction, Literature got the lion’s share with the other categories—romance, horror, science fiction, African-American literature, mystery—all getting their own little stretches of shelf.

Now, be honest, did you have a little hiccup there? African-American literature had its own shelf space. I wasn’t shelving Maya Angelou up near James Agee or even Kobo Abe. She was over with Toni Morrison and W. E. B. DuBois in their own place, as if she were not part of my literature. It was the only place in the store that books were shelved according to the race of their authors.

When I talked to my manager about my discomfort with this, she told me that the company did it that way because black people wanted to have the section. They would come in and ask for it. Those were books (I took her to mean) that in the opinion of the corporation spoke to their experience, not ours. This was reinforced by the fact that the first digit of African-American Lit wasn’t the 6 of literature but the 3 of anthropology and sociology.

There are more stories like those. Seriously, I could go on all day. Jorge Amado’s Home is the Sailor with its hilariously intrusive narrator and my misunderstanding of the word “cunt.” The central place of Albert Manguel’s magical realist anthology Black Water in my early short stories. My introduction to bell hooks via Jane Campion’s The Piano. Octavia Butler, Mario Vargas Llosa, Italo Calvino. Red Sky at Morning. The Ways of White Folk. My reading was always omnivorous, and sometimes the stories were by and about people who weren’t like me. Sometimes they were important to me all the same.

The debate between multiculturalism and assimilation—between the salad bowl and the melting pot—hasn’t got a side that matches my experience.

As I understand it, assimilation calls for identifying with the dominant culture—teaching and speaking only English, Americanizing names, etc.—in order to build a common context everyone participates in. The good part of assimilation is the goal of a unified, shared culture, a kind of universal buy-in of mutual allegiance. The bad part is that it does it by trying to ignore, silence, and pretend away things that don’t fit with the picture of that culture. That strikes me as . . . well, wrong-headed is a polite word.

Living as I do in the only state in the union that’s bilingual by its constitution, I have a better opinion of multiculturalism, but not without reservation. The good part of multiculturalism is that it tries to acknowledge and celebrate things that aren’t usually included in the dominant narrative, and I’m comfortable with that. The consequence that doesn’t sit so well with me is that, in practice, we seem to divide traditions and voices into fiefdoms—African-American culture, Hispanic culture, white culture. When I say that seems wrong to me, I don’t mean morally wrong. I mean inaccurate. My experience is that as soon as two cultures touch, they mix.

One of my father’s hobbies is tracing cowboy slang back to Spanish: vamoose from vamonos, mosey from muevese. The tradition of rhyming poetry came into the Western world from Moorish Spain, and I hear it on my radio every day. On the Day of the Dead, my daughter and I went to my grandmother’s grave and left a picture of my kid and a pack of cigarettes on it. I didn’t go down to the south valley for the parade, but about half the people I know did. I went to a Japanese drumming performance once where the opening act was an Indian heavy metal band. My lived experience already draws from more than what “white” or “Anglo” supplies.

My family came from a highly religious Welsh community and moved to America, or, more plausibly, made up Welsh roots to hide Jewish ones. (Ira and Miriam Abraham, the Welsh Christian couple. Suuuure.) Other folks I know are in families that came to New Mexico before it was American; they spoke Spanish, hid menorahs in their basements, and pretended to have pork allergies. And there are people whose families came here in chains. And people who were living here when all these other folks showed up. And people who aren’t Americans at all, but publish books for American audiences. Or whose books found their way to a guy who could translate them on the fly while he was reading to his kid.

Maya Angelou and Enrique Anderson Imbert already a part of my literature, no matter where they get shelved. Likewise Toni Morrison, and Octavia Butler, and Eduardo Galeano, and Alberto Manguel. Their books are available, although some require some work to track down. I’ve read them. I’ve incorporated, rejected, and forgotten bits of all their work. My literature also includes Dorothy Sayers and Dorothy Dunnett, Robert Silverberg, Leigh Brackett, Albert Camus, Terry Brooks, Rumi, David Eddings, Cornell Woolrich, Orson Scott Card, and Dan Simmons. Hell, it includes The Turner Diaries, and I think that book’s evil.

My literary experience is broad and unfocused and it’s not a tenth of a percent of what’s out there. Some of it’s wonderful, some of it’s hateful, some of it’s kind of goofy. The books cover the whole range of sins and conflicts within and among people, and they talk about universal experiences that everyone shares. They walk me through experiences and perspectives I can’t get to any other way and make my life richer, deeper, and more interesting. My guess is they do the same for you.

I believe in a single, common literature too large for any one person to embody or experience. It’s a literature that has deep conflicts within it, where people’s experiences diverge and their descriptions of events can be mutually exclusive. By literature, I mean culture, and by culture, I mean society.

And by believe, I don’t mean aspire to; I mean it’s already like that, whether we acknowledge it or not.

About the Author

Daniel Abraham is a writer of genre fiction with a dozen books in print and over thirty published short stories. His work has been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Hugo Awards and has been awarded the International Horror Guild Award. He also writes as MLN Hanover and (with Ty Franck) as James S. A. Corey. He lives in the American Southwest.

Editor’s Desk: Clarkesworld by the Numbers

Neil Clarke

I’m a data junkie. Over the last five-plus years, I’ve collected a lot of data about all things Clarkesworld and some about the state of online fiction. This month, I thought I’d dig into that data and share some of the more interesting data and what they mean to me.

I’m going to start with something that says a lot about the history of Clarkesworld and perhaps even a little about the growing acceptance of online fiction since 2006:

The solid line in this chart indicates unique readers per issue and the dotted line is a cumulative six-month average that influences how I determine our monthly readership.

One of the first things I notice when I look at this graph are the spikes and how they become more pronounced over time. When we first launched in 2006, online fiction was still suffering from an image problem, the audience was much smaller, and there were very few SFWA-qualifying online magazines. None of those problems exist today. The spikes for those early years are small and reflect the lower potential audience of the time. This fits within the context of discussions I’ve had with other editors that were around at the time.

If the size of a spike can help you guage the changes in potential market, the frequency should demonstrate interest in what the magazine has to offer. It’s also a great visual indicator of the viral nature of the medium we’re working in. If you like something, you are more likely to share it. If someone shares something with you and you like it, you might just stick around and become a regular reader. In a sense, this is just good old-fashioned word-of-mouth marketing, but on steroids.

I do feel the need to comment here. When we select stories or articles, our goal is to pick great content. As far as we’re concerned, spikes happen when people think we met our goal. They are a side-effect, not the objective.

By now, you’re probably curious about what triggered some of those spikes, so here’s a few:

1. An editorial on the state of short fiction
2. “Spar” by Kij Johnson
3. “The Things” by Peter Watts
4. Hugo and Nebula Award nominations for Clarkesworld, “Spar” and “Non-Zero Probabilities” by N. K. Jemisin.
5. Hugo win for Best Semiprozine.
6. Several items, including a resurgence in activity for “The Things”, “Spar”, and various non-fiction. Also strong showings for the first part of the serialization of “Silently and Very Fast” by Catherynne M. Valente and “Tying Knots” by Ken Liu.

OUR READERS

We don’t know much about our readers, not even the ones that are subscribing to our Kindle or EPUB editions at Amazon and Weightless. (Ok, we do know you’re all really classy people who empower us to keep doing what we do!) However, web statistics give us a hint. For example:

70% of our readers are in the USA
20% of our readers are in the UK, Canada or Australia
10% read from a total of over 30 different countries, more than half of which aren’t English-speaking countries
35% use an Apple computer
15% use Windows XP
5% use some form of Unix/Linux
Our most widely read story is “The Things” by Peter Watts (240K+ readers)
Our most widely listened to story is also “The Things” (17K+ listeners)
Roughly 5-6K of you listen to our stories on our podcast

According to Facebook:

Obviously, this is more a profile of the 3500 people who are willing to follow us on Facebook (as opposed to the over 25K reading the magazine), but it does paint an interesting picture. This is something I’d love to have better data on, but in the end, it doesn’t influence us all that much though it might come in handy if someone decides they want to buy ad space from us.

SHORT STORIES

Since 2009, I’ve been using an online submission form to collect stories from authors interested in being published in our magazine. These stories make up what is known as the “slush pile” and I occasionally post slush pile statistics over on my blog. Here, I’m going to focus on the big picture.

The solid line is the number of stories submitted to Clarkesworld on a monthly basis. The dotted line is the number of rejection letters that go out in the same month. As you can see, we receive a lot more stories than we could ever publish. The two dips to zero were months we closed to submissions, typically Christmas break. The huge jump after the second reopening maps to a change in submission guidelines (allowing longer stories) and surge in readership and award nominations very close to spike #3 on the chart above.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

There isn’t a lot to be said about this. I have no way of knowing whether or not what we are seeing here is an accurate representation of the short fiction authors in the science fiction and fantasy field. This data is more interesting in comparison to the following:

Over the years, I’ve found it very interesting that the gender breakdown for accepted stories at any given period in our history is nearly evenly split, despite the wider disparity between the genders in the volume of submissions. I’ve seen all sorts of interesting interpretations of this data, but from my standpoint it simply says that when it comes to talent, neither gender has an upper hand. In the end, quantity loses to quality.

Now, let’s look at international submissions:

The top eleven are shown, with the Phillipines just missing the cut at number 12. They and ninety other countries represent that “other” wedge of the pie. I’m very pleased by the variety of countries represented, but the top four tend to dominate the stories we publish. In the last year, however, we have had the pleasure of publishing two Chinese translations. This is an aspect of the magazine that I hope to see expand over the next few years and a way data is influencing how I run things.

If you’ve made it this far, you can consider yourself a fellow data junkie. If you’d like to see more, or have any questions, please feel free to jump into the comments and ask away.

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, owner of Wyrm Publishing and a 2012 Hugo Nominee for Best Editor (short form). He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Clarkesworld Magazine

Issue 70

Table of Contents

Astrophilia

by Carrie Vaughn

The Switch

by Sarah Stanton

Iron Ladies, Iron Tigers

by Sunny Moraine

Life After Quatermass: Hammer Films' '60s Science Fiction

by Mark Cole

To Save Ourselves: A Conversation with Nancy Kress

by Jeremy L. C. Jones

Another Word: The Exceptional Smurfette, or Being One of the Guys as a Superpower

by Ekaterina Sedia

Launch Day

Art by Cristi Balanescu

© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2012
www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

Astrophilia

Carrie Vaughn

After five years of drought, the tiny, wool-producing household of Greentree was finished. First the pastures died off, then the sheep, and Stella and the others didn’t have any wool to process and couldn’t meet the household’s quota, small though it was with only five of them working at the end. The holding just couldn’t support a household and the regional committee couldn’t keep putting credits into it, hoping that rains would come. They might never come, or the next year might be a flood. No one could tell, and that was the problem, wasn’t it?

None of them argued when Az and Jude put in to dissolve Greentree. They could starve themselves to death with pride, but that would be a waste of resources. Stella was a good weaver, and ought to have a chance somewhere else. That was the first reason they gave for the decision.

Because they dissolved voluntarily, the committee found places for them in other households, ones not on the verge of collapse. However, Az put in a special request and found Stella’s new home herself. “I know the head of the place, Toma. He’ll take good care of you, but more than that his place is prosperous. Rich enough for children, even. You could earn a baby there, Stella.” Az’s wrinkled hands gripped Stella’s young ones in her own, and her eyes shone. Twenty-three years ago, Greentree had been prosperous enough to earn a baby: Stella. But those days were gone.

Stella began to have doubts. “Mama, I don’t want to leave you and everyone—”

“We’ll be fine. We’d have had to leave sooner or later, and this way we’ve got credits to take with us. Start new on a good footing, yes?”

“Yes, but—” She hesitated, because her fears were childish. “What if they don’t like me?”

Az shook her head. “Winter market I gave Toma the shawl you made. You should have seen him, Stella, his mouth dropped. He said Barnard Croft would take you on the spot, credits or no.”

But what if they don’t like me, Stella wanted to whine. She wasn’t worried about her weaving.

Az must have seen that she was about to cry. “Oh, dear, it’ll be all right. We’ll see each other at the markets, maybe more if there’s trading to be done. You’ll be happy, I know you will. Better things will come.”

Because Az seemed so pleased for her, Stella stayed quiet, and hoped.

In the spring, Stella traveled to Barnard Croft, three hundred miles on the Long Road from Greentree, in the hills near the coast.

Rain poured on the last day of the journey, so the waystation driver used a pair of horses to draw the wagon, instead of the truck. Stella offered to wait until the storm passed and the solar batteries charged up, but he had a schedule to keep, and insisted that the horses needed the exercise.

Stella sat under the awning on the front seat of the wagon, wrapped in a blanket against the chill, feeling sorry for the hulking draft animals in front of her. They were soaked, brown coats dripping as they clomped step by step on the muddy road. It might have been faster, waiting for the clouds to break, for the sun to emerge and let them use the truck. But the driver said they’d be waiting for days in these spring rains.

She traveled through an alien world, wet and green. Stella had never seen so much water in her whole life, all of it pouring from the sky. A quarter of this amount of rain a couple of hundred miles east would have saved Greentree.

The road curved into the next green valley, to Barnard Croft. The wide meadow and its surrounding, rolling hills were green, lush with grass. A handful of alpaca grazed along a stream that ran frothing from the hills opposite. The animals didn’t seem to mind the water, however matted and heavy their coats looked. There’d be some work, cleaning that mess for spinning. Actually, she looked forward to it. She wanted to make herself useful as soon as she could. To prove herself. If this didn’t work, if she didn’t fit in here and had to throw herself on the mercy of the regional committee to find some place prosperous enough to take her, that could use a decent weaver . . .no, this would work.

A half-a-dozen whitewashed cottages clustered together, along with sheds and shelters for animals, a couple of rabbit hutches, and squares of turned black soil with a barest sheen of green—garden plots and new growth. The largest cottage stood apart from the others. It had wide doors and many windows, shuttered now against the rain—the work house, she guessed. Under the shelter of the wide eaves sat wooden barrels for washing wool, and a pair of precious copper pots for dyeing. All comfortable, familiar sights.

The next largest cottage, near the garden plots, had a smoking chimney. Kitchen and common room, most likely. Which meant the others were sleeping quarters. She wondered which was hers, and who’d she’d be sharing with. A pair of windmills stood on the side of one hill; their trefoil blades were still.

At the top of the highest hill, across the meadow, was a small, unpainted shack. It couldn’t have held more than a person or two standing upright. This, she did not recognize. Maybe it was a curing shed, though it seemed an unlikely spot, exposed as it was to every passing storm.

A turn-off took them from the road to the cottages, and by the time the driver pulled up the horses, eased the wagon to a stop, and set the brakes, a pair of men wrapped in cloaks emerged from the work house to greet them. Stella thanked the driver and jumped to the ground. Her boots splashed, her long woolen skirt tangled around her legs, and the rain pressed the blanket close around her. She felt sodden and bedraggled, but she wouldn’t complain.

The elder of those who came to greet her was middle aged and worn, but he moved briskly and spread his arms wide. “Here she is! Didn’t know if you would make it in this weather.” This was Toma. Az’s friend, Stella reminded herself. Nothing to worry about.

“Horses’ll get through anything,” the driver said, moving to the back of the wagon to unload her luggage.

“Well then,” Toma said. “Let’s get you inside and dried off.”

“Thank you,” Stella managed. “I just have a couple of bags. And a loom. Az let me take Greentree’s loom.”

“Well then, that is a treasure. Good.”

The men clustered around the back of the wagon to help. The bags held her clothes, a few books and letters and trinkets. Her equipment: spindles and needles, carders, skeins of yarn, coils of roving. The loom took up most of the space—dismantled, legs and frames strapped together, mechanisms folded away in protective oilskin. It would take her most of a day to set up. She’d feel better when it was.

A third figure came running from the work house, shrouded by her wrap and hood like the others. The shape of her was female, young—maybe even Stella’s age. She wore dark trousers and a pale tunic, like the others.

She came straight to the driver. “Anything for me?”

“Package from Griffith?” the driver answered.

“Oh, yes!”

The driver dug under an oil cloth and brought out a leather document case, stuffed full. The woman came forward to take it, revealing her face, sandstone-burnished skin and bright brown eyes.

Toma scowled at her, but the woman didn’t seem to notice. She tucked the package under her arm and beamed like sunshine.

“At least be useful and take a bag,” Toma said to her.

Taking up a bag with a free hand, the woman flashed a smile at Stella, and turned to carry her load to the cottage.

Toma and other other man, Jorge, carried the loom to the work house. Hefting the rest of her luggage, Stella went to the main cottage, following the young woman at a distance. Behind her, the driver returned to his seat and got the horses moving again; their hooves splashed on the road.

Around dinner time, the clouds broke, belying the driver’s prediction. Some sky and a last bit of sunlight peeked through.

They ate what seemed to her eyes a magnificent feast—meat, eggs, preserved fruits and vegetables, fresh bread. At Greentree, they’d barely got through the winter on stores, and until this meal Stella hadn’t realized she’d been dimly hungry all the time, for weeks. Months. Greentree really had been dying.

The folk of the croft gathered around the hearth at night, just as they did back home at Greentree, just as folk did at dozens of households up and down the Long Road. She met everyone: Toma and Jorge, who’d helped with the loom. Elsta, Toma’s partner, who ran the kitchen and garden. Nik and Wendy, Jon and Faren. Peri had a baby, which showed just how well off Barnard was, to be able to support a baby as well as a refugee like Stella. The first thing Peri did was put the baby—Bette—in Stella’s arms, and Stella was stricken because she’d never held a wriggly baby before and was afraid of dropping her. But Peri arranged her arms just so and took the baby back after a few moments of cooing over them both. Stella had never thought of earning the right to have her implant removed, to have a baby—another mouth to feed at Greentree would have been a disaster.

Elsta was wearing the shawl Stella had made, the one Az had given Toma—her audition, really, to prove her worth. The shawl was an intricate weave made of finely spun merino. Stella had done everything—carded and spun the wool, dyed it the difficult smoky blue, and designed the pattern herself. Elsta didn’t have to wear it, the croft could have traded it for credits. Stella felt a small spark of pride. Wasn’t just charity that brought her here.

Stella had brought her work basket, but Elsta tsked at her. “You’ve had a long trip, so rest now. Plenty of time to work later.” So she sat on a blanket spread out on the floor and played with Bette.

Elsta picked apart a tangle of roving, preparing to draft into the spindle of her spinning wheel. Toma and Jorge had a folding table in front of them, and the tools to repair a set of hand carders. The others knit, crocheted, or mended. They no doubt made all their own clothing, from weaving the fabric to sewing, dark trousers, bright skirts, aprons, and tunics. Stella’s hands itched to work—she was in the middle of knitting a pair of very bright yellow socks from the remnants of yarn from a weaving. They’d be ugly but warm—and the right kind of ugly had a charm of its own. But Elsta was probably right, and the baby was fascinating. Bette had a set of wooden blocks that she banged into each other; occasionally, very seriously, she handed them to Stella. Then demanded them back. The process must have had a logic to it.

The young woman wasn’t with them. She’d skipped dinner as well. Stella was thinking of how to ask about her, when Elsta did it for her.

“Is Andi gone out to her study, then?”

Toma grumbled, “Of course she is.” The words bit.

Her study—the shack on the hill? Stella listened close, wishing the baby would stop banging her blocks so loudly.

“Toma—”

“She should be here.”

“She’s done her work, let her be. The night’s turned clear, you know how she gets.”

“She should listen to me.”

“The more you push, the angrier she’ll get. Leave her be, dearest.”

Elsta’s wheel turned and purred, Peri hummed as she knit, and Bette’s toys clacked. Toma frowned, never looking up from his work.

Her bags sat by one of the two beds in the smallest cottage, only half unpacked. The other bed, Andi’s, remained empty. Stella washed, brushed out her short blond hair, changed into her nightdress, and curled up under the covers. Andi still hadn’t returned.

The air smelled wrong, here. Wet, earthy, as if she could smell the grass growing outside the window. The shutters cracked open to let in a breeze. Stella was chilled; her nose wouldn’t stop running. The desert always smelled dusty, dry—even at night, the heat of the sun rose up from the ground. There, her nose itched with dust.

She couldn’t sleep. She kept waiting for Andi to come back.

Finally, she did. Stella started awake when the door opened with the smallest squeak—so she must have slept, at least a little. Cocooned under the covers, she clutched her pillow, blinking, uncertain for a moment where she was and what was happening. Everything felt wrong, but that was to be expected, so she lay still.

Andi didn’t seem to notice that she was awake. She hung up her cloak on a peg by the door, sat on her bed while she peeled off shoes and clothes, which she left lying on the chest at the foot of her bed, and crawled under the covers without seeming to notice—or care—that Stella was there. The woman moved quickly—nervously, even? But when she pulled the covers over her, she lay still, asleep in moments. Stella had a suspicion that she’d had practice, falling asleep quickly in the last hours before dawn, before she’d be expected to rise and work.

Stella supposed she would get a chance to finally talk to her new roommate soon enough, but she had no idea what she was going to say to her.

The next day, the clouds had more than broken. No sign of them remained, and the sun blazed clear as it ever had in the desert, but on a world that was wet, green, and growing. The faint sprouts in the garden plots seem to have exploded into full growth, leaves uncurling. The angora in the hutches pressed twitching noses to the wire mesh of their cages, as if they could squeeze out to play in the meadow. Every shutter and window in the croft was opened to let in the sun.

The work house was wide, clean, whitewashed inside and out. It smelled of lanolin, fiber and work. Lint floated in beams of sunlight. Two—now three—looms and a pair of spinning wheels sat facing each other, so the weavers and spinners could talk. Days would pass quickly here. The first passed quickly enough, and Stella finished it feeling tired and satisfied.

Andi had spent the day at the wash tubs outside, cleaning a batch of wool, preparing it to card and spin in the next week or so. She’d still been asleep when Stella got up that morning, but must have woken up soon after. They still hadn’t talked. Not even hello. They kept missing each other, being in different places. Continually out of rhythm, like a pattern that wove crooked because you hadn’t counted the threads right. The more time passed without them speaking, the harder Stella found it to think of anything to say. She wanted to ask, Are you avoiding me?

Stella had finished putting away her work and was headed for the common room, when she noticed Andi following the footpath away from the cottages, around the meadow and up the hill to the lonely shack. Her study, Elsta had called it. She walked at a steady pace, not quite running, but not lingering.

After waiting until she was far enough ahead that she was not likely to look over her shoulder, Stella followed.

The trail up the hill was a hike, and even walking slowly Stella was soon gasping for breath. But slowly and steadily she made progress. The path made a couple of switchbacks, and finally reached the crest of the hill and the tiny weathered shack planted there.

As she suspected, the view was worth the climb. The whole of Barnard Croft’s valley was visible, as well as the next one over. The neighboring croft’s cottages were pale specks, and a thread of smoke climbed from one. The hills were soft, rounded, cut through with clefts like the folds in a length of fabric. Trees along the creek gave texture to the picture. The Long Road was a gray track painted around the green rise. The sky above stretched on, and on, blue touched by a faint haze. If she squinted, she thought she could see a line of gray on the far western horizon—the ocean, and the breeze in that direction had a touch of salt and wild. From this perspective, the croft rested in a shallow bowl that sat on the top of the world. She wondered how long it would take to walk around the entire valley, and decided she would like to try some sunny day.

The shed seemed even smaller when she was standing next to it. Strangely, part of the roof was missing, folded back on hinges, letting in light. The walls were too high to see over, and the door was closed. Stella hesitated; she shouldn’t be here, she was invading. She had to share a room with this woman, she shouldn’t intrude. Then again—she had to share a room with this woman. She only wanted to talk. And if Andi didn’t like it, well . . .

Stella knocked on the door before she could change her mind. Three quick, woodpecker-like raps.

When the door swung out, she hopped back, managed not to fall over, and looked wide eyed to see Andi glaring at her.

Then the expression softened, falling away to blank confusion. “Oh. Hi.”

They stared at each other for a long moment. Andi leaned on the door, blocking the way; Stella still couldn’t see what was inside.

“May I come in?” she finally asked, because Andi hadn’t closed the door on her.

“Oh—sure.” The woman seemed to shake herself out of a daydream, and stepped back to open the door wide.

The bulk of the tiny room was taken up by a device mounted on a tripod as tall as she was. A metallic cylinder, wide as a bucket, pointed to the ceiling. A giant tin can almost, except the outer case was painted gray, and it had latches, dials, levers, all manner of protrusions connected to it. Stella moved around it, studying it, reminding herself not to touch, however much the object beckoned.

“It’s a telescope, isn’t it?” she asked, looking over to Andi. “An old one.”

A smile dawned on Andi’s face, lighting her mahogany eyes. “It is—twelve-inch reflector. Century or so old, probably. Pride and joy.” Her finger traced up the tripod, stroking it like it was a favorite pet.

Stella’s chest clenched at that smile, and she was glad now that she’d followed Andi here. She kept her voice calm. “Where’d you get it? You couldn’t have traded for it—”

“Oh no, you can’t trade for something like this. What would you trade for it?” Meaning how many bales of wool, or bolts of cloth, or live alpacas, or cans full of fish from the coast was something like this worth? You couldn’t put a price on it. Some people would just give it away, because it had no real use, no matter how rare it was. Andi continued, “It was Pan’s, who ran the household before Toma. He was one of the ones who helped build up the network with the observatories, after the big fall. Then he left it all to me. He’d have left it to Toma, but he wasn’t interested.” She shrugged, as if unable to explain.

“Then it actually works?”

“Oh yes.” That smile shone again, and Stella would stay and talk all night, to keep that smile lit up. “I mean, not now, we’ll have to wait until dark, assuming the weather stays clear. With the roof open it’s almost a real observatory. See how we’ve fixed the seams?” She pointed to the edges, where the roof met the walls. Besides the hinges and latches that closed the roof in place, the seams had oilskin weatherproofing, to keep rain from seeping through the cracks. The design was clever. The building, then, was shelter for the equipment. The telescope never moved—the bottom points of the tripod were anchored with bricks.

Beside the telescope there wasn’t much here: a tiny desk, a shelf filled with books, a bin holding a stack of papers, and a wooden box holding pencils. The leather pouch Andi had received yesterday was open, and packets of paper spread over the desk.

“Is that what you got in the mail?”

She bustled to the desk and shuffled through the pages. “Assignment from Griffith. It’s a whole new list of coordinates, now that summer’s almost here. The whole sky changes—what we see changes, at least—so I make observations and send the whole thing back.” The flush in her brown face deepened as she ducked away. “I know it doesn’t sound very interesting, we mostly just write down numbers and trade them back and forth—”
“Oh no,” Stella said, shaking her head to emphasize. “It’s interesting. Unusual—”

“And useless, Toma says.” The smile turned sad, and last night’s discussion became clear to Stella.

“Nothing’s useless,” Stella said. “It’s like you said—you can’t just throw something like this away.” This wasn’t like a household that couldn’t feed itself and had no choice but to break up.

Three sharp rings of a distant brass bell sounded across the valley. Stella looked out the door, confused.

“Elsta’s supper bell,” Andi explained. “She only uses it when we’ve all scattered.” She quickly straightened her papers, returned them to their pouch, and latched the roof back in place. Too late, Stella thought to help, reaching up to hold the panel of wood after Andi had already secured the last latch. Oh well. Maybe next time.

Stella got a better look at Andi as they walked back to the croft. She was rough in the way of wind and rain, her dark hair curly, pulled back by a scrap of gray yarn that was unraveling. The collar of her shirt was untied, and her woven jacket had slipped off a shoulder. Stella resisted an urge to pull it back up, and to brush the lock of hair that had fallen out of the tie behind her ear.

“So you’re really more of an astronomer than a weaver,” Stella said. She’d tried to sound encouraging, but Andi frowned.

“Drives Toma crazy,” Andi said. “If there was a household of astronomers, I’d join. But astronomy doesn’t feed anyone, does it? Well, some of it does—meteorology, climatology, solar astronomy, maybe. But not what we’re doing. We don’t earn anyone a baby.”

“What are you doing?”

“Astronomical observation. As much as we can, though it feels like reinventing the wheel sometimes. We’re not learning anything that people didn’t already know back in the day. We’re just—well, it feels like filling in the gaps until we get back to where we were. Tracking asteroids, marking supernovae, that sort of thing. Maybe we can’t do much with the data. But it might be useful someday.”

“There, you see—it’s planning ahead. There’s use in that.”

She sighed. “The committees mostly think it’s a waste of time. They can’t really complain, though, because we—those of us in the network—do our share and work extra to support the observatories. A bunch of us designate ration credits toward Griffith and Kitt Peak and Wilson—they’ve got the region’s big scopes—to keep staff there maintaining the equipment, to keep the solar power and windmills running. Toma always complains, says if I put my extra credits toward the household we could have a second baby. He says it could even be mine. But they’re my credits, and this is important. I earn the time I spend with the scope, and he can’t argue.” She said that as a declaration, then looked straight at Stella, who blushed. “They may have brought you here to make up for me.”

Stella didn’t know what to say to that. She was too grateful to have a place at all, to consider that she may have been wanted.

Awkwardly, Andi covered up the silence. “Well. I hope you like it here. That you don’t get too homesick, I mean.”

The words felt like a warm blanket, soft and wooly. “Thanks.”

“We can be kind of rowdy sometimes. Bette gets colicky, and you haven’t heard Wendy sing yet. Then there’s Jorge and Jon—they share a bed as well as a cottage, see, and can get pretty loud, though if you tease them about it they’ll deny it.”

“I don’t mind rowdy. But I did almost expect to find a clandestine still in that shed.”

Andi laughed. “I think Toma’d like a still better, because at least you can drink from it. Elsta does make a really good cider, though. If she ever put enough together to trade it would make up for all the credits I waste on the observatories.”

As they came off the hill and approached the cluster of cottages, Andi asked, “Did you know that Stella means star in Latin?”

“Yes, I did,” she answered.

Work was work no matter where you were, and Stella settled into her work quickly. The folk of Barnard were nice, and Andi was easy to talk to. And cute. Stella found excuses to be in the same room with her, just to see that smile. She hadn’t expected this, coming to a new household. But she didn’t mind, not at all.

Many households along the Long Road kept sheep, but the folk at Barnard did most of the spinning and weaving for trade. All the wool came to them. Barnard also produced a small quantity of specialty fibers from the alpaca and angora rabbits they kept. They were known for the quality of all their work, the smoothness of their yarns, the evenness of their weaving. Their work was sought after not just along the Long Road, but up and down the coast.

Everyone spun, wove, and dyed. Everyone knew every step of working with wool. They either came here because they knew, or because they’d grown up here learning the trade, like Toma and Nik, like Bette would in her turn. As Andi had, as Stella found out. Andi was the baby that Toma and Elsta had earned together.

Stella and Andi were at the looms, talking as they worked. The spring rains seem to have broken for good, and everyone else had taken their work outside. Wendy sat in the fresh air with her spinning wheel. A new batch of wool had arrived, and Toma and Jorge worked cleaning it. So Stella had a chance to ask questions in private.

“Could you get a place at one of the observatories? How does that work?”

Andi shook her head. “It wouldn’t work out. There’s three people at Kitt and two each at Griffith and Wilson, and they pick their successors. I’m better use to them here, working to send them credits.”

“And you have your telescope, I suppose.”

“The astronomers love my telescope,” she said. “They call my setup Barnard Observatory, as if it’s actually important. Isn’t it silly?”

“Of course it isn’t.”

Andi’s hands flashed, passing the shuttle across. She glanced up every now and then. Stella, for her part, let her hands move by habit, and watched Andi more than her own work. Outside, Wendy sang as she spun, in rhythm with the clipping hum of her wheel. Her voice was light, dream-like.

The next time Andi glanced up, she exclaimed, “How do you do that? You’re not even watching and it’s coming out beautiful.”

Stella blinked at her work—not much to judge by, she thought. A foot or two of fabric curling over the breast beam, only just starting to wind onto the cloth beam. “I don’t know. It’s what I’m good at. Like you and the telescope.”

“Nice of you to say so. But here, look at this—I’ve missed a row.” She sat back and started unpicking the last five minutes of her work. “I go too fast. My mind wanders.”

“It happens to everyone,” Stella said.

“Not you. I saw that shawl you did for Elsta.”

“I’ve just gotten good at covering up the mistakes,” Stella said, winking.

A week after her arrival, an agent from the regional committee came to visit. A stout, gray-haired, cheerful woman, she was the doctor who made regular rounds up and down the Long Road. She was scheduled to give Bette a round of vaccinations, but Stella suspected the woman was going to be checking on her as well, to make sure she was settling in and hadn’t disrupted the household too much.

The doctor, Nance, sat with Bette on the floor, and the baby immediately started crying. Peri hovered, but Nance just smiled and cooed while lifting the baby’s arms and checking her ears, not seeming at all bothered.

“How is the world treating you then, Toma?” Nance turned to Toma, who was sitting in his usual chair by the fire.

His brow was creased with worry, though there didn’t seem to be anything wrong. “Fine, fine,” he said brusquely.

Nance turned. “And Stella, are you doing well?”

“Yes, thank you,” Stella said. She was winding yarn around Andi’s outstretched hands, to make a skein. This didn’t feel much like an inspection, but that only made her more nervous.

“Very good. My, you’re a wiggler, aren’t you?” Bette’s crying had finally subsided to red-faced sniffling, but she continued to fling herself from Nance’s arms in an attempt to escape. After a round with a stethoscope, Nance let her go, and the baby crawled away, back to Peri.

The doctor turned her full attention to Toma. “The committee wants to order more banners, they expect to award quite a few this summer. Will you have some ready?”

Toma seemed startled. “Really? Are they sure?”

Barnard supplied the red-and-green patterned cloth used to make the banners awarded to households who’d been approved to have a baby. One of the things Nance had asked about when she first arrived was if anyone had tried bribing him for a length of the cloth over the last year. One of the reasons Barnard had the task of producing the banners—they were prosperous enough not to be vulnerable to bribes. Such attempts happened rarely, but did happen. Households had been broken up over such crimes.

The banner the household had earned for Bette was pinned proudly to the wall above the mantel.

Nance shrugged. “The region’s been stable for a couple of years. No quota arguments, most households supporting themselves, just enough surplus to get by without draining resources. We’re a healthy region, Toma. If we can support more children, we ought to. And you—with all these healthy young women you have, you might think of putting in for another baby.” The doctor beamed.

Stella and Andi looked at each other and blushed. Another baby so soon after the first? Scandalous.

Nance gathered up her kit. “Before I go, let me check all your birth control implants so we don’t have any mishaps, eh?”

She started with Elsta and Toma and worked her way around the room.

“Not that I could have a mishap,” Andi muttered to Stella. “They ought to make exceptions for someone like me who isn’t likely to get in that kind of trouble. Because of her preferences, you know?”

“I know,” Stella said, blushing very hard now. “I’ve had that thought myself.”

They stared at each other for a very long moment. Stella’s mouth had suddenly gone dry. She wanted to flee the room and stick her head in a bucket of cool water. Then again, she didn’t.

When Nance came to her side to prod her arm, checking that the implant was in place, Stella hardly felt it.

“Looks like you’re good and covered,” Nance said. “For now, ‘eh? Until you get that extra banner.” She winked.

The doctor stayed for supper and still had enough daylight left to walk to the next waystation along the road. Elsta wrapped up a snack of fruit and cheese for her to take with her, and Nance thanked her very much. As soon as she was gone, Toma muttered.

“Too many mouths to feed—and what happens when the next flood hits? The next typhoon? We lose everything and then there isn’t enough? We have enough as it is, more than enough. Wanting more, it’s asking for trouble. Getting greedy is what brought the disasters in the first place. It’s too much.”

Everyone stayed quiet, letting him rant. This felt to Stella like an old argument, words repeated like the chorus of a song. Toma’s philosophy, expounded by habit. He didn’t need a response.

Stella finished winding the skein of yarn and quietly excused herself, putting her things away and saying goodnight to everyone.

Andi followed her out of the cottage soon after, and they walked together to their room.

“So, do you want one?” Stella asked her.

“A baby? I suppose I do. Someday. I mean, I assumed as well off as Barnard is I could have one if I wanted one. It’s a little odd, thinking about who I’d pick for the father. That’s the part I’m not sure about. What about you?”

Besides being secretly, massively pleased that Andi hadn’t thought much about fathers . . . “I assumed I’d never get the chance. I don’t think I’d miss it if I didn’t.”

“Enough other people who want ‘em, right?”

“Something like that.”

They reached their room, changed into their nightclothes, washed up for bed. Ended up sitting on their beds, facing each other and talking. That first uncomfortable night seemed far away now.

“Toma doesn’t seem to like the idea of another baby,” Stella prompted.

“Terrified, I think,” she said. “Wanting too much gets people in trouble.”

“But it only seems natural, to want as much as you can have.”

Andi shook her head. “His grandparents remembered the old days. He heard stories from them about the disasters. All the people who died in the floods and plagues. He’s that close to it—might as well have lived through it himself. He thinks we’ll lose it all, that another great disaster will fall on us and destroy everything. It’s part of why he hates my telescope so much. It’s a sign of the old days when everything went rotten. But it won’t happen, doesn’t he see that?”

Stella shrugged. “Those days aren’t so far gone, really. Look at what happened to Greentree.”

“Oh—Stella, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that there’s not anything to it, just that . . .” She shrugged, unable to finish the thought.

“It can’t happen here. I know.”

Andi’s black hair fell around her face, framing her pensive expression. She stared into space. “I just wish he could see how good things are. We’ve earned a little extra, haven’t we?”

Unexpected even to herself, Stella burst, “Can I kiss you?”

In half a heartbeat Andi fell at her, holding Stella’s arms, and Stella clung back, and either her arms were hot or Andi’s hands were, and they met, lips to lips.

One evening, Andi escaped the gathering in the common room, and brought Stella with her. They left as the sun had almost set, leaving just enough light to follow the path to the observatory. They took candles inside shaded lanterns for the trip back to their cottage. At dusk, the windmills were ghostly skeletons lurking on the hillside.

They waited for full dark, talking while Andi looked over her paperwork and prepared her notes. Andi asked about Greentree, and Stella explained that the aquifers had dried up in the drought. Households remained in the region because they’d always been there. Some survived, but they weren’t particularly successful. She told Andi how the green of the valleys near the coast had almost blinded her when she first arrived, and how all the rain had seemed like a miracle.

Then it was time to unlatch the roof panels and look at the sky.

“Don’t squint, just relax. Let the image come into focus,” Andi said, bending close to give directions to Stella, who was peering through the scope’s eyepiece. Truth be told, Stella was more aware of Andi’s hand resting lightly on her shoulder. She shifted closer.

“You should be able to see it,” Andi said, straightening to look at the sky.

“Okay . . .I think . . .oh! Is that it?” A disk had come into view, a pale, glowing light striped with orange, yellow, cream. Like someone had covered a very distant moon with melted butter.

“Jupiter,” Andi said proudly.

“But it’s just a star.”

“Not up close it isn’t.”

Not a disk, then, but a sphere. Another planet. “Amazing.”

“Isn’t it? You ought to be able to see some of the moons as well—a couple of bright stars on either side?”

“I think . . .yes, there they are.”

After an hour, Stella began shivering in the nighttime cold, and Andi put her arms around her, rubbing warmth into her back. In moments, they were kissing, and stumbled together to the desk by the shack’s wall, where Andi pushed her back across the surface and made love to her. Jupiter had swung out of view by the time they closed up the roof and stumbled off the hill.

Another round of storms came, shrouding the nighttime sky, and they spent the evenings around the hearth with the others. Some of the light went out of Andi on those nights. She sat on a chair with a basket of mending at her feet, darning socks and shirts, head bent over her work. Lamplight turned her skin amber and made her hair shine like obsidian. But she didn’t talk. That may have been because Elsta and Toma talked over everyone, or Peri exclaimed over something the baby did, then everyone had to admire Bette.

The day the latest round of rain broke and the heat of summer finally settled over the valley, Andi got another package from Griffith, and that light of discovery came back to her. Tonight, they’d rush off to the observatory after supper.

Stella almost missed the cue to escape, helping Elsta with the dishes. When she was finished and drying her hands, Andi was at the door. Stella rushed in behind her. Then Toma brought out a basket, one of the ones as big as an embrace that they used to store just-washed wool in, and set it by Andi’s chair before the hearth. “Andi, get back here.”

Her hand was on the door, one foot over the threshold, and Stella thought she might keep going, pretending that she hadn’t heard. But her hand clenched on the door frame, and she turned around.

“We’ve got to get all this new wool processed, so you’ll stay in tonight to help.”

“I can do that tomorrow. I’ll work double tomorrow—”

“Now, Andi.”

Stella stepped forward, hands reaching for the basket. “Toma, I can do that.”

“No, you’re doing plenty already. Andi needs to do it.”

“I’ll be done with the mending in a minute and can finish that in no time at all. Really, it’s all right.”

He looked past her, to Andi. “You know the rules—household business first.”

“The household business is done. This is makework!” she said. Toma held the basket out in reproof.

Stella tried again. “But I like carding.” It sounded lame—no one liked carding.

But Andi had surrendered, coming away from the door, shuffling toward her chair. “Stella, it’s all right. Not your argument.”

“But—” The pleading in her gaze felt naked. She wanted to help, how could she help?

Andi slumped in the chair without looking up. All Stella could do was sit in her own chair, with her knitting. She jabbed herself with the needle three times, from glancing up at Andi every other stitch.

Toma sat before his workbench, looking pleased for nearly the first time since Stella had met him.

Well after dark, Stella lay in her bed, stomach in knots. Andi was in the other bed and hadn’t said a word all evening.

“Andi? Are you all right?” she whispered. She stared across the room, to the slope of the other woman, mounded her under blanket. The lump didn’t move, but didn’t look relaxed in sleep. But if she didn’t want to talk, Stella wouldn’t force her.

“I’m okay,” Andi sighed, finally.

“Anything I can do?”

Another long pause, and Stella was sure she’d said too much. Then, “You’re a good person, Stella. Anyone ever told you that?”

Stella crawled out from under her covers, crossed to Andi’s bed, climbed in with her. Andi pulled the covers up over them both, and the women held each other.

Toma sent Andi on an errand, delivering a set of blankets to the next waystation and picking up messages to bring back. More makework. The task could just have as easily been done by the next wagon messenger to pass by. Andi told him as much, standing outside the work house the next morning.

“Why wait when we can get the job done now?” Toma answered, hefting the backpack, stuffed to bursting with newly woven woolens, toward her.

Stella was at her loom, and her hand on the shuttle paused as she listened. But Andi didn’t say anything else. Only glared at Toma a good long minute before taking up the pack. She’d be gone most of the day, hiking there and back.

Which was the point, wasn’t it?

Stella contrived to find jobs that kept Toma in sight, sorting and carding wool outside where he was working repairing a fence, when she should have been weaving. So she saw when Toma studied the hammer in his hand, looked up the hill, and started walking the path to Andi’s observatory.

Stella dropped the basket of wool she was holding and ran.

He was merely walking. Stella overtook him easily, at first. But after fifty yards of running, she slowed, clutching at a stitch in her side. Gasping for breath with burning lungs, she kept on, step after step, hauling herself up the hill, desperate to get there first.

“Stella, go back, don’t get in the middle of this.”

Even if she could catch enough of her breath to speak, she didn’t know what she would say. He lengthened his stride, gaining on her. She got to the shed a bare few steps before him.

The door didn’t have a lock; it had never needed one. Stella pressed herself across it and faced out, to Toma, marching closer. At least she had something to lean on for the moment.

“Move aside, Stella. She’s got to grow up and get on with what’s important,” Toma said.

“This is important.”

He stopped, studied her. He gripped the handle of the hammer like it was a weapon. Her heart thudded. How angry was he?

Toma considered, then said, “Stella. You’re here because I wanted to do Az a favor. I can change my mind. I can send a message to Nance and the committee that it just isn’t working out. I can do that.”

Panic brought sudden tears to her eyes. He wouldn’t dare, he couldn’t, she’d proven herself already in just a few weeks, hadn’t she? The committee wouldn’t believe him, couldn’t listen to him. But she couldn’t be sure of that, could she?

Best thing to do would be to step aside. He was head of the household, it was his call. She ought to do as he said, because her place here wasn’t secure. A month ago that might not have mattered, but now—she wanted to stay, she had to stay.

And if she stepped aside, leaving Toma free to enter the shed, what would she tell Andi afterward?

She swallowed the lump in her throat and found words. “I know disaster can still happen. I know the droughts and storms and plagues do still come and can take away everything. Better than anyone, I know. But we have to start building again sometime, yes? People like Andi have to start building, and we have to let them, even if it seems useless to the rest of us. Because it isn’t useless, it—it’s beautiful.”

He stared at her for a long time. She thought maybe he was considering how to wrestle her away from the door. He was bigger than she was, and she wasn’t strong. It wouldn’t take much. But she’d fight.

“You’re infatuated, that’s all,” he said.

Maybe, not that it mattered.

Then he said, “You’re not going to move away, are you?”

Shaking her head, Stella flattened herself more firmly against the door.

Toma’s grip on the hammer loosened, just a bit. “My grandparents—has Andi told you about my grandparents? They were children when the big fall came. They remembered what it was like. Mostly they talked about what they’d lost, all the things they had and didn’t now. And I thought, all those things they missed, that they wanted back—that was what caused the fall in the first place, wasn’t it? We don’t need it, any of it.”

“Andi needs it. And it’s not hurting anything.” What else could she say, she had to say something that would make it all right. “Better things will come, or what’s the point?”

A weird crooked smile turned Toma’s lips, and he shifted his grip on the hammer. Holding it by the head now, he let it dangle by his leg. “God, what a world,” he muttered. Stella still couldn’t tell if he was going to force her away from the door. She held her breath.

Toma said, “Don’t tell Andi about this. All right?”

She nodded. “All right.”

Toma turned and started down the trail, a calm and steady pace. Like a man who’d just gone out for a walk.

Stella slid to the ground and sat on the grass by the wall until the old man was out of sight. Finally, after scrubbing the tears from her face, she followed him down, returning to the cottages and her work.

Andi was home in time for supper, and the household ate together as usual. The woman was quiet and kept making quick glances at Toma, who avoided looking back at all. It was like she knew Toma had had a plan. Stella couldn’t say anything until they were alone.

The night was clear, the moon was dark. Stella’d learned enough from Andi to know it was a good night for stargazing. As they were cleaning up after the meal, she touched Andi’s hand. “Let’s go to the observatory.”

Andi glanced at Toma, and her lips pressed together, grim. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“I think it’ll be okay.”

Andi clearly didn’t believe her, so Stella took her hand, and together they walked out of the cottage, then across the yard, past the work house, and to the trail that led up the hill to the observatory.

And it was all right.

About the Author

Carrie Vaughn is the bestselling author of a series of novels about a werewolf named Kitty who hosts a talk radio advice show for the supernaturally disadvantaged. The tenth novel in the series, Kitty Steals the Show, is due out in 2012. She's also written novels for young adults (Voices of Dragons, Steel), two stand-alone novels (Discord's Apple, After the Golden Age), and more than fifty short stories. She's been nominated for the Hugo Award for best short story, and is a graduate of the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop. After living the nomadic childhood of a typical Air Force brat, she's managed to put down roots in Colorado, where she lives with her fluffy attack dog and too many hobbies.

The Switch

Sarah Stanton

It starts out like this: halfway up a ladder looking at the stars. Xiao Zhu is behind me with the paint pots, whistling something tuneless to himself. I’ve got a brush in my hand and a delicate tracework of flowers in front of me; there’s a job to be done, and Lao Yang is waiting. But all I can think of is the stars.

We don’t see them that often, not the real ones. On the streets of Beijing you can see them every night, a glorious winking parade for the people who made them, but in the courtyards, the behind-spaces where we live and work and play, we just see clouds. Ever since I was a boy, there’s been a roof of smog over my head. And these days people think there’s something suspicious about stars. They’re for farmers and foreigners and dissidents, people who know how to find them and still want to. But they’re up there tonight, faint specks in the muck, and my hands go still as I stare.

Lao Yang coughs behind me. It’s a smoker’s cough, full of sound and fury, but it’s also a warning: there’s a job to be done. I turn my eyes to the roof beam, to the beautiful tracery of blossoms and leaves, and begin to fill in the green. Xiao Zhu begins to wander the courtyard, a young man’s amble, taking in the neat tiles and the potted pomegranate in one corner. Lao Yang just waits.

The paint takes shape under my brush as if it were a living thing. Red, green, blue, gold; it drifts across the wood and makes it real. When I have chased the last of the color into the corners, Lao Yang helps me down the ladder, and the three of us look up in silence at what we have done.

“It’s finished,” he says.

I nod.

“Three months’ work,” he says.

I nod again.

We walk out onto the street, sharing a steady silence between us. Xiao Zhu is already busy at the gate, stabbing at a small control panel with his slim fingers. We turn and look at the image of a house, the stone lions guarding its door, its roof beams painted like a sunrise. Above us, the false stars shine clear and unadorned.

Xiao Zhu hits the switch, and the hologram collapses. There is a quiet shimmer, and then nothing. The street remains unchanged.

Lao Yang smiles. “Let’s go home.”

It starts out like that, but that’s not where it started. It started fifteen years ago, when the hutongs disappeared. Those narrows alleys, pinpricked by public toilets and hawkers, the sights and the sounds and the pervasive smells, and on either side the courtyard houses, the heritage of Beijing. They were already vanishing by the close of the twentieth century, whole stretches of history being leveled to make way for apartments and poor quality condos. A lucky few were protected, turned into tourist traps and holiday homes. Gulou, Nanluoguxiang, Liulichang Jie: their names trip off our tongues like ancient mnemonics. But eventually, they too disappeared.

Lao Yang was forty when he saw the demolition sign go up above his door. He lived in a protected hutong, a heritage-listed area. When he went to register his protests with the local authorities, he was waylaid by plainclothes agents and beaten. That was the day the first hologram went up, in front of the place Lao Yang used to call home. Seen from the street, it looked like any other courtyard house, elegant and serene. From behind, it was a sick pile of rubble. He tells us over and over how he could put his hand through the mirage, how in that moment what he saw and what the world saw changed forever.

The next day, Lao Yang’s whole street was cloaked in holograms. The usual smog had subsided into a pearly blue. The crude demolition notices had vanished from the doors, to be replaced by fresh coats of vermillion paint. Lao Yang looked at them and knew that there was rubble waiting behind. And the holograms spread, street after street, so fast you could see a workman in the morning and know your whole district would be gone in the afternoon. I was just a boy when it happened, but I remember the spread of blue skies and green leaves like it was Chinese New Year. I didn’t understand back then. All I knew was that the city was beautiful, and I never wanted to leave.

I understand now. People believe what they see. These government holograms, they make Beijing a dream town, a false perfection that follows you home and leaves you at the door. We don’t see the demolition, the shaky buildings, the squalor. There are clear skies every day even though it hurts to breathe. We are a city of flickering images, of fantasy, of fraud, and nobody objects because nobody sees anything to object to. There are stars above us at night. Who cares where they come from?

We troop out of the hutong in single file, Lao Yang, Xiao Zhu and me. We never talk much after a job: we have done something majestic, something monstrous, and the silence is almost holy. We make our way through the winding streets like an ant trail, left, right and left again, until we reach the main road, bustling with cars. Xiao Zhu flags a taxi and bargains the price down to something we can afford. He sits in the front and we sit in the back, while the driver putters us home.

I met Lao Yang three years ago in a dingy noodle shop which had looked much cleaner from the outside. We were sitting side by side, slurping our noodles like some triumphant symphony. I had a book propped up against the vinegar pot and was considering it thoughtfully as I chewed. Not that I’m an intellectual or anything; I’m a man who works with his hands. But I like books. There’s something honest about a printed page. You know what it is today, and you can make a fair guess at what it’s going to be tomorrow.

Lao Yang peered over at my paperback. ‘You’re reading,” he observed.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Why?”

I hooked a noodle out of my bowl. “I like words,” I said.

“You a writer?”

“No,” I said. “Just a laborer.”

Lao Yang considered this. Then he grunted. “Let’s have a few beers.”

I guess that’s where it really started: me and Lao Yang, getting drunk together in a deadbeat little noodle shop like any other in Beijing. That’s when he told me about what had happened to his home, the place he’d brought his wife back to and the place where his children grew up. He told me he had a plan to bring back the hutongs, as good as they’d been or better. He already knew a kid who could manipulate the hologram systems, knock out the feed to a single house. All we had to do was rebuild the ruins behind it, hit the switch, and watch the fantasy be replaced with something real.

We’ve restored twenty-odd courtyard houses so far. Some of them have been left vacant and fallen into disrepair; these are the small jobs, just repairing and repainting and finally, hitting the switch. The bigger jobs are the houses which were actually destroyed, demolished to make way for property developments which never came around. These we rebuild, brick and timber and roof tiles, until the only difference between the house and the hologram is the color of the sky. We are the quietest dissidents in Beijing. When we do our job right, nobody knows we were ever there. But little by little, the three of us are fighting to bring the barrier between truth and illusion down.

Home is the first courtyard house we ever fixed up, on the outskirts of Gulou. Lao Yang’s house. When we arrived it was little better than a heap; now a crab-apple tree hangs lazily over the courtyard, and goldfish drift in the ornamental urns. The only furniture we have has been salvaged from demolition sites, old moth-eaten futons and wobbly tables, giving the place an eccentric, creaking charm. We’ve never been able to afford to buy new things for ourselves.

Xiao Zhu goes into the kitchen to boil water for noodles. I join him, helping to shake the little flat cakes out of the packets and into the bowls.

“You did a good job today,” he says. “All those colors. Really pretty.”

“You too,” I say, tearing open a seasoning sachet.

I never quite know what to say to Xiao Zhu. He’s a young guy, good with all the technology which has long since left me and Lao Yang behind. He’s got a thick mop of hair and a rakish smile and he dances when he walks. He could’ve been a TV idol, but he became a dissident instead. He’s the one who works the holograms for us, when all the hard labor is done; he helps out here and there with the painting and tiling, but his real job is something I can’t even begin to understand. I don’t know where Lao Yang found him. But he’s part of the secret, and that makes him family. I just wish I knew what to say.

We carry the steaming bowls of noodles out to the courtyard and sit down. Lao Yang hawks and spits into the bushes, picks up his chopsticks and digs in. Xiao Zhu and I eat slowly, making each bite last. When we’re done, Lao Yang lights up a cigarette, puts his feet up and eyes us across the table.

“That was our twenty-eighth house,” he says. “From here in Gulou to Chenxiang Jie and out to Dongjiaominxiang, we have brought twenty-eight courtyard houses back to reality. Nobody knows it but us, but we are making the past the present, and the present the truth of the past. The future is ours. And I think it’s time to move on.”

“Double prosperity,” I murmur.

“Double prosperity,” Lao Yang agrees. “Twenty-eight is an auspicious number. We’ve talked about this before, and I think we’re ready. There’s a jewel at the heart of this city, a treasure lying forgotten, and it needs to be saved. We can save it, if we’re willing to try.”

“The Forbidden City?” says Xiao Zhu. “We’re talking about the Forbidden City again? It’s massive. We’d be dead before we finished.”

“Not if we had help,” says Lao Yang, and a gleam creeps into his eyes. “What have we been playing at, these past three years? Pockets of reality here and there. Drops in an ocean. But if we could rebuild the palace—shut the holograms off and let people see the truth through the haze—that’d be worth dying for. I know a guy. He’s got a construction company. He’ll come in and help us for a price. We can do it! Give the people back their history! The government thinks they own our futures. Let’s fight them with the past!”

I pick up our bowls, toss the chopsticks in with a clatter. “We’ll talk about it,” I say. And then, apropos of nothing: “If the past and the present and the future had a battle, who would win?”

“The future,” Xiao Zhu says softly. “The future always wins.”

The next day, I head over to Houhai to see my girlfriend. She’s a sweet thing, a little younger than me, and has no idea what I get up to in the small hours of the night. Sometimes I think I should marry her, but then I remember I have no money, no job, no future. I am a down-and-out hero, not a husband. At these times I hold her tighter, kissing her with a sweet desperation; when she finds out the truth, we are finished. But the sun is bright today, the holographic sky projecting a deep and powerful blue, and we walk around the lake hand in hand while she chatters about her extensive circle of friends. I drift in and out, thinking about what Lao Yang said. Restoring the Forbidden City. Bringing it back to reality. Could we really pull it off?

“Oh!” my girlfriend exclaims, her eyes falling on a nearby shop. “They’ve put up the lanterns for the festival!”

“They’re not real lanterns,” I sigh. “They’ve just altered the hologram.”

“Hologram, real lanterns, what’s the difference?” she says. “They’re pretty!”

She rushes over to the shop and insists on posing for a photo, two fingers up in a cheeky V-sign. I dutifully hold her bag and snap the picture with her smartphone, assuring her she looks beautiful in every way.

“I’m going to eat so many mooncakes this year,” she says. “I always do. Every year when they come out in the shops, I go in and scold them. You’re going to make me so fat! I say. But I just can’t resist them.”

“You’re not fat,” I say absentmindedly. I’m thinking about the palace, how we’re going to shingle those roofs. Then my phone buzzes in my pocket. It’s Xiao Zhu.

“They’ve got Lao Yang,” he gasps.

I stop dead. “Who has?”

“The cops. Or someone like them. That guy he met was a plant, or a rat, or something. They grabbed him this morning on his way to where they were meeting. I don’t know where they took him. I don’t know where they’ve gone.”

“Calm down,” I say, trying to sound soothing without arousing my girlfriend’s suspicions. “Where are you now?”

“Back at the house. I don’t know how long we’ll be safe here, though. He’ll have to tell them everything.”

“I’m coming over right now,” I say. “I’ll get a cab.”

“Don’t take the first one,” he says, and hangs up.

Xiao Zhu is pacing the length of our courtyard, one of Lao Yang’s cigarettes on his lips. The smog is thick today, outside the holographic curtain, and I have to squint to see him.

“It’s over,” he says. “Him and his fucking double prosperity. They’ll come for us, and we’ll never see the light of day again. Not that we are now. Not that we ever have.”

I sag onto one of our dilapidated couches. “It’s not over,” I say. “There’s still the two of us. You can work the holograms, and I can do everything else. It’ll take us longer to finish a house, but it’s what he’d want us to do. To keep going. To keep making things real.”

Xiao Zhu snorts. “You’re just like him. Big dreams. Today the Forbidden City, tomorrow the stars. What are you in it for anyway? What are you hoping to change?”

I start to speak, and then pause. What am I in it for? I loved the holograms as a kid. I remember people cheering when they switched them on in our street, watching the sky turn blue and the grass turn green. We never even had grass before. But then I grew up, and one day I realized I hadn’t seen the sun for ten years. Not the real sun. Not the stars. And I started looking at houses and shops I had known all my life with suspicion. What did they really look like? I knew what they looked like inside, because government-sponsored holograms stop at the door. But the truth of them was as foreign to me as if I had never seen them before.

When Lao Yang approached me that day, I slurped at my noodles and listened to a dream. He wanted to live in Beijing—not a copy or a model, but a real city, a city that breathed, a city that had shit on the pavement and smog in the air but was free, effervescent and alive. He wanted a place that could move from past to present to future of its own accord, without technological intervention. He wanted his home back. And I wanted to help him.

“I’m in it because sometimes you just fight,” I say, finally. “And you keep fighting until it’s done. Lao Yang’s out there. He’s an old man and he’s hurting. But he’s helped you, and he’s helped me, and I’m not going to let him disappear. I said something dumb before. I said there’s still the two of us. That’s not true. There’s three like there always was. I’m going to try and help him. And you’re coming with me.”

Xiao Zhu lights another cigarette, blows the smoke out into the haze. “Nice speech, big guy. In a battle between the past, present and future, who would you be?”

I growl. “The future. The future always wins.”

Two days later, we have the names of the people who took Lao Yang and where they’re hiding him. Xiao Zhu bribed a local guard and wouldn’t tell me where he got the money. We have a plan, too, but I don’t trust it. It relies too much on gadgets, on things I’ve never learned to think of as real. This is Xiao Zhu’s world, and it makes me uncomfortable. But there’s nowhere else to turn.

We’re standing in front of the Ru Jia hostel in east Chaoyang. Just like home!, the sign proclaims, and I believe it. I’ve met plenty of people who get beaten at home. Behind this facade is a black jail, an illegal holding facility for protesters and political dissidents. This is where they’re keeping Lao Yang, stripped naked and starving, pulpy and bruised; for once, I don’t have to see it to know that’s it’s true.

I look over at Xiao Zhu. “Ready?” I ask.

He nods, and pulls the hope of our whole campaign out of his pocket. It’s a portable holographic projector, powerful enough to generate a large object or change the appearance of a room. I have no idea where he got it; they’re normally only found in large hotels or function halls, helping to create a dream wedding at a fraction of the cost. He studies it intently, thumbing buttons as he perfects the image, confirming every last detail. A guard left the building half an hour ago, and I watch over Xiao Zhu’s shoulder as he is recreated, down to the pores on his skin, on an alien machine.

“Ready,” Xiao Zhu says at last. He pushes a button, and the guard flickers into existence by our side. My stomach lurches involuntarily. If something like this passed me on the street, I’d think it was real. Xiao Zhu curls his hand around the projector, concealing it from sight, and the two of us walk up the steps of the Ru Jia with our holographic guard close behind.

“You programmed the speech?” I whisper.

“Everything you said,” Xiao Zhu replies. “We’ll be fine.”

I knock on the door, then jump back behind the guard and try to look penitent. The door opens a fraction and a man peers out.

“Yeah?”

“I got ‘em, sir,” the false guard says. “The two that were with Lao Yang. Figured I’d drop them off here until the courts decide where they belong. Should I throw them in with their pal?”

“Do that,” the man says, “do that. Make sure they feel welcome, too—ha, ha!”

“Yessir,” says our guard. “I’ll treat them just right, don’t you worry about that.” The door creaks open further, and we step inside.

The first thing that hits us when we enter the jail is the darkness. The second is the stench. Somewhere in another room a woman is sobbing, an endless, throaty sob that sounds like it could eat up the whole world. For the first time in years, I find myself longing for the comfort of holograms. Our false guard leads us down the corridor to the room where Lao Yang is being held; as we get closer, the stench grows stronger, and I start to panic. When we stop, it’s at Room 28. Double prosperity. I want to cry.

I open the door. It’s not locked—the people here know what happens if they run. Lao Yang is lying in a ball on his bed, shaking in time to some unknown beat in his head. There’s dried blood on the sheets, and a dank smell in the air. I run to him. “Lao Yang, it’s me,” I say. I say it over and over, willing him to respond. At last he raises his head, a distant look in his eyes. “Oh,” he says. “So it is.”

We lift him to his feet, cradling his body and wincing as each new bruise is revealed. Xiao Zhu takes the clothes we’ve brought from his pack, and we dress him as gently as we can, first pants and then arms up for the shirt. Lao Yang says nothing as we fuss over him, swaying unsteadily like a sapling in the wind. It is as if knowledge and years have all been beaten out of him, leaving him back as he began, an empty seed. When I reach out to him, I find myself stroking his hair as I would a child’s.

“We should get moving,” Xiao Zhu says. “I’ve reprogrammed the projector.”

“Just give me a minute,” I say. I look at the old man twitching feverishly in my grip, try to catch my gaze with his own. “Lao Yang, we’re going to get you out of here now. Just think of this time as a hologram. It was a bad one, but we’re going to hit the switch and bring you back to reality. You’ll never need to be afraid again.”

Lao Yang’s gaze wavers, but he nods. I turn to Xiao Zhu. “Let’s go.”

We pack up the bag and sneak out into the corridor, Lao Yang hobbling between us. The guard is slouched by the door, watching some trashy late-night television and tossing sunflower seeds into his mouth.

“Are you sure this will work?” I whisper. “It’s so melodramatic.”

“It’ll work,” says Xiao Zhu, and as he pushes the button, he grins.

A van slams through the opposite wall of the corridor, sending glass and masonry flying through the air. A brick lands on the horn, setting off a piercing wail. Lights flash and spin manically. Despite myself, I sniff. Melodramatic. The guard jumps up, shouts for someone, anyone, and rushes to inspect the damage. We run for the door, Lao Yang propped up between us, our footsteps camouflaged by the racket. We have about five seconds before he realizes there’s no van after all.

We stop for breath in a small park two streets over, flattening ourselves against the trees for cover. I hold onto Lao Yang as tightly as I dare. I don’t believe what I said to him; reality is smog and shit and beatings, and you can’t hit the switch on that. But when you’re looking into the face of a broken man, what can you say? Beijing is a city of holograms, and that’s reality. It’s a city where you can get picked up off the street for no reason, and that’s reality. But we got in and out. We rescued a friend. That’s reality, too.  “It shouldn’t have been that easy,” I say. “We should have had to fight them.”

“I wanted to fight them,” says Xiao Zhu. “All those people in there, and that sobbing. We should have rescued them all.”

“That trick wasn’t going to work twice,” I say. “We did what we could. We fought until it was done.”

Xiao Zhu considers this, while the traffic roars past us and the holographic stars shine down. Then he turns to me, and the light in his eyes is brighter than them all.

“We’re not done,” he says. “I’ve got a surprise for you.”

Two minutes later, with my heart in my mouth, I watch the hologram go down.

The bright blue and yellow paint of the Ru Jia flickers, becomes faded and dull. Cracks appear in the plaster, windows become fractured and dusty, and the grass around its borders suddenly dies. For the first time in years, I see an eyesore on the streets of Beijing. And it stands out. It shouts its presence to the world. It makes me smile until I hurt.

“Tomorrow morning, people are going to be asking questions about that,” says Xiao Zhu. ‘They’ll probably even have a look at what goes on inside.”

Lao Yang lifts his head. “What did you do?”

“I released a virus into their system, one that operates on a time delay. It’s knocked out their projector and it’ll block any attempt to fix it. I did it to cover our escape, but—” and he grins, helplessly, “it has an upside, too.”

“Xiao Zhu,” I say, “I could kiss you. Let’s go home.”

It’s funny. We spent three years picking away at the scab of history, but we never pulled it off until tonight. Twenty-eight courtyard houses are scattered throughout Beijing. They are beautiful, and they represent truth, but they never changed the world. All those roof beams, those delicate flowers, the tiles and the urns and the towers never did so much as hitting a switch and showing reality as it is. Our greatest triumph wasn’t renewing the past, but exposing the future. And in a battle between the past, present and future, the future always wins.

About the Author

Sarah Stanton grew up in Perth, Western Australia. Halfway through university, she abandoned a promising career in not having much of a career when she transferred from an opera performance course into a Chinese language major, having fallen for the Middle Kingdom more or less overnight. Three years, two exchange programs and one potential firework accident later, she has settled in Beijing as a freelance translator and editor specializing in contemporary literature. As a writer, she has been published in a variety of magazines and indie projects, including Voiceworks, Hunger Mountain, Asian Cha Journal and dotdotdash. She is a recipient of the Talus Prize and was recently shortlisted for the James White Award.

Iron Ladies, Iron Tigers

Sunny Moraine

Ping.

Vita. Wake up.

Spinning through the dark, I hear and feel CERA’s alert both at once, a sound that is a vibration like a plucked string between my sealed eyes. I shift in the padded transit cocoon. I move hands that barely feel like mine, and I feel wires pulling the jacks in my skin at the same instant as my fingers hit the tape over my eyelids. I wedge my nails under the strips and they come away like old skin. My tongue feels like a dry slug trapped between my teeth and my soft palate. But all of this is distant. I’m in high orbit over myself, and I can choose where I want to place my attention.

I chase the plucking string to its source.

All at once I learn a number of things, data nestled at the point where I and CERA intersect, waiting for me to retrieve it. I flip through it like a printed report; it helps to imagine these things in physical terms. This is how I was trained and in moments of partial consciousness it’s best to fall back on what you know at the most basic level. And here are the new things I know: as far as CERA can determine, re-emergence into normal space has occurred. There are a number of equipment malfunctions. Most of the sensor array appears to be offline. The primary Q-drives are offline. The differential sail is online and can be deployed if needed. Life support is online.

I am alive. I already knew this, but it’s nice to have it confirmed.

Chronometrics are offline.

Shit.

Extensive systems failure was a distinct possibility; we knew this as well, and I was told it repeatedly in the weeks leading up to the launch, as if it might make a difference. It makes no difference now in the most complete possible sense, but I punch a weak fist into the padding of the cocoon.

CERA’s plucked string voice in the center of my head—she’s waiting on my command. She’s a smart AI but even so she operates at about the intelligence of the average Labrador. She can think. But in situations featuring high degrees of uncertainty she needs instructions.

Do we have visual?

She shivers an affirmative into me. I feel something approaching relief; I’m flying blind in every meaningful way but one, then. My craft can’t tell me exactly where or when I am, the composition of the space around me, the relative location of any neighboring bodies, or whether I’ve gone anywhere else at all. But I can see.

At my command CERA engages my optical feed. But my body jerks in protest, though the cocoon swallows the movement. This isn’t right. I can feel myself blinking, lifting my hands to my eyes again—the frantic movements of the abruptly blind. Because all of my vision is blackness.

Here’s a dream that’s also a memory: Kendra and I are in our closet of a kitchen in the slightly larger closet of the apartment that we shared for those last three years, and I’m excited about work, about the breakthrough we’ve just had, about possibilities. I’m pacing in what room there is to pace. Kendra is sitting on the counter and her legs are swinging like a child’s. She’s eating an orange. I remember—and I dream, God, over and over—that at the height of my excitement, the part about the possible applications of the technology, I braced my hands on either side of her hips and kissed her and the taste of her and that orange filled my mouth and both were a kind of sweet alchemical perfection. I remember that the lights were off and the sun was westering through the window. I remember that her hair flashed a deep gold in the corner of my vision as I slid a hand into it.

I remember these things with a clarity that doesn’t apply to anything I said aloud to her. At the time, I thought that the things I was saying were the most important part of that moment.

I know better now. But my mind loves to remind me.

CERA is telling me that the visual feed is fine. I shove her back into another round of diagnostics. I have no idea if an AI at her level can feel—though after a year in training with her and a third of a second in nearly constant uplink you’d think I’d know her well enough to tell—but I could swear that she’s getting tense.

I understand that the system could have broken down in such a way that CERA can’t see the damage even when she runs the full set of diagnostics. I know that this is possible. But knowing it is useless. We have no plan for that scenario.

CERA, if the visual is working then why can’t I see stars?

I don’t know, Vita, CERA pings me, and of course it is. Without any of the rest of the sensory array, how could she even begin to collect herself into an answer?

Speculate?

It’s a half-literal stab in the dark. I don’t even know if CERA can speculate that way. I drift in the cocoon, in warm darkness, and I listen to the silence of her thinking. I know it’s wild anachronism, but I imagine immense gears turning in blackness, grinding through numbers like meat.

It’s possible that the craft has emerged into normal space-time far beyond the edge of any local galactic groups or clusters.

I’m not sure. I am just as much in the dark as you.

I have to take a breath and hold it, listening to my pulse pounding between my ears—and I’m trying to ignore that last, that part of her voice that twists away from chilly digital delivery and into something a whole hell of a lot familiar. All that time we spent together, I didn’t mean for that to happen.

Too late now. And I have bigger problems. Because what she’s saying . . . It would be beyond miscalculation. It would be disaster. Which I planned for before I climbed into my soft cocoon world, but it’s never quite the same as being faced with the fact of it—you think you can teach yourself to expect the worst, to train your mind to bend around and against it like a reed.

But there are some things you can’t plan for.

How remote is the possibility?

CERA tells me. I swallow the number down and it burns. I know: it doesn’t matter how remote the possibility is if it’s actually what’s happened. I float and I try to think. I turned off the visuals but now I cut them back in again and stare at the darkness.

Nothing. Not even the faintest specks of light. If the rest of the sensory array was online I would have ultraviolet, infrared. But I don’t. All I have is what’s in front of me. I just need to be sure of what that is.

CERA, I say. Give me full interface.

I can feel it, a widening of everything. The visuals are still engaged as I dive into her, spreading myself into her channels and pathways, hunting for a sign.

Here is another dream that’s also a memory. I have this one less frequently, but it does come. I wonder sometimes if my brain makes greater sport of the ones that hurt or the ones that feel wonderful until I wake up and the rest of my memory asserts itself. Does it hurt more to live in the parts of the past that were genuinely good? I still don’t know.

But in this dream Kendra and I are fighting. It was a very bad week. Now we have arrived at its apex, the black spike of it, and it’s about to drive itself into both of our spines and cripple us.

You can’t ask me to choose, I’m saying. I’m close to yelling. We are standing in a half-lit living room, the TV on mute and nothing but a colored blur. We’re both so tired and that only makes it worse. That’s bullshit, Kendra. We made a deal when we got here. You can’t ask me to choose now.

Things change, she says. Her arms are crossed and all of her feels small and cold like a body in space: distant, receding. In this moment I begin to understand that she is already leaving me. That she has already left. Why can’t we change with them? I’m not asking for anything unreasonable.

This is the part where I let out a cough of laughter. It’s calculated to convey just the right amount of scornful incredulity. I recall that I was proud of it at the time. I’m sorry, have you completely missed everything I’ve been doing for the last four months? Did you check out when I was explaining it? Or did you just not get it?

She’s smaller, colder. Goodbye, Kendra. Goodbye. I’m not stupid, she says. In this memory—and how close it is to the truth, I can never be sure—she is literally backing toward the door. And yes, I missed it. You weren’t here. I missed you.

I missed you too, I’m saying, but what should be an olive branch feels like a blow. I want to hurt her. I want to make things better. I want to be anywhere but this moment, which is why I keep coming back to it. But things are—this is important. You know? It’s really fucking important.

A lot of things are important. She’s fading. Red shift. The blackness that is the hallway and the night. There is an entire universe outside of us and I’m losing her to it. We’re important. We were. Now I’m going to go do something important by myself. I’m sorry. I’ll call you.

She didn’t. I never blamed her for that.

The higher functions of the sensory array are not salvageable. I’m not sure how long it takes for me to discover this, but in the end I’m sweating and aching, my muscles tense with the effort of untangling miles of digital pathways only to discover total burnout. A blackened hulk where a fantastic intricacy of pseudo-organic computing used to be, comprising all of the parts of CERA that are devoted to the analysis of where we are, when we are, what’s around us and how close and how big it is and what it’s made of and what we should do in response to all of that information. Chronometrics is adjacent in the solid-spin core. It’s all gone.

I’m sweating against the cocoon’s padding. I want to beat against the sides of the thing until I’ve pounded my fists into fucking pulp. I want out. And what would I see?

I can’t fix what’s burned out in transit. I don’t even know what happened to burn it out. That piece of time is blank in the logs, just as much a charred lump of uselessness as the broken array.

We didn’t plan for this because we couldn’t. But I know it’s more than that. We didn’t plan for it because we moved too fast. Because I did. Because I was running.

Here is a memory that isn’t a dream. It doesn’t need to be. I have this one saved. I have them all saved, all her vlogs, but I don’t watch most of them. There are two that I come back to, over and over. They’re the only two I need, because while the others can hurt me, it’s only background. After this long, I am refined in my taste for self-torture.

The first one: it’s only fifteen minutes long. She’s showing the viewer around the village where she’s working—it’s mostly huts made from tin and wood and mud. Large families crowd outside several of them, the children naked, the older children and the women wrapped in brightly-colored fabric. Dogs roam the dirt. Mothers carry impossibly heavy loads on their heads. Men stand with farming implements in their hands or lean against ancient trucks, squinting into the sun.

You know this. You’ve seen it before. It’s beyond a trope, beyond cliché—it’s what we build to look at when seeing is too hard.

But here’s the thing. Two things. I saw them immediately.

The first thing is that the people are smiling. They’re waving. This isn’t some kind of appeal for charity or pity. The women look happy: they laugh together and I see them pull Kendra into a hug. The men nod and say things I don’t understand. They gesture at one of the trucks, the bed of which is piled with sacks of what might be grain. The children are skinny but they don’t look unhealthy. The sun is high and hot—I can practically feel it through the screen, sucking the moisture out of my skin—but they don’t look beaten down by it. They show me things. Their village well. They show me their school, which is a room filled with neat rows of desks and a wall covered with crayon drawings. At the front of the room is a wide LCD screen.

The message is clear: these people are doing well. Whatever has been done there is working. The video is meant to be seen by particular people with access to particular bank accounts, and as such I know what I see is filtered and framed for consumption, but I also believe it, because it feels true. It doesn’t feel like clever staging. What she and her group were doing—it was working.

And here is the second thing I see: Kendra, Kendra smiling, tucking a glossy black strand of hair behind her ear. Kendra smiling with her already dark skin darkened further by the sun and wind—dark and glowing like the heart of a coal. Kendra, happier than I ever remember seeing her with me.

The message beneath the message is clear, and the fact that I know that she never meant for me to see it makes no difference at all. Leaving me was the best choice she could have made.

I don’t blame her, or them, or anyone. But it doesn’t help. There’s no one left alive to blame.

Troubleshooting is different when the computer has been jacked directly into your brain for the better part of two years. You know it like you know your own internal workings, which is to say not well at all. But you can feel your way through it in a more instinctive fashion. You’re fumbling in a dark room—in a very systematic way, in a grid pattern, protocol by protocol—but you feel that it’s a room in which you already know the layout. You’ve been here before. You saw it once, in a memory. In a dream.

I lose time when I’m fully interfaced with CERA’s systems. Some of it is simple micro-focus, and some of it is that inside CERA, time doesn’t work the same way—I always found that appropriate, considering what we do. So I’m not sure how long I work inside her, feeling the pieces of her back together, turning them to make them fit, discarding the ones that seem twisted or misshapen beyond repair. At some point I feel a buzz and I pull back enough to hear her.

Partial array function has been restored. Gravimetrics are online. Proximity detection is online. All other sensory systems remain non-functional. Chronometrics are still non-functional. Same old, same old.

When I bite down on my bottom lip, enough of me is still in my body to feel the pain. It’s better than nothing. What about visuals?

The visual feed is functional, she says again, and she sounds impatient, all amusement gone. And then she’s silent. Because what else can she really say?

I don’t know how long I join her in the quiet. I’m out of her and back in me, but time is still slippery, and with chronometrics offline it feels unreal. Which I guess it always was. But at last I stir and open my eyes into the darkness again.

Okay. We’ll work with what we have. CERA, if the beacon is still—

Proximity alert. We are approaching an object. I go still in the cocoon, already vaulting to assumptions. We’re okay. We’re going to be saved.

Even if some part of me knows better.

Here is a memory that will never be a dream. I never get that far. I can approach it in sleep, but as soon as the shape of it comes into view I’m plunging back up, too breathless and too exhausted to scream.

I see it—I am seeing it—on the news, before I know what I’m looking at. It’s shaky cell phone footage, and it’s a wall of water advancing on a shitty little town somewhere and none of this is unusual enough to get my attention, even if I know somewhere in the rear corners of my attention that this one is different.

Here’s what happens: the water is coming and it’s swallowing everything. It’s like someone is pulling a blanket of water up over the land. I’m sitting in a bar near the lab, drinking off a long day, and as I’m watching, idle and only half interested, I’m not sure if it’s live or if it happened already. Not like it matters.

And I see her.

It’s just a second. After, I spend days going over footage and photos and info on where she was then, friends, her mother—God, her mother, who I never liked talking to even when we were still together—and then I go over the body counts and the casualty reports, like I can bend the numbers a different way if I focus hard enough.

Like I can run time backward. Just like that.

But I see her, and she’s scrambling up an embankment with a crowd of people so wet and muddy they barely look human, and then the embankment crumbles under them and they all go down. I don’t see her face when she drowns. My imagination does the heavy lifting for me.

Kendra. Jesus Christ.

How many people died that day? All that time staring at the numbers and I’m honestly still not sure. No one’s sure, of course, but we love to count, don’t we? I know it was thousands. Tens of thousands. I cared about one in all of them. Does that make me a heartless bitch? Was that always part of the problem? Is that where entropy starts?

I can’t change anything, Kendra. But you know I was trying. You know I still am.

I’d twist time around my fingers for you.

Is it a ship? I hadn’t realized how frantic I was getting. Now I can feel it in the strain of my own inner voice. CERA, is it a satellite? Can we—?

Careful, Vita. Gravimetrics indicate that the object is extremely dense. A closer approach is likely to make escape from its gravitational field difficult.

We don’t have the thrust sufficient to climb a gravity well. We launched in space. I tense up and clutch at what’s around me like I can control it with my muscles.

CERA, full stop.

I know I can’t feel us pull to an easy, reverse-thrusted halt in space, but I still feel as though I can. And I feel that thing out there, whatever it is. The thing I’m blind to. I’m in a dark room and now I know there’s something in here with me. Not a satellite. Obviously too much pull. A planet? A star?

I’m so pissed at the malfunctioning visuals, I wish I could tear them out of my eyes. And then I’d really be blind, drifting and bleeding, but I’m suddenly so pissed it almost feels worth it.

What is it,CERA?

Tough to say. Density is estimated at 1 x 10¹³—but it’s only an estimate. Alpha, beta, gamma, and electromagnetic radiation are all minimal.

No heat or light to speak of. Not a star. Unless.

God.

Everything here is wild speculation. That I’m even here is wild speculation—we were pretty sure this would work, but we weren’t positive. Time, space, how exactly the mechanics of both would work when my little craft shoved them in a blender and hit puree—we didn’t know. It’s too much to call this an experiment: we were flailing around in the dark. I wasn’t afraid of that. But a lot can change in a few million years. If something went wrong. If I went too far. If I’m not where and when I should be.

That thing out there in the dark might be a hungry mouth, open and ready to swallow me.

Visuals on, I stare at black nothing. I will some photons to sneak out of that blackness and give me a clue. But none come. Or I can’t see them. The end is the same.

So here’s what I could do, I think, staring so hard my head starts to ache and the cocoon around me starts to feel like something designed to smother instead of something keeping me alive. I could just drift blind until someone finds me, if anyone does, if anyone’s there to do the finding. I have a week of air. I have enough water to keep me going almost that long, if the moisture reclamation sponges laced into the cocoon’s fabric hold out.

Or I could start being a little more goddamn proactive.

Launch the probe, CERA.

I have one. It was a kind of concession to research outside of the tunnel-vision focus on what we were really trying to do. In case I found anything interesting. Now it might tell me nothing useful. It might be able to tell me, in exquisitely measured detail, just how fucked I am.

But we have to know, don’t we? We always have to fucking know.

I feel the craft eject the probe. I imagine it shooting toward the thing spinning invisibly out there, black and potentially lethal. I don’t trust any of what CERA is telling me. I don’t trust my eyes. I haven’t in a long time.

They never showed me what was there until I didn’t want them to. And then it was all they would let me see.

I ran, Kendra. Okay? I admit it. You got me. I ran. I was always running. Maybe I saw something in you that I didn’t know how to deal with. Maybe it’s just who and what I am. I ran away from you and then after you were gone I ran away from everything.

But we were going to blast a hole through decades and pop out the other side. You weren’t just a little bit excited by that? You don’t think that was worth some sacrifices?

Was it? Was it worth you?

I hate questions without answers. I ran from them, too. Here’s the thing, Kendra—here’s my dirty little secret. I thought maybe, in the future, they’d have neatened everything up. Simplified things. The world would be a less messy place to be in. Everything would fit. Everything would make sense. And in that world, you would naturally come back to me, because we made sense.

I believed in something better. I did. Better… and easy.

And now look.

Iron.

I wait for more. I wait a while. Time spins out—I wonder if I’m hallucinating its passing. The truth is, I’m sort of wondering if there is such a thing as time anymore.

CERA?

The composition of the object is pure iron. It’s very dense. It’s highly probable that it is the last remnant of a stellar object.

I wait again. There’s more silence. In that silence, I think I’m dreaming, and what I’m dreaming of is laying my cheek against something hard and cold in the darkness. Lying down on its surface and letting it pull me into itself. Because this—right here, in the ending-black, circling a ball of solid cold—this is always where I was headed.

We try to make things mean things. We can’t. They don’t.

CERA. Are there any records of any such objects on file?

Everything I know about it is only speculation, Vita.

Tell me.

She does. I stare into the darkness and I listen.

We have a lot of ideas about time, us temporally-bound creatures. I know them. I read all about them years ago in the kind of quantity that requires scientific notation. Some of it was research. Some of it was… well. Passing the time.

Here’s one that I always liked, because it’s not about time, not really. It’s about spacetime, and it’s about probability and the shape of things. That every possible choice we could make has been made, somewhere, in some iteration of the universe. That bad decision you made that changed everything? Somewhere you didn’t make it. You took the other door and you got the lady and not the tiger.

Of course, that leaves an almost infinite number of versions of you that got the tiger instead. And you personally? You only get the one choice. That’s the rule.

The rule broke me. I wanted to break it. That’s why I climbed inside the cocoon. Somewhere there’s a me that came home when I said I would, said the right things, did the right things, and somewhere there’s a Kendra who didn’t drown in a country I still can’t even spell. Somewhere we’re together and we’re happy and we might even get to go on forever.

But I don’t get to make that choice, even if the rules don’t totally apply to me anymore. Even if I broke the one. I get the choice I made. And now I get the darkness.

How long?

CERA is silent for a moment—for her a moment is a decade and I wonder what she can possibly be doing that holds her back from response. Then she vibrates at me out of the center of my cortex.

I don’t understand your question, Vita.

Fuck. How far did we go?

Another moment of silence. This time I can feel what it is: she’s actually thinking through it, reading entire books on the subject, consulting a hundred thousand databases’ worth of info. Getting all she can for me. But of course, when she speaks again I already know the answer.

The theoretical timeframe within which stellar objects could potentially decay into spheres of iron-56 is 10¹⁵⁰⁰ years from our temporal point of departure.

One sentence. Very simple. I almost can’t believe it took her so long to come up with that.

There’s nothing, I think. I feel the words behind my lips. Nothing. Not technically correct, but practically true, and the latter means more than the former most of the time. Like: She left me. She’s gone.

I’m gone. I can’t get back. With no one, with nothing, no energy source for the jump, no hand to pull back the slingshot. I can’t move on pure iron. I’m here. Here is the only when I’ll ever be.

My cocoon closes tighter around me in response to the drop in my body’s temperature. I feel a flash of fear of smothering even though that couldn’t happen. But it will. It is. Air, water, food… Here I am in the dark, in my warm little center of the nothing that’s left. There’s nothing to do. There’s nothing that I can or should do. In the most fundamental way possible, I am inconsequential, and so are all my stupid little choices. The ones I made and the ones I didn’t. The ladies and the tigers.

And somewhere in that darkness I realize that what I’m feeling is relief.

CERA, I say, and really, the words are so much easier than I thought they would be. Take us away.

I can almost sense CERA’s confusion, though I know that technically she can’t have any. Please specify a destination, Vita.

Random. My eyes are open, staring at a darkness without stars. Iron dark. All I want to do is sleep. It doesn’t matter.

I’m dreaming with my eyes open. I don’t need to close them now if I want the dark; it’s all around me. It’s the night face of everything. CERA is quiet in the center of my head, the cocoon is warm around me, and I drift. I think about water and blood and countries the names of which I can’t spell. I think about light in the strands of Kendra’s hair. I think about choices, ladies, tigers.

I had to come billions of years to understand that it doesn’t matter. That it is what it is. That we had what we had and now it’s over. I shift my hands in the folds of the cocoon, it’s like I can reach into the dark and touch iron, close my fingers around it. Feel the coming cold. Sleep inside it. Dream.

About the Author

Sunny Moraine is a humanoid creature of average height, luminosity, and inertial mass. They’re also a PhD student in sociology and a writer-like object who has published short stories in Strange Horizons, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, and Shimmer, among other places. Her first novel Line & Orbit, co-written with Lisa Soem, is forthcoming from Samhain Publishing.

Life After Quatermass: Hammer Films’ ’60s Science Fiction

Mark Cole

Hammer Films: The name conjures images of sinister images in garish color, of Frankenstein, Dracula, and a thousand other terrors of the night.

Like some monstrous creature in one of its own films, Hammer has returned from the dead. After a 43-year absence, The Woman in Black recently hit American theaters, with the promise of further films to come.

So far, however, Hammer has announced no plans to explore another important part of its legacy (although one unfamiliar to many of their fans): science fiction. Hammer’s SF films of the ’50s—inspired by the legendary Quatermass serials—were the company’s first venture into horror. Not only did their success encourage Hammer to make its first Gothics, but they played a pivotal role in the development of British SF cinema over the next decade.

While many critics have discussed the Quatermass films and their numerous copies, few have paid much attention to the SF films Hammer made in the decade that followed. They are a curious lot, ranging from true classics to classy exploitation films, from the deadly serious to the just plain goofy, from daring astronauts to topless cavegirls. They reflect the rapidly changing times and Hammer’s own struggles to stay afloat in an uncertain market. But no matter how dark or absurd they can be, they remain eminently watchable, thanks to the care and professionalism that Hammer brought to all its films.

According to Bill Warren’s massive Keep Watching the Skies!: American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties, it was the rise of Gothic horror that drove SF out of the theaters at the end of the ’50s. For Hammer, 1957 marked both the end of its initial burst of Quatermass films and the beginning of its horror cycle. This is no accident: Quatermass’ adventures featured strong doses of horror, something nearly unprecedented in SF film at the time they appeared on TV. It was Hammer’s desire to make horror films that led the company first to Quatermass, then to Gothics. These proved so successful that it would be six years before Hammer returned to SF, in a sadly neglected classic.

The Damned (aka These Are the Damned in the U.S.) remains one of Hammer’s strangest and most elusive films. One look at the shocking images on its movie posters tells us that Hammer intended to cash in on the success of MGM’s Village of the Damned. However, while lethal to those around them, the film’s radioactive children are otherwise ordinary: They evoke not horror but pity.

Nor does The Damned look anything like our conception of an SF film. Set in the English seaside town of Weymouth, its stunning widescreen cinematography contrasts the sharp cliffs and rocky seashore with the crowded Victorian streets. In fact, the film takes its time reaching its first SF elements.

It starts like another sort of film altogether, introducing us to a gang of Teddy Boys led by the psychotic King (Oliver Reed) who uses his sister Joan (Shirley Anne Field) to trap wealthy tourists. By 1961 many people had become frightened of the growing number of youth gangs and the increase in juvenile delinquency; at first glance, The Damned could be yet another serious drama about violent teens. (It is also one the few elements taken from the film’s source, H. L. Lawrence’s Children of Light.)

But the gang is not the only thing disturbing Weymouth. The army is there as well, and military helicopters buzz constantly over the peaceful town. On top of the cliffs is a high-security research facility run by a soft-spoken scientific bureaucrat (identified only by his first name, Bernard) played by Alexander Knox. As Joan attempts to escape her brother’s control with the help of the gang’s latest victim, retired American businessman, Simon Wells (MacDonald Carey), the two stumble on the underground complex hidden in the caves beneath.  There they find a handful of seemingly ordinary children—only they don’t feel the cave’s chill and are themselves cold to the touch.

One might expect to learn that the military created these children. Instead they are a natural mutation, born of mothers exposed to nuclear fallout. Like the Teddy Boy gang, they are the accidental products of our society. Bernard sees in the children the salvation of mankind. They alone will be able to survive in the smoking ruins of civilization after the inevitable nuclear holocaust. As several of them have already died of natural causes, his confidence seems misplaced.

What many reviewers have missed about The Damned is that the film is very much an anti-Quatermass film. Here it is the scientific hero—attempting to save mankind from destruction—who has become the villain. It is not the children who are terrifying. It’s Bernard’s blasé acceptance of man’s impending destruction; his obsessive secrecy and willingness to murder anyone who might reveal his secrets; the casual inhumanity of his project; and his bland insistence that he loves the children under his care. While we never learn Bernard’s full name, it seems no coincidence that he shares Professor Quatermass’ first name.

The first Quatermass films reflected the Cold War paranoia of the age, setting us against an enemy who, while capable of absorbing us into itself, was ultimately from somewhere outside. In The Damned, the enemy we have to fear is our own selves and our own government. It reflects the growing Cold War nihilism of the ’60s, as we began to question our own actions in what seemed an endless conflict that could only end in destruction. It is this dark political edge that led to The Damned’s obscurity.

While blacklisted American director Joseph Losey completed The Damned in 1961, it took two years and the removal of nine minutes to convince Hammer to release it in the UK. It would not reach U.S. for another two years, in a seriously truncated version shorn of another ten minutes—as well as most of its political and philosophical elements. Many critics dismissed this sad remnant of a film without paying much attention to it, and its dark ending did not help it find an audience. Only now that the full-length version is available has it gradually gained the critical recognition it deserves.

And perhaps the film isn’t quite as despairing as we think—not if, after the final credits, we watch Simon and Joan turn his boat around to make one more try at rescuing the children…

It seems strange, but it’s true: After four groundbreaking ’50s SF films, the most typical of Hammer ’60s SF output (and only marginal SF at that!) was its bikini-cavegirl films.

The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) set the company’s path for many years. One of the first color horror films, it shocked audiences with its garish splashes of gore. The films Hammer made in its wake threw even more blood at the screen and amped up the violence. But as Hammer’s competition (in particular Roger Corman’s Edgar Allen Poe films for American International Pictures) became fiercer, Hammer followed the latest trend in European film and turned to sex to distinguish itself from the herd. By the mid-’60s, Hammer films regularly featured pageant winners and Playboy Playmates. It’s no coincidence that Raquel Welch appeared side by side with Bond girl Ursula Andress on a stunning dual poster for Hammer’s first cavegirl movie, One Million Years B.C. (1965) and its new adaptation of H. Rider Haggard’s She.

Most of Hammer’s best-known films seem to have been remakes, sequels, or adaptations, so it comes as no surprise that One Million Years B.C. is a remake of One Million B.C. (1940). In glorious color, the remake rejected the original’s lizards with added fins in favor of some of Ray Harryhausen’s best stop-motion dinosaur work. However, it did retain the curious conceit of rendering dialogue in an imaginary primitive language.

Clearly, Hammer never had any illusion that One Million Years B.C.’s major attractions amounted to much more than Welch’s fur bikini, and Harryhausen’s dinosaurs. It’s purely an exploitation film, albeit a vastly entertaining one, made with Hammer’s usual panache, craftsmanship, and technical savvy.

However, it was extremely expensive, at least by Hammer’s standards. The company decided to get the most out of its investment in 1967 by making Prehistoric Women (aka Slave Girls), which recycles One Million Years B.C.’s sets and costumes (but had no dinosaurs). Supposedly based on a 1950 film of the same name (although the two have little in common), Prehistoric Women’s magical time-travel elements make it fantasy rather than SF. It’s also unique among these films for its English dialogue.

In 1970 Hammer followed these with When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, returning to One Million Years B.C.’s successful formula of dinosaurs plus cave girls. Only this time, actor Victoria Vetri and animator Jim Danforth provided the film’s major attractions; J. G. Ballard provided the story; and Hammer included a few nude sequences in the original British version of the film.

The following year, Hammer produced its final cavegirl film, The Creatures the World Forgot—which, while dinosaur-free, offered one-time Miss Norway, Julie Ege. And even more nudity.

The early ’60s was not a good time for SF cinema. The number of new films fell dramatically. Audiences became more demanding, expecting far better effects and more coherent films. While some filmmakers responded by trying to make more intelligent movies, they failed to create new interest in the genre.

Perhaps the best film of this era was Hammer’s classic 1967 adaptation of Quatermass and the Pit (known in the U.S. as Five Million Years to Earth). It took Hammer nine years to turn Nigel Kneale’s TV serial into a film. The company’s first attempt in 1961 quickly stalled because it couldn’t find American backers. This hiatus, however, allowed Hammer to replace lead Brian Donlevy, whom Kneale detested, with a new Quatermass: Andrew Keir.

The differences between the new film and the two that precede it, though, it are far greater than a change of actors—or the switch from black-and-white to widescreen color. It’s by far the least science-fictional of the three, dwelling instead on myth and legend. While the first two were SF with horror elements, Quatermass and the Pit is at heart a Lovecraftian horror film, centered around a supernatural menace with a science-fictional explanation. After Hammer’s ten years of making horror films, however, the new emphasis makes sense.

It’s another change that’s harder to understand: Quatermass’ role is seriously reduced, so much so that Hammer stalwart James Donald, playing paleontologist Dr. Roney, gets top billing. In the U.S., the film’s advertising campaign made no reference to either Quatermass or the previous installments. Perhaps this is a reflection of the movie’s shift toward supernatural horror; after all, it is not Quatermass’ science that finds the way to destroy the alien menace, but Roney’s occult research.

1968 brought what is probably the strangest film Hammer ever made, and certainly its strangest ’60s film—a movie that seems entirely out of sync with the times that produced it: The Lost Continent.

Hammer had an enormous success with its adaptation of Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out and decided to follow it up with a version of another of his novels, Uncharted Seas. While he was one of the most popular adventure novelists of his day, Wheatley is mostly remembered today for the Hammer films based on his work. In fact, his career had already started to fade by the time Hammer made The Lost Continent.

If one had to try to describe The Lost Continent, it might be simplest to compare it to a pulpy adventure novel written in 1926. Certainly, the one movie that it most strongly resembles is 1975’s The Land That Time Forgot, which was also based on a pre-World War II adventure novel and offers a similar combination of thrills on the high sea, hidden worlds, and strange creatures.

In fact, except for a brief opening tease, the so-called lost continent does not appear until the film is halfway over. It starts with Captain Jensen (Eric Porter) trying to outrun the harbor police. His ship is overdue at the scrap yard; he’s smuggling a deadly cargo of white phosphorus, which explodes if it gets wet; and his passengers are all as desperate as he is. Before long, he finds himself dealing with a deadly storm, a hole in his hull, mutiny, and water rushing into a hold full of explosives.

It’s at this point, with Jensen, the surviving passengers and crew all adrift in a lifeboat, that the characters suddenly find themselves in an SF film. First they encounter carnivorous seaweed, then a strange lost world made of ships caught in the weed, then a girl crossing the seaweed wearing what looks like snowshoes and two big balloons on her shoulders. There are mutant monsters and even the Spanish Inquisition

The Lost Continent is an odd and decidedly old-fashioned mixture of disparate elements. While it has not been well regarded over the years, it’s gradually acquired a cult status of sorts—and a deserved one, as it manages to deliver its share of pulpy thrills, if only to those willing to wait for the lost continent’s arrival.

As the ’60s progressed, Hammer grew increasingly desperate. The market shifted towards subtler contemporary horror films like Rosemary’s Baby and The Haunting. Hammer responded with a series of increasingly bizarre offerings: from naked lesbian vampires to modern-dress Dracula films (one of which features gun-toting thugs dragging Dr. Helsing into a high-rise office building to confront Dracula!) to a kung-fu-Chinese-vampires-meet-Dracula movie.

Moon Zero-Two, Hammer’s answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey has more than a hint of desperation about it. Billed as “the first Moon Western,” it offers a heady mix of detailed and mostly accurate space flight with a very familiar story about claim-jumpers on the moon. It even has a heroine named Clementine, although actor Catherine Schell is far too elegant and European for a Western.

The film’s animated opening credits distance it from the Cold War concerns of Hammer’s earlier SF, although they have little relationship to the rest of the film. In that opening, two astronauts, one American and one Russian, vie to see who gets to claim the moon—a long, comic sequence set to the film’s psychedelic theme song. Only the astronauts wind up finding that businessmen have already landed and turned the moon into a big tourist trap, forcing them to flee together.

Perhaps these animated figures are meant to represent the film’s American hero and his Russian co-pilot, forced to fly an ancient salvage ship because no one is exploring space any more; everyone is too busy making money. Moon Zero-Two offers extravagant ’60s design, dancing girls in the local saloon, colorful spacesuits, and a female sheriff. Oddly, despite the accuracy of the rest of the film, it also includes artificial gravity and ray guns.

Long neglected, Moon Zero-Two has also assumed cult notoriety, largely thanks to its appearance on Mystery Science Theater 3000. It may be absurd, but it’s also absurdly entertaining, thanks as always to Hammer’s innate professionalism.

Hammer’s all-too-brief career of producing the classiest exploitation films ever made slowed to a halt over the next decade, ending finally on television in the ’80s. The company left behind a legacy of great films: horror, suspense, mystery, adventure—and even SF.

In an era when SF had lost its luster, Hammer deserves credit for bringing so many SF films to the screen, even if they do reflect the confusion that had overtaken the film genre. One can only wonder about the films Hammer couldn’t get made: the fourth Quatermass film and its adaptation of 1961’s British SF television serial, A for Andromeda.

Despite the huge success of 2001 and the rush of films that tried to cash in on it, the film industry did no better than Hammer did in finding a new audience for SF film in the late ’60s and early ’70s. That would have to wait until the late ’70s and Star Wars and Alien.

But that’s another story.

About the Author

Mark Cole hates writing bios. Despite many efforts he has never written one he likes, perhaps because there are many other things he’d rather be writing. He writes from Warren, Pennsylvania, where he has managed to avoid writing about himself for both newspaper and magazine articles. His stories have appeared at Flash Fiction Online (”Reverse Engineering”) and Abyss And Apex (”I Expect There Will Be A Reason Soon”).

To Save Ourselves: A Conversation with Nancy Kress

Jeremy L. C. Jones

After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall by Nancy Kress opens with a deformed teenage boy kidnapping a baby from a hysterical mother. The boy, Pete, has come from the future, using alien technology, to save the baby from the ecological disaster that will soon befall the world she lives in.

Pete is also stealing the child to bolster the gene pool of the future, to bring a fertile human into a time when 26 humans, most of them infertile, fight to keep the human race alive.

The 26 are lead by the brilliant McAllister and live in the Shell, which is sparsely furnished habitat created by the Tesslies, an alien race they believe to be responsible for the devastation of the world.

The novel weaves three timelines: 2013, 2014, and 2035. The 2013 story arc follows Julie Kahn, a mathematician consulting for the FBI. Along with Special Agent in Charge Gordon Fairford, Kahn has noticed a pattern to a series of kidnappings and burglaries and developed predictive algorithms. In 2014, there’s unusual geological activity under the Yellowstone Caldera and in the Cannery Islands; K. planticola, a mutating bacteria, secretes too much alcohol and kills plants at the roots. In 2035, the majority of humankind is infertile.

Nancy Kress is the best-selling author of more than two dozen books. She has written novels, such as Beggars in Spain, Dogs, Probability Space, and Steal across the Sky, as well as short story collections and books about writing. Her next book, Flash Point, is due out from Viking in the fall.

Many of Kress’ stories, long and short, involve genetics and speculations about the near future. She blends scientific rigor with intensely human characters. The result is often intensely intimate, and always character-driven. Kress has won the Campbell, Hugo, Nebula, and Sturgeon Awards, among others.

Below, Kress talks about After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall, writing, teaching, Gaia, and giving something back to the field. Be forewarned: Some events of the book will be revealed.

In the first pages of After the Fall, we meet Pete,who’s kidnapping a baby. And yet it’s easy to instantly sympathize with him. How did you do that?

[Laughs.] I don’t know. I got a review from a newspaper somewhere that compared McAllister to Fagin [from Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist], teaching this band of juvenile delinquents to steal and I thought, “That’s not exactly the book I wrote.”

[Pete and the other survivors] are trying to ensure the survival of the human race and also save these children from the destruction that they know is coming. And that’s not exactly what Fagin is doing. Pete’s basically a good kid. He has grown up with an odd set of morals. They’re the morals that fit the situation and, from the outside, his actions probably look despicable, stealing a baby from a hysterical mother, but I wanted to show how it looks to him, on the inside. Maybe that’s why he’s coming across as sympathetic. I’m glad that he is, because I had a lot of sympathy for him. They’re doing the best they can in an impossible situation.

The novel seems to hinge on McAllister’s wanting Pete to not repeat the mistakes of the past.

Right, that’s part of it. The other thing is that I almost never—I was thinking about this the other day—I almost never write villains and there really aren’t any villains in this book. McAllister and her band of “juvenile delinquents” are not villains. The Tesslies are actually trying to rescue what they can and keep this planet going on their own peculiar terms. Julie’s not a villain. Gordon’s not a villain. The only villain, I guess if you want to count it, is the planet, and it’s just going to preserve itself by getting rid of whatever is making conditions [not conducive to] life and, in the moment, that’s us.

Then what do you bounce the protagonist off of?

Sometimes himself, sometimes the fact that humans being being what we are, want conflicting things, and you can’t have both, clashes like love versus loyalty, duty versus love, those kinds of things. Sometimes it’s bad guys. I won’t say I never do villains. But the kind of pure evil villain that’s so common in SF, I just don’t buy. There’s a couple of those guys in history, but not very many. Most people are doing what seems to them reasonable at the time.

It seems like McAllister does everything she can to prevent the kids from thinking in terms of villains. In the end, though, we find out that she has made an assumption about the Tesslies that casts them as villains.

Yes, she made a mistake. She, and everybody else in the Shell, thought the Tesslies had destroyed the earth, and it turns out, of course, that they hadn’t. She has made a misassumption. The book is full of misassumptions. People have assumed the wrong thing in a number of places and that was one thing I was going for.

Where did you start After the Fall? What came first?

[Laughs.] It started with the Gaia theory from James Lovelock which came out in the ’70s, and which now has pretty much fallen into some disrepute, but I was always fascinated by it. I got his book and I read it, and his basic theory is that the earth can be considered as a large self-regulating, non-conscious entity adjusting itself endlessly to make conditions possible for life. For instance, with all the salt that’s washed down into the ocean from the rivers over the millennia, it should be saltier than it is, but it isn’t. There are mechanisms for removing the salt down on the ocean floor, and locking it up in a way that the ocean doesn’t get too salty to support fish, to support life, so that cells don’t burst. And this has turned around in my mind for 30 years now, and at one point it came to me, “Well, if the earth is trying to remove conditions that are inimical to life, the thing on it right now that’s the most inimical to life is probably us, with the climate change, pollution, and dead zones in the ocean.” I thought, “What if the earth started to fight back?”

And that’s an idea, that’s not a character. Usually characters come to me first. But in this case, the idea came to me first and it came through rational thinking. The part that did not come through rational thinking was Pete, because the characters never do. They sort of pop into my mind. I saw what he was trying to do. He was trying to get kids from the past. And the first scene, as often happens when I write, came almost full, and I wrote it down. After I get a first scene, I have to look at it and think, “Okay, where does this go from here? How does this first scene and this idea become a story?”

Did Pete surprise you at all while you were writing After the Fall?

All my characters surprise me. I didn’t realize he was in love in a 15-year-old-boy sort of way with McAllister, but that came out as I was writing. I didn’t realize that he was going to have quite so many 15-year-old-boy sulks, but that came out, too, as I was writing. I grew quite fond of Pete.

It seems as though Pete and of Julie may be working at cross-purposes.

Well, Julie is the grownup. Pete is the 15-year-old, floundering around, prey to his emotions, doing the best he can, making mistakes, flying off the handle. Julie makes rational decisions based on whatever information she has and she has the adult emotions of wanting to protect and care for her daughter [Alicia]. And Julie’s reliable, which Pete certainly isn’t. They’re not really working at cross-purposes. Pete is trying to save his world and Julie is trying to save her daughter, which is all she can save as her own world.

How on earth does Julie make the decision to give up Alicia?

At first, she just intends to try to confront Pete and maybe stop him. Then as she realizes what is happening [in the natural world], she has to be try to get the truth. When she realizes what the truth is, she wants to go with him. And when she realizes she can’t go, at least she can send Alicia. But her initial impulse is to take herself and Alicia, because our initial impulse is always to save ourselves and our children. Incidentally, if the Canary Islands ever did blow in that way, you would get a five-hour warning for a tidal wave that would roll across the Atlantic. I did a lot of research for this story. The science is reasonably accurate.

Are there places where you had to tinker with the science a little, bend the rules?

The Canary Islands blowing is controversial. Half of it did sheer off at one point in history and it did cause a massive tidal wave. I moved the fault line a little bit, so that when the mountain sheers and slides, it does set off the kind of an earthquake that in turn sets off the tsunami. It’s at least theoretically possible. So it isn’t that I changed the science, but I took the most drastic possible view.

I had known some of the science beforehand. As soon as I started writing and researching, I had a nice file of interesting material. The Canary Island tsunami was there; the fact that the Yellowstone Caldera could blow at any time was there. And in this file I also had the K. planticola, the bacteria that creates too much alcohol. It’s a common form that is on plants already. They did try in Germany to create an alternate version that would convert plant waste to alcohol as a byproduct, and they found out that it would kill all the plants, so they obviously didn’t do anything with it. It never got out of the lab. But because it was in my file, it was something I could do something with. I was thinking about it.

And also, at the time I was writing this, Science News came out with a follow-up on the Iceland volcano. So I thought, “Well, that’s interesting, too. I can use more volcanoes like that.” [Laughs.] So I looked around until I found information on that. Science fiction writers, they do two things. First of all, they take the things that don’t ordinarily go together and stick them together. And secondly, they try the best they can to make a little bit of knowledge look like a lot of knowledge. Those are two completely necessary tools for science fiction writing.

You move among three time lines and points of view in After the Fall. Did you write each chapter in the order they appear?

The first part appears in the order I wrote it. And then, for the second half, I was going on a roll with Pete, so I set Julie aside and I wrote all of the rest of his sections up till the end. Then I went back and wrote all of Julie’s sections up till the final scene. This is the way I always write. I never really know how things are going to turn till I’m halfway through. When I don’t know where I’m going, I kind of have to follow along and try different paths.

Are you ever going to return to these characters, to Pete and McAllister and Alicia and the rest?

I haven’t thought about it, but you never know. It’s possible. There’s a bunch of them now loose on the planet trying to restart civilization. Incidentally, one of the characters that I had most fun writing was Darlene: the acerbic and unrepentant Christian who keeps assuming that everything is Satan’s work. [Laughs.] If you’re going to pick up a random assortment of people, the way the Tesslies did, snatching whoever happened to be alone and available, you’re going to end up with a couple strange people in the group. I could return to them, yeah.

Flash Point comes out in the fall?

Yes. It’s a YA science fiction set on near-future earth, and it’s about teens who are involved in a reality show. That one started with a character. I had in my mind this really desperate teenage girl, in—it’s not a dystopian U.S., but it’s a U.S. in a bad economic slump, even worse than the one we are in—and her parents are dead, she has a young sister she’s trying to support and a grandmother who was supporting them both and is now dying, and this girl desperately needs a job. So I started with her in a position where she’s applying along with several hundred other girls for a job and the story went from there.

Was writing YA terribly different than writing for an older audience?

No, it really wasn’t. YA has changed so much that there really isn’t much of a line anymore, except that the protagonists are teenagers. You’re allowed sex, you’re allowed violence, you’re allowed all kinds of stuff.

Sounds like there’s a similarity between the protagonist of Flash Point and Pete from After the Fall—desperation and the balancing of the needs of family and of the individual. Is there a lot of Pete in this new character?

This girl is much different. She’s very smart. She’s educated in terms of our world, anyway. She’s much more worldly. She’s much more knowledgeable than from Pete. And she’s functioning in a world she understands.

Not much sulking?

[Laughs.] No, not much sulking. She doesn’t have time to sulk. She’s got too many problems to sulk.

What are you working on now?

I’m working on a new YA [book]. And I don’t want to talk about it yet because I don’t like to talk about work in progress. But the decision to write YA was simply, like all of my writing, sort of a non-decision. I kind of write when it comes to me. I know writers who say, “Oh, I’ve got a million ideas and I just need to develop them.” I’m not that writer. I don’t get very many ideas that I’m excited about enough to write. And sometimes, there’s a stretch of a month or two where there aren’t any ideas I’m excited about to write, and that makes me really, really uneasy. Just before I started this book, there had been a month with no writing. And then this idea came to me. I’m always so grateful when I get one that I like. I can’t write a synopsis. I’ve never sold a book on a synopsis in my life. I always write the whole book, because I don’t know where they’re going to go. I dive in and then plot as I go along. I don’t even know if I can finish it.

Now you just got back from a two weeks of teaching Taos Toolbox.

I love to teach. And I do a lot of workshops here and there. I tend to rely heavily on critique workshops because I think the best way to learn to write is to actually write, and then get feedback on it, and then re-write it again. These workshops where you’re given prompts and the ideas you’re supposed to be inspired and all the rest of it, I don’t much hold with those. Writing is not a matter of inspiration except for your initial idea. Writing is a matter of sitting down and doing it. And you have to do a lot of it to get publishable. I know Robert Silverberg sold his first story, but we can’t all be Robert Silverberg now can we? You can’t teach imagination, and you can’t teach a feeling for English prose, but you can teach craftsmanship.

Now with the books you’ve written about elements of craft, do you ever get tired of people asking you about viewpoint or talking about description or characterization? Does it ever get old?

It isn’t that it gets old but after a workshop like Taos Toolbox, I get burned out for a while. I don’t want to see a student manuscript for another couple of months. But that works out fine. Because the next one I do will be in October in Seattle, and by that time, I’ll be ready again. I like teaching. I just would not want to do it full-time.

Does teaching feed the writing at all?

No. In fact, it probably takes the same parts of the brain. The thing about writing is that it’s a solitary activity. It’s you and your computer and a bunch of people who don’t exist. And when you spend a lot of your day doing that, it’s good to get out and talk with other people who are in your field. I like conventions. I like SF parties. I like teaching workshops. I like the contact with people. I’m married, so I see my husband, but he also has an actual job, and my kids are grown and gone. So I need this, and also I like it. I like giving back something to the field.

About the Author

Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and teacher. He is the Staff Interviewer for Clarkesworld Magazine and a frequent contributor to Kobold Quarterly and Booklifenow.com. He teaches at Wofford College and Montessori Academy in Spartanburg, SC. He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006. Jones lives in Upstate South Carolina with his wife, daughter, and flying poodle.

Another Word: The Exceptional Smurfette, or Being One of the Guys as a Superpower

Ekaterina Sedia

This essay is a result of some thoughts that occurred during one of the weekly FeministSF chats on Twitter, when we were discussing exceptionality of female characters in urban fantasy novels—that is, their tendency to be the only woman in the book. This essay is meant to summarize some thoughts on this issue. And to encourage everyone to participate in FeministSF chats, obviously!

We all are familiar with the Smurfette principle—the idea that in any group of characters (such as The Smurfs) only male leads are allowed personalities, while the girl gets to be . . . well, a girl. That’s her whole shtick. It is also nothing new that urban fantasy is lousy with strong female characters—an epidemic well described elsewhere (for example, here). I am here, however, to tell you that the two of them combined created a terrible monster—an Exceptional Smurfette (or Super-Smurfette, if you will), and she is not exactly good news when it comes to representations of women in fiction and advancing the cause of said representations.

Again, elsewhere it has been well established that really, we should have more variety of female characters and various definitions of female strength since the kick-ass heroine is sort of taking over, blinding us to other species of strength (and the very notion that a woman doesn’t have to kick ass to be worthy of the protagonist status.) What troubles me most, however, is the exceptionality: in some urban fantasy books (as well as comic books and movies) this kick-ass heroine is the only woman allowed to inhabit the protagonist space. As a result, she is surrounded by men, is friends with men, is romantically involved with them, and usually is a daddy’s girl. She is, in other words, very much one of the guys.

And really, this by itself, in any given urban fantasy novel, is not necessarily a big deal. It’s just the sheer number of books and movies and other media that present this picture is so great that it becomes a normalized cultural default. And considering that this exceptional lady is just that—exceptional (what with ass-kicking and vampire-hunting and what not), a very insidious pattern is established: A woman becomes worthy of inclusion into a male domain only if she adopts a masculine notion of strength and associated power signifiers, and becomes exceptionally good at them.

Now, I have my fair number of issues with women who shun the company of their own gender—internalized sexism is a problem, and a culture-wide devaluing of all things feminine is a pervasive and often invisible force. Women often receive a message that they should become like men to become worthy, to become better, to be strong—and when we call a girl “one of the guys” we often mean it as a compliment. But the exceptional female raises the bar even higher: To be included in that masculine domain, a woman must become a superhero—something the original Smurfette never had to deal with. Meanwhile, other women who do not aspire to such pursuit are not just absent (as is the case with the Smurf village), but are painted as lesser, jealous, stupid, meddling, and undeserving. Mothers are either absent or incompetent, and fathers or father figures usually get to do a fair amount of character shaping. There are no female friends in most cases: Other women are either rivals or unflattering points of comparison. That is, Smurfs are paragons of feminism compared to this.

This situation is not only found in urban fantasy novels, of course: A slew of recent movies features such superpowered Smurfettes. One of the more interesting examples of it in movies is perhaps embodied by Hit-Girl, Chloë Moretz’s character in the movie Kick-Ass. Even though she is quite young, we can see the making of the Super-Smurfette in her. She is raised by her father, who is pretty much the main influence who shapes her; she has no friends among the girls around her age; and in the end she teams up with a lot less competent, male-superhero wannabe. (We won’t go into the whole thing where he gets to save the day). Don’t get me wrong—Moretz is wonderful in the movie. But she so obviously outclasses the titular character that one cannot help but feel that she is settling just a tad. Why? Because being one of the boys is a reward enough.

It also doesn’t seem to be much of a stretch to see the grown-up version of Moretz in Janeane Garofalo’s The Bowler from Mystery Men—another superhero flick (which predates Kick-Ass by good ten years). Her character’s father is firmly dead but still influential in the form of the talking skull inside the bowling ball with which The Bowler destroys her enemies. She is, of course, the only girl in the group—and as far as skills go, she is also the most qualified. Still, she seeks to be a part of The Mystery Men—a group of superheroes with dubious to middling powers, indicating that being one of the guys is as worthy a goal as being a superhero (and in many ways equally desirable and/or challenging.)

This is not a new phenomenon: One only needs to look to the Greek myths, to Athena (the ultimate daddy’s girl), who was positioned as exceptional even among the gods (although there were quite a few goddesses there) because of her persistent commitment to masculinity. I think it is interesting to see Athena’s behavior in The Eumenides—even though she is respectful of the Furies, she is backed by Zeus and has nothing to fear from them. And yet she talks them down, urging them to abandon retribution. She sides firmly with the men, since Furies are the ones avenging wrongdoings done to women. Athena acts remarkably like many urban fantasy heroines who identify more strongly with men and tend to take their side against their own gender. Consider:

“There is no mother anywhere who gave me birth,
and, but for marriage, I am always for the male
with all my heart, and strongly on my father’s side.
So, in a case where the wife has killed her husband, lord
of the house, her death shall not mean most to me.”

(Aeschylus. Trans. Richmond Lattimore. Oresteia: The Eumenides. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953.)

Athena, however, is an exception in the Greek tradition. Along with the absent mother (who was, ahem, eaten by Zeus) she exhibits many characteristics in common with—and provides a curious point of comparison to—modern urban fantasy heroines. After all, wouldn’t the Furies provide a much better model of strength, not dependent on male (i.e. fatherly) backing and approval? But of course, it is not exactly surprising that under the patriarchal system we do not see three women working together; we see one woman who has internalized male values, working within the system where they are allowed the benefit of exceptional status, and disparaging other women who dare to challenge this system of values and dominance.

One would expect that as the time goes on, representations of women in literature would become more diverse. And indeed they have been: There are many versions of female characters and female strength being written about. But the Super-Smurfette still towers large in her dominance. I don’t want to call out individual authors and books, because really, it’s just one way of writing female characters. However, I feel that when one archetype becomes so dominant as to pretty much be associated with the genre (urban fantasy and its heroines conform to this mold often enough for us to have this conversation), it is probably time to challenge that and to ask ourselves: Do our strong, kick-ass heroines need to be walking representations of internalized sexism? Can they function without male approval? Will they die if they occasionally have a girlfriend or two who is not into the whole vampire-fighting business and yet is presented as pleasant and levelheaded? I sure would like to see more of them.

About the Author

Ekaterina Sedia resides in the Pinelands of New Jersey. Her critically-acclaimed and award-nominated novels, The Secret History of Moscow, The Alchemy of Stone, The House of Discarded Dreams, and Heart of Iron, were published by Prime Books. Her short stories have sold to Analog, Baen’s Universe, Subterranean, and Clarkesworld, as well as numerous anthologies, including Haunted Legends and Magic in the Mirrorstone. She is also the editor of the anthologies Paper Cities (World Fantasy Award winner), Running with the Pack, and Bewere the Night, as well as forthcoming Bloody Fabulous and Wilful Impropriety. Her short-story collection, Moscow But Dreaming, will be released by Prime Books in December 2012.

Clarkesworld Magazine

Issue 71

Table of Contents

Mantis Wives

by Kij Johnson

Honey Bear

by Sofia Samatar

Fade to White

by Catherynne M. Valente

The Spell of History: Magic Systems and Real-World Zeitgeists

by Jeff Seymour

In a Carapace of Light: A Conversation with China Miéville

by Jeremy L. C. Jones

Another Word: Plausibility and Truth

by Daniel Abraham

Editor's Desk: Finding the Good in a Dark Day

by Neil Clarke

Space Journey

Art by Martin Faragasso

© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2012
www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

Mantis Wives

Kij Johnson

“As for the insects, their lives are sustained only by intricate processes of fantastic horror.” —John Wyndham.

Eventually, the mantis women discovered that killing their husbands was not inseparable from the getting of young. Before this, a wife devoured her lover piece by piece during the act of coition: the head (and its shining eyes going dim as she ate); the long green prothorax; the forelegs crisp as straws; the bitter wings. She left for last the metathorax and its pumping legs, the abdomen, and finally the phallus. Mantis women needed nutrients for their pregnancies; their lovers offered this as well as their seed.

It was believed that mantis men would resist their deaths if permitted to choose the manner of their mating; but the women learned to turn elsewhere for nutrients after draining their husbands’ members, and yet the men lingered. And so their ladies continued to kill them, but slowly, in the fashioning of difficult arts. What else could there be between them?

The Bitter Edge: A wife may cut through her husband’s exoskeletal plates, each layer a different pattern, so that to look at a man is to see shining, hard brocade. At the deepest level are visible pieces of his core, the hint of internal parts bleeding out. He may suggest shapes.

The Eccentric Curve of His Thoughts: A wife may drill the tiniest hole into her lover’s head and insert a fine hair. She presses carefully, striving for specific results: a seizure, a novel pheromone burst, a dance that ends in self-castration. If she replaces the hair with a wasp’s narrow syringing stinger, she may blow air bubbles into his head and then he will react unpredictably. There is otherwise little he may do that will surprise her, or himself.

What is the art of the men, that they remain to die at the hands of their wives? What is the art of the wives, that they kill?

The Strength of Weight: Removing his wings, she leads him into the paths of ants.

Unready Jewels: A mantis wife may walk with her husband across the trunks of pines, until they come to a trail of sap and ascend to an insect-clustered wound. Staying to the side, she presses him down until his legs stick fast. He may grow restless as the sap sheathes his body and wings. His eyes may not dim for some time. Smaller insects may cluster upon his honeyed body like ornaments.

A mantis woman does not know why the men crave death, but she does not ask. Does she fear resistance? Does she hope for it? She has forgotten the ancient reasons for her acts, but in any case her art is more important.

The Oubliette: Or a wife may take not his life but his senses: plucking the antennae from his forehead; scouring with dust his clustered shining eyes; cracking apart his mandibles to scrape out the lining of his mouth and throat; plucking the sensing hairs from his foremost legs; excising the auditory thoracic organ; biting free the wings.

A mantis woman is not cruel. She gives her husband what he seeks. Who knows what poems he fashions in the darkness of a senseless life?

The Scent of Violets: They mate many times, until one dies.

Two Stones Grind Together: A wife collects with her forelegs small brightly colored poisonous insects, places them upon bitter green leaves, and encourages her husband to eat them. He is sometimes reluctant after the first taste but she speaks to him, or else he calms himself and eats.

He may foam at the mouth and anus, or grow paralyzed and fall from a branch. In extreme cases, he may stagger along the ground until he is seen by a bird and swallowed, and then even the bird may die.

A mantis has no veins; what passes for blood flows freely within its protective shell. It does have a heart.

The Desolate Junk-land: Or a mantis wife may lay her husband gently upon a soft bed and bring to him cool drinks and silver dishes filled with sweetmeats. She may offer him crossword puzzles and pornography; may kneel at his feet and tell him stories of mantis men who are heroes; may dance in veils before him.

He tears off his own legs before she begins. It is unclear whether The Desolate Junk-land is her art, or his.

Shame’s Uniformity: A wife may return to the First Art and, in a variant, devour her husband, but from the abdomen forward. Of all the arts this is hardest. There is no hair, no ant’s bite, no sap, no intervening instrument. He asks her questions until the end. He may doubt her motives, or she may.

The Paper-folder. Lichens’ Dance. The Ambition of Aphids. Civil Wars. The Secret History of Cumulus. The Lost Eyes Found. Sedges. The Unbeaked Sparrow.

There are as many arts as there are husbands and wives.

The Cruel Web: Perhaps they wish to love each other, but they cannot see a way to exist that does not involve the barb, the sticking sap, the bitter taste of poison. The Cruel Web can be performed only in the brambles of woods, and only when there has been no recent rain and the spider’s webs have grown thick. Wife and husband walk together. Webs catch and cling to their carapaces, their legs, their half-opened wings. They tear free, but the webs collect. Their glowing eyes grow veiled. Their curious antennae come to a tangled halt. Their pheromones become confused; their legs struggle against the gathering web. The spiders wait.

She is larger than he and stronger, but they often fall together.

How to Live: A mantis may dream of something else. This also may be a trap.

About the Author

Kij Johnson is the author of three novels and a number of short stories, a three-time winner of the Nebula Award (including in 2010, for her Clarkesworld story, “Spar”), and a winner of the World Fantasy, Sturgeon, Crawford, and Asimov’s Reader Awards. Currently she splits her time between Seattle and Kansas.

Honey Bear

Sofia Samatar

We’ve decided to take a trip, to see the ocean. I want Honey to see it while she’s still a child. That way, it’ll be magical. I tell her about it in the car: how big it is, and green, like a sky you can wade in.

“Even you?” she asks.

“Even me.”

I duck my head to her hair. She smells fresh, but not sweet at all, like parsley or tea. She’s wearing a little white dress. It’s almost too short. She pushes her bare toes against the seat in front of her, knuckling it like a cat.

“Can you not do that, Hon?” says Dave.

“Sorry, Dad.”

She says “Dad” now. She used to say “Da-Da.”

Dave grips the wheel. I can see the tension in his shoulders. Threads of gray wink softly in his dark curls. He still wears his hair long, covering his ears, and I think he’s secretly a little bit vain about it. A little bit proud of still having all his hair. I think there’s something in this, something valuable, something he could use to get back. You don’t cling to personal vanities if you’ve given up all hope of a normal life. At least, I don’t think you do.

“Shit,” he says.

“Sweetheart…”

He doesn’t apologize for swearing in front of Honey. The highway’s blocked by a clearance area, gloved hands waving us around. He turns the car so sharply the bags in the passenger seat beside him almost fall off the cooler. In the back seat, I lean into Honey Bear.

“It’s okay,” I tell Dave.

“No, Karen, it is not okay. The temp in the cooler is going to last until exactly four o’clock. At four o’clock, we need a fridge, which means we need a hotel. If we are five minutes late, it is not going to be okay.”

“It looks like a pretty short detour.”

“It is impossible for you to see how long it is.”

“I’m just thinking, it doesn’t look like they’ve got that much to clear.”

“Fine, you can think that. Think what you want. But don’t tell me the detour’s not long, or give me any other information you don’t actually have, okay?”

He’s driving faster. I rest my cheek on the top of Honey’s head. The clearance area rolls by outside the window. Cranes, loading trucks, figures in orange jumpsuits. Some of the slick has dried: they’re peeling it up in transparent sheets, like plate glass.

Honey presses a fingertip to the window. “Poo-poo,” she says softly.

I tell her about the time I spent a weekend at the beach. My best friend got so sunburned, her back blistered.

We play the clapping game, “A Sailor Went to Sea-Sea-Sea.” It’s our favorite.

Dave drives too fast, but we don’t get stopped, and we reach the hotel in time. I take my meds, and we put the extra in the hotel fridge. Dave’s shirt is dark with sweat, and I wish he’d relax, but he goes straight out to buy ice, and stores it in the freezer so we can fill the cooler tomorrow. Then he takes a shower and lies on the bed and watches the news. I sit on the floor with Honey, looking at books. I read to her every evening before bed; I’ve never missed a night. Right now, we’re reading The Meadow Fairies by Dorothy Elizabeth Clark.

This is something I’ve looked forward to my whole adult life: reading the books I loved as a child with a child of my own. Honey adores The Meadow Fairies. She snuggles up to me and traces the pretty winged children with her finger. Daffodil, poppy, pink. When I first brought the book home, and Dave saw us reading it, he asked what the point was, since Honey would never see those flowers. I laughed because I’d never seen them either. “It’s about fairies,” I told him, “not botany.” I don’t think I’ve ever seen a poppy in my life.

Smiling, though half-asleep,
The Poppy Fairy passes,
Scarlet, like the sunrise,
Among the meadow grasses.

Honey chants the words with me. She’s so smart, she learns so fast. She can pick up anything that rhymes in minutes. Her hair glints in the lamplight. There’s the mysterious, slightly abrasive smell of hotel sheets, a particular hotel darkness between the blinds.

“I love this place,” says Honey. “Can we stay here?”

“It’s an adventure,” I tell her. “Just wait till tomorrow.”

On the news, helicopters hover over the sea. It’s far away, the Pacific. There’s been a huge dump there, over thirty square miles of slick. The effects on marine life are not yet known.

“Will it be fairyland?” Honey asks suddenly.

“What, sweetie?”

“Will it be fairyland, when I’m grown up?”

“Yes,” I tell her. My firmest tone.

“Will you be there?”

No hesitation. “Yes.”

The camera zooms in on the slick-white sea.

By the time I’ve given Honey Bear a drink and put her to bed, Dave’s eyes are closed. I turn off the TV and the lights and get into bed. Like Honey, I love the hotel. I love the hard, tight sheets and the unfamiliar shapes that emerge around me once I’ve gotten used to the dark. It’s been ages since I slept away from home. The last time was long before Honey. Dave and I visited some college friends in Oregon. They couldn’t believe we’d driven all that way. We posed in their driveway, leaning on the car and making the victory sign.

I want the Dave from that photo. That deep suntan, that wide grin.

Maybe he’ll come back to me here, away from home and our neighbors, the Simkos. He spends far too much time at their place.

For a moment, I think he’s back already.

Then he starts shaking. He does it every night. He’s crying in his sleep.

“Ready for the beach?”

“Yes!”

We drive through town to a parking lot dusted with sand. When I step out of the car the warm sea air rolls over me in waves. There’s something lively in it, something electric.

Honey jumps up and down. “Is that it? Is that it?”

“You got it, Honey Bear.”

The beach is deserted. Far to the left, an empty boardwalk whitens in the sun. I kick off my sandals and scoop them up in my hand. The gray sand sticks to my feet. We lumber down to a spot a few yards from some boulders, lugging bags and towels.

“Can I take my shoes off too? Can I go in the ocean?”

“Sure, but let me take your dress off.”

I pull it off over her head, and her lithe, golden body slips free. She’s so beautiful, my Bear. I call her Honey because she’s my sweetheart, my little love, and I call her Bear for the wildness I dream she will keep always. Honey suits her now, but when she’s older she might want us to call her Bear. I would’ve loved to be named Bear when I was in high school.

“Don’t go too deep,” I tell her, “just up to your tummy, okay?”

“Okay,” she says, and streaks off, kicking up sand behind her.

Dave has laid out the towels. He’s weighted the corners with shoes and the cooler so they won’t blow away. He’s set up the two folding chairs and the umbrella. Now, with nothing to organize or prepare, he’s sitting on a chair with his bare feet resting on a towel. He looks lost.

“Not going in?” I ask.

I think for a moment he’s going to ignore me, but then he makes an effort. “Not right away,” he says.

I slip off my shorts and my halter top and sit in the chair beside him in my suit. Down in the water, Honey jumps up and down and shrieks.

“Look at that.”

“Yeah,” he says.

“She loves it.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m so glad we brought her. Thank you.” I reach out and give his wrist a squeeze.

“Look at that fucked-up clown on the boardwalk,” he says. “It looks like it used to be part of an arcade entrance or something. Probably been there for fifty years.”

The clown towers over the boardwalk. It’s almost white, but you can see traces of red on the nose and lips, traces of blue on the hair.

“Looks pretty old,” I agree.

“Black rocks, filthy gray sand, and a fucked-up arcade clown. That’s what we’ve got. That’s the beach.”

It comes out before I can stop it: “Okay, Mr. Simko.”

Dave looks at me.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

He looks at his watch. “I don’t want to stay here for more than an hour. I want us to take a break, go back to the hotel and rest for a bit. Then we’ll have lunch, and you can take your medication.”

“I said I’m sorry.”

“You know what?” He looks gray, worn out, beaten down, like something left out in the rain. His eyes wince away from the light. I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it if he never comes back. “I think,” he tells me, “that Mr. Simko is a pretty fucking sensible guy.”

I lean back in the chair, watching Honey Bear in the water. I hate the Simkos. Mr. Simko’s bent over and never takes off his bathrobe. He sits on his porch drinking highballs all day, and he gets Dave to go over there and drink too. I can hear them when I’ve got the kitchen window open. Mr. Simko says things like “Après nous le déluge” and “Keep your powder dry and your pecker wet.” He tells Dave he wishes he and Mrs. Simko didn’t have Mandy. I’ve heard him say that. “I wish we’d never gone in for it. Broke Linda’s heart.” Who does he think brings him the whiskey to make his highballs?

Mrs. Simko never comes out of the house except when Mandy comes home. Then she appears on the porch, banging the door behind her. She’s bent over like her husband and wears a flowered housedress. Her hair is black fluff, with thin patches here and there, as if she’s burned it. “Mandy, Mandy,” she croons, while Mandy puts the stuff down on the porch: liquor, chocolate, clothes, all the luxury goods you can’t get at the Center. Stuff you can only get from a child who’s left home. Mandy never looks at her mother. She hasn’t let either of the Simkos touch her since she moved out.

“I’m going down in the water with Honey,” I say, but Dave grabs my arm.

“Wait. Look.”

I turn my head, and there are Fair Folk on the rocks. Six of them, huge and dazzling. Some crouch on the boulders; others swing over the sea on their flexible wings, dipping their toes in the water.

“Honey!” Dave shouts. “Honey! Come here!”

“C’mon, Hon,” I call, reassuring.

Honey splashes toward us, glittering in the sun.

“Come here!” barks Dave.

“She’s coming,” I tell him.

He clutches the arms of his chair. I know he’s afraid because of the clearance area we passed on the highway, the slick.

“Come here,” he repeats as Honey runs up panting. He glances at the Fair Folk. They’re looking at us now, lazy and curious.

I get up and dry Honey off with a towel. “What?” she says.

“Just come over here,” says Dave, holding out his arms. “Come and sit with Daddy.”

Honey walks over and curls up in his lap. I sit in the chair next to them and Dave puts his hand on my shoulder. He’s got us. He’s holding everyone.

Two of the Fair Folk lift and ripple toward us through the light. There seems to be more light wherever they go. They’re fifteen, twenty feet tall, so tall they look slender, attenuated, almost insect-like. You forget how strong they are.

They bend and dip in the air: so close I can see the reds of their eyes.

“It’s okay,” Dave whispers.

And it is, of course. We’ve got each other. We’re safe.

They gaze at us for a moment, impassive, then turn and glide back to their comrades.

Honey waves at them with both hands. “Bye, fairies!”

On my first visit to the clinic, I went through all the usual drills, the same stuff I go in for every two weeks. Step here, pee here, spit here, breathe in, breathe out, give me your arm. The only difference the first time was the questions.

Are you aware of the gravity of the commitment? I said yes. Have you been informed of the risks, both physical and psychological? Yes. The side effects of the medication? Blood transfusions? Yes. Yes. The decrease in life expectancy? Everything: yes.

That’s what you say to life. Yes.

“They chose us,” I told Dave. Rain lashed the darkened windows. I cradled tiny Honey in my lap. I’d dried her off and wrapped her in a towel, and she was quiet now, exhausted. I’d already named her in my head.

“We can’t go back,” Dave whispered. “If we say yes, we can’t go back.”

“I know.”

His eyes were wet. “We could run out and put her on somebody else’s porch.”

He looked ashamed after he’d said it, the way he’d looked when I’d asked him not to introduce me as “my wife, Karen, the children’s literature major.” When we first moved into the neighborhood he’d introduce me that way and then laugh, as if there was nothing more ridiculous in the world. Children, when almost nobody could have them anymore; literature when all the schools were closed. I told him it bothered me, and he was sorry, but only for hurting me. He wasn’t sorry for what he really meant. What he meant was: No.

That’s wrong. It’s like the Simkos, hateful and worn out with saying No to Mandy, saying No to life.

So many people say no from the beginning. They make it a virtue: “I can’t be bought.” As if it were all a matter of protection and fancy goods. Of course, most of those who say yes pretend to be heroes: saving the world, if only for a season. That’s always struck me as equally wrong, in its own way. Cheap.

I can’t help thinking the absence of children has something to do with this withering of the spirit—this pale new way of seeing the world. Children knew better. You always say yes. If you don’t, there’s no adventure, and you grow old in your ignorance, bitter, bereft of magic. You say yes to what comes, because you belong to the future, whatever it is, and you’re sure as hell not going to be left behind in the past. Do you hear the fairies sing? You always get up and open the door. You always answer. You always let them in.

The Fair Folk are gone. I’m in the ocean with Honey. I bounce her on my knee. She’s so light in the water: soap bubble, floating seed. She clings to my neck and squeals. I think she’ll remember this, this morning at the beach, and the memory will be almost exactly like my own memory of childhood. The water, the sun. Even the cooler, the crumpled maps in the car. So many things now are the way they were when I was small. Simpler, in lots of ways. The things that have disappeared—air travel, wireless communication—seem dreamlike, ludicrous, almost not worth thinking about.

I toss Honey up in the air and catch her, getting a mouthful of saltwater in the process. I shoot the water onto her shoulder. “Mama!” she yells. She bends her head to the water and burbles, trying to copy me, but I lift her up again. I don’t want her to choke.

“My Bear, my Bear,” I murmur against the damp, wet side of her head. “My Honey Bear.”

Dave is waving us in. He’s pointing at his watch.

I don’t know if it’s the excitement, or maybe something about the salt water, but as soon as I get Honey up on the beach, she voids.

“Christ,” says Dave. “Oh, Christ.”

He pulls me away from her. In seconds he’s kneeling on our towels, whipping the gloves and aprons out of the bag. He gets his on fast; I fumble with mine. He rips open a packet of wipes with his teeth, tosses it to me, and pulls out a can of spray.

“I thought you said it wasn’t time yet,” he says.

“I thought it wasn’t. It’s really early.”

Honey stands naked on the sand, slick pouring down her legs. Already she looks hesitant, confused. “Mama?”

“It’s okay, Hon. Just let it come. Do you want to lie down?”

“Yes,” she says, and crumples.

“Fuck,” says Dave. “It’s going to hit the water. I have to go make a call. Take this.”

He hands me the spray, yanks his loafers on and dashes up the beach. There’s a phone in the parking lot, he can call the Service. He’s headed for the fence, not the gate, but it doesn’t stop him, he seizes the bar and vaults over.

The slick is still coming. So much, it’s incredible, as if she’s losing her whole body. It astounds me, it frightens me every time. Her eyes are still open, but dazed. Her fine hair is starting to dry in the sun. The slick pours, undulant, catching the light, like molten plastic.

I touch her face with a gloved hand. “Honey Bear.”

“Mm,” she grunts.

“You’re doing a good job, Hon. Just relax, okay? Mama’s here.”

Dave was right, it’s going to reach the water. I scramble down to the waves and spray the sand and even the water in the path of the slick. Probably won’t do anything, probably stupid. I run back to Honey just as Dave comes pelting back from the parking lot.

“On their way,” he gasps. “Shit! It’s almost in the water!”

“Mama,” says Honey.

“I know. I tried to spray.”

“You sprayed? That’s not going to do anything!”

I’m kneeling beside her. “Yes, Honey.”

“Help me!” yells Dave. He runs down past the slick and starts digging wildly, hurling gobs of wet sand.

Honey curls her hand around my finger.

“Karen! Get down here! We can dig a trench, we can keep it from hitting the water!”

“This is scary,” Honey whispers.

“I know. I know, Hon. I’m sorry. But you don’t need to be scared. It’s just like when we’re at home, okay?”

But it’s not, it’s not like when we’re at home. At home, I usually know when it’s going to happen. I’ve got a chart. I set up buckets, a plastic sheet. I notify the Service of the approximate date. They come right away. We keep the lights down, and I play Honey’s favorite CD.

This isn’t like that at all. Harsh sunlight, Dave screaming behind us. Then the Service. They’re angry: one of them says, “You ought to be fucking fined.” They spray Honey, right on her skin. She squeezes my finger. I don’t know what to do, except sing to her, a song from her CD.

A sailor went to sea-sea-sea
To see what he could see-see-see
But all that he could see-see-see
Was the bottom of the deep blue sea-sea-sea.

At last, it stops. The Service workers clean Honey up and wrap her in sterile sheets. They take our gloves and aprons away to be cleaned at the local Center. Dave and I wipe ourselves down and bag the dirty wipes for disposal. We’re both shaking. He says: “We are not doing this again.”

“It was an accident,” I tell him. “It’s just life.”

He turns to face me. “This is not life, Karen,” he snarls. “This is not life.“

“Yes. It is.”

I think he sees, then. I think he sees that even though he’s the practical one, the realist, I’m the strong one.

I carry Honey up to the car. Dave takes the rest of the stuff. He makes two trips. He gives me an energy bar and then my medication. After that, there’s the injection, painkillers and nutrients, because Honey’s voided, and she’ll be hungry. She’ll need more than a quick drink.

He slips the needle out of my arm. He’s fast, and gentle, even like this, kneeling in the car in a beach parking lot. He presses the cotton down firmly, puts on a strip of medical tape. He looks up and meets my eyes. His are full of tears.

“Jesus, Karen,” he says.

Just like that, in that moment, he’s back. He covers his mouth with his fist, holding in laughter. “Did you hear the Service guy?”

“You mean ‘You ought to be fucking fined’?”

He bends over, wheezing and crowing. “Christ! I really thought the slick was going in the water.”

“But it didn’t go in the water?”

“No.”

He sits up, wipes his eyes on the back of his hand, then reaches out to smooth my hair away from my face.

“No. It didn’t go in. It was fine. Not that it matters, with that giant dump floating in the Pacific.”

He reads my face, and raises his hands, palms out. “Okay, okay. No Mr. Simko.”

He backs out, shuts the door gently, and gets in the driver’s seat. The white clown on the boardwalk watches our car pull out of the lot. We’re almost at the hotel when Honey wakes up.

“Mama?” she mumbles. “I’m hungry.”

“Okay, sweetie.”

I untie the top piece of my suit and pull it down. “Dave? I’m going to feed her in the car.”

“Okay. I’ll park in the shade. I’ll bring you something to eat from inside.”

“Thanks.”

Honey’s wriggling on my lap, fighting the sheets. “Mama, I’m hungry.”

“Hush. Hush. Here.”

She nuzzles at me, quick and greedy, and latches on. Not at the nipple, but in the soft area under the arm. She grips me lightly with her teeth, and then there’s the almost electric jolt as her longer, hollow teeth come down and sink in.

“There,” I whisper. “There.”

Dave gets out and shuts the door. We’re alone in the car.

A breeze stirs the leaves outside. Their reflections move in the windows.

I don’t know what the future is going to bring. I don’t think about it much. It does seem like there won’t be a particularly lengthy future, for us. Not with so few human children being born, and the Fair Folk eating all the animals, and so many plant species dying out from the slick. And once we’re gone, what will the Fair Folk do? They don’t seem able to raise their own children. It’s why they came here in the first place. I don’t know if they feel sorry for us, but I know they want us to live as long as possible: they’re not pure predators, as some people claim. The abductions of the early days, the bodies discovered in caves—that’s all over. The terror, too. That was just to show us what they could do. Now they only kill us as punishment, or after they’ve voided, when they’re crazy with hunger. They rarely hurt anyone in the company of a winged child.

Still, even with all their precautions, we won’t last forever. I remember the artist in the park, when I took Honey there one day. All of his paintings were white. He said that was the future, a white planet, nothing but slick, and Honey said it looked like fairyland.

Her breathing has slowed. Mine, too. It’s partly the meds, and partly some chemical that comes down through the teeth. It makes you drowsy.

Here’s what I know about the future. Honey Bear will grow bigger. Her wings will expand. One day she’ll take to the sky, and go live with her own kind. Maybe she’ll forget human language, the way the Simko’s Mandy has, but she’ll still bring us presents. She’ll still be our piece of the future.

And maybe she won’t forget. She might remember. She might remember this day at the beach.

She’s still awake. Her eyes glisten, heavy with bliss. Large, slightly protuberant eyes, perfectly black in the centers, and scarlet, like the sunrise, at the edges.

About the Author

Sofia Samatar is a fantasy writer, poet, and critic, and a PhD student in African Languages and Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She studies twentieth-century Egyptian and Sudanese fiction, and is writing a dissertation on the uses of fantasy in the works of the Sudanese writer, Tayeb Salih. Sofia’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in a number of places, including Ideomancer, Expanded Horizons and Strange Horizons. Her poetry can be found at Stone Telling, Bull Spec and Goblin Fruit, among others; one of her poems was reprinted in the anthology The Moment of Change. Her debut novel, A Stranger in Olondria, is forthcoming from Small Beer Press in 2013.

Fade to White

Catherynne M. Valente

Fight the Communist Threat in Your Own Backyard!

ZOOM IN on a bright-eyed Betty in a crisp green dress, maybe pick up the shade of the spinach in the lower left frame. [Note to Art Dept: Good morning, Stone! Try to stay awake through the next meeting, please. I think we can get more patriotic with the dress. Star-Spangled Sweetheart, steamset hair the color of good American corn, that sort of thing. Stick to a red, white, and blue palette.] She’s holding up a resplendent head of cabbage the size of a pre-war watermelon. Her bicep bulges as she balances the weight of this New Vegetable, grown in a Victory Brand Capsule Garden. [Note to Art Dept: is cabbage the most healthful vegetable? Carrots really pop, and root vegetables emphasize the safety of Synthasoil generated by Victory Brand Capsules.]

Betty looks INTO THE CAMERA and says: Just because the war is over doesn’t mean your Victory Garden has to be! The vigilant wife knows that every garden planted is a munitions plant in the War Fight Struggle Against Communism. Just one Victory Brand Capsule and a dash of fresh Hi-Uranium Mighty Water can provide an average yard’s worth of safe, rich, synthetic soil—and the seeds are included! STOCK FOOTAGE of scientists: beakers, white coats, etc. Our boys in the lab have developed a wide range of hardy, modern seeds from pre-war heirloom collections to produce the Vegetables of the Future. [Note to Copy: Do not mention pre-war seedstock.] Just look at this beautiful New Cabbage. Efficient, bountiful, and only three weeks from planting to table. [Note to Copy: Again with the cabbage? You know who eats a lot of cabbage, Stone? Russians. Give her a big old zucchini. Long as a man's arm. Have her hold it in her lap so the head rests on her tits.]

BACK to Betty, walking through cornstalks like pine trees. And that’s not all. With a little help from your friends at Victory, you can feed your family and play an important role in the defense of the nation. Betty leans down to show us big, leafy plants growing in her Synthasoil. [Note to Casting: make sure we get a busty girl, so we see a little cleavage when she bends over. We're hawking fertility here. Hers, ours.] Here’s a tip: Plant our patented Liberty Spinach at regular intervals. Let your little green helpers go to work leeching useful isotopes and residual radioactivity from rain, groundwater, just about anything! [Note to Copy: Stone, you can't be serious. Leeching? That sounds dreadful. Reaping. Don't make me do your job for you.] Turn in your crop at Victory Depots for Harvest Dollars redeemable at a variety of participating local establishments! [Note to Project Manager: can't we get some soda fountains or something to throw us a few bucks for ad placement here? Missed opportunity! And couldn't we do a regular feature with the "tips" to move other products, make Betty into a trusted household name—but not Betty. Call her something that starts with T, Tammy? Tina? Theresa?]

Betty smiles. The camera pulls out to show her surrounded by a garden in full bloom and three [Note to Art Dept: Four minimum] kids in overalls carrying baskets of huge, shiny New Vegetables. The sun is coming up behind her. The slogan scrolls up in red, white, and blue type as she says:

A free and fertile tomorrow. Brought to you by Victory.

Fade to white.

The Hydrodynamic Front

More than anything in the world, Martin wanted to be a Husband when he grew up.

Sure, he had longed for other things when he was young and silly—to be a Milkman, a uranium prospector, an astronaut. But his fifteenth birthday was zooming up with alarming speed, and becoming an astronaut now struck him as an impossibly, almost obscenely trivial goal. Martin no longer drew pictures of the moon in his notebooks or begged his mother to order the whiz-bang home enrichment kit from the tantalizing back pages of Popular Mechanics. His neat yellow pencils still kept up near-constant flight passes over the pale blue lines of composition books, but what Martin drew now were babies. In cradles and out, girls with bows in their bonnets and boys with rattles shaped like rockets, newborns and toddlers. He drew pictures of little kids running through clean, tall grass, reading books with straw in their mouths, hanging out of trees like rosy-cheeked fruit. He sketched during history, math, civics: twin girls sitting at a table gazing up with big eyes at their Father, who kept his hat on while he carved a holiday Brussels sprout the size of a dog. Triplet boys wrestling on a pristine, uncontaminated beach. In Martin’s notebooks, everyone had twins and triplets.

Once, alone in his room at night, he had allowed himself to draw quadruplets. His hand quivered with the richness and wonder of those four perfect graphite faces asleep in their four identical bassinets.

Whenever Martin drew babies they were laughing and smiling. He could not bear the thought of an unhappy child. He had never been one, he was pretty sure. His older brother Henry had. He still cried and shut himself up in Father’s workshop for days, which Martin would never do because it was very rude. But then, Henry was born before the war. He probably had a lot to cry about. Still, on the rare occasion that Henry made a cameo appearance in Martin’s gallery of joyful babies, he was always grinning. Always holding a son of his own. Martin considered those drawings a kind of sympathetic magic. Make Henry happy—watch his face at dinner and imagine what it would look like if he cracked a joke. Catch him off guard, snorting, which was as close as Henry ever got to laughing, at some pratfall on The Mr. Griffith Show. Make Henry happy in a notebook and he’ll be happy in real life. Put a baby in his arms and he won’t have to go to the Front in the fall.

Once, and only once, Martin had tried this magic on himself. With very careful strokes and the best shading he’d ever managed, he had drawn himself in a beautiful gray suit, with a professional grade shine on his shoes and a strong angle to his hat. He drew a briefcase in his own hand. He tried to imagine what his face would look like when it filled out, got square-jawed and handsome the way a man’s face should be. How he would style his hair when he became a Husband. Whether he would grow a beard. Painstakingly, he drew a double Windsor knot in his future tie, which Martin considered the most masculine and elite knot.

And finally, barely able to breathe with longing, he outlined the long, gorgeous arc of a baby’s carriage, the graceful fall of a lace curtain so that the pencilled child wouldn’t get sunburned, big wheels capable of a smoothness that bordered on the ineffable. He put the carriage-handle into his own firm hand. It took Martin two hours to turn himself into a Husband. When the spell was finished, he spritzed the drawing with some of his mother’s hairspray so that it wouldn’t smudge and folded it up flat and small. He kept it in his shirt pocket. Some days, he could feel the drawing move with his heart. And when Father hugged him, the paper would crinkle pleasantly between them, like a whispered promise.

Static Overpressure

The day of Sylvie’s Presentation broke with a dawn beyond red, beyond blood or fire. She lay in her spotless white and narrow bed, quite awake, gazing at the colors through her Sentinel Gamma Glass window—lower rates of corneal and cellular damage than their leading competitors, guaranteed. Today, the sky could only remind Sylvie of birth. The screaming scarlet folds of clouds, the sun’s crowning head. Sylvie knew it was the hot ash that made every sunrise and sunset into a torture of magenta and violet and crimson, the superheated cloud vapor that never cooled. She winced as though red could hurt her—which of course it could. Everything could.

Sylvie had devoted a considerable amount of time to imagining how this day would go. She did not worry and she was not afraid, but it had always sat there in her future, unmovable, a mountain she could not get through or around. There would be tests, for intelligence, for loyalty, for genetic defects, for temperament, for fertility, which wasn’t usually a problem for women but better safe than sorry. Better safe than assign a Husband to a woman as barren as California. There would be a medical examination so invasive it came all the way around to no big deal. When a doctor can get that far inside you, into your blood, your chromosomes, your potentiality and all your possible futures, what difference could her white gloved fingers on your cervix make?

None of that pricked up her concern. The tests were nothing. Sylvie prided herself on being realistic about her qualities. First among these was her intellect; like her mother Hannah she could cut glass with the diamond of her mind. Second was her silence. Sylvie had discovered when she was quite small that adults were discomfited by silence. It brought them running. And when she was angry, upset, when the world offended her, Sylvie could draw down a coil of silence all around her, showing no feeling at all, until whoever had affronted her grew so uncomfortable that they would beg forgiveness just to end the ordeal. There was no third, not really. She was what her mother’s friends called striking, but never pretty. Narrow frame, small breasts, short and dark. Nothing in her matched up with the fashionable Midwestern fertility goddess floor-model. And she heard what they did not say, also—that she was not pretty because there was something off in her features, a ghost in her cheekbones, her height, her straight, flat hair.

Sylvie gave up on the fantasy of sliding back into sleep. She flicked on the radio by her bed: Brylcreem Makes a Man a Husband! announced a tinny woman’s voice, followed by a cheerful blare of brass and the morning’s reading from the Book of Pseudo-Matthew. Sylvie preferred Luke. She opened her closet as though today’s clothes had not been chosen for years, hanging on the wooden rod behind all the others, waiting for her to grow into them. She pulled out the dress and draped it over her bed. It lay there like another girl. Someone who looked just like her but had already moved through the hours of the day and come out on the other side. The red sky turned the deep neckline into a gash.

She was not ready for it yet.

Sylvie washed her body with the milled soap provided by Spotless Corp. Bright as a pearl, wrapped in white muslin and a golden ribbon. It smelled strongly of rose and mint and underneath, a blue chemical tang. The friendly folks at Spotless also supplied hair rinse, cold cream, and talcum for her special day. All the bottles and cakes smelled like that, like growing things piled on top of something biting, corrosive. The basket had arrived last month with a bow and a dainty card attached congratulating her. Until now it had loomed in her room like a Christmas tree, counting down. Now Sylvie pulled the regimented colors and fragrances out and applied them precisely, correctly, according to directions. An oyster-pink shade called The Blossoming of the Rod on her fingernails, which may not be cut short. A soft peach called Penance on her eyes, which may not be lined. Pressed powder (The Visitation of the Dove) should be liberally applied, but only the merest breath of blush (Parable of the Good Harlot) is permitted. Sylvie pressed a rosy champagne stain (Armistice) onto her lips with a forefinger. Hair must be natural and worn long—no steamsetting or straightening allowed. Everyone broke that rule, though. Who could tell a natural curl from a roller these days? Sylvie combed her black hair out and clipped it back with the flowers assigned to her county this year—snowdrops for hope and consolation. Great bright thornless roses as red as the sky for love at first sight, for passion and lust.

Finally the dress. The team at Spotless Corp. encouraged foundational garments to emphasize the bust and waist-to-hip ratio. Sylvie wedged herself into a full length merry widow with built-in padded bra and rear. It crushed her, smoothed her, flattened her. Her waist disappeared. She pulled the dress over her bound-in body. Her mother would have to button her up; twenty-seven tiny, satin colored buttons ran up her back like a new spine. Its neckline plunged; its skirt flounced, showing calf and a suggestion of knee. It was miles of icy white lace, it could hardly be anything else, but the sash gleamed red. Red, red, red. All the world is red and I am red forever, Sylvie thought. She was inside the dress, inside the other girl.

The other girl was very striking.

Sylvie was fifteen years old, and by suppertime she would be engaged.

Even Honest Joe Loves an Ice-Cold Brotherhood Beer!

CLOSE-UP on President McCarthy in shirtsleeves, popping the top on a distinctive green glass bottle of BB—now with improved flavor and more potent additives! We see the moisture glisten on the glass and an honest day’s sweat on the President’s brow. [Note to Art Dept: I see what you're aiming at, but let's not make him look like a clammy swamp creature, shall we? He's not exactly the most photogenic gent to begin with.]

NEW SHOT: five Brothers relaxing together in the sun with a tin bucket full of ice and green bottlenecks. Labels prominently displayed. A Milkman, a TV Repairman, a couple of G-Men, and a soldier. [Note to Casting: Better make it one government jockey and two soldiers. Statistically speaking, more of them are soldiers than anything else.] They are smiling, happy, enjoying each others’ company. The soldier, a nice-looking guy but not too nice-looking, we don’t want to send the wrong message, says: There’s nothing like a fresh swig of Brotherhood after spending a hot Nevada day eye to eye with a Russkie border guard. The secret is in the thorium-boosted hops and New Barley fresh from Alaska, crisp iodine-treated spring water and just a dash of good old fashioned patriotism. The Milkman chimes in with: And 5-Alpha! They all laugh. [Note to Copy: PLEASE use the brand name! We've had meetings about this! Chemicals sound scary. Who wants to put some freakshow in your body when you can take a nice sip of Arcadia? Plus those bastards at Standard Ales are calling their formula Kool and their sales are up 15%. You cannot beat that number, Stone.] TV Repairman pipes up: That’s right, Bob! There’s no better way to get your daily dose than with the cool, refreshing taste of Brotherhood. They use only the latest formulas: smooth, mellow, and with no jitters or lethargy. G-Man pulls a bottle from the ice and takes a good swallow. 5-Alpha leaves my head clear and my spirits high. I can work all day serving our great nation without distraction, aggression, or unwanted thoughts. Second G-Man: I’m a patriot. I don’t need all those obsolete hormones anymore. And Brotherhood Beer strikes a great bargain—all that and 5.6% alcohol! Our soldier stands up and salutes. He wears an expression of steely determination and rugged cheer. He says: Well, boys, I’ve got an appointment with Ivan to keep. Keep the Brotherhood on ice for me.

QUICK CUT back to President McCarthy. He puts down his empty bottle and picks up a file or something in the Oval Office. Slogan comes in at hip level [Note to Art Dept: how are we coming on that wheatstalk font?]:

Where There’s Life, There’s Brotherhood.

Fade to white.

Optimum Burst Altitude

One week out of every four, Martin’s Father came home. Martin could feel the week coming all month like a slow tide. He knew the day, the hour. He sat by the window tying and untying double Windsor knots into an old silk tie Dad had let him keep years ago. The tie was emerald green with little red chevrons on it.

Cross, fold, push through. Wrap, fold, fold, over the top, fold, fold, pull down. Make it tight. Make it perfect.

When the Cadillac pulled into the drive, Martin jumped for the gin and the slippers like a golden retriever. His Father’s martini was a ritual, a eucharist. Ice, gin, swirl in the shaker, just enough so that the outer layer of ice releases into the alcohol. Open the vermouth, bow in the direction of the Front, and close it again. Two olives, not three, and a glass from the freezebox. These were the sacred objects of a Husband. Tie, Cadillac, martini. And then Dad would open the door and Faraday, the Irish Setter, would yelp with waggy happiness and so would Martin. He’d be wearing a soft grey suit. He’d put his hat on the rack. Martin’s mother, Rosemary, would stand on her tiptoes to kiss him in one of her good dresses, the lavender one with daises on the hem, or if it was a holiday, her sapphire-colored velvet. Her warm blonde hair would be perfectly set, and her lips would leave a gleaming red kiss-shape on his cheek. Dad wouldn’t wipe it off. He’d greet his son with a firm handshake that told Martin all he needed to know: he was a man, his martini was good, his knots were strong.

Henry would slam the door to his bedroom upstairs and refuse to come down to supper. This pained Martin; the loud bang scuffed his heart. But he tried to understand his brother—after all, a Husband must possess great wells of understanding and compassion. Dad wasn’t Henry’s father. Pretending that he was probably scuffed something inside the elder boy, too.

The profound and comforting sameness of those Husbanded weeks overwhelmed Martin’s senses like the slightly greasy swirls of gin in that lovely triangular glass. The first night, they would have a roasting chicken with crackling golden skin. Rosemary had volunteered to raise several closely observed generations of an experimental breed called Sacramento Clouds: vicious, bright orange and oversized, dosed with palladium every fortnight, their eggs covered in rough calcium deposits like lichen. For this reason they could have a whole bird once a month. The rest of the week were New Vegetables from the Capsule Garden. Carrots, tomatoes, sprouts, potatoes, kale. Corn if it was fall and there hadn’t been too many high-level days when no one could go out and tend the plants. But there was always that one delicious day when Father was at home and they had chicken.

After dinner, they would retire to the living room. Mom and Dad would have sherry and Martin would have a Springs Eternal Vita-Pop if he had been very good, which he always was. He liked the lime flavor best. They would watch My Five Sons for half an hour before Rosemary’s Husband retired with her to bed. Martin didn’t mind that. It was what Husbands were for. He liked to listen to the sounds of their lovemaking through the wall between their rooms. They were reassuring and good. They put him to sleep like a lullaby about better times.

And one week out of every four, Martin would ask his Father to take him to the city.

“I want to see where you work!”

“This is where I work, son,” Father would always say in his rough-soft voice. “Right here.”

Martin would frown and Dad would hold him tight. Husbands were not afraid of affection. They had bags of it to share. “I’ll tell you what, Marty, if your Announcement goes by without a hitch, I’ll take you to the city myself. March you right into the Office and show everyone what a fine boy Rosie and I made. Might even let you puff on a cigar.”

And Martin would hug his Father fiercely, and Rosemary would smile over her fiber-optic knitting, and Henry would kick something upstairs. It was regular as a clock, and the clock was always right. Martin knew he’d be Announced, no problem. Piece of cake. Mom was super careful with the levels on their property. They planted Liberty Spinach. Martin was first under his desk every time the siren went off at school. After Henry’s Announcement had gone so badly, he and Mom had installed a Friendlee Brand Geiger Unit every fifteen feet and the light-up aw-shucks faces had only turned into frowns and x-eyes a few times ever. There was no chance Martin could fail. Things were way better now. Not like when Henry was a kid. No, Martin would be Announced and he’d go to the city and smoke his cigar. He’d be ready. He’d be the best Husband anyone ever met.

Aaron Grudzinski liked to tell him it was all shit. That was, in fact, Aaron’s favorite observation on nearly anything. Martin liked the way he swore, gutturally, like it really meant something. Grud was in Martin’s year. He smoked Canadian cigarettes and nipped some kind of homebrewed liquor from his gray plastic thermos. He’d egged Martin into a sip once. It tasted like dirt on fire.

“Look, didn’t you ever wonder why they wait til you’re fifteen to do it? Obviously they can test you anytime after you pop your first boner. As soon as you’re brewing your own, yeah?” And Grud would shake his flask. “But no, they make this huge deal out of going down to Matthew House and squirting in a cup. The outfit, the banquet, the music, the filmstrips. It’s all shit. Shit piled up into a pretty castle around a room where they give you a magazine full of the wholesome housewives of 1940 and tell you to do it for America. And you look down at the puddle at the bottom of the plastic tumbler they call your chalice, your chalice with milliliter measurements printed on the side, and you think: That’s all I am. Two to six milliliters of warm wet nothing.” Grud spat a brown tobacco glob onto the dead grass of the baseball field. He knuckled at his eye, his voice getting raw. “Don’t you get it? They have to give you hope. Well, I mean, they have to give you hope. I’m a lost cause. Three strikes before I got to bat. But you? They gotta build you up, like how everyone salutes Sgt. Dickhead on leave from the glowing shithole that is the great state of Arizona. If they didn’t shake his hand and kiss his feet, he might start thinking it’s not worth melting his face off down by the Glass. If you didn’t think you could make it, you’d just kill yourself as soon as you could read the newspaper.”

“I wouldn’t,” Martin whispered.

“Well, I would.”

“But Grud, there’s so few of us left.”

The school siren klaxoned. Martin bolted inside, sliding into the safe space under his desk like he was stealing home.

The Shadow Effect

Every Sunday Sylvie brought a couple of Vita-Pops out to the garage and set up her film projector in the hot dark. Her mother went to her Ladies’ Auxiliary meeting from two to four o’clock. Sylvie swiped hors d’oeuvres and cookies from the official spread and waited in the shadows for Clark Baker to shake his mother and slip in the side door. The film projector had been a gift from her Father; the strips were Clark’s, whose shutterbug brothers and uncles were all pulling time at the Front. Every Sunday they sat together and watched the light flicker and snap over a big white sheet nailed up over the shelves of soil-treatment equipment and Friendlee Brand gadgets stripped for parts. Every Sunday like church.

Clark was tall and shy, obsessed with cameras no less than any of his brothers. He wore striped shirts all the time, as if solid colors had never been invented. He kept reading Salinger even after the guy defected. Sometimes they held hands while they watched the movies. Mostly they didn’t. It was bad enough that they were fraternizing at all. Clark already drinking Kool Koffee every morning. Sugar, no cream. Clark was a quiet, bookish black boy who would be sent to the Front within a year.

On the white sheet, they watched California melt.

It hadn’t happened during the war. The Glass came after. This thing everyone did now was not called war. It was something else. Something that liquefied the earth out west and turned it into the Sea of Glass. On the sheet it looked like molten silver, rising and falling in something like waves. Turning the Grand Canyon into a soft grey whirlpool. Sylvie thought it was beautiful. Like something on the moon. In real life it had colors, and Sylvie dreamed of them. Red stone dissolving into an endless expanse of dark glass.

“There are more Japanese people in Utah than in Japan now,” Clark whispered when the filmstrip rolled up into black and the filmmaker’s logo. Sylvie flinched as if he’d cut her.

They didn’t talk about her Presentation. It sat whitely, fatly in their future. Once Clark kissed her. Sylvie cried afterward.

“I’ll write you,” he said. “As long as I can write.”

The growth index for their county was very healthy, and this was another reason Clark Baker should not have been holding her hand in the dark while men in ghostly astronaut suits probed the edges of the Glass on a clicking filmstrip. Every woman on the block had a new baby this year. They’d gotten a medal of achievement from President McCarthy in the spring. The Ladies’ Auxiliary graciously accepted the key to the city. She suspected her Father had a great deal to do with this. When she was little, he had come home one week in four. Now it was three days in thirty. His department kept him working hard. He’d be there for her Presentation, though. No Father missed his daughter’s debut.

Sylvie thought about Clark while her mother slipped satin-covered buttons through tiny loops. Their faces doubled in the mirror. His dark brown hand on hers. The Sea of Glass turning their faces silver.

“Mom,” Sylvie said. Her voice was very soft in the morning, as if she was afraid to wake herself up. “What if I don’t love my Husband? Isn’t that…something important?”

Hannah sighed. Her mouth took a hard angle. “You’re young, darling. You don’t understand. What it was like before. We had to have them here all the time, every night. Never a moment when I wasn’t working my knees through for my husband. The one before your Father. The children before you. Do you think we got to choose then? It wasn’t about love. For some people, they could afford that. For me, well, my parents thought he was a very nice man. He had good prospects. I needed him. I could not work. I was a woman before the war, who would hire me? And to do what? Type or teach. Not to program punchcard machines. Not to cross-breed new strains of broccoli. Nothing that would occupy my mind. So I drowned my mind in children and in him and when the war came I was glad. He left and it was me going to work every morning, me deciding what happened to my money. So the war took them,” she waved her hand in front of her eyes, “war always does that. I know you don’t think so, but the program is the best part of a bad situation. A situation maybe so bad we cannot fix it. So you don’t love him. Why would you look for love with a man? How could a man ever understand you? He who gets the cake cannot be friends with the girl who gets the crumbs.” Sylvie’s mother blushed. She whispered: “My Rita, you know, Rita who comes for tea and bridge and neptunium testing. She is good to me. Someone will be good to you. You will have your Auxiliary, your work, your children. One week in four a man will tell you what to do—but listen to me when I say they have much better manners than they used to. They say please now. They are interested in your life. They are so good with the babies.” Hannah smoothed the lacy back of her daughter’s Presentation gown. “Someday, my girl, either we will all die out and nothing will be left, or things will go back to the old ways and you will have men taking your body and soul apart to label the parts that belong to them. Enjoy this world. Either way, it will be brief.”

Sylvie turned her painted, perfected face to her mother’s. “Mom,” she whispered. Sylvie had practiced. Listened to the makeshift radio spitting half-garbled broadcasts from the other side of the world. A dictionary Clark found at a transfer station. Her mother. Whispering while she slept. Practiced until her lips hurt. So much, so often. She ordered the words in her head like dolls, hoped they were the right ones. Hoped they could stand up straight. “Watashi wa anata o shinjite ī nā.” I wish I could believe you.

Hannah’s dark eyes flew wide and, without a moment’s hesitation, she slapped her daughter across the cheek. It wasn’t hard, not meant to wound, certainly not to leave a mark on this day of all days, but it stung. Sylvie’s eyes watered.

“Nidoto,” her mother pleaded. “Never, never again.”

Gimbels: Your Official Father’s Day Headquarters!

PANORAMA SHOT of the Gimbels flagship store with two cute kiddos front and center. [Note to Casting: get us a boy and a girl, blonde, white, under ten, make sure the boy is taller than the girl. Put them in sailor suits, everyone likes that.] The kids wave at the camera. Little Linda Sue speaks up. [Note to Copy: Nope. The boy speaks first.] It’s a beautiful June here in New York City, the greatest city on earth! Jimmy throws his hands in the air and yells out: And that means FATHER’S DAY! Scene shift, kiddos are walking down a Gimbels aisle. We see toolboxes, ties, watches in a glass case, barbecue sets. Linda Sue picks up a watch and listens to it tick. Jimmy grabs a barbecue scraper and brandishes it. He says: Come on down with your Mom and make an afternoon of it at the Brand New Gimbels Automat! Hot, pre-screened food in an instant! Gee wow! [Note to Copy: hey, Stone, this is a government sponsored ad. If Gimbels want to hawk their shitty Manhattan Meals they're going to have to actually pay for it. Have you ever tried one of those things? Tastes like a kick in the teeth.] Linda Sue: At Gimbels they have all the approved Father’s Day products. (Kids alternate lines) Mr. Fix-It! Businessman! Coach! Backyard Cowboy! Mr. Gimbel appears and selects a beautiful tie from the spring Priapus line. He hands it to Linda Sue and ruffles her hair. Mr Gimbel: Now, kids, don’t forget to register your gift with the Ladies’ Auxiliary. We wouldn’t want your Daddy to get two of the same gift! How embarrassing! That’s why Gimbels carries the complete Whole Father line, right next to the registration desk so your Father’s Day is a perfect one. Kids: Thanks, Mr. Gimbel!

Mr. Gimbel spreads his arms wide and type stretches out between them in this year’s Father’s Day colors. [Note to Art Dept: It's seashell and buttercup this year, right? Please see Marketing concerning the Color Campaign. Pink and blue are pre-war. We're working with Gimbels to establish a White for Boys, Green for Girls tradition.]

Gimbels: Your One Stop Shop for a One of a Kind Dad.

Fade to white.

Flash Blindness

Martin wore the emerald green chevroned tie to his Announcement, even if it wasn’t strictly within the dress code. Everything else was right down the line: light grey suit, shaved clean if shaving was on the menu, a dab of musky Oil of Fecunditas behind each ear from your friends at Spotless Corp. Black shoes, black socks, Spotless lavender talcum, teeth brushed three times with Pure Spearmint Toothpaste (You’re Sure with Spearmint!). And his Father holding his hand, beaming with pride. Looking handsome and young as he always did.

Of course, there was another boy holding his other hand.

His name was Thomas. He had broad shoulders already, chocolate-colored hair and cool slate eyes that made him look terribly romantic. Martin tried not to let it bother him. He knew how the program worked. Where the other three weeks of the month took his Father. Obviously, there were other children, other wives, other homes. Other roasting chickens, other martinis. Other evening television shows on other channels. And that’s all Thomas was: another channel. When you weren’t watching a show, it just ceased to be. Clicked off. Fade to white. You couldn’t be jealous of the people on those other channels. They had their own troubles and adventures, engrossing mysteries and stunning conclusions, cliffhangers and tune-in-next-weeks. It had nothing to do with Martin, or Rosemary, or Henry in his room. That was what it meant to be a Husband.

The three of them sat together in the backseat of the sleek gray Cadillac. An older lady drove them. She wore a smart cap and had wiry white hair, but her cheeks were still pink and round. Martin tried to look at her as a Husband would, even though a woman her age would never marry. After all, Husbands didn’t get to choose. Martin’s future wives—four to start with, that was standard, but if he did well, who knew?—wouldn’t all be bombshells in pin-up bathing suits. He had to practice looking at women, really seeing them, seeing what was good and true and gorgeous in them. The chauffeur had wonderful laugh lines around her eyes. Martin could tell they were laugh lines. And her eyes, when she looked in the rear view mirror, were a nice, cool green. She radioed to the dispatcher and her voice lilted along with a faint twinge of English accent. Martin could imagine her laughing with him, picking New Kale and telling jokes about the King. He imagined her naked, laying on a soft pink bed, soft like her pink cheeks. Her body would be the best kind of body: the kind that had borne children. Breasts that had nursed. Legs that had run after misbehaving little ones. He could love that body. The sudden hardness between his legs held no threat, only infinite love and acceptance, a Husband’s love.

When I think about how good I could be, my heart stops, Martin thought as the space between his neighborhood and the city smeared by. The sun seared white through dead black trees. But somewhere deep in them there was a green wick. Martin knew it. He had a green wick, too. I will remember every date. Every wife will be so special and I will love her and our children. I will make her martinis. I will roast the chicken so she doesn’t have to. When I am with one of them I will turn off all other channels in my mind. I can keep it straight and separate. I will study so hard, so that I know how to please. It will be my only vocation, to be devoted. And if they, the women of Elm St or Oak Lane or Birch Drive find love with each other when I am gone, I will be happy for them because there is never enough love. I will draw them happy and they will be happy. The world will be green again. Everything will be okay.

It all seemed to happen very fast. Thomas and Martin and a dozen other boys listened to a quintet play Mendelssohn. The mayor gave a speech. They watched a recorded message from President McCarthy which had to be pretty old because he still sported a good head of hair. Finally, a minister stood up with a lovely New Tabernacle Bible in her one good hand. The other was shriveled, boneless, a black claw in her green vestments. The pages of the Bible shone with gilt. A ribbonmark hung down and it was very red in the afternoon flares. She did not lay it on a lectern. She carried the weight in her hands and read from the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, which Martin already knew by heart. The minister’s maple-syrup contralto filled the vaults of Matthew House.

“And when Mary had come to her fourteenth year, the high priest announced to all that the virgins who were reared in the Temple and who had reached the age of their womanhood should return to their own and be given in lawful marriage. When the High Priest went in to take counsel with God, a voice came forth from the oratory for all to hear, and it said that of all of the marriageable men of the House of David who had not yet taken a wife, each should bring a rod and lay it upon the altar, that one of the rods would burst into flower and upon it the Holy Ghost would come to rest in the form of a Dove, and that he to whom this rod belonged would be the one to whom the virgin Mary should be espoused. Joseph was among the men who came, and he placed his rod upon the altar, and straightaway it burst into bloom and a Dove came from Heaven and perched upon it, whereby it was manifest to all that Mary should become the wife of Joseph.”

Martin’s eyes filled with tears. He felt a terrible light in his chest. For a moment he was sure everyone else would see it streaming out of him. But no, the minister gave him a white silk purse and directed him to a booth with a white velvet curtain. Inside, silence. Dim, dusty light. Martin opened the purse and pulled out the chalice—a plastic cup with measurements printed on it, just like Grud said. With it lay a few old photographs—women from before the war, with so much health in their faces Martin could hardly bear to look at them. Their skin was so clear. She’s dead, he thought. Statistically speaking, that woman with the black hair and heart-shaped face and polka-dotted bikini is dead. Vaporized in Seattle or Phoenix or Los Angeles. That was where they used to make pictures, in Los Angeles. This girl is dead.

Martin couldn’t do it. This was about life. Everything, no matter how hard and strange, was toward life. He could not use a dead girl that way. Instead, he shut his eyes. He made his pictures, quick pencil lines glowing inside him. The chauffeur with her pink cheeks and white hair. The minister with her kind voice and brown eyes and her shriveled hand, which was awful, but wasn’t she alive and good? Tammy, the girl from the Victory Brand Capsule Garden commercials in her star-spangled dress. A girl with red hair who lived two blocks over and was so pretty that looking at her was like getting punched in the chest. He drew in bold, bright lines the home he was going to make, bigger than himself, bigger than the war, as big as the world.

Martin’s body convulsed with the tiny, private detonation of his soul. His vision blurred into a hot colorless flash.

Blast Wind

Sylvie’s mother helped her into long white gloves. They sat together in a long pearl-colored Packard and did not speak. Sylvie had nothing to say. Let her mother be uncomfortable. A visceral purple sunset colored the western sky, even at two in the afternoon. Sylvie played the test in her head like a filmstrip. When it actually started happening to her, it felt no more real than a picture on a sheet.

The mayor gave a speech. They watched a recorded message from President McCarthy’s pre-war daughter Tierney, a pioneer in the program, one of the first to volunteer. Our numbers have been depleted by the Germans, the Japanese, and now the Godless Russians. Of the American men still living only 12% are fertile. But we are not Communists. We cannot become profligate, wasteful, decadent.We must maintain our moral way of life. As little as possible should change from the world your mothers knew—at least on the surface. And with time, what appears on the surface will penetrate to the core, and all will be restored. We will not sacrifice our way of life.

A minister with a withered arm read that Pseudo-Matthew passage Tierney had dredged up out of apocrypha to the apocrypha, about the rods and the flowers and Sylvie had never felt it was one of the Gospel’s more subtle moments. The minister blessed them. They are flowers. They are waiting for the Dove.

The doctors were women. One was Mrs. Drexler, who lived on their cul-de-sac and always made rum balls for the neighborhood Christmas cookie exchange. She was kind. She warmed up her fingers before she examined Sylvie. White gloves for her, white gloves for me, Sylvie thought, and suppressed a giggle. She turned her head to one side and focused on a stained-glass lamp with kingfishers on it, piercing their frosted breasts with their beaks. She went somewhere else in her mind until it was over. Not a happy place, just a place. Somewhere precise and clean without any Spotless Corp products where Sylvie could test soil samples methodically. Rows of black vials, each labeled, dated, sealed.

They took her blood. A butterfly of panic fluttered in her—will they know? Would the test show her mother, practicing her English until her accent came out clean as acid paper? Only half enemy, half threat, born in San Francisco before the war, white enough to pass. A woman who spent her life curling her hair like it would save her. Lining her eyes so heavy, so they would look like magazine eyes. Sylvie shut her own unlined eyes. She said her mother’s name three times in her mind. The secret, talismanic thing that only they together knew. Hidaka Hanako. Hidaka Hanako. Hidaka Hanako. Don’t be silly. Japan isn’t a virus they can see wiggling in your cells. Mom’s documents are flawless. No alarm will go off in the centrifuge.

And none did.

She whizzed through the intelligence exams—what a joke. Calculate the drag energy of the blast wind given the following variables. Please. Other girls milled around her in their identical lace dresses. The flowers in their hair were different. Their sashes all red. Red on white, like first aid kits floating through her peripheral vision. They went from medical to placement testing to screening. They nodded shyly to each other. In five years, Sylvie would know all their names. They would be her Auxiliary. They would play bridge. They would plan block parties. They would have telephone trees. Some of them would share a Husband with her, but she would never know which. That was what let the whole civilized fiction roll along. You never knew, you never asked. Men had a different surname every week. Only the Mrs. Drexlers of the neighborhood knew it all, the knots and snags of the vital genetics. Would she share with the frosted blonde who loved botany or the redheaded math genius who made her own cheese? Or maybe none of them. It all depended on the test. Some of these girls would score low in their academics or have some unexpressed, unpredictable trait revealed in the great forking family trees pruned by Mrs. Drexler and the rest of them. They would get Husbands in overalls, with limited allowances. They would live in houses with old paint and lead shielding instead of Gamma Glass. Some of them would knock their Presentation out of the park. They’d get Husbands in grey suits and silk ties, who went to offices in the city during the day, who gave them compression chamber diamonds for their birthdays. As little as possible should change.

Results were quick these days. Every year faster. But not so quick that they did not have luncheon provided while the experts performed their tabulations. Chicken salad sandwiches—how the skinny ones gasped at the taste of mayonnaise! Assam tea, watercress, lemon curd and biscuits. An impossible fairy feast.

“I hope I get a Businessman,” said the girl sitting next to Sylvie. Her bouffant glittered with illegal setting spray. “I couldn’t bear it if I had to live on Daisy Drive.”

“Who cares?” said Sylvie, and shoved a whole chicken salad triangle into her mouth. She shouldn’t have said anything. Her silence bent for one second and out comes nonsense that would get her noticed. Would get her remembered.

“Well, I care, you cow,” snapped Bouffant. Her friends smiled behind their hands, concealing their teeth. In primates, baring the teeth is a sign of aggression, Sylvie thought idly.She flashed them a broad, cold smile. All thirty-two, girls, drink it in.

“I think it’s clear what room you’ll be spending the evening in,” Bouffant sneered, oblivious to Sylvie’s primate signals.

But Sylvie couldn’t stop. “At best, you’ll spend 25% of your time with him. You’ll get your rations the same as everyone. You’ll get your vouchers for participating in the program and access to top make-work contracts. What difference does it make who you snag? You know this is just pretend, right? A very big, very lush, very elaborate dog breeding program.”

Bouffant narrowed her eyes. Her lips went utterly pale. “I hope you turn out to be barren as a rock. Just rotted away inside,” she hissed. The group of them stood up in a huff and took their tea to another table. Sylvie shrugged and ate her biscuit. “Well, that’s no way to think if you want to restore America,” she said to no one at all. What was the matter with her? Shut up, Sylvie.

Mrs. Drexler put a warm hand on her shoulder, materializing out of nowhere. The doctor who loved rum balls laid a round green chip on the white tablecloth. Bouffant saw it across the room and glared hard enough to put a hole through her skull at forty yards.

Sylvie was fertile. At least, there was nothing obviously wrong with her. She turned the chip over. The other side was red. Highest marks. Blood and leaves. Red on white. The world is red and I am red forever. One of Bouffant’s friends was holding a black chip and crying, deep and horrible. Sylvie floated. Unreal. It wasn’t real. It was ridiculous. It was a filmstrip. A recording made years ago when Brussels sprouts were small and the sunset could be rosy and gentle.

FADE IN on Mrs. Drexler in a dance hall with a white on white checkerboard floor. She’s wearing a sequin torchsinger dress. Bright pink. She pumps a giant star-spangled speculum like a parade-master’s baton. Well, hello there Sylvia! It’s your big day! Should I say Hidaka Sakiko? I only want you to be comfortable, dear. Let’s see what you’ve won!

Sylvie and the other green-chip girls were directed into another room whose walls were swathed in green velvet curtains. A number of men stood lined up against the wall, chatting nervously among themselves. Each had a cedar rod in one hand. They held the rods awkwardly, like old men’s canes. A piano player laid down a slow foxtrot for them. Champagne was served. A tall boy with slightly burned skin, a shiny pattern of pink across his cheek, takes her hand, first in line. In Sylvie’s head, the filmstrip zings along.

WIDE SHOT of Mrs. Drexler yanking on a rope-pull curtain. She announces: Behind Door Number One we have Charles Patterson, six foot one, Welsh/Danish stock, blond/blue, scoring high in both logic and empathy, average sperm count 19 million per milliliter! This hot little number has a reserved parking spot at the Office! Of course, when I say “Office,” I mean the upper gentlemen’s club, brandy and ferns on the 35th floor, cigars and fraternity and polished teak walls. A little clan to help each other through the challenges of life in the program—only another Husband can really understand. Our productive heartthrobs are too valuable to work! Stress has been shown to lower semen quality, Sylvie! But as little as possible should change. If you take the Office from a man, you’ll take his spirit. And what’s behind Door Number Two?

Sylvie shuts her eyes. The real Mrs. Drexler was biting into a sugar cookie and sipping her champagne. She opened them again—and a stocky kind-eyed boy had already cut in for the next song. He wore an apple blossom in his lapel. For everlasting love, Broome County’s official flower for the year.The dancing Mrs. Drexler in her mind hooted with delight, twirling her speculum.

TIGHT SHOT of Door Number Two. Mrs Drexler snaps her fingers and cries: Why, it’s Douglas Owens! Five foot ten, Irish/Italian, that’s very exciting! Brown/brown, scoring aces in creative play and nurturing, average sperm count 25 million per milliliter—oh ho! Big, strapping boy! Mrs. Drexler slaps him lightly on the behind. Her eyes gleam. He’s a Businessman as well, nothing but the best for our Sylvie, our prime stock Sylvie/Sakiko! He’ll take his briefcase every day and go sit in his club with the other Husbands, and maybe he loves you and maybe he finds real love with them the way you’ll find it with your friend Bouffant in about two years. Who can tell? It’s so thrilling to speculate! It’s not like men and women got along so well before, anyway. Take my wife, please! Why I oughtta! To hell with the whole mess. Give it one week a month. You do unpleasant things one week out of four and don’t think twice. Who cares?

Someone handed her a glass of champagne. Sylvie wrapped her real, solid fingers around it. She felt dizzy. A new boy had taken up her hand and put his palm around her waist. The dance quickened. Still a foxtrot, but one with life in it. She looked at the wheel and spin of faces—white faces, wide, floor-model faces. Sylvie looked for Clark. Anywhere, everywhere, his kind face moving among the perfect bodies, his kind face with a silver molten earth undulating across his cheeks, flickering, shuddering. But he wasn’t there. He would never be there. It would never be Clark with a cedar rod and a sugar cookie. Black boys didn’t get Announced. Not Asians, not refugees, not Sylvie if anyone guessed. They got shipped out. They got a ticket to California. To Utah.

As little as possible should change.

No matter how bad it got, McCarthy and his Brothers just couldn’t let a nice white girl (like Sylvie, like Sylvie, like the good floor-model part of Sylvie that fenced in the red, searing thing at the heart of her) get ruined that way. (If they knew, if they knew. Did the conservative-suit warm-glove Mrs. Drexler guess? Did it show in her dancing?) Draw the world the way you want it. Draw it and it will be.

Sylvie tried to focus on the boy she was dancing with. She was supposed to be making a decision, settling, rooting herself forever into this room, the green curtains, the sugar cookies, the foxtrot.

QUICK CUT to Mrs. Drexler. She spins around and claps her hands. She whaps her speculum on the floor three times and a thin kid with chocolate-colored hair and slate eyes sweeps aside his curtain. She crows: But wait, we haven’t opened Doooooor Number Three! Hello, Thomas Walker! Six foot even, Swiss/Polish—ooh, practically Russian! How exotic! I smell a match! Brown/gray, top marks across the board, average sperm count a spectacular 29 million per milliliter! You’re just showing off, young man! Allow me to shake your hand!

Sylvie jittered back and forth as the filmstrip caught. The champagne settled her stomach. A little. Thomas spun her around shyly as the music flourished. He had a romantic look to him. Lovely chocolate brown hair. He was saying something about being interested in the animal repopulation projects going on in the Plains States. His voice was sweet and a little rough and fine, fine, this one is fine, it doesn’t matter, who cares, he’ll never sit in a garage with me and watch the bombs fall on the sheet with the hole in the corner. Close your eyes, spin around three times, point at one of them and get it over with.

IRIS TRANSITION to Mrs. Drexler doing a backflip in her sequined dress. She lands in splits. Mr. and Mrs. Wells and Walker invite you to the occasion of their children’s wedding!

Sylvie pulled the red, thornless rose and snowdrops from her hair and tied their ribbon around Thomas’s rod. She remembered to smile. Thomas himself kissed her, first on the forehead and then on the mouth. A lot of couples seemed to be kissing now. The music had stopped. It’s over, it’s over, Sylvie thought. Maybe I can still see Clark today. It takes time to plan a wedding.

Voices buzzed and spiked behind her. Mrs. Drexler was hurrying over; her face was dark.

ZOOM on Mrs. Drexler: Wait, sorry, wait! I’m sorry we seem to have hit a snag! It appears Thomas and Sylvie here are a little too close for comfort. They should never have been paired at the same Announcement. Our fault, entirely! Sylvie’s Father has been such a boon to the neighborhood! Doing his part! Unfortunately, the great nation of the United States does not condone incest, so you’ll have trade Door Number Three for something a little more your speed. This sort of thing does happen! That’s why we keep such excellent records! CROSS-REFERENCING! Thank you! Mrs. Drexler bows. Roses land at her feet.

Sylvie shut her eyes. The strip juddered; she was crying tracks through her Spotless Corp Pressed Powder and it was not a film, it was happening. Mrs. Drexler was wearing a conservative brown suit with a gold dove-shaped pin on the lapel and waving a long-stemmed peony for masculine bravery. Thomas was her brother, somehow, there had been a mix-up and he was her brother and other arrangements would have to be made. The boys and girls in a ballroom with her stared and pointed, paired off safely. Sylvie looked up at Thomas. He stared back, young and sad and confused. The snowdrops and roses had fallen off his rod onto the floor. Red on white. Bouffant was practically climbing over Douglas Owens 25 million per milliliter like a tree.

In four years Sylvie will be Mrs. Charles Patterson 19 million per. It’s over and they began to dance. Charles was a swell dancer. He promised to be sweet to her when he got through with training and they were married. He promised to make everything as normal as possible. As little as possible should change. The quintet struck up Mendelssohn.

Sylvie pulled her silence over her and it was good.

Fade to white.

CLOSE-UP of a nice-looking Bobby, a real lantern-jaw, straight-dealing, chiseled type. [Note to Casting: maybe we should consider VP Kroc for this spot. Hair pomade knows no demographic. Those idiots at Brylcreem want to corner the Paternal market? Fine. Let them have their little slice of the pie. Be a nice bit of PR for the re-election campaign, too. Humanize the son of a bitch. Ray Kroc, All-American, Brother to the Common Man. Even he suffers symptomatic hair loss. Whatever—you get the idea. Talk to Copy.] Bobby’s getting dressed in the morning, towel around his healthy, muscular body. [Note to Casting: if we go with Kroc here we'll have to find a body double.] Looks at himself in the mirror and strokes a 5-o’clock shadow.

FEMALE VOICE OVER: Do you wake up in the morning to a sink full of disappointment?

PAN DOWN to a clean white sink. Clumps of hair litter the porcelain. [Note to Art Dept: Come on, Stone, don't go overboard. No more than twenty strands.] Bobby rubs the top of his head. His expression is crestfallen.

VOICE OVER: Well, no more! Now with the radiation-blocking power of lead, All-New Formula Samson Brand Hair Pomade can make you an All-New Man.

Bobby squirts a generous amount of Samson Brand from his tube and rubs it on his head. A blissful smile transforms his face.

VOICE OVER: That feeling of euphoria and well-being lets you know it works! Samson Pomades and Creams have been infused with our patented mood-boosters, vitamins, and just a dash of caffeine to help you start your day out right!

PAN DOWN to the sink. Bobby turns the faucet on; the clumps of hair wash away. When we pan back up, Bobby has a full head of glossy, thick, styled hair. [Note to Art Dept: Go whole hog. When the camera comes back put the VP in a full suit, with the perfect hair—a wig, obviously—and the Senate gavel in his hand. I like to see a little more imagination from you, Stone. Not a good quarter for you.]

VOICE OVER: Like magic, Samson Brand Pomade gives you the confidence you need. [Note to Copy: not sure about 'confidence' here. What about 'peace of mind'? We're already getting shit from the FDA about dosing Brothers with caffeine and uppers. Probably don't want to make it sound like the new formula undoes Arcadia.]

He gives the camera a thumbs-up. [Note to Art Dept: Have him offer the camera a handshake. Like our boy Ray is offering America a square deal.]

Bold helvetica across mid-screen:

Samson Guards Your Strength.

Fade to white.

Ten Grays

Martin watched his brother. The handsome Thomas. The promising Thomas. The fruitful and multiplying Thomas. 29 million per mil Thomas. Their father (24 million) didn’t even try to fight his joyful tears as he pinned the golden dove on his son’s chest. His good son. His true son. For Thomas the Office in the city. For Thomas the planning and pleasing and roasted chickens and martinis. For Thomas the children as easy as pencil drawings.

For Martin Stone, 2 million per milliliter and most of those dead, a package. In a nice box, to be certain. Irradiated teak. It didn’t matter now anyway. Martin knew without looking what lay nestled in the box. A piece of paper and a bottle. The paper was an ordnance unknown until he opened the box. It was a lottery. The only way to be fair. It was his ticket.

It might request that he present himself at his local Induction Center at 0900 at the close of the school year. To be shipped out to the Front, which by then might be in Missouri for all anyone knew. He’d suit up and boot it across the twisted, bubbled moonscape of the Sea of Glass. An astronaut. Bouncing on the pulses from Los Alamos to the Pacific. He would never draw again. By Christmas, he wouldn’t have the fine motor skills.

Or it would request just as politely that he arrange for travel to Washington for a battery of civic exams and placement in government service. Fertile men couldn’t think clearly, didn’t you know? All that sperm. Can’t be rational with all that business sloshing around in there. Husbands couldn’t run things. They were needed for more important work. The most important work. Only Brothers could really view things objectively. Big picture men. And women, Sisters, those gorgeous black chip girls with 3-Alpha running cool and sweet in their veins. Martin would probably pull Department of Advertising and Information. Most people did. Other than Defense, it was the biggest sector going. The bottle would be Arcadia. For immediate dosage, and every day for the rest of his life. All sex shall be potentially reproductive. Every girl screwing a Brother is failing to screw a Husband and that just won’t do. They said it tasted like burnt batteries if you didn’t put it in something. The first bottle would be the pure stuff, though. Provided by Halcyon, Your Friend in the Drug Manufacturing Business. Martin would remember it, the copper sear on the roof of his mouth. After that, a whole aisle of choices. Choices, after all, make you who you are. Arcadia or Kool. Brylcreem or Samson.

Don’t worry, Martin. It’s a relief, really. Now you can really get to work. Accomplish something. Carve out your place. Sell the world to the world. You could work your way into the Art Department. Keep drawing babies in carriages. Someone else’s perfect quads, their four faces laughing at you forever from glossy pages.

Suddenly Martin found himself clasped tight in his Father’s arms. Pulling the box out of his boy’s hands, reading the news for him, putting it aside. His voice came as rough as warm gin and Martin could hardly breathe for the strength of his Father’s embrace.

Thomas Walker squeezed his Brother’s hand. Martin did not squeeze back.

Velocity Multiplied by Duration

Sylvie’s Father was with them that week. He was proud. They bought a chicken from Mrs. Stone and killed it together, as a family. The head popped off like a cork. Sylvie stole glances at him at the table. She could see it now. The chocolate hair. The tallness. Hannah framed her Presentation Scroll and hung it over the fireplace.

Sylvie flushed her Spotless trousseaux down the toilet.

She wasn’t angry. You can’t get angry just because the world’s so much bigger than you and you’re stuck in it. That’s just the face of it, cookie. A poisoned earth, a sequined dress, a speculum you can play like the spoons. Sylvie wasn’t angry. She was silent. Her life was Mrs. Patterson’s life. People lived in all kinds of messes. She could make rum balls. And treat soil samples and graft cherry varieties and teach some future son or daughter Japanese three weeks a month where no one else could hear. She could look up Bouffant’s friend and buy her a stiff drink. She could enjoy the brief world of solitude and science and birth like red skies dawning. Maybe. She had time.

It was all shit, like that Polish kid who used to hang around the soda fountain kept saying. It was definitely all shit.

On Sunday she went out to the garage again. Vita-Pops and shadows. Clark slipped in like light through a crack. He had a canister of old war footage under his arm. Stalingrad, Berlin, Ottawa. Yellow shirt with green stripes. Nagasaki and Tokyo in ’45, vaporizing like hearts in a vast, wet chest. The first retaliation. Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles. Berlin and Rome swept clean and blank as pages. Clark reached out and held her hand. She didn’t squeeze back. The silent detonations on the white sheet like sudden balloons, filling up and up and up. It looked like the inside of Sylvie. Something opening over and over, with nowhere to burn itself out but in.

“This is my last visit,” Clark said. “School year’s over.” His voice sounded far away, muffled, like he didn’t even know he was talking. “Car’s coming in the morning. Me and Grud are sharing a ride to Induction. I think we get a free lunch.”

Sylvie wanted to scream at him. She sucked down her pop, drowned the scream in bubbles.

“I love you,” whispered Clark Baker.

On the sheet, the Golden Gate Bridge vanished.

Sylvie rolled the reel back. They watched it over and over. A fleck of nothing dropping out of the sky and then, then the flash, a devouring, brain-boiling, half-sublime sheet of white that blossomed like a flower out of a dead rod, an infinite white everything that obliterated the screen.

Fade to black.

And over the black, a cheerful fat man giving the thumbs up to Sylvie, grinning:

Buy Freedom Brand Film! It’s A-OK!

About the Author

Catherynne M. Valente is the New York Times bestselling author of over a dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, Deathless, and the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Own Making. She is the winner of the Andre Norton Award, the Tiptree Award, the Mythopoeic Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Million Writers Award. She has been nominated for the Hugo, Locus, and Spectrum Awards, the Pushcart Prize, and was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award in 2007 and 2009. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with her partner, two dogs, and enormous cat.

The Spell of History: Magic Systems and Real-World Zeitgeists

Jeff Seymour

Systems of magic in fantasy can be as varied as the worlds they inhabit. Some novels feature rigorous, intensely scientific collections of spells, reagents, and forces whose causes and effects can be measured, mapped, and predicted. Others treat magic as whimsical, unpredictable, and fantastic in every sense of the word. In those worlds, a spell can be as likely to blow up in the caster’s face as to go off successfully, or even have a will of its own. And sometimes, magic is just treated as a given. The reader may never learn more about it than he or she absolutely needs to.

Every system of magic is a product of its creator. Robert Jordan gave us saidin and saidar. Margaret Weis and Terry Hickman gave us Solinari, Nuitari, and Lunitari. Brandon Sanderson gave us Allomancy. But systems of magic are also the products of the cultural forces that act on, inspire, or dismay their authors as they create their secondary worlds. And if we do a little digging, we can unearth the zeitgeist that helped give birth to a system of magic, put the two side by side, and learn a bit about how the one can influence the other.

We can start as far back as 1872, when a British professor and minister named George MacDonald penned The Princess and the Goblin, a fairy tale about a princess and a miner’s son outwitting the goblins who live below them. The book went on to influence several of the seminal authors of modern fantasy.

Magic in The Princess and the Goblin falls very much into the “given” category. It’s used very sparingly, and it’s focused around a grandmother who gives the titular princess a magic ring and a ball of thread. Neither the princess nor the reader learns how the magic works. It simply does, and the princess uses it to escape from the goblins when they capture her. Magic, in the world of The Princess and the Goblin, is decidedly unscientific.

When we look into what was going on in Britain in 1872, we get a glimpse at one reason that might be. Despite the Industrial Age revving into full force, the world as mirrored through the pages of British newspapers doesn’t seem to contain a great deal of science either. In 1872, the Empire’s major papers reported on plenty of economic stories and lots of religious ones. They were crawling with foreign affairs pieces, murders, and poisonings. They did not spend much space on science coverage. The Guardian ran a regular short feature called “Art, Literature, and Science” that seems to have focused primarily on art. The Times (of London) covered the occasional scientific expedition or society meeting. That’s about it.

Fast-forward eighty-two years to J. R. R. Tolkien, who began publishing The Lord of the Rings in 1954. There’s a similarly nonscientific system of magic in a very different cultural moment. Magic in Middle-Earth shares a lot in common with the magic of The Princess and the Goblin. It is rarely used and often focused around objects, and while it’s necessary for the story to proceed, the mechanics of the magic itself are not at the heart of it. Gandalf and Saruman occasionally use magic. The One Ring possesses extremely powerful magic. But the particulars of how any of it works are left to the imagination. Magic just is.

1954 was a tumultuous time in Britain. World War II had been over for nine years, but the Cold War was heating up. In the months surrounding the publication of The Fellowship of the Ring, The Times covered a shortage of science teachers, awards for new glider designs, the development of new jetliners and the crashes of old ones, and the advent of nuclear energy and failed attempts to de-escalate the nuclear arms race. On the day the book came out, The Times ran a scathing disapproval of British diplomacy. The world was growing smaller, Britain’s place in it was changing, and you can feel the societal tension crackling in the headlines.

How magic in The Lord of the Rings plays into all that is a little difficult to tease out. One need not reach beyond Tolkien’s feelings on religion and science to find an explanation of his magic. But Tolkien also held strong opinions on the changes taking place in his country, and given the upheaval of 1950s Britain, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to see the simple magic in The Lord of the Rings,or at least its resonance with readers,as a throwback to a simpler age.

Several decades later, the world seems to have grown more interested in the future than the past. On November 12, 1984, Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s Dragons of Autumn Twilight came out in the United States, spawning the incredibly successful Dragonlance fantasy franchise. Ronald Reagan had just won a buoyant reelection campaign. Time was running articles on extra-solar planets, plans for the Star Wars missile defense program, and an infant who had received a heart transplanted from a baboon. The advertisements running between the stories (”Introducing the ultimate VCR: The end of an incredible journey”) sported inspirational, glowing imagery and a sense of the magical even within the technological.

Dragonlance, which owes its existence to the Dungeons & Dragons tabletop roleplaying games, introduced a magic system that was much more scientific than those MacDonald and Tolkien had developed, but still left plenty to the imagination. In the world of Dragonlance, spells take time to memorize and vanish from the caster’s mind once used. They sometimes require reagents. They take a toll on the body, and they’re related to three of the gods in the Dragonlance pantheon.

But that’s about all the reader learns in the early books of the series. How spells do what they do, and exactly what forces are being manipulated, goes unsaid. There’s a great deal of unpredictability and even playfulness to the magic, although it’s better explained than much of what came before it. And the feeling in the news that anything is possible feels well-suited to the lively, anything-might-happen atmosphere of the magic.

A little more than half a decade later, the optimism was slipping. The Soviet Union was cracking and dissipating, communist bloc countries were falling to uprisings, and the American economy was still recovering from the savings and loan crisis. The New York Times covered racial iniquities in schools and terrorist attacks in Peru. And in January 1990, The Eye of the World, the first book in Robert Jordan’s mind-bogglingly massive epic fantasy series The Wheel of Time, was released.

Magic in The Wheel of Time revolves around a mystical font of energy called The One Power, which can be channeled and woven by individuals for various purposes. The results of a given weave of The Power are repeatable, and there’s an element of empirical experimentation present. In one of the later novels in the series, a character discovers how to restore a person’s connection to The One Power by playing with different weaves until she succeeds.

But The Wheel of Time leaves many things unexplained. How exactly The One Power changes from mystical energy into another form is left unexplored, as is why some people can grasp it while others cannot. In The Wheel of Time, magic has measurable, repeatable effects, but it remains incompletely understood, like gravity or the strong force. And in the face of the uncertainty of 1990, it could be that Jordan’s semi-scientific magic system, in which cause and effect made a definite appearance but magic kept an almost spiritual undertone, appealed to readers.

In 2006, the headlines showed a lot of uncertainty again, and the first volume of another fantasy saga, Mistborn: The Final Empire, was released mid-year. In Mistborn, written by Brandon Sanderson, magic revolves around the use of metals. Allomancers can “burn” them in their bodies to gain certain powers. Feruchemists can store magical power in them. And Hemalurgists can steal power from others using spikes driven through the heart. All three types of magic are precise and provide predictable, often physics-driven outcomes, while the metals used in the magic range from the real and common (iron, copper) to the real and uncommon (cadmium, chromium), to the imaginary.

The cultural moment of July 2006 makes for an interesting contrast with Sanderson’s scientific magic. George W. Bush was president. Stem-cell research was on the outs. Headlines and articles in U.S. publications covered flaws in the Dolly sheep-cloning experiments and problems in Einstein’s personal life. One can feel a palpable distrust of, or at least disillusionment with, science in the headlines. In that environment, skeptical readers may have rewarded Sanderson for creating a system they could trust to behave in predictable ways.

Sanderson makes an interesting segue into another genre in which magic and science often intersect: steampunk. He recently jumped 300 years ahead in the Mistborn timeline to write The Alloy of Law, which takes his magic from a more traditional fantasy setting into the middle of a time period roughly analogous to the late 19th century. Though the origins of steampunk reach all the way back to the Victorian Era it so often emulates, the term itself didn’t crop up until the 1980s, and it makes sense to start our investigation of magic in the genre there, with Tim Powers’ seminal novel The Anubis Gates.

In The Anubis Gates, which came out in December 1983, magic and science coexist uneasily. The book’s entire plot hinges around an attempt to bring back ancient Egyptian gods and rejuvenate the dying magic they once fueled. Certain elements of magic in the book involve scientific principles (there’s a reference to a “Newtonian” reaction after the summoning of fire elementals), and others, like magic being negated by a physical connection to the earth, are repeatable and explained.

But the book leaves plenty of magical elements soundly in the realm of the inexplicable, as well. The book’s sorcerers eventually start to gravitate (literally) toward the moon rather than the earth, but the reader never learns why. As in Dragonlance, magic in The Anubis Gates has a deleterious effect on the body, but it’s never quantified. While sorcerers in the book complain about being exhausted by their magic, they always seem to have enough energy left to cast a spell when they need to.

The news in December 1983 was a little less optimistic than that it was when Dragonlance was born a year later, but there was still plenty to feel good about. Coverage of developments in science included new satellite images and improvements in surgical techniques. Advertising imagery was even more futuristic, with car drivers talking to robots and science fiction movies being presented as the best reason to buy a VCR. One article on improved telephone technology ran complete with a picture of a keyboard, a joystick, and an astonished-looking man reflected on a computer screen that showed a wire model of a digital telephone. Given the news and the ads, it seems likely that the zeitgeist that affected Dragonlance had a similar effect on The Anubis Gates.

There’s been a steady stream of steampunk novels, movies, conventions, comic books, and video games since The Anubis Gates, and in 2001 China Miéville, one of the genre’s latest darlings, broke big with the award-winning steampunk/New Weird novel Perdido Street Station. In that book,magic exists side by side with science, and the line between them is often blurry. Both subjects are studied in university, and scientists and magicians often operate in the same fashion with similar results. Magic can be unpredictable, but its results vary in the same ways that results can fluctuate in physics and chemistry when you’re working with imprecise tools. Magicians sometimes use machines to work their magic, and scientists sometimes use magic to improve their machines. In Perdido Street Station, neither the magic nor the science is wholly fleshed out, but neither is completely obscure, and both are subsumed entirely by the overwhelming alienness of the story as a whole.

Early 2001 was a quiet but unsettled time. The U.S. had just been through the polarizing first election of George W. Bush, and its magazines and newspapers were covering the new administration and the pardons Bill Clinton made during his last days in office. In the UK, where Miéville was pursuing a Ph.D., the presses were rolling on an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, train crashes, and political sparring over an upcoming election. The period was an uncomfortable one, full of scandals and disasters. Reading the headlines, you can catch a whiff of the skepticism that was in full force by 2006. It’s little wonder that Miéville’s blurring of science and magic, and the way his characters vacillate between the two while trying to solve their problems, went over well in that environment.

It’s difficult to draw any major conclusions from the juxtaposition of systems of magic and history. It would certainly be as unfair to assume that the creation of a system of magic stemmed completely from its zeitgeist as it would be to claim that it was entirely independent of it. And while readers react undeniably to the magic in fantasy novels, they also fall in love with (or despise) characters, worlds, storytelling, and voice. The interactions between magic and zeitgeist are complicated, to boot. In the uncertainty of the 1950s, readers enjoyed the nonscientific magic of The Lord of the Rings. In the uncertainty of the new millennium, they flocked to the more scientific magic systems of Mistborn and Perdido Street Station.

Trying to look at past cultural moments and the magic that developed in them in a way that would allow us to predict the future will probably always be a lost cause. There are too many variables to take into account. But at the same time, it remains fascinating to think about. The zeitgeist we live in is a tumultuous one. Commercial space travel is edging closer and closer to reality. Earth’s climate grows painfully and inexorably warmer every year. Technology is rapidly worming its way into every moment of our lives. Politics are as fraught and dysfunctional as ever. It will be exciting, at least, to see what magic may grow out of it.

About the Author

Author, freelance writer, and editor Jeff Seymour has been creating speculative fiction since he was a teenager. His writing covers a variety of genres, from magical realism to SF to young adult fantasy, and his first book of short stories, Three Dances, is slated for a Fall 2012 release. Jeff is also serializing a novel on Wattpad.com, and he presently works as a freelance editor for Harlequin’s digital-first imprint Carina Press. In his free time, Jeff blogs about his writing and editing, climbs mountains near his home in Colorado, and dreams about someday getting a cat.

In a Carapace of Light: A Conversation with China Miéville

Jeremy L. C. Jones

Intense, immersive, and startling, China Miéville’s novels have done more than won many major awards—they’ve helped change the face of speculative fiction. The English-born fantasist attended Cambridge University, earned a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics, and has taught at Harvard University. He’s the author of the Bas-Lag series, which comprises Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and Iron Council. His standalone novels include King Rat, Un Lun Dun, The City & the City, Kraken, Embassytown, and the recent Railsea, his second Young Adult novel.

Set on a train in a world of railways and wastelands, Railsea maintains a constant, pressure-cooker tension between the vast outside world and the claustrophobic interior. “This is the story of a bloodstained boy,” writes Miéville in the book’s prologue; that boy, Sham ap Soorap, is an idealistic young doctor’s assistant who sets out on his first hunt, traveling on the moletrain Medes in search of the giant moles called Moldywarpes. With parallels to (and subversions of) Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Railsea is perhaps Miéville’s tightest novel in terms of plot, but it’s still suitably sprawling.

Something of a traveler himself, Miéville spoke with Clarkesworld about his writing process, his fidelity to the notion of planning, and how books can be methods of transportation.

Do you get much time to write while you travel?

No, no. I write in very intensive chunks at various times. I am not someone who is very good at writing a certain amounts every day. I know that’s what one is told one should do, but what I tend to do is kind of sequester myself away while I am in London for a few weeks at a time and become very antisocial and write very, very intensively over a relatively short time. I am much more of a burst writer than a steady-state writer.

Is there ever any anxiety between bursts that the words won’t come next time you sit down to write?

Not exactly. I wouldn’t say “anxiety.” I don’t tend to doubt that I will be able to think of things to write, but there can be a kind of low-level dread, because especially the early stages are quite hard. So I don’t have that existential dread so much of, “Oh my God, I am never going to be able to write another book,” but I do have that sense of this is going to be hard work, which is fine, that’s appropriate, but especially early on in a project. Once you’ve built up a certain amount of momentum, it rolls much more swiftly and is much easier to continue, so my heart needs a certain amount of bolstering early on in a project. That’s the definitely the case.

Does the writing that you do early on in the burst every need to be scrapped?

Absolutely. I’m ruthless with early drafts, as one has to be. As the general rule, although I am getting better about it, but as a general rule I write long first and then end up doing quite a lot of cutting. More and more as I get older and as I change as a writer, so what tends to happen is the first draft tends to be quite long and maybe quite flabby, then I’ll trim that down. There can be occasions when it’s very difficult because there are some sections that you really want to keep in, but, at the same time, you know that you probably ought to get rid of that bit. Sometimes, you have to be quite ruthless with yourself. But there is no question that I end up getting rid of quite a lot of stuff.

There is no easy read between the way things are written and what works. Sometimes, things that are written in a very exhausted, overnight state that you would think would be among the most kind of scrappy and worse stuff is actually some of the stuff that works best. You can’t narrowly says, “Okay, these five days because I was in such and such state, I probably will not use any of that.” You just never quite know.

How do you know when it works?

Well… sometimes you don’t. This is where you need to try and minimize your own ego and have friends you trust and editors who are prepared to look over stuff. But I think you can train yourself into a certain kind of rigor about your own work. There are all sorts of little tricks. You’ll often hear writers say that one of things you have to do is to read things out loud and that can be really helpful. You have to sort of read it as ruthlessly as possible and always with the possibility in your mind that you’re wrong. That’s why you really do need outside, especially on the second and third draft, you really do need outside people to come and give you thoughts about this. The short answer, I guess, that you don’t always know. You don’t. There are ways of getting closer to it, and I think the two key things are to try to have as much humility as you can in the sense of being aware that your own stuff might not work and of trusting certain people with earlier drafts that you wouldn’t want anyone else to look at.

Do you have a sense of where the story is going from the beginning, or is it a process of discovery?

No, I tend to be very much a planner. I mean obviously details veer in the telling all the time, that’s clearly the case, but in terms of the broad architecture of a book I plot carefully and if things start to veer halfway through, I tend to stop and either pull them back on course, or if I realize they are going in a better direction, I extrapolate and work out what effect this is going to have further down. I am not one of these writers who is able to enjoy flying by the sit of my pants. And there’s no value judgment there, incidentally. I am very well aware that some absolutely fantastic, wonderful writers do that. For me, no, I cannot do it. I have to plan quite meticulously, so often the first several weeks of a book, writing will consist of me grumpily chewing over notebooks and scribbling notes and that kind of thing and not actually putting pen to paper at all other than vague and incomprehensible notes to myself.

Were there any veering moments in the writing of Railsea?

Yes, absolutely. The ending changed quite a lot a couple of times. Again, what happen is I get halfway down and then I suddenly think, “Hang on a minute, this going in a different direction,” and I stop, and I tinker, and I do some more plotting, and I say, “Well, if I do that, then I am going to do this, and that’s going to mean that, and so on.” And I extrapolate it down. That did happen with Railsea not just the ending, certain details got added. Some things you can add without making a huge difference to the structure of a book, and other things break the structure much more. In a way, what you dread is suddenly realizing something that will make the book much better, but which will necessitate quite a big structural revisions because then you really ought to do it, but you know that it’s going to be a lot of work. I had a couple of those. You get them with all books. There was nothing unusual about Railsea in the sense that there was no more or less than usual. I think that it would be very rare that it stuck completely, rigorously to the plan all the way through. It’s not a question of fidelity to the plan as I have written it at the beginning, so much as a fidelity to the notion of planning.

Did I read somewhere that you wanted to do a book in every genre?

What happened there was that that was a throwaway comment I made in an interview some years ago, which as you know the Internet has a tremendous capacity to never forget anything. People have been asking me about that ever since, but what happened was, and this again is not that uncommon, as I said that’s a kind of throwaway line and then people kept saying back to me. The more I thought about it the more I thought, “Yeah, that’s a really good idea. I should probably do that.” It was an off-the-cuff thing, but it’s an off-the-cuff thing that has a certain truth and resonance.

The thing is I am really very, very interested in genres. I find genres fascinating. I’m very interested in the way they work and the way they put things together. That includes genres that I don’t have any strong tradition with, genres that I have to come in from the outside and learn how they work. I don’t have a checklist in my pocket and I’m not going to rush it through. Especially those genres that I don’t know so much about… when I wrote Iron Council, I took quite a lot of time to read a lot of Westerns and work out how the Western works. Genres like Regency Romances that I have read, but I am not steeped in, I do like the idea of taking some time and taking them apart and working out how they work. And I thing that that idea of slowly over the course of career travelling through these different traditions and trying to be respectful to them but also do something, bring your own stuff to that table, I think is a really exciting idea.

Your fondness for the notion of planning seems to be very similar to your fondness for genre. The plan is there, then you deviate from it, or you don’t.

It’s an interesting formulation. At a conscious level I cannot say that I am fond of planning. I would say it’s more a question of my psychological model requiring planning. I take neither pleasure nor displeasure from plans. I just need them to proceed. Whereas with the genres, I take a lot of pleasure with the genres and in the way they work and their protocols and so on.

But I think you are probably onto something in the sense that I tend to be quite a structured thinker. I tend to find structures very useful in ways in terms of organizing my thoughts and the things I do and so on. That clearly has some ramifications in both those fields. It’s not something that would have occurred to me, but I wouldn’t say you’re wrong, you’re probably onto something.

Do you ever experiment with not being structured at any point in the process? Does being structured become a limitation, or is it always a strength?

I think it varies writer to writer. There are certainly writers for whom being overly structured would not be a strength at all. I don’t doubt that one could probably make a strong claim that some of the things… The people that don’t like my stuff might say that some of the problem with it stem from this kind of care, some would say neurosis, about this sort of planning. It’s very difficult to say because it’s so kind of integral to my mental model that thinking outside of it is to kind of think in terms of a different me. I have on a couple of occasions tried writing things which don’t have a structure and don’t have a plan in mind. What I can do, I think, reasonably well, I think I can write good sort of very short, mood pieces, maybe a page long. These are not plot things. These are almost sort of prose poems. Those, I think, work very well, for me anyway. I like both. That can kind of tap into certain intensity, but for anything that’s longer that has a narrative, I just get a bit lost without a plan.

It’s also the case that having a plan and a structure does not negate the intensity. I think sometimes there is an anxiety that if you plan too much you will end up with something quite bloodless and that doesn’t feel urgent. I am sure that may be true for some people. I don’t feel it to myself at all. They’re two separate axes. I can very, very rigorously plan something over a couple of weeks and then I actually sit down to write it, I am rushing with that kind of buzz, that sort of high, just as much as if it had just spilled out of the pen there and then.

What is the secret to capturing mood so intensely?

I don’t know. This is the kind of thing that writers agonize over for centuries. I suspect that it’s something to do with a relatively unmediated sense presence. All these things that you do when you are trying to write something that’s very evocative of scene and you kind of sit back and close your eyes, you know it may look a bit ridiculous sometimes, but it’s perfectly reasonable thing to do. Writing and invoking images and that sort of thing are… You know, there is no division between the mind and the body, they are bodily acts. Putting yourself into a state of mind where you are very reflective of those moments may very well involve putting your body in certain place. This is why some writers write very brilliantly on drugs, which I don’t as it happens, it’s not my interest.

Certainly, a certain kind of very repetitive music, and a certain kind of close intensity can be very evocative. For me, I find often the most powerful writing that I think I do in terms of that moment, that kind of presence in a moment, is often very late at night when very few other people are awake and I am looking out of the window. I always work looking out the window. I am not someone who has my desk facing a wall. I am looking at the city and the lights are on in the windows. There is this great sense of being in a carapace of light. That sort of strangely dream-like moment, I think what you are trying to do when you get that kind of intensity is that you are trying to translate a sense that is basically like a dream in a waking moment. Anything you can do physically or mentally that gets you closer to that experience is probably good.

Is it harder in a non-urban setting to get into this state of mind?

I wouldn’t want to generalize it. I tend to get into it in an urban setting. That’s probably because I tend to be in an urban setting. I know perfectly well that some people find being in the wilderness, being in the woods, intensely hypnotic, hallucinatory, and intense. Certainly, I have written things that I love and that I think do touch that not in urban setting. I wouldn’t want to generalize that. It is the case, as I say, that I tend to do it in an urban setting, but that says more about me and about the projects that I’m interested in than it says about the countryside versus the city in general.

Railsea is your second young adult novel. What does this category require of you? Does it challenge you in different ways than, say, a more intricate book like Embassytown?

I don’t like the category of young adult very much. I think it’s not terribly helpful. It’s basically a marketing category. I am not having a go at marketers here. I work with marketers. They have to do their job. I understand that. These categories may be useful in marketing terms, but what it’s not, I think, is a psychological category or an aesthetic category or philosophical category or anything like that. It’s not my job to worry about marketing, so for that reason, I don’t particularly set much store by the category of Young Adult.

I am very aware that when I read books as a child—I would say as a child, not as a young adult–there was a different kind of intensity that I fell into. No matter how much I love a book now, I don’t read it in the same way, with that same kind of absolutely compulsive inhabiting of the book in a way that I did when I was a kid. And then there’s a shift. I think what Young Adult tends to mean is this blurry line, a very, very, very blurry line between that and “adult” book. I think essentially for me it’s simply question of not worrying about it. I don’t really care. What I always do, and I think probably a lot of writers would say this, you’re writing for yourself and you’re writing for yourself at a particular time in your life. Quite early on when I was planning Railsea, I realized that I was writing for my own, I would say roughly twelve-ish, maybe thirteen-year-old self. That doesn’t preclude reading it also when I am older, and it doesn’t preclude reading it when I am younger. But that was who I think I had in mind when I was doing the writing.

What does it mean? For me, it’s a question of the kind of voice that transports and transported me when I was that age, which doesn’t mean dumbing down or anything like that. You don’t have to do those at all. For me, because of the kind of books that I loved, it means a certain kind of relationship to language, a certain more kind of overtly playful relationships. I use things like punts, which I wouldn’t tend to use in a book written for an older me. It means a certain kind of playfulness about the structure and shape of the novel, so that the whole book is predicated on a silly joke about Moby-Dick. It’s a joke that’s hopefully kind of fun, but it’s the kind of thing that I wouldn’t feel secure writing with my thirty-year-old in mind.

That doesn’t mean that my thirty-year-old self wouldn’t read it and enjoy it, it just means that’s not who I am writing for in that moment. Different writers can do this very differently. For me, things like those jokes, those puns, that kind of playfulness about language tend to be the kind of things that get freed up. I keep repeating the word playfulness because that’s the fundamental difference that I am aware of. I know when my British publisher has published this book, and they haven’t called it a YA novel, it’s a “story for readers of all ages.” On one hand, that’s obviously a piece of marketing because they don’t want anyone to feel they shouldn’t buy it. And I am grateful to them for that, but I do honestly much prefer that as a description because that’s how it feels in my head. It feels like Un Lun Dun. I know some adults read and enjoyed Un Lun Dun. I am delighted by that. We can all read and enjoy books for younger readers. But that felt very much like a book for younger readers for me. Railsea feels more like a book is written for “readers of all ages.”

Is there anything that you read now or any particular writer now who gives you a taste of that compulsive inhabiting of a book like you experienced when you were younger? I keep thinking of drug-users trying to recapture that first high. Can we get that back? Can we still find that buzz?

Some people may be able to. I suspect not. I suspect that that particular kind of buzz is absolutely, fundamentally a function of reading as a young reader who doesn’t have a lot of, relatively speaking, a lot of reading under their belt and who doesn’t have a lot of life under their belt. But again, that doesn’t mean that you don’t feel a trace all the time. I think we do feel a trace of it. It’s one of the many things that we’re constantly hankering for. If there are readers who really do fall into books in the same way they did when they were eight, then I am envious of them. You also have certain new things when you read as an adult. It’s not all a loss. You gain some things, too. One of the things you gain as an adult is that every book you read, you are reading it through a matrix, through the kind of warp and weft of all the other books you’ve read and that number grows and grows and grows, so every book becomes more and more entangledly intertextual. That’s a lovely thing. You lose and you gain. There is definitely a melancholy to it, I freely admit that, but melancholy is not the worst thing. That hankering itself gives you a certain drive to read, which is good.

Are there any books that you inhabited when you were younger that changed you in a significant way? Books that you keep visiting in your mind?

Oh my god, so many! Absolutely heaps, and often when I am asked to list them, one forgets them because they are so close up. It’s like that thing when you look for your glasses, and you are wearing them. The paradox is a lot of the books that are most embedded in me are books that I sometimes forget to mention, which is a terrible injustice. The short answer is yes, loads. I mean there is no hard division between children’s books and adult books. I would say book that did that for me, hugely, was The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers, which is not a children’s book. It’s an adult book, but I read it when I was probably eleven. It absolutely took up residence in my head. It’s one of the key texts in my head.

What was it about The Anubis Gates that captured you?

It’s always very difficult to sort of explain one’s affective reaction. I love the intricacy—and I get back to your structure point, although I wasn’t aware of it at the time—I loved the intricacy of the time-travel narrative. I love the way that it appeared to be exploding into this chaos, but then everything came together with this extraordinary neatness, this extraordinary kind of clicking into place. I thought that was beautiful. I loved the monsters. I loved the time-shifting visions of London. It’s magic, but it’s systematized magic. I passionately love that book. It’s difficult for me to host back there and explain why, but that’s a kind of groping towards it.

Lastly, what are you working on now?

I am doing a novel, which I will not say too much about because I am always very superstitious about talking about work in progress. I am very much looking forward to doing some more short stories. I love writing short stories, although I am not a very quick writer. I write one every so often, but I love them when I do. I’d also like to do some more nonfiction, which I haven’t done for a while. I really enjoy writing nonfiction. Other than that, I am doing a regular comic now for DC [Dial H For Hero]. That is something I would love to keep doing. That kind of depends on people continuing to buy and read it.

About the Author

Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and teacher. He is the Staff Interviewer for Clarkesworld Magazine and a frequent contributor to Kobold Quarterly and Booklifenow.com. He teaches at Wofford College and Montessori Academy in Spartanburg, SC. He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006. Jones lives in Upstate South Carolina with his wife, daughter, and flying poodle.

Another Word: Plausibility and Truth

Daniel Abraham

There’s a puzzle I don’t know the answer to, but the more I look around for it, the more I see it. Most of the time, it’s amusing. Sometimes it scares the crap out of me.

So, funny story. Back in 1998, I was at Clarion West. One of my classmates turned in a story about a woman who worked from home, writing up recipes for the local newspaper. The essential problem in the story was that the protagonist’s dog kept digging up space-time wormholes. It was a light, comic piece, and one I remember fondly. But we were there for a workshop, and critics have to criticize. We came together for the morning critique, and our comments were very consistent. We all loved the wormhole dog, but no one was willing to believe in a woman supporting herself writing recipes.

I’ve known for as long as I can remember that the willing suspension of disbelief is something that science fiction and fantasy writers work for. Finding the details that make something feel not realistic—there’s nothing that can make, for instance, a psychic-power inducing space fuel harvested from a planet-wide desert inhabited by massive sandworms into mimetic realism—but plausible. It’s not truth that we’re looking for, but the tricks to make something seem true.

I’ve come to understand that it’s something mainstream and literary writers need to concern themselves with too. The thing I’m coming to see now, the one that moves me from amused to anxious, is that nonfiction writers, journalists, bloggers, and scientists (oh my God and scientists) have to worry about that too. Being true, it turns out, isn’t enough, even when you’re just trying to tell the truth.

The relationship between plausibility and truth is always a problem.

So, funny story. Given how much nonfiction I’ve read, I really haven’t written much, but now and then the occasion arises. A few years back, a good friend of mine was guest of honor at the local convention, and I got to write her biography for the program book. I had a scheme for how to approach it that would be fun, but for it to work, I needed a bunch of trivia about her life and history, and I was running a little short. As I recall, I was writing it pretty late at night and pretty close to deadline. I could have called her, rousted her out of bed, and quizzed her about herself. Or I could go to Wikipedia.

I went to Wikipedia, and it had everything I needed for my project. I whipped up a nice little biographical essay that was, I hoped, amusing and informative and fun to read. One of our mutual friends read it at the convention and whooped with delight. Not because it was such a great piece and not because I’d gotten something egregiously wrong. It turned out that one of the little bits of light trivia I’d harvested from her online bio was a ringer. And in fact, it was a ringer that our mutual friend had planted in the article as a joke.

It’s not the first time I’ve been gulled. It’s not even the first time I’ve been gulled by a friend. But the fella in question wasn’t laughing because I’d fallen for his trick. He was delighted because now that the false fact had been picked up, used, and put in print, the Wikipedia article could include a citation saying where the information had come from: me.

There are things that make a story seem real. Some of them happen inside the story itself. Concrete, specific details are more convincing than vague, abstract ones. Slightly surprising details are more convincing than expected ones, so a model with a zit on his earlobe seems more real than just a model. Other things exist outside the story. Things that are repeated are more believable, especially if they’re repeated by more than one source (for example, a citation in Wikipedia). Things are more believable when they’re presented by someone who seems not to have anything to gain by telling the story. Or when the folks listening already have a larger worldview that the story seems to bolster, so they’re predisposed to accept it.

But that’s not about being true. That’s about seeming true.

Most of us aren’t testing the world around us. We’re taking the word of people around us. We don’t evaluate whether something is true by going out and putting our hands on it, because most of the time, that would be irrational, right? I don’t even know from experience that it would be impossible to make a living writing recipes for a newspaper. I absolutely and unshakably believe it’s impossible, but the source of that certainty isn’t evidence. It’s a decision I made about a narrative (this seems unlikely) that was echoed back to be by a bunch of different sources (my fellow critiquers) and fit into a larger story that I was already disposed to believe (newspapers don’t pay well, especially for things that can’t be put under copyright). I didn’t call any newspapers or talk with anyone who puts together cookbooks. My time is a limited resource, and if I started tracking down and checking everything I came across and withholding judgment until I’d made my own investigations, I wouldn’t be able to do the things I actually want to do. Like make dinner or have a job.

So instead of judging facts, most of the time, I judge stories about facts. So does everybody. We don’t look for truth, because truth demands too much time and effort. We looks for plausibility, because it’s what we have time for. We suspend our disbelief at the drop of a hat for any number of reasons—because the person telling the story is a journalist, because the information matches what we already thought was true, because it’s a good story.

Most of the time, that’s close enough.

So, not-so-funny story. I have a friend who ran an oil-and-gas company in New Mexico, so she worked with a lot of geologists and engineers, most of them men, and most with a profound politically conservative bent. There was one man in particular, a fella who’d been in the industry for decades. An educated man and a professional with a wealth of practical, hands-on experience. He believes that anthropogenic global warming was a myth, but he also sees the drought that is slowly killing the American Southwest. He sees the fire seasons getting worse and worse. He came to the conclusion that terrorists in the Middle East have invented a weather control device that they’re using to destroy the United States.

And I can’t laugh at this guy. I want to. I’d love to call him an idiot and a rube and someone who is so blinded by the sins of his profession that he can’t handle the truth, and, oh my, do I think he is wrong about the weather-control thing. Only I can’t.

He’s using the same tools I am. He’s comparing the stories that are presented to him, maybe telling a few of his own, just like we all do.

The difference between plausibility and truth is that truth is objective and hard to find, while plausibility is subjective and easy. When the oilman says he doesn’t believe in global warming, what he’s saying is that however much the scientists insist that the data proves it, he’s heard some other story that’s more compelling to him. I can say that the idea that humanity can spend the time since the Industrial Revolution actively changing the atmosphere of the planet without changing anything doesn’t seem plausible to me. But neither one of us has easy access to the data or the expertise to interpret it for ourselves. Objective truth is difficult to come by, and even if you have it, what you can pass on to the next person is the story that you tell about it.

Stories—by which I mean novels, newspapers, the interpretation sections of scientific papers—aren’t a vehicle for truth. The things that make a narrative convincing are technical issues, and they don’t have anything to do with whether the picture they create of the world is true. The techniques are largely the same whether we’re talking about a detail of someone’s life in a program book biography, a light fiction piece about a dog digging up wormholes in the back yard, or whether our species is closing up our own ecological niche. In order for truth to be recognized as true, it has to be wrapped in plausibility. Just the same as lies.

And that scares the crap out of me.

About the Author

Daniel Abraham is a writer of genre fiction with a dozen books in print and over thirty published short stories. His work has been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Hugo Awards and has been awarded the International Horror Guild Award. He also writes as MLN Hanover and (with Ty Franck) as James S. A. Corey. He lives in the American Southwest.

Editor’s Desk: Finding the Good in a Dark Day

Neil Clarke

Last month, my family and I filled the van with books and drove four-and-a-half hours to Burlington, MA for Readercon, one of my favorite conventions. After a nice dinner with Lisa and the boys, I walked over to the dealer’s room to get started on setting up the Clarkesworld table. After a team of volunteers helped unload my van, I started assembling my shelves. Halfway through, I began to feel overheated and nauseous. It felt like food poisoning, so I headed back to our room, but the situation worsened as time passed. Eventually, Lisa had to call the front desk for an ambulance. The paramedics arrived quickly, and after a series of questions, began to suspect that I was having a significant heart attack. They were right. I was rushed down the street to the Lehay Clinic, where they then proceeded to put two stents in my heart, in a location of my heart that they refer to as “the widowmaker.”

The day after, I recall asking Lisa to see if friends at the con could arrange to get all my boxes loaded back into the van. Later, however, she told me that when people heard what happened, they set up my table and arranged to have volunteers handle sales for the entire weekend. They were determined to make sure that I wouldn’t be carrying any boxes of books back with me. Cards were made from my promotional posters and people kept stopping by the table to sign and send me their best wishes for a speedy recovery. They even made arrangements to get some books from my personal collection signed for me. They handled every little detail. By the end of the weekend, they took what remained of the books, loaded my van and handed Lisa a stack of money. From my hospital bed, I checked in on email, Facebook and Twitter via my Kindle Fire. Every day, I was emotionally overwhelmed by the support and efforts of these people. I still am.

All too often, we only hear about the bad things that happen within fandom. It’s right to point out the creeps and other disturbing things that happen, but we can’t let those few outshine the genuinely good people that make up the majority. In many ways, it is a testament to fandom that I haven’t been able to track down all the names of the people that helped my family that weekend. Friends, acquaintances and even total strangers pitched in and gave up their own time when we really needed it. Even the smallest gestures added up and lifted our spirits when we needed it the most. For that, I will be eternally grateful. I can’t think of a sufficient way to thank everyone.

I’m told the following people are deserving of special thanks: Gavin Grant, Sean Wallace, Kate Baker, Jaym Gates, Genevieve Valentine, Eric Rosenfield, Molly Tanzer, and Sam Berman. These are good people. Treat them that way.

I wish the story could end right here, but unfortunately there’s more. Within eight hours of returning home, I found myself headed to the emergency room of Morristown Memorial Hospital with a kidney stone. Normally a simple procedure, my already weakened heart and the high level of blood thinners in my system complicated any attempts to fix things. Eventually, they decided to go in after the stone, but it proved too much. Instead they left a stent inside me to help prevent the stone from causing further pain until such a time that my heart can handle the strain of the full procedure. I have months of recovery ahead of me, but I am finally home and have the support of my friends and family. That’s enough for me right now.

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, owner of Wyrm Publishing and a 2012 Hugo Nominee for Best Editor (short form). He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Clarkesworld Magazine

Issue 72

Table of Contents

The Found Girl

by David Klecha and Tobias S. Buckell

Robot

by Helena Bell

muo-ka's Child

by Indrapramit Das

Between a UFO and a Hard Place: The Real-Life Science Heroics of Dr. Omond Solandt

by Jason S. Ridler

The Satirist's Progress: A Discussion with Nick Mamatas and Paul Tremblay

by Jeremy L. C. Jones

Another Word: Super Duper Sexual Spiritual Black Woman: The New and Improved Magical Negro

by Chesya Burke

Editor's Desk: Professionally Speaking

by Neil Clarke

Awe at Thistledown

Art by Angel Nieves

© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2012
www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

The Found Girl

David Klecha and Tobias S. Buckell

Melissa stalked a trash compactor in the Elemental Caverns deep in the depths below the Street, where steam hissed from newly regrown pipes and oversized dendrites spread across the ancient brick of the connective tunnels. The glowing moss that dripped brown water filled the air with a faint glow, enough to let Melissa squint her way through the Caverns.

The Street gave her the mission the usual way: pictographs glowing on the side of the steps leading up to the two storied, red brick building the Found Children called The Castle. She had puzzled for a moment as to what the “trashcan + clamp” had meant, but eventually she’d figured that the Street lost a compactor and needed it retrieved.

And of course, she knew the quartered circle that indicated the caverns.

The Found Children didn’t like the Caverns. They were haunted. With so few real people around anymore, ghosts and demons felt free to roam a world filled with buildings that moved and talked, where mysterious magics dusted the air and flitted around.

So Melissa accepted the Street’s request. She wouldn’t let any of the younger children risk waking the demons.

After all, La Llorona lurked this far under the Street. Melissa glimpsed her bedraggled hair and torn up clothes the last time she’d rescued a lost machine for the Street. Held her breath and hid as the demon ghost snuffled and tramped around the darks of the Caverns.

“Hello,” she whispered to herself. She stopped at the concrete edge of an ancient sewer and knelt to look into a puddle of muck collected in a depression. The telltale kinked track of the compactor looked fresh. The muck would dry out in six hours, maybe twelve on a humid day. He had been by here recently, then, headed deeper into the caverns. On tiptoes she headed deeper, swallowing hard and hoping she was being ghost-quiet.

Scuffling whispers echoed through the stale air from deeper in the caverns.

Melissa froze.

The sounds carried the scent of earth and water. She looked around a corner carefully. Somewhere, deep along one of the arrow-straight tubes, a faint fire flickered.

“La Llorona,” Melissa whispered to herself, the back of her neck prickling.

Melissa knew the stories from her days hiding in the Outskirts. Alien and incomprehensible the old demon stalked abandoned, wet sewers, snatching up wayward orphans, devouring those who had lost hope.

If La Llorona showed, she would tempt Melissa with her demonic tongue. Melissa shied away from the tunnel, keeping her hope, keeping her strength.

She looked down at the tracks. The trash compactor had been wooed by La Llorona’s voice and tricked into coming down here, no doubt. And the Street needed it rescued. And the Street was good to the Found Children. It had given them a safe building, and good food.

Melissa steeled herself and followed the tracks where they led, right down the tunnel toward La Llorona. The glow down that way was brighter, and the smell of smoke unmistakable.

“Infernal fire,” she said softly. The smells of rotting things and burned flesh overwhelmed the purer smells of earth and water.

Smoke should be sweeter, but no one told La Llorona that.

Halfway down, the trash compactor shuddered in spastic circles, twitching a half turn to the left, then backing to the right one full turn. Back and forth he stuttered in little circles, and Melissa could tell the machine was caught between the call of La Llorona and the freedom and sweet air of the Street.

Right now Melissa wanted nothing more than to call on the beautiful, angelic, and pure Blue Lady to come save her. The same Blue Lady that had appeared in the Outskirts, and given her food. Then told her and the Found Children about the Street, and the safe place.

But the Blue Lady didn’t always come when you screamed and prayed. And it was better to save your prayers for when you really needed them. So Melissa gritted her teeth and approached the wayward machine.

Fortunately, the Old Man on the Street had shown her what to do in cases like this. When the trash compactor paused to reevaluate its path she leapt onto its chassis, her muddy feet scrambling up and over its metallic arms and mouths. On top was a button covered by a clear plastic guard. She flipped up the guard and mashed the button down, then whispered, “I am lost, take me home.”

Immediately, the trash compactor stopped twitching, oriented itself back the way Melissa had come, and trundled off. She clung to it, her bony knees hooked into one of its bumpers, her fingers clutching the front edge, her slim body laid across the top. The little treads whirred and the compactor sped up with a flurry of dank water and mud as it carried them away from La Llorona, and then eventually with a burst of light, out of the Elemental Caverns entirely.

“You did good work with the trash compactor,” the Old Man said, walking beside her down the center of the asphalt strip, “that took a lot of courage. I know you don’t like being underground.” Melissa looked up at him. He wore a simple cream-colored suit with a pink tie. Sometimes he dressed differently—when she met him he had been wearing sandals, khakis, and a patterned shirt—but he otherwise always looked the same with his lined and careworn face and the shiny implants at his temples, forehead and base of his skull.

“I guess so,” she said, walking beside him. Her head came just above his elbow, and she wore the same long skirt and t-shirt that she had worn that morning into the caverns. The t-shirt had a stylized rocketship on the front with three colorful monkeys hanging off it as it shot into space.

“We appreciate it, nonetheless. Even if we lack courage ourselves anymore.”

“You mean you’re afraid?” she asked. “But you’re an adult.”

“No, we’re not afraid, either. Not afraid, not courageous. It doesn’t apply to us any more.”

“Because you . . . transcended?”

“Yes,” he said, steering her toward the front steps of the safe building. The Castle. The other kids, all younger than her, had finished playing for the day and were heading back toward The Castle. Most of them were dirty, a few nicked up from playing rough, but they were otherwise healthy and in good spirits. They had a freedom now that they had lacked before, and they reveled in it.

The only cost to that freedom was the occasional task laid on them by the Street. Most of the cleaning things she let them handle, but as the oldest, she took the difficult things like the trash compactor onto herself. She couldn’t let any of the younger ones risk themselves with La Llorona.

“Do you miss it?”

“Feeling afraid?” he asked. “Or courageous?”

“Yes.”

“Not yet,” he said. She imagined a smile further creasing his face, but it remained calm. “We still remember it, after all. We remember the fear and courage of all of us. And that’s enough, in a way. Though it’s nice to actively see yours. We take some pleasure in knowing these things are still around and still possible.”

“Is that why you like my art?”

“Well, we like neo-primativist compositions. And your color choice is fairly unique for someone of your age and background.”

“Thank you. I think.” She stopped at the base of the stairs, then turned to look up at him.

“What for?” he asked.

“For this,” she said, spreading her arms, indicating the Street as a whole. “You make it safe and clean and okay for us.”

“You make it clean, you and your friends.”

Melissa glanced up the stairs. Darkness was settling and the others had all gone inside. When she looked back, the Old Man was walking away, his hands in his pockets. Far beyond him, down at the east end of the Street, a ten foot tall block of walking metal, a checkpoint sentry, ambled forward awkwardly and then squatted to block that end off from unwanted guests. Another such sentry blocked the west end.

As she kept looking to the east, a bright light flared over the city. The silhouetted skyline was darker than it had been this time a year ago. A pillar of light grew, glowing blue and white, reaching for the heavens. Melissa wondered what it was.

An invocation for the Blue Lady lingered on Melissa’s tongue long after the pillar of light faded and vanished, but never passed her lips.

“What’s out there?” Melissa asked the sentry the next day, craning her head as she looked up at the strips of steel along its side. “Now, I mean. It’s all changed. I don’t understand it anymore.”

“You were out there before, weren’t you?” the sentry replied.

Parts of the steel block could change and move, revealing barriers, maybe weapons even, but she couldn’t be sure of that. It was doing that now, to talk to her. The booming voice coming from a new porthole opening up. Small machine irises bloomed and twisted to point themselves at her.

Nothing got past the sentry without the Street’s say-so. Except La Llorona.

Melissa guessed that only the Blue Lady could stop the demon. But she hadn’t seen the Blue Lady since she came to rescue the Found Children.

“Yes,” Melissa said. The sentry must know her story, she thought. But then, he hadn’t appeared until just after most of the adults in the city transcended. Maybe the sentry wasn’t like the rest of everything here on the Street, knowing what seemed like everything there was to know. “My mother and I lived on the streets for years, when I was little. She died four, maybe five years ago, I don’t know any more.”

“How did you fare on the street?” the sentry asked.

“Well enough,” she replied. “We sang songs for people on the streets, back when they were filled with people. Sometimes people put money in the cup. Sometimes we went to the shelters, but mom was scared of them.”

“You still tell stories, don’t you?”

“When the other children need them,” Melissa replied. “To explain the world.”

“How often does that happen?”

“All the time,” she said, flashing a smile at the sentry, and stepped across a steel ribbon in the road that marked the edge of the Street. Over to the other side. Nothing much happened, though she felt a tingle that told her the sentry had looked at her very closely. She turned her head and smiled again at the steel block and walked out into the north-south road. No vehicles used it any more, and outside of the Street, she could see weeds and grass had begun to sprout in the cracks.

This road itself seemed to be a no-man’s land. “Her” street did not continue on the other side, there was just a blank wall, the side of what had been a large hospital that had declined rapidly in the last six months. There were hardly any patients any more. And those that needed help, she heard, got it from machines grown in their own homes.

“It’s nice out there,” the Old Man said from behind her. She turned back. He leaned against the sentry, but she hadn’t seen or heard him approach. He was wearing jeans and sneakers now, with a tie-dyed t-shirt. “The transcended are pitching in to help the people left behind in a big way. It’s relatively safe for a girl on her own, even one as young as you. Safer than it was before you came to join us in The Castle.”

“I like the Street,” she said, turning to face him now. A shiver ran down her spine as she stood in the middle of the road, knowing in that instinctual way that she should not be able to do this, to stand where cars had once whipped by, and more to stand outside the protection of the Street. Spirits were out here, demons and all the rest, like La Llorona. She looked around again and took in the vacant buildings, the closed off streets, the emptiness of it all. Far away, to the south, she could see figures moving across the road, dim outlines in the distance.

“The Street likes you,” the Old Man said.

“Are you the King of the Street?” Melissa asked. Or President. Or leader. She didn’t understand the new world.

She’d barely understood the old one. The busy streets, the cars, the busy and stressed people. Suits. Acrid air. Factories. Hunger. Steel buildings. Jobs and homes.

Planes. She wondered if she’d dreamed them. Like metal birds, filled with people, going here and there, far over head. She missed the contrails.

“No,” the Old Man said, “this is just a facet of the Street. This body was once an individual that lived here in one of the apartments. Now he is part of the Street, speaking to you with the voice of all of us. One of us.”

Melissa still didn’t get it. She looked off in the distance, away from the Street and asked the same question she asked every week, just to reassure herself that she wasn’t trapped. “Can I leave the Street?”

“If you want to,” the Old Man replied. “You’re not our prisoner. Or even our ward. Though we would have . . . concern for you. We would prefer you to stay.”

“Concern?”

“Accidents still happen. The world is safer, but not completely safe.”

Melissa thought about La Llorona hidden away beneath the Street, hiding in the caverns down there. Was the Street completely safe either?

She wondered if the Blue Lady would help her if she left the Street? She thought so. She had seen her, after all, in the Outskirts.

But if Melissa left the Street, she would leave the Found Children alone. And who would warn them about La Llorona? The Street did not seem interested.

“I’ll stay,” she said, and walked back through the sentry’s gates. “For now.”

“. . . La Llorona lost her children a long, long time ago. Some say she drowned them, and was cast back into the world after she killed herself. And that’s why we must fear her. She’s looking for lost children,” Melissa said, looking around at the other children.

Only ten of the thirty in The Castle sat and listened to her tales on the benches by the sidewalk, mostly the youngest ones. They sat with their lunch—provided, as always, by the Street—and listened in fascination edged with disbelief. Last week she had twelve listeners. More the month before.

“I saw her in the Elemental Caverns,” Melissa said, stomping a thinly-shod foot on the concrete sidewalk. “Right here. Right beneath our feet. She will take you and bind you and make you hers forever.”

That sent a shiver through them. “Stranger danger,” muttered one of the kids, repeating one of the old warding phrases they’d all learned and passed on to each other. Even though they stayed within the long block that made up the Street, the freedom within it was nearly unfathomable. To be able to run and play, beyond the tightly fenced playground behind their building . . . this was a freedom they had never known in their lives. Food. Warmth.

Melissa thought back to the lessons she had been taught. The stories she’d been told about the world. “There is evil and there is good, in the world,” she repeated. “Demons, like La Llorona, want to capture us and steal our energy. But there are angels out there. And they want us to be free, and to laugh and play. It makes them happy to see that.”

Her mom had made angels out of bits of wire and bottles that she found. Twisted metal wings wrapped onto the bottles, with bottle cap faces. When they’d stayed in the tent on the Outskirts, her mother had made hundreds of them. “They protect us,” her mother had said. “From the government. They hide us from the bad people who’ll take you away from me.”

But then she’d died. Killed by the demon that ripped her up from the inside and made her cough blood. And Melissa had been left alone to sing on the street, to beg for food.

Alone while people started to fade away, and the city got silent.

Alone until the beautiful Blue Lady came out to the Outskirts and talked to her. Invited her to come to the Street.

A little boy with braided hair raised his hand and broke through Melissa’s memories. “Is the Street an angel?”

Melissa opened her mouth. And didn’t have an answer.

The others scattered as they realized she was done, their lunches finished, their attention waning. She didn’t blame them, but she hoped they would take what she said to heart. Many of them didn’t believe in La Llorona the way she did, they hadn’t smelled her fire, heard her strange and demonic language. Some of them had been reading things, learning history from the Street.

Even some of the other children who’d hunkered in the Outskirts, near that abandoned factory that Melissa had hid in after her mom died, had stopped believing.

The Old Man was standing there, watching her. Today he had gone back to the cream-colored suit, but with a peach-colored tie.

“We really enjoy your stories,” he said to her, “the way you teach the children what you know about the world.”

“They need to know,” she said. “And no one else wants to do it, I think. Is that why you want me to stay?”

“We want you to stay for many reasons,” he said, “but your stories are a part of it.”

“What do you mean? You must know far more than I do,” she replied. “You transcended.”

That was why everyone left. She hadn’t understood, not talking to other people. Hiding in the parks. Begging.

Did you ever use your mother’s old phone? the Blue Lady had asked. Or play with a computer? They get faster and faster. And better. And some people use mind interfaces. Or speak to them.

Technology got faster. Better. And then technology started designing technology. Evolving. What used to take a lifetime took a decade, then years. And then last year, months. Weeks. Days.

People transcended. Became other things. Many other things. Some were still here. Some had left. Some were different.

Some stayed the same.

The Found Children had been left behind.

“Transcending was the problem,” the Old Man said. “In some ways, we’re only the sum of our parts. The collective that is the Street is made up of only so many individuals, with so much life experience, with so much knowledge, or emotion, or wisdom. If we do not take care to find more, to cultivate more, we could easily stagnate and die. Believe it or not, it has happened to collectives already, others elsewhere have encountered this. It took one such collective in Switzerland just a week, in your time.”

“In my time? Isn’t my time the same as yours?” Melissa asked, walking along the sidewalk, watching the other children run and play. Some of them were playing tag, others had a more complicated game of make-believe going on. A couple of the others had started a painting project early, only they did not seem to be doing quite the nice, even job the Street had suggested. The Old Man took that in as well, but smiled with approval.

“Machine intelligence has multiplied us, in a way. Everything happens faster, your experiences seem exponentially slower. We can make very complex decisions in the blink of your eye.”

“That changed you,” she said.

“You could say that.”

“I don’t want to change,” she replied, not sure where the defensiveness had come from, suddenly. She didn’t want to become a robot body for some larger entity like the Street. Even if the Street was made of all the minds of people who had lived in these buildings a year ago. “I want to be me, forever.”

“Indeed,” the Old Man said, and that was all on that subject.

The next night, a tribe of adults entered through the western checkpoint and set up camp on the opposite side of the Street from The Castle. They rolled up in a small caravan of vehicles, including one large truck with tarp-covered objects on the back. Much to her excitement the people seemed mostly normal to Melissa, though they greeted her with a deference that surprised her. The other kids stayed away, mostly, only peering-through-the-windows curious right now. They had had so few visitors through the Street in the months since the transcendence, since the neighborhood became the Street.

“They’re heading to the spaceport,” the Old Man had explained to her. “We’re giving them freeway and a camping spot in exchange for some things they will make for us in space, in zero gravity.”

Melissa looked up as she crossed the Street, at the stars overhead, thinking about his words. What kind of people would want to go there? She was meet-them curious, so she approached a small group gathered around a grill. There were only a few others that she had seen, beside these three, and they were busy with tasks she could not see.

Once they had finished the greetings, and Melissa explained who and what she was—careful to emphasize that they were in the Street’s safekeeping—she asked what they were doing, where they were going.

“To space,” one of them replied, light in his eyes. His curiosity and passion lit a small fire in her. “We’re going to be adapted to life in zero-gee, and we’re going to explore the solar system. Maybe beyond, if we can figure it out. The transcended are making huge strides toward that, now.”

“So you’re not transcended?” she asked.

“No, but we’re going to be modified, enhanced,” said one of the women, a similar light in her eyes. “In those,” she said and jerked a thumb toward the tarp-covered objects. “Some of our friends are already undergoing the changes.”

“Changed? Enhanced?”

“Do you want to see?” said another of the women. And without waiting for Melissa’s response, she climbed up on the back of the truck and started undoing one of the tarps. She lifted the edge, and Melissa could then see underneath. Machinery, wrapped around a green glowing tank, beeped and blinked at her. Inside, she could dimly make out a human form, only it wasn’t quite so human any more. The body was changing, slowly, very slowly. Elongating here and there, widening in the limbs, flattening. New lumps on the body showed implanted machinery, perhaps, or new organs grown to perform whole new tasks the human body could never have evolved to perform.

“Are you still you?” she asked the woman holding the tarp.

“We’re still individuals,” she said. “Linked, by technology in our heads, some of the same technology that allows people to transcend. But we use it differently.”

That night, Melissa stood on the rooftop of The Castle, looking up at the sky. Lights moved across the stars now, something she had never noticed before. Were they angels, going about a heavenly mission? Or more like these people, exploring the worlds beyond hers? Perhaps both, now that she thought about it.

But as she watched, shrill cries broke the night. She looked down at the visiting tribe, but they were all asleep, and undisturbed.

The cries went on for a full minute, and then trailed away. Melissa hurried inside. They had come from somewhere on the Street. They had to have been caused, she knew, by La Llorona.

Only La Llorona could sound that sad and scared.

The next day, the tribe readied to depart. Some of the orphans ran around, their hesitancy overcome, and they were now doing tasks for the visitors, little things that earned them treats or simple pats on the head. Melissa walked back and forth along the Street, almost like a nervous hen, keeping an eye on her chicks. Surely, La Llorona slipped up onto the surface with the tribe?

No, the Street would have noticed, she felt. It would not have allowed that. No, besides, La Llorona came from the depths, from the caverns, coming up from under the Street.

Once the tribe had moved on, she was joined by the Old Man again, walking the length of the Street. He asked her what she had thought of the visitors, if she wanted to go with them, what she had been working on artistically.

But she could also sense that he wasn’t quite as engaged with the questions as he usually was. Something was missing in his attitude, and as they neared the western end of the Street, he guided her down an alley. It ended, a hundred feet down, in a blank wall erected since the transcendence, physically blocking the Street off and helping make it more of an enclave.

Between the street and the wall lay a boy’s body, bloody and tattered, surrounded by sparkling shards of glass. She looked up at once, instinctively, but there were no windows on the buildings that formed the alley. She looked back down and whispered, “La Llorona. I heard the screams last night. I’ve warned you. Why don’t you listen to me?”

She wiped tears from her cheeks.

“You think she did this?” the Old Man asked, walking close to look at the boy. He was not one of the Found Children. He was an outsider, from a nearby neighborhood. She had seen him before, a little younger than her, but at the time imperious, walking like he owned the world and smiling at the Found Children, but not talking to them. Now he was dead, the life gone from his body.

She looked up and met the Old Man’s eyes, looking into them for what she thought must truly be the first time. She found herself falling into them, as though under a spell, seeing in him time and space, the stars of eternity, the soul of hundreds, maybe thousands. How many were dead now, like this boy?

“He was one of us, you know,” the Street whispered, in the body of this Old Man. “He is one of us. But a piece of us was in there when this happened. And now it’s gone.”

Melissa turned and ran from him then, running back to The Castle, running to the hidden room she had once used, high in The Castle, and shut herself in. She held her knees to her chest and rocked back and forth, crying softly lest anyone hear her. She had not needed this room, this tiny closet of freedom since she arrived here, holding the Blue Lady’s hand. Scared of the new children. Scared of the Old Man.

The close walls, the musty smell, the semi-darkness enclosed her, comforted her. Here she was trapped, and yet free, free from everything out there that wanted to consume her, from La Llorona and the Street, the Old Man and the other children. The dead child.

Death. The Street didn’t seem to fear it, at least not the way she did. The violent, brutal murder of that child, the child who had no doubt been the source of the cries the night before.

Melissa cried herself to sleep.

The blue glow woke her, late in the night. It appeared first around the edges of the secret door that led into her private space, and then the door opened. Melissa tried to block the glare with her hand, but then it subsided on its own, revealing a beautiful woman, dressed in blue, radiating blue light from her skin. She had a soft and sympathetic smile, and reached a hand out toward Melissa.

Melissa smiled widely, her own hand meeting the Blue Lady’s, feeling her fingers touch that warmth. She held on, and the Lady guided her out of her hiding place. Melissa climbed down and stood before her looking up.

“It’s you,” she whispered.

“Hello, Melissa.”

“Why did you come?” Melissa asked. “I didn’t call you.”

“You did,” she said, “when you saw Rafael in the alley, don’t you remember?”

She nodded, but couldn’t actually remember. Her mind had been a whirl then.

“I must have,” Melissa whispered.

“Do you really think it was La Llorona?”

Melissa nodded, though she had actually become less sure since leaving the boy’s body. His death didn’t mesh with anything she knew about La Llorona, and doubt had begun to creep into her mind that she wasn’t real at all. The Blue Lady’s presence threw those thoughts into disarray once more.

“Do you know where we can find her? You said you saw her under the Street, right?”

“Yes,” Melissa said, then shook her head. “No. No. But, I do know . . . I did come near the lair of a demon once, a few days ago.”

“You knew it was a demon?”

“Who else could live like that?” she asked, shuddering. Deep in the sewers, the burning reek of its lair infesting the Elemental Caverns and fouling the sweet smell of smoke.

“Can you show me?”

“I . . .”

“It will be safe,” the Blue Lady said, “you called on me to protect you, and I will. But I need to see this place. I need you to lead me there.”

“Okay,” Melissa said, and took the Blue Lady’s hand again.

Together they walked out of The Castle into the cool night. The other children were all asleep, or hiding themselves, and she knew it was better if they did not see her with the Blue Lady. They would be scared, even if they believed Melissa’s stories, they would know this meant danger lurked nearby. And she did not want them to be afraid, any more, ever. She wanted them to be free of that, too. Fear was horrible, awful, and if the Street no longer feared death, maybe that was for the better.

Melissa led the Blue Lady to the entrance she used for the Elemental Caverns, a grate that had been stacked with boxes to keep it from being pushed up from underneath. Together, they pushed the boxes to the side and slowly crawled down the ladder inside to the concrete path inside. Melissa went first, swallowing her fear, and looked around carefully after beckoning the Blue Lady down.

Melissa began creeping toward the place she had last seen the glow of the demon’s fire, but the Blue Lady walked without fear, her stride long, her feet loud on the concrete. Melissa tried to hurry quietly, but gave it up, drawing strength from the Blue Lady’s fearlessness.

Before they reached it, she could smell the sickly smoke, see the glow reflecting on the walls. Within another minute, she was at the place she had found the trash compactor, the dried muck there still churned from where it had been turning its erratic circles.

Another few steps and she saw the shadows moving on the far wall, occluding the glow of the fire. Melissa froze in place as the demon stepped around the corner, ragged looking, long, straggly hair hanging from his head.

His head?

Melissa’s thoughts swirled with confusion. The face she saw was certainly a man’s. This was not La Llorona. Or was it? Was La Llorona tricking them?

She didn’t have time to think further, as the demon breathed words in the demon language, and Melissa felt her knees shake with fear. He carried something in his right hand, long like a gun, but strangely shiny.

Melissa wanted to back away but could not, her body would not respond to her. But then the Blue Lady, who she’d almost forgot about, stepped around her. The demon started to raise the thing in his right hand, screaming something in his language at the Blue Lady. Her hands moved in a flicker and filaments shot from her fingers, glittering in the firelight. They whipped across the intervening distance and in a blink the demon was pinned against the wall.

His gun fired, the sound unmistakable in the confined space, but the filaments had pinned it to the wall as well, and it discharged harmlessly at the floor. The Blue Lady strode forward, her calm undisturbed. She had been right, Melissa was safe with her.

“It’s okay, you can come closer,” the Blue Lady said, beckoning Melissa to her side. She followed, coming closer to the demon, and seeing that he was not, in fact, a demon, but just an angry bad smelling man with long hair. He spat words at the Blue Lady and jerked the trigger again on his gun, but it would not fire now.

A thousand little shards of glass were embedded in the concrete around his feet. Melissa crouched down to look closer at them.

“That is what killed the boy,” the Blue Lady said, reassuring her. “Not La Llorona, or anything else. Just this awful man’s awful weapon.”

“Who is he?” she asked.

“A man, just a man from across the ocean.”

“From where?” she asked.

“Does it matter?” the Blue Lady asked, and Melissa had no answer.

“You were right, when you thought of him as La Llorona,” she said. “Not everyone transcended, or chose to. He’s an individual. He is the last remnant of a meme that has worked its way through all of human history, that believes a race or a nation are exceptional and destined to great things in history. He’s a nationalist. Transcendence ignores such boundaries, but he wants them back and is willing to hurt people in the name of this desire.”

Melissa nodded, understanding and yet not understanding at all. Her mind was unraveling, and then remaking connections.

“You are the Street, aren’t you?” Melissa asked. “Another aspect of it.”

“I am,” she said, turning now to look down at Melissa. “Abandoned children talk about the legend of the Blue Lady. We felt you would trust us, let us take care of you, if I found you.”

But Melissa didn’t answer, didn’t say anything else, just walked away.

Melissa stopped telling her stories.

There seemed little point any more. La Llorona was not real. There were no demons, only sad and pathetic men living in a sewer, killing children because of an idea.

The children were safe, as safe as could be on the Street. No matter what Melissa warned them about.

The Street now understood how the man had snuck in. It knew about the “glass flechettes” and could prepare for them. The orphans were not in danger, and there wasn’t much her stories could do. The world was strange. Stranger than the one she’d been born into. The children seemed to adapt to that easier than her.

“Why aren’t you telling your stories any more?” the Street asked her. The Old Man was back, dressed in flowery shorts and a white t-shirt with sunglasses and a straw hat. The hat mostly covered the metallic growths on his head.

“I can’t believe them any more, not after what I saw, what I know. I question everything.”

“That’s understandable,” the Old Man said, his eyes sad. “We’ll miss your stories, though.”

“I’ll miss them too,” she replied.

“Do you want to join us?”

“Become like you, or the Blue Lady, or the boy in the alley?” she asked, looking up at him.

“Yes,” he said.

“No,” she said. “I . . . want to be more like them, the tribe that passed through. But I want to remain myself. It seems like dying, becoming part of the Street.”

“It’s not,” the Old Man said. “I can even introduce you to the boy whose body you saw. He is alive and happy within us.”

“But he isn’t himself, alone. He can’t ever be free and alone, like I was when the Blue Lady came to me. I can’t be me.”

“Are you still yourself when you work with the other kids to clean the street, moving as one unit to accomplish a task?”

“Yes, of course. But I haven’t changed, I am still myself,” she said.

“But who are you, yourself?” he asked. “Are you the same person here, right now, that you were before you learned the truth about La Llorona, or the Blue Lady? You have changed, even in that. Transcending would hardly be different. You are nothing more than colonies of bacteria and cells, all working together to a greater whole. We are not that much different.”

She had nothing to say to that, for now, only looked off toward the east. The tribe had left days ago, and must be to the spaceport by now. She thought about trying to catch them, but it seemed like a long way to go on her own, even in a world mostly safer than the one she had grown up in.

“The children would be safe?” she asked.

“We are very invested in them,” the Old Man replied.

“Why?”

“Like we said to you before, we need new input, to stagnate for us would be like death.”

“So you’re afraid of it?”

“As much as we are of anything,” he replied.

“You want the children to join with you?”

“If they choose to,” he said. “Otherwise, we’ll enjoy their play and their art and their curiosity. Maybe they will go out into the world and return to us with their experiences. Maybe they will join us and add their individual creativity and spark to our collective.”

She looked off to the east again and sighed.

“You are a strange guardian, Street. But better than none, I guess. Thank you for the offer, but I think I would like to leave. Is there another tribe passing through soon?”

“In a week, your time,” he said, “or you can catch up with the last one. It’s not that far.”

“You would let me go?”

“Of course. We told you, you are not our prisoner.”

“Then I’ll go,” she said. “I’ll need to pack some food.”

“No need. I’ll make arrangements. Just ask and we will make sure you have what you need delivered. I will order the sentry to make a bike for you.”

Melissa swallowed. This was it. This was really happening. They walked silently along the Street. At the end, once more, Melissa stepped over the boundary to the other side.

The sentry thundered from its niche between two houses, blocking out the sun as it approached. From inside something gurgled and belched, a puff of smoke leaked out, and then a bike slid out from a compartment in a gush of green liquid that turned into smoke and wafted away.

Melissa took the handles.

“The offer will stand, to join us, if you come back,” the Street said.

“Of course,” she said.

“Good bye, Melissa,” said the sentry as it settled back toward its niche.

“Good bye, Street,” she said, and turned back toward the world without a Blue Lady, or La Llorona, or Santa Claus.

But maybe, she thought, full of other wonders.

About the Authors

David Klecha is a writer and Marine combat veteran currently living in West Michigan with his family and assorted computer junk. He works in IT to pay the bills, like so many other beginning writers and artists.

Tobias S. Buckell is a Caribbean-born writer and NYT Bestseller who grew up in Grenada, the British Virgin Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. His latest novel is Arctic Rising.

Robot

Helena Bell

You may wash your aluminum chassis on Monday and leave it on the back porch opposite the recyclables; you may wash your titanium chassis on Friday if you promise to polish it in time for church; don’t terrorize the cat; don’t lose the pamphlets my husband has brought home from the hospital; they suggest I give you a name, do you like Fred?; don’t eat the dead flesh of my right foot until after I have fallen asleep and cannot hear the whir of your incisors working against the bone.

This is a picture of the world from which you were sent; this is a copy of the agreement between our government and theirs; these are the attributes they claim you are possessed of: obedience, loyalty, low to moderate intelligence; a natural curiosity which I should not mistake for something other than a necessary facet of your survival in the unfamiliar; this is your bill of manufacture; this is your bill of sale; this is a warrant of merchantability on which I may rely should I decide to return you from whence you came; this is your serial number, here, scraped in an alien script on the underside of your knee; the pamphlets say you may be of the mind to touch it occasionally, like a name-tag, but if I command you, you will stop.

This is a list of the chores you will be expected to complete around the house when you are not eating the diseases out of my flesh; this is the corner of my room where you may stay when you are not working; do not look at me when you change the linens, when you must hold me in the bathroom, when you record in the notebook how many medications I have had that day, how many bowel movements, how the flesh of my mouth is raw and bleeding against the dentures I insist on wearing.

The pamphlets say you are the perfect scavenger: completely self contained, no digestion, no waste; they say I can hook you up to an outlet and you will power the whole house.

You may polish the silver if you are bored; you may also rearrange the furniture, wind the clocks, pull weeds from the garden; you may read in the library any book of your choosing; my husband claims you have no real consciousness, only an advanced and sophisticated set of pre-programmed responses, but I have seen your eyes open in the middle of the night; I have seen you stare out across the fields as if there is something there, calling you.

Cook my meals in butter, I will not eat them otherwise; do not speak to the neighbors; do not speak to my children, they are not yours; do not let anyone see you when I open the door for the mail; no, there is nothing for you, who even knows that you are here?

Help me to walk across this room; help me to wipe bacon grease from the skillet—do not think I do not see you trying to wash it with soap when I am done.

Help me to knit my granddaughter a sweater, she is my favorite and it is cold where she will be going; if you hold my hands so they are steady I will allow you to terrorize my Bridge club; I will teach you the rules: cover an honor with an honor; through strength and up to weakness.

Help me to pronounce atherosclerosis when I am speaking with the physician; remember the questions I must ask him; recite my list of medications when asked; if you would like, we may go early so that you may sit with me in the waiting room with all the others like you and me.

Do you see that one?; that is the way you will carry me when my other foot has gone down the black froth of your mouth.

Lie to me about my children; tell me they have called and called again; I think perhaps you are keeping them from me; I think you hope I will forget them and change my will so you may have everything when you have devoured my body completely.

These are my personal things which you may not touch; these are the magazines you may read; these are the newspapers you may not read; the pamphlets say you have no interest in the affairs of the world and thus it is not necessary for you to have them; I wish you would not look at me when you swallow my tendons, my calves, my patella; I wish you could feel so you would know isolation.

The pamphlets say I should compliment your body as it changes: your skin has taken on a waxy texture inconsistent with the evil robot I know you are; your amber eyes glow like bonfires intent on destroying the savannah; your breath smells like swamp gas.

Do not correct me in front of my friends; I have to finesse for the queen; I know how many trumps are out; I know how to play this game; I am the reason you are here, why are you so ungrateful?

Evolution is a quirk of humans and other sentient species; you are not real, not alive, your changes may be slow and insistent but they are the result of the consumption of my flesh.

The pamphlets claim you are neither human nor alien and incapable of willful intent; you are not devious; you do not conspire to replace me, to wear my dresses, court my husband and disown my children; you are unthinking, unplanning, harmless; you are here for my comfort, I should thank your world for sending you.

You have no family; you are a construct, a robot; you were not born; you will not die; you have only the home I give you and learn only the things I teach you.

These are the toys and letters I sent my children when I was abroad, these are the folds and refolds my husband made so I would think they had been read.

This is a closet for all your things; this is its lock; this is a key; do not lose it, it is the only one.

This is the way to stumble like a human; this is the way to delete your messages from the people with whom you no longer wish to speak; this is the way to reclaim your childhood by clinging to anger and hurt; this is the way to insult your neighbors while making it sound like you are paying them a compliment; this is the way to eat ice cream in the middle of the night because you are old and no one is looking; this is the way to ignore your husband when he calls out to you from the porch and you are in your own world, sitting high in a swing and your legs are not chewed off at the knees—you are back in your space ship, you are finding a new planet, a new species, forging new treaties and living the life you always knew you would live without consequence or regret—there are no mistakes, no cardiovascular impairments—you are not host to an alien robot hell-bent on devouring you.

I think you are beginning to look a little like me; usurper; slut; flesh-eating mongrel; ingrate; monster; orphan; spy; speaking to you now I feel a stranger’s hand inside my jaw moving it for me.

My granddaughter has sent me a note expressing the appropriate level of gratitude for the sweater—it is warm and tight knit and shines like burnished steel—it is cold for our kind where she is going and now she will be comfortable; she wonders if she will be a famous explorer; she wonders if the sun flashes blue before disappearing beyond the horizon of deep space; I have left the note on the dresser in your room.

You will have to write my correspondence for me; you will have to go to the market and buy avocados which do not give in; you will learn to make a roux; you will touch my husband’s shoulder when he is about to fall asleep in church; you will watch the news and tell me when the next ships leave; the pamphlets say you are happy for this opportunity to be helpful; your only desire is to assimilate into our culture; you do not miss your home.

They say you will stop eating when only good flesh and good circulation remain; you are designed as a recycler; the flesh you have taken from me is converted into energy which fuels I know not what; you are a marvel; in a thousand years our scientists could not understand the science your makers have wrought.

I dream you will not stop; I will shrink to the size of a basketball and you will carry my head under your arms; you will tell people your name and it will be my name; you will tell people your husband is my husband, my children your children, my home is yours as well; you will place me on the sill and one day, when the window is open I will fall down and roll into the garden, into the fields and I will watch you from the horizon, the blue of my eyes glowing in the night when you pretend to look for me.

Do not believe the lies my children say about me; do not think I have not worked hard my entire life; do not think I do not notice your pity when you scrub blood from my sheets, when you allow me to lean against your legs when I am on the toilet; there are a thousand ways for a body to die, to live, to be born, to evolve; a thousand things I know I do not know.

Am I only meat to you? A mother, a friend, a tyrant?; do you sleep, do you dream, do you derive satisfaction by making more and more of me disappear every day?

There is a story my husband told me before I went abroad and I was afraid we would not find anything, we would fail in our mission: we can only see what we expect to see; when Pizarro sailed across the Atlantic, his ships appeared as great white birds on the horizon and not until he strode onto the beach, his armor shining like a burnished oyster shell, did the Incas realize he was a person at all.

About the Author

Helena Bell is an occasional poet, writer, and international traveler which means that over half of what she says is completely made up, the other half is probably made up, and the third half is about the condition of the roads. She has a BA, an MFA, a JD, and a Tax LLM which fulfills her life long dream of having more letters follow her name than are actually in it. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Shimmer Magazine, Brain Harvest, and Rattle.

muo-ka’s Child

Indrapramit Das

Ziara watched her parent, muo-ka, curl up and die, like an insect might on Earth.

muo-ka was a giant of a thing, no insect. Ziara was the one who’d always felt like an insect around it. Its curled body pushed against the death shroud it had excreted in its dying hours, the membrane stretched taut against rigid limbs. She touched the shroud. It felt smooth but sticky. Her fingertips stuck lightly to it, leaving prints. It felt different from her clothes. muo-ka had excreted the ones she wore a month ago. They smelled softer than the death shroud, flowers from Earth on a distant, cosmic breeze. She raised her fingers to her face, touching them with her tongue. So salty and pungent it burned. She gagged instantly, coughing to stop herself retching.

“muo-ka,” she said, throat thick. “You are my life.” Ziara thought about this. “You are my life, here.” She meant these words, but felt a hollow, aching relief that muo-ka’s presence was gone.

She closed her eyes to remember the blue rind of Earth, furred with clouds, receding behind the glass as she drifted into amniotic sleep. Orphan. Volunteer. Voyager. A mere twenty years on that planet. When she had opened her eyes after the primordial dream of that year of folding space, the first thing she saw and felt was muo-ka pulling her from the coma, breaking open the steaming pod with predatory lurches. Its threaded knot of limbs rippling like a shredded banner in the sweltering light, stuck on the leviathan swell of its dark shape. She had opened her mouth, spraying vomit into the air, lazy spurts that moved differently than on Earth. muo-ka had pulled her out of the pod and towards it, its limbs sometimes whiplashes, sometimes articulated arms, flickering between stiffness and liquid softness so quickly it hurt her eyes to see that tangled embrace. Stray barbed limbs tugged and snapped at the rubbery coil of her umbilicus, ripping it off so pale shreds clung to the valve above her navel.

muo-ka had grasped at Ziara’s strange, small, alien body, making her float in the singing air as she tried and tried to scream.

Ziara watched the shroud settle over muo-ka. Already the corpse had shrunk considerably as air and water left it. Its body whistled softly. A quiet song for coming evening. With a bone knife, she cut small slits into the shroud to let the gas escape more freely, even though the membrane was porous. The little rents fluttered. A breeze ruffled the flat waters of the eya-rith basin into undulations that lapped across muo-ka’s islet, washing Ziara’s bare feet and wetting the weedy edges of the stone deathbed. The water sloshed in the ruined shell of the pod at the edge of the islet, its sleek surfaces cracked and scabbed with mossy growth. Inside was a small surveying and recording kit. She had discovered the kit, sprung free of its wall compartment, shattered and drowned from the rough landing. Even if it had worked, it seemed a useless thing to her now.

When the pod had once threatened to float away, Ziara had clung to it, trying to pull it back with her tiny human arms, heaving with frantic effort. muo-ka had lunged, sealed the wreck to the islet with secretions. Now it stood in a grassy thatch of fungal filaments, a relic from another planet.

muo-ka had no spoken words. Yet, its islet felt quieter than it had ever been. Ziara had learned its name, and some of its words, by becoming its mouth, speaking aloud the language that hummed in a part of its body that she had to touch. It had been shockingly easy to do this. What secret part of her had muo-ka unlocked, or taught to wake? muo-ka’s skin had always felt febrile when she touched it, and when it spoke through her she felt hot as well.

The first thing it had said through her mouth was “muo-ka,” and she had known that was its name. “Ziara,” she had said, still touching it. “Jih-ara,” it had said in her mouth, exuding a humid heat, a taste of blood and berries in her head. Ziara had disengaged her palm with a smack, making it shiver violently. Clammy with panic, she had walked away. It had felt too strange, too much like becoming a part of muo-ka, becoming an organ of its own.

Ziara rarely spoke to muo-ka in the time that followed. When she got an urge to communicate, she’d often stifle it. And she did get the urge, again and again. In those moments she’d hide in the broken pod on the islet’s shore. She’d curl into its clammy, broken womb and think of the grassy earth of the hostel playground, of playing catch with her friends until the trees darkened, of being reprimanded by the wardens, and smoking cigarettes by the barred moonlight of the cavernous bathrooms, stifling coughs into silent giggles when patrols came by. Daydreams of their passing footsteps would become apocalyptic with the siren wail of muo-ka’s cries. It never could smell or detect her in the strange machinery of the wrecked pod. She assumed the screams were ones of alarm.

“You’ve fed me,” Ziara said to the corpse. “And clothed me. And taught me to leap across the sky.” Those stiffened limbs that its shroud now clung to had snatched her from the air if she leaped too high, almost twisting her shoulders out of their sockets once. She’d landed on the mud of the islet safe, alive. In the shadow of muo-ka she’d whispered “Fuck you. Just, fuck you. Fuck you, muo-ka.”

She had tasted the sourness of boiled fruit at the back of her throat. muo-ka covered the sky above her, and offered one of its orifices. Gushing with the steam of regurgitate cooked inside it. She’d reached inside and took the scorching gumbo in her hands. The protein from dredged sea and air animals tasted like spongy fish. It was spiced with what might have been fear.

Ziara didn’t have an exact idea of how long it had been since muo-ka had pulled her into the air of this world from the pod. She had marked weeks, months and years on a rock slick with colonies of luminescent bacteria. Left a calendar of glowing fingerprints that she had smeared clean and then restarted at the end of every twelve months, marking the passing years with long lines at the top. She had three lines now. They glowed strongest at dusk. If they were right, they told her she was twenty-four years old now. muo-ka had been her parent for three years.

Not that the number mattered. Days and years were shorter here. muo-ka had always lingered by that rocky calendar of fingerprints, hovering over it in quiet observation when it thought she wasn’t looking, when she was off swimming in the shallows. Watching from afar in the water, she could always taste an ethanol bitterness at the back of her throat and sinuses. A taste she came to associate with sadness, or whatever muo-ka would call sadness.

muo-ka had never washed the calendar clean. It had never touched it. It had only ever looked at that glimmering imprint of time mapped according to a distant world invisible in the night sky. The dancing fingertips of its incredible child.

The evening began to cast shadows across the shallow seas. Across the horizon, uong-i was setting into mountains taller than Everest and Olympus Mons. uong-i at this time was the blue of a gas flame on a stove, though hot and bright. Sometimes the atmosphere would tint it green at dawn and dusk, and during the day it was the white of daylit snow. But now it was blue.

Ziara touched muo-ka’s shroud again. It was drier, slightly more tough as it wrapped around the contours of the moaning, rattling body. She lit the flares by scratching them on the mossed rocks. The two stalks arced hot across the water, sparks dancing across her skin. She plunged them into the soil by the deathbed.

Her eyes ached with the new light. Again, she remembered her first moment with muo-ka, remembered her panic at the thing ensnaring her in blinding daylight. The savagery with which it severed her umbilicus, the painful spasming of its limbs around her. She remembered these things, and knew muo-ka had been in as much panic as she had. She had long since realized this, even if she hadn’t let it sink in.

From her first moment here, muo-ka remained a giant, terrifying thing. The days of recovery in the chrysalid blanket it wove around her. She’d been trapped while it smothered her with boiling food from its belly, trying and failing to be gentle. Fevers raging from nanite vaccines recalibrating her system, to digest what her parent was feeding her and breathe the different air, the new soup of microbes. “Stop,” she would tell muo-ka. “Please stop. I can’t eat your food. I’m dying.” But it would only clutch her cocooned body and tilt her so she could vomit, the ends of its limbs sharp against her back. It would continue feeding her, keep letting her shit and piss and vomit in that cocoon, which only digested it all, preventing any infections.

Sure enough, the fevers faded away and one day the cocoon came off in gummy strips. Ziara could move again, could move like she had on Earth. At first it was an aching crawl, leaving troughs in the rich mud of the islet. But she’d balled that mud in her fists and growled, standing on shaking legs. She watched her human shadow unfurl long across the silty islet, right under the eclipsing shape of muo-ka above her, its limbs whipping around her, supporting her until she shrugged them off.

Ziara had laughed and laughed, to be able to stand again, until phlegm had gathered in her throat and she had to spit in joy. So she walked, walked over this human stain she had left on the ground, walked over the wet warmth of muo-ka’s land. She walked until she could run. She was so euphoric that she could only dance and leap across the basin, flexing her muscles, testing her augmented metal bones in this low gravity. Sick with adrenalin, she soared through the air, watching the horizon expand and expand, bounding from rock to rock, whipping past exoskeletal flying creatures that flashed in the sun. muo-ka watched, its leviathan darkness suddenly iridescent. Then Ziara stood in one place panting, and she screamed, emptied her lungs of that year of deep sleep through a pierced universe. She screamed goodbye to the planet of her first birth. As this unknown sound swept across the basin, muo-ka’s limbs glittered with barbs that it flung into itself.

Ziara nodded at this memory. “muo-ka. Leaping? You taught me to walk,” she said with a smile.

She had avoided muo-ka’s oppressive presence by hiding in the pod. She would shit and piss, too, under the shade of the tilted wreck, in its rain of re-leaked tidal water. When she didn’t want the smallness of the pod, she slipped into the basin’s seas, walked across the landbridges and glittering sandbars to swirling landscapes of rock and mud fronded with life-colonies that clung like oversized froth. But always her parent would be looming on the horizon, its hovering shape bobbing over the water, limbs alternating in a flicker over the surface as it dredged for food. Sometimes it would soar over her in the evening, its blinking night eyes flickering lights, stars or aircraft from the striated skies of Earthly dusks. With those guiding lights it would lead her back to the islet. Her throat would throb in anger and frustration, at the miles of watery, rocky, mountainous horizon she couldn’t escape, but she’d know that straying far would likely mean she’d be killed by something on land or sea that was deadlier than her.

It took her a while to have her first period on the planet, because of the nanite vaccine calibrations and the shock of acclimatisation. All things considered, it hadn’t been her worst. But she had recognized the leaden pain of cramps immediately, swallowed the salty spit of nausea and gone to the pod again. She’d squatted under it and bled into the unearthly sea.

Looking at that, she’d wondered what she was doing. Whether she was seeding something, whether she was changing the ecosystem. She’d felt like an irresponsible teenager. But looking at those crimson blossoms in the waves, she’d also felt a sudden, overwhelming longing. She’d become breathless at the thought that there was nobody else in the world. Not a single human beyond that horizon of seas and mountains and mudflats. Only the unbelievably remote promise that the mission would continue if the unmanned ship that had ejected her pod managed to return to Earth, with the news that the visitation had been successful. Another human might be sent, years later, maybe two if they could manage, hurtling down somewhere on the world with no means of communicating with her. Or a robot probe sent to scour the planet until it found and recorded her impact, just like the first probes that had seeded messages and artifacts to indicate Ziara’s arrival.

But at that moment, she was as alone as any human could be. It was conceivable that she might never see a human again. Her eyelids had swollen with tears, and she’d watched her blood fall into the sea. She hadn’t been able to see muo-ka from under the pod then. But she’d heard it secreting something, with loud rattling coughs. She’d sat and waited until her legs ached, until the rising tide lapped at her thighs.

Later she’d found fresh, coarse membranes strewn across the ground next to her rock calendar. They were waterproof.

New clothes.

Ziara had wrapped the membranes around herself like a saree, not knowing how else to wear them. She became light-headed when she caught the scent of flowers in them. It was a shocking sensation, a smell she’d never encountered on this world before.

muo-ka had been absent that whole day. When it returned, lights flickering in sunset, she held out her hand. It lurched gracelessly through the air as if caught in turbulence, before hovering down to her, curtaining her in softened limbs. Her palm fell against the familiar spot behind the limbs. She flinched at the heat.

“Thank you,” Ziara said.

It said nothing through her, only unfurling, drowning the back of her throat in bloody sweetness.

muo-ka had been dying for months. It had told Ziara, in its sparse way, a cloying thick taste of both sweet berried blood and bitterness in her head.

“Sick?” she had asked.

“Sh-ikh,” it had said in her mouth. “Ii-sey-na,” it said, and when the word formed in her throat she knew it meant “death.”

“Sorry,” she had whispered.

“Euh-i,” it had said. No. Not sorry.

Ziara had let it talk for longer than ever before. For hours, her hand flushed red from its heat. It had told her several words, sentences, that made up an idea of what to do with its dead body. Then it went on, forming concepts, ideas, lengthier than ever before. muo-ka told her many things.

Ziara thought about her relief, now, looking at dead muo-ka. It disturbed her, but it was the truth. There was a clarity to her world now. To this world. She would move along the mudflats and sandbridges and mountains. She would make blades of her parent’s bones, as it had told her, and explore the world. She would finally go beyond that horizon, which now flared and dimmed with the setting of uong-i.

She was an alien, and the world would kill her, sooner rather than later. Even if by some miracle the second human arrived in the coming months, he’d be too weak to help. If one of the leviathans adopted him—and it would be a man that fell this time—it might even violently keep Ziara away from him as its own child, and she had no chance of fighting that. She knew nothing about the dynamics of this adoption. She was the first, after all. They had come into this without much knowledge, except their curiosity and gentle handling of the initial probes.

Until and unless Earth sent an actual colonization team that could touch down a vessel with equipment and tools on the surface, humans wouldn’t be able to survive here without the help of muo-ka’s kind. As muo-ka’s child, she wondered if she might be able to befriend one of them, or whether she’d be killed in an instant.

Ziara shook her head. It was no point overthinking. She would walk this world, and see what came. She had chosen this, after all. She hadn’t chosen her parent, but there it was, in front of her, dead as she was alive. And she was alive because of it.

The blue dome of the gas giant appeared over the horizon, filling the seas with reflections. In the sparking light of the flares, Ziara waited. The shroud had fossilized into a flexible papyrus, with an organic pattern that looked like writing, symbols. The shrunken behemoth finally vented its innards as the stars and far moons appeared in the night sky, behind streaks of radiant aurora. Ziara clenched her jaw and began to scoop the entrails up to give to the sea, as was dignified. For a moment, she wondered what the deaths of these solitary creatures were normally like. She had seen others on the horizons, but always so far they seemed mirages. They lived their lives alone on this world, severed from each other. It had to be the child that conducted the death rites, once it was ready to move on. Perhaps they induced death in themselves once their child was mature enough.

She stopped, recoiling from the mess.

In the reeking slop of its guts, she saw muo-ka replicated. A small muo-ka. But not muo-ka. A nameless one, budded in its leviathan body. It was dead. The child’s limbs were tangled in the oily foam of its parent’s death. The body was crushed. Her hands slid over its cold, broken form.

muo-ka had budded a child. A child that would have done muo-ka’s death rites once it had matured, ready to go on its own.

“Oh,” she said, fingers squelching in the translucent mud seeping out of muo-ka’s child. “Oh, no. My muo-ka. My dear muo-ka,” she whispered, to both corpses.

muo-ka had budded a child, and finding a mature child already ready to venture out into the world, it had crushed the one growing inside it. Only ziara was muo-ka’s child.

“You brought me to life,” ziara said, leaning in her parent’s guts, holding her dead sibling, wrapped in clothes her parent had made. Her face crumpled as she buried it in the remains of muo-ka’s life, her body shaking.

ziara left her sibling in the sea with muo-ka’s guts. Using the bone-knife, she cut away the death shroud carefully and wore it around her shoulders. One day, ziara swore to herself, she would translate the symbols it had excreted on it. Her parent’s death letter. She sliced off a part of the deflated hide, scrubbed it in the sea, and wore it as a cowl to keep her head warm during nights. The flares had smoked out. She looked at muo-ka curled dead. It had told her the creatures of the air would come and consume it, slowly, as it should be. She felt bad leaving it there on that stony deathbed, but that was what it had told her to do. She wiped her eyes and face. A bone knife and a whole world she didn’t belong in, except right here on this islet.

A fiery line streaked across the sky. A human vessel. Or a shooting star. ziara gazed at its afterimage for a moment, and walked off the islet and across the shallows and mudflats of the basin. She had named that basin once, or muo-ka had, with her mouth.

eya-rith. Earth, so she would not be homesick.

About the Author

Indrapramit Das is a writer and artist from Kolkata, India. His short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Apex Magazine, Redstone Science Fiction, The World SF Blog, Flash Fiction Online, and is forthcoming in the anthology Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana (Zubaan Books). He is a grateful graduate of the 2012 Clarion West Writers Workshop. He completed his MFA at the University of British Columbia, and is currently in Vancouver working as a freelance writer, artist, editor, game tester, tutor, would-be novelist, and aspirant to adulthood. Follow him on Twitter (@IndrapramitDas).

Between a UFO and a Hard Place: The Real-Life Science Heroics of Dr. Omond Solandt

Jason S. Ridler

Type the name “Omond Solandt” in a search engine these days, and you will likely find these top four entries. First, a very thin Wikipedia article. Second, an entry for the scholarship named in Solandt’s honour. And third, you will find a detailed article I wrote about Dr. Solandt and his career. If these were your first attempts to find details about this man, you’d be introduced to an incredible intellect: a physiologist who visited Stalin’s Russia as a student; a polio survivor and soldier-scientists who pioneered a branch of applied science; and, a man who walked an atomic battleground and held court with the highest echelons of military science during the deadly and early cold war. He was a man of importance, distinction, and contribution who led an amazing life.  

When I began my doctoral research on Dr. Solandt in 2003, though, the number one entry on him online, currently number four, was from the The Presidents UFO Website: A Tale of Extraterrestrial Politics in the White House, created and run by UFO conspiracy proponent Grant Cameron. The site has an entire section on Canadian UFO material from the 1950s, including letters to and from Dr. Solandt by both Cameron and other UFO enthusiasts and skeptics (which appear to be authentic), as well as letters from engineer Wilber Smith. In the 1950s, Smith worked for Dr. Solandt’s Defence Research Board (DRB), the Canadian government’s defence research organization for the armed forces. Most of the letters concern investigations conducted by the Canadian government when UFO hysteria was running wild in the 1950s. Smith worked on one of these projects and became obsessed with trying to contact UFOs.

But the most upsetting part of the site is a transcribed interview one Dr. Armen Victorian allegedly had with Solandt by phone in 1991. Solandt was 82, ill, and two years away from his death. Solandt is patient and gracious, explaining that DRB tried to keep an open mind about such things, but Smith’s work led nowhere, the investigations turned up nothing, and the evidence of the UFOs was nonexistent and not something he had much interest in. Victorian’s questions were insistent and aggressive, and while pleasantries abounded they also often read as the badgering of an elderly man.

Ten years after his death in 1993, when I started his biography, Solandt’s name was forgotten to all but the most diehard historians of the Cold War in Canada and a few former defence official and scientists. Anyone interested in his life that went online would see Dr. Solandt was a minor cog in the conspiratorial wheel of aliens and UFOs, perhaps a nefarious one.

This state of affairs was obscene. Dr. Solandt’s life was far more interesting than the strained theories on a cruddy website made in the 1990s. He was a true science hero, one whose intellect, dedication to research and efficiency, and meticulous ability to problem-solve led him from Winnipeg, Manitoba, to the atomic battlegrounds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—and beyond.

Though never beyond terra firma.

Origin Story

Born in 1909, Solandt became one of the great minds of his generation in Canada: a penetrating intellect, a pragmatic, technical problem-solver, and an utter beast on the football field. He excelled through public and high school and arrived at the University of Toronto in 1927, ready to conquer any field he found. He became the star pupil of the physiology department’s star teacher Dr. Charles Best, co-discoverer of insulin with Nobel laureate Sir Frederick Banting.

Under Best’s patronage, Solandt cleaned house, earning gold-medal standing for academic achievement. Sadly, a vicious bout of bulbar polio almost killed him, but under the tireless support of his mother he recovered, finished his masters, and prepared for grad work at Cambridge. Best also arranged for Solandt and his older brother Don (also one of Best’s brightest) to attend the 14th Physiological Conference in Leningrad and Moscow in 1935. In Stalin’s Russia they drank cherry brandy, attended opulent buffets, and saw impressive Soviet facilities contrasted with shoeless women repairing railway tracks in winter as shadowy government agents stalked their movements.

At Cambridge in 1938, Solandt earned a reputation as an insanely rigorous researcher while working with Sir Alan Drury, founder of the Lister Institute. After acing the dreaded Royal Medical Exams on the first try (a rare feat), he finished his MA at Cambridge and prepared for a career in physiology. Confident, brilliant, and cagey, Solandt bucked authority if he found he had a better answer, and he often did. He championed talented researchers under his charge, and worked harder than anyone in any organization he ran to set the standard. He had no time for personages of pedigree and vanity, but liked people from any walk of life that were capable and engaged with the world around him, be it the mechanic on the shop floor or a member of the Royal Society. And he prided himself on controlling his emotions, keeping them under wraps so they would not sully his experiments, so while some found him cold, others appreciated his excellent research. This collection of abilities and attitude would find much use after Germany invaded Poland in September 1939.

From Tank Doctor to Atomic Expert

Solandt was soon tasked to run the South West London Blood Depot during the Battle of Britain. He earned high marks for its efficiency in supplying blood to hospitals during the worst of the Blitz, as well as rescue work and research for those suffering from crush injuries (being pinned under debris). The British military took notice, too, and soon Solandt was selected to create and run a physiological laboratory for the Armoured Fighting Vehicles School in Dorset. Tank crews were passing out during gun trials just as the armored war in North Africa intensified. Solandt and his team soon realized it was the amount of carbon monoxide being released into the sealed tank, primarily from the Besa machine gun, and began work on ventilation and tank design. Other man-machine problems arose with optics, night fighting, and chemical warfare gear. Solandt and his crew were now in high demand.

Solandt then jumped to the British Army Operational Research Group. AORG was an ad hoc science organization that did for all the British Army what Solandt was doing for the Armoured Corps: using science to solve a range of problems, from antiaircraft system design to lethality-of-weapons studies. Their approach was a new form of applied science known as operational research, in which pragmatic scientific methods from physics to zoology were used to solve problems, improve equipment and training, and even change strategies. Solandt soon became the deputy superintended of AORG under the command of Brigadier Basil Schonland, the famed South African physicist and lightning expert, and eventually ran AORG when Schonland left. At war’s end, he’d been tasked to become scientific advisor to Lord Louis Mountbatten’s South East Asia Command, but the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war before he arrived.  

Instead, in November of 1945 Solandt joined the British Mission to Japan to survey the damage of the atomic bombs. While their main objective was examining structural damage, Solandt’s medical training made him a boon to investigating the impact of the bombs on the Japanese people. So it was that when the Canadian government offered him the chance to lead its first peacetime defence research organization, the Defence Research Board (DRB), they got a genius, a pioneer in operational research, a seasoned leader and manager of military science organizations, and an early expert on the realities of atomic warfare. The kind of career that makes UFO hysteria look like third-rate science fiction.

The Cold Warrior

Solandt led the DRB from its birthing pains to its massive buildup after the Korean War, with over a thousand employees and dozens of establishments, labs, liaison groups and detachments.  As Chairman, Solandt was both a chief executive of a national science organization and a member of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, Canada’s senior military body, where he was given the equivalent rank of lieutenant-general so he would not be pushed around or ignored by the senior services. He stuck out like a sore thumb in his civilian attire, slicked hair, and glasses, and the fact that he was a 37-year-old genius who’d retired his war rank as colonel in the Canadian Army Medical Corps in 1945, but knew what atomic war actually looked like.

DRB did groundbreaking and valuable work in advanced radar communications, chemical and biological warfare defence, weapons design, and winter warfare research. He sent OR field teams to Korea and more. Solandt was perhaps the most knowledgeable member of the Canadian government on atomic affairs, attending British atomic tests in Australia, working with Canadian civilian nuclear researchers, and promoting atomic warfare courses for the Canadian military. In public, Solandt became a science celebrity in North America and Europe, conducting dozens of lectures on science, warfare, and the atomic bomb long before futurist Herman Kahn became famous for his controversial thermonuclear chats.

The Soviets took notice. They were not pleased.

In the Soviet press, Solandt was portrayed as a cold, inhuman tool of Western imperialism and an abuser of science. A May 1950 article in Pravda quoted Solandt as saying that robots were “cool-headed and able to concentrate under fire.” Such practical statements were taken by Pravda as evidence that the West was preparing to replace human soldiers with robots to face the Red Army. In April 1952, James G. Endicott, a former Canadian missionary from Toronto who was in China during the Korean War, made public speculations about Solandt and the DRB’s biological warfare work. In an interview broadcast by Moscow, Endicott said Canada was manufacturing germs at Suffield to feed the alleged biological-warfare measures the U.S. was employing in Korean War. He then maligned Solandt by falsely quoting him as saying that the prospects for mass death through BW were “extremely heartening.” No evidence of such claims were ever brought to light, but concern grew in government until Ron Kenyon of the Toronto Telegram interviewed Solandt. “This was no fire-spouting dragon as Dr. Endicott would have him,” Kenyon wrote. “He was just not the type to describe the horrors of bacteriological warfare as ‘heartening.’ In fact he had assured me that he had said no such thing.” Endicott’s statements were summed up by Solandt as a fishing expedition for propaganda purposes, and the matter dropped.

And then came the UFOs. At least in the press.

For three years Solandt had quietly ignored the rising tide of supposed flying-saucer sightings in Canada and the U.S., but by 1952, there was too much public interest. Solandt told the press that he was “as mystified as anyone else” regarding the sightings of odd lights in the sky and said he and senior scientists were “keeping open minds on the questions.” This included the creation of the aptly titled “Committee Set Up to Deal with ‘Flying Saucers’ Sightings” under the Chairmanship of astrophysicist Dr. P. W. Millman of the Dominion Observatory, and would be given the name Project Magnet (where engineer Wilbur Smith ran his failed tests). No evidence of UFOs was ever found. But for some, the fact that there were committees involved in investigating UFOS was proof enough.

End Game

When Solandt retired from the DRB in 1956, his list of accolades and awards was staggering, from a British OBE to an American Medal of Freedom and a Gold Medal from the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada (to name three of dozens), not to mention being made a Companion of the Order of Canada in the 1970s. Compared to the rest of his career, the sum total of his involvement in UFO hysteria amounted to peanuts. Sure, flying peanuts from Mars, but peanuts nonetheless. He’s also come a long way on the Internet; in addition to my own work, there’s finally a full Wikipedia entry and a Canadian Encyclopedia entry dedicated to him.

Despite being a straight-laced fellow, Solandt had discovered that much of the breakthroughs in life are not done by the regular joes who tow the party line. As he told a graduating class in 1954:

One of the very real dangers to our North American civilization is our worship of conformity. In almost every walk of life the person who conforms most pliably to the accepted standards of dress and behaviour is most likely to succeed. We must recognize that this enforcement of conformity will finally result in universal mediocrity. New ideas, especially in human relations and often even in science, come from those who refuse to conform.

I’ve always found great solace in Solandt’s battle cry for the eccentric. Thankfully, there has been a bump in Dr. Solandt’s reputation in the growing online environment of the 21st century— from a secondary character in the UFO hysteria of the 1950s to his proper place as one of the finest minds Canada produced in the 20th century, who made distinct contributions to the use of science in warfare against both the Nazis and the Soviet Union. He led a life dedicated to service and helping his country more than personal gain. It is a life worth remembering.

About the Author

Jason Ridler is the author of the Spar Battersea thrillers (Death Match and Con Job) and the short story collection Knockouts. He has also published over 50 stories in such magazines and anthologies as Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Brain Harvest, Not One of Us, Chilling Tales, Tesseracts Thirteen, and more. His nonfiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Dark Scribe, and the Internet Review of Science Fiction. A former punk rock musician and cemetery groundskeeper, Mr. Ridler holds a Ph.D. in War Studies from the Royal Military College of Canada. His doctoral thesis on Dr. Solandt will be published under the title Maestro of Science: Omond McKillop Solandt and Government Science in War and Hostile Peace by the University of Toronto Press.

The Satirist’s Progress: A Discussion with Nick Mamatas and Paul Tremblay

Jeremy L. C. Jones

As a distorted, exaggerated, skewed, and otherwise mutated vision of the reality that surrounds us, satire shares a lot with speculative fiction. It’s to isolate humor as the element that separates the two genres, but it’s not that easy. As far back as Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal (whose macabre premise could be the stuff of today’s weird fiction) and Voltaire’s Candide (which lampoons Leibniz’s proto-quantum concept of “the best of all possible worlds), satire has not only been grim; it’s been fabulist. And in the past 100 years, everyone from Thomas Pynchon and William S. Burroughs to Philip K. Dick and Terry Pratchett have mined the common ground between science fiction and satire.

Those shades of ambiguity between humor, critique, reality, and fantasy have been well served within the genre in recent years by Nick Mamatas and Paul Tremblay. Each in his own way, these unique authors have poked and stretched the skin of human existence through the deft use of wild speculation and biting commentary. Their stuff is also deeply funny—that is, if you don’t mind belly laughs with an aftertaste of bile. Clarkesworld spoke with these two literary iconoclasts about the ins and outs of satire, SF, and the fuzzy boundary between the two.

Nick Mamatas is a former fiction co-editor of Clarkesworld, and his works of satire include 2004’s cult classic Move Under Ground and 2011’s Sensation. His new novel, the non-satirical yet darkly reflective Bullettime, is published by ChiZine Publications.

Paul Tremblay is the author of the narcoleptic-detective novels The Little Sleep and No Sleep till Wonderland, among others. The dizzying, dystopian Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye is his latest book (and first satire), and it also is published by ChiZine.

In light of your new novel, do you consider yourself a satirist?

Nick Mamatas: No, not in light of my new novel. My 2007 novel Under My Roof was a political satire, and so was 2011’s Sensation, but Bullettime isn’t a satire. Some reviews have mentioned “hilarity” amid the horror and such. But satire needs an object. What is Bullettime satirizing?

Anyway, broadly I consider myself a satirist when engaging in satire. When I’m doing something else I consider myself something else. Isn’t there a joke whose punchline is “But fuck one goat…“? I try to keep away from totalizing identities like “satirist” or “goat-fucker.”

Paul Tremblay: Hey, I heard the goat joke in its pig iteration, not for nothing.

My previous narcoleptic detective novels weren’t really satires; certainly not political ones. But with Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye, I’m now officially a satirist (I’d like some sort of membership card, if possible), and hopefully a successful one. Humor and absurd situations have been elements of all my novels so far, but the donkey novel is the only one of the three that squarely and broadly takes aim at American politics and culture.

I guess to more directly answer your question, I consider myself a writer in general, but with this particular work, yeah, I’m a satirist.

What is at stake in your new novel?

Nick Mamatas: Nothing. It’s a novel. Novels are important, they aren’t crucial to the culture. It’s a good thing too, since these days anyone can get a novel published if he or she has an email address.

Paul Tremblay: It’s true. I have an email address.

What’s at stake? The fate of the my narrator’s mom and the state of localized Western Civilization! Or at least it is in my novel where there is a small scale revolution at the mega-conglom Farm, a bizarre election that could determine the fate of City, and the narrator (who is an indentured worker at Farm) finds out that his mother might be homeless back in City, which means she’s in danger of being shipped/deported below City to the Pier. He escapes Farm and instead of finding his mother, he finds his deadbeat dad, who is now a Catholic priest. My plan for the book was to start the dystopian novel off with wild, borderline goofy scenarios and have the novel’s tone gradually become more serious and emotional as the reader progressed. Genuine empathy/emotion (and not sentimentality, as John Gardner defined it, “emotion or feeling that rings false, usually because achieved by some form of cheating or exaggeration”) is always what is at stake for me as a writer.

How has the role of satire changed in speculative fiction over the years?

Nick Mamatas: It’s become much less important. Speculative fiction has become much less about transparent allegories or satires and such, and much more about itself. There are some “serious speculations” about the future and a lot of earnest adventuring, but not a lot of satire. Of course, there are plenty of SF novels full of kooky political and social ideas, but as it turns out the authors generally believe in their own nonsense about the importance of polygamy, asteroid palladium-mining-backed currencies, and mandatory spankings for willful females.

Paul Tremblay: While I have to admit that I’m much more well read in horror fiction and general lit (whatever that means) than what is marketed as contemporary SF, I agree with Nick. What the heck do I mean by “marketed as contemporary SF?” Well, some recent examples of successful (both in terms of being a good book and having actually sold decently) satires include most of George Saunders’ work (Civilwarland in Bad Decline, Pastoralia, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil), Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, and Mat Johnson’s Pym, and they all relied heavily upon speculative-fiction elements.

These are works of SF, but they weren’t marketed as contemporary SF. They were marketed as high literary satire. Perhaps I’m being too paranoid and way too anecdotal (I certainly haven’t done a detailed market analysis because, well, I’m lazy), but it seems to me that in the eyes of the larger publishing world, contemporary satire is the domain of high literature (right? even the canonized satirists Kurt Vonnegut, Franz Kafka, and Margaret Atwood, according to many, wrote literature not SF), and it trumps us lowly speculative-fiction toilers. Or something like that.

Are satire and speculative fiction inseparable?

Nick Mamatas: Yes. Even if it’s only a minor current within speculative fiction, satire will always have a place in it, because exaggeration is crucial to satire. You cannot satirize the here and now simply through reproduction of it via bourgeois realism. Even Jonathan Franzen, in The Corrections, had to throw in a science-fictional element. Freedom didn’t have one (though he did his tech homework on both mining and birding) and then everyone took the damn book seriously, as though we were supposed to like the characters or something.

Paul Tremblay: To play devil’s advocate… Maybe I’m too broad with what qualifies as satire but some of my favorite satires are devoid of speculative fiction elements: A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, plus two more recent novels; Treasure Island!!! by Sara Levine and Home Land by Sam Lipsyte. All three picaresque novels satirize class/society (with the latter two certainly taking jabs at suburbia) with their over-the-top narrators tweaking their betters, thumbing their noses at societal expectations, etc.

That said, I agree with Nick’s larger point, because I don’t want him to yell at me.

In what ways did writing a novel-length satire, or a novel with satirical elements, change your understanding of satire and of the novel form?

Nick Mamatas: Satires are better when they’re short. There’s always a concern that the issues satirized may become obsolete, but it’s minor issue. Many more people read Nathanael West’s A Cool Million today than the Horatio Alger books it mocks.

Paul Tremblay: I like shorter books in general, so I’m in agreement with that.

This could be said for all novels, but I do think the best novel-length satires spend as much time/focus on developing character(s) as they do their exaggerated plots/situations. To make a clumsy comparison to horror fiction: Generally, a horror story is only going to unsettle/scare/move me if the story is anchored by realistic, empathetic, interesting characters. I think the same can be said for satire. I can certainly enjoy clever scenarios and biting wit, but it’ll only really hit home with me if the story is grounded by the characters. The genius of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and so many of Vonnegut’s books are due in large part to Captain Yossarian, Billy Pilgrim, and Kilgore Trout.

In your recent novel, what elements did you try to balance, and what elements were necessarily out of balance?

Nick Mamatas: I’m sorry, I don’t even understand this question. It honestly sounds like it could be asked about anything but a novel—a cake recipe, an ice-dancing routine, the wheel alignment of a 1988 Volvo being outfitted for the Burning Man artcar parade. Anything but a novel!

Paul Tremblay: As I mentioned a bit earlier, I wanted to achieve a noticeable (but not clunky) shift in tone, from comedy to pathos, in the arc of the story. So early in the novel, I really tried to make some of the humor/silliness over the top. By the end of the novel, hopefully, the contrast between the Farm the readers are introduced to is nicely contrasted to the Farm they’re reintroduced to after everything in the novel had happened. I hope that makes sense.

What are you working on now, and what’s sharpening your wit’s edge?

Nick Mamatas: I’m trying to finish a crime novel, Love is the Law, by the end of next month. Right now, I’m expending a lot of energy writing answers to interview questions about Bullettime, though not from anyone who has read the book and wishes to discuss it.

Paul Tremblay: I’m slowly working on a satire of the publishing industry and society’s apocalyptic zeitgeist. I don’t want to give the title away because I might not be done for a while, and I don’t want anyone to steal it! The title is gold, I tell you, gold!

About the Author

Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and teacher. He is the Staff Interviewer for Clarkesworld Magazine and a frequent contributor to Kobold Quarterly and Booklifenow.com. He teaches at Wofford College and Montessori Academy in Spartanburg, SC. He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006. Jones lives in Upstate South Carolina with his wife, daughter, and flying poodle.

Another Word: Super Duper Sexual Spiritual Black Woman: The New and Improved Magical Negro

Chesya Burke

In 2001, Spike Lee popularized the term the Super Duper Magical Negro (SDMN) while speaking to students at Washington State and Yale University. The reference was about the stereotype of the magical Black person who is written into the story to help the white protagonist on his journey. The characters are often uneducated, male, and desexed. They do not have families of their own (The Stand’s Mother Abigail—the human race is her family) or desires of their own (The Legend of Bagger Vance’s titular character—his sole purpose is to help the white character). Nor do they exist outside of the white characters’ constructed idea of them (Noah Cullen—willingly dies to protect the white criminal character in The Defiant Ones). None of this is news. Everyone’s been bombarded with the image of the passive, Black person who only wants to serve.

A little-mentioned incarnation of this archetype, however, has gone relatively ignored or unrecognized. Henceforth called the Super Duper Sexual Spiritual Black Woman (SDSPBW), this epitome mixes the fictional SDMN character with real-life stereotype of the Strong Black Woman to create a character who is a seemingly powerful representation of strong, self-assured authority.

To understand this incarnation, it’s best to start by looking at the societal image of the Strong Black Woman (SBW). Supposedly a positive image, this stereotype is constructed as an example of true Black womanism. This stereotype is depicted within society as a Black woman who willingly suffers quietly without help, supporting others selflessly and without reward to herself. The SBW does not complain about her place in society and is held up as an example of how others should be. She is content, accepting, and although not necessarily happy, she is proud of the society she supports.

Unfortunately, within the speculative genre, the real-life image of the Strong Black Woman is often conflated with the Magical Negro to create the Super Duper Sexual Spiritual Black Woman, which endows these characters with powers that are not only used for the good of the broader white society, but that are also not powerful enough change her status in the world.

For the purposes of distinction, I differentiate the SDSPBW image from its predecessor, the Magical Negro, because of the use of three important factors: submissiveness, mysteriousness, and sexuality. Although the SDMN trope sometimes includes the first two, it is the third aspect that separates the SDSPBW from its antecedent. As a construct, both images work to affirm society’s ideology and current structure, but only the SDSPBW image uses the sexuality of Black women as a way to defend their current social status.

In other words, much like the Strong Black Woman real life stereotype the Super Duper Sexual Spiritual Black Woman image not only justifies the marginalization of Black women, it is an acceptable fantasy for white society, much like the Magical Negro stereotype. It attributes a false sense of power to Black women through their sexuality which does not translate to actual autonomy for them. Instead it allows white audiences to uphold racial segregation philosophy and ideology.

The sexuality of Black women has been a constructed reality for U.S. society since its beginning. From the image of the temptress slave woman to the Black jezebel, our society has used these images to control Black women’s movement within society. For the speculative genre, Black women have often become a fantasy of hyper-magical femininity portrayed through sexual prowess.

Of the many popular and recurring images that support this idea, perhaps most obvious one is the Tia Dalma character from The Pirates of the Caribbean films. Introduced as Davy Jones’ erstwhile lover, Dalma is a flirty seductress who is more than willing to help the white characters for little or no reward. Originally the powerful goddess Calypso, she once held control over the seas and everything within it. Now she is “bound” into human form because she rejected her white lover, Davy Jones, and her power is reduced to only aiding the heroes on their journey, as she has been denied one of her own.

For this character, the message is clear. Black women are meant to support white men. If they are unwilling to do this, the punishment is swift and uncompromising. Dalma has been relegated to a mere shadow of her former self, and society is better for it. Without Dalma’s current submissive state, the journey of the white men would be in jeopardy, and all of the fictional society would be threatened by the presence of her Black superpowers. Instead, she is depicted as an overly strong, sexual woman, who is rightly regulated to a submissive role for the benefit of this wider fictionalized world.

Another popular image is the longstanding Marvel comic book character, Storm. Best known as the on-again-off-again leader of the X-Men, Storm is the queen of Wakanda (due to her marriage to the comic character Black Panther) and possesses the ability to control all elements of the weather, both on Earth and beyond. Despite all of this power, Storm, like most female comic-book characters, is portrayed in scanty attire, exposed breast and skimpy thongs, as opposed to her male counterparts whose costumes cover their entire bodies. Not surprisingly, her race is a constant presence as Storm is considered beautiful and sexy because “her features don’t fit any conventional classification. Not Negroid, Caucasian, or Oriental—yet somehow, an amalgam of the rarest elements of them all. White hair. Blue eyes.”

This is quoted directly from an issue of Uncanny X-Men published in 1989—not 1889! Through her white features and the quiet strength of the Strong Black Woman, Storm is accepted as a member and often leader of the X-Men. As with Tia Dalma, the endowment of supernatural powers has not changed Storm’s position in society. Rather, these powers have made her more white, relegating her Blackness or “Negroid[ness]” to second-class status. For Storm, supernatural powers not only do not upset the racial and gender hierarchy but they forge a constant battle between her race and gender, causing a binary opposition where she is forced to choose among these two identities. Needless to say, the genre has often chosen the more white identity for her, as evidenced by the light-skinned Halle Berry who played Storm in the X-Men films.

Trying to move outside of these images often proves difficult for Black women. Genre fans sometimes level anger toward Black women when they step outside of their accepted roles. An obvious example of this is with the 2012 controversy of the film adaptation of The Hunger Games. Although the characters of Rue and Thresh are described within the book as having “dark brown skin and eyes,” many fans leveled racist insults at the Black actors playing the roles. However, it was the actress Amandla Stenberg (Rue) who received the most flack. Fans tweeted that they were unable to connect to the character after being confronted with her Black presence in the film. The problem was not only that this Black girl did not deserve sympathy, but that she was in the wrong place; she did not belong in their fantasy futurist society. Give her a couple of years, throw her on stage as a teen seductress (àla Lisa Bonet in Angel Heart), and everything will be exactly as it should be.

Taking a look at the broader genre, it’s easy to see that not all Black female characters are depicted as Super Duper Sexual Spiritual Black Women. However, it’s also easy to see that way too many of them are. The problem is not that there are negative characters who also happen to be Black women (and minority people as a whole), but that there are rarely any contrasting positive images. Even the character of Rue dies after granting wisdom and medicine to the white protagonist. So while the obvious racism is held under scrutiny, the problematic issue of Rue being placed within the text simply to advance the plot for the white character has been left unexamined. Real life Black women don’t have supernatural powers, and they aren’t stronger than white women—but they are expected to be, so this effects the way people interact with them.

One of the problems for genre writers is that, while trying to be progressive by endowing these characters with supernatural powers, they have simultaneously relied on old, worn-out stereotypes—including the sexual aggression of Black women. Whether inadvertent or not, these genre conventions very well may create a space where Black women are more subjugated through the bestowment of supernatural powers, as that appearance leaves the mostly white audience unthreatened in their patriarchal and racial positions in society.

About the Author

Chesya Burke has been writing speculative fiction for over a decade. Her work has appeared in such publications as Dark Dreams I, II, and III: Horror and Suspense by Black Writers, and her short story collection, Lets Play White, received high praise from Samuel Delany and Nikki Giovanni. Several of her articles appeared in the African American National Biography published by Harvard and Oxford University Press. She is the recent recipient of the American Association of University Women (AAUW) scholarship, and is a juror for the 2012 Shirley Jackson awards.

Editor’s Desk: Professionally Speaking

Neil Clarke

I’m quite happy to report that since the last issue, I have not seen the inside of an emergency room. I’m still on the mend from my heart attack, but doing well enough to keep my doctors pleased.

I had hoped to spend the first weekend in September in Chicago, the site of this year’s Worldcon and the Hugo Award Ceremony. Instead, I’m spending the weekend at home. It would have been nice to meet with friends and participate on panels, but given my current situation, several people expressed concern about attending the Hugo ceremony. They are most likely correct.

I’m very grateful to be a nominee this year and would have loved to have participated. Award ceremonies can be stressful, even when you don’t expect to win. Should I win, I’ve asked Kate Baker to attend on my behalf. It’s not fair to ask someone to do that unless you are prepared to give them an acceptance speech to read. My first draft simply read, “If anyone out there is watching the ceremony in NJ, please have them send an ambulance to my house.” The final version was more appropriate, I assure you.

Speaking of awards, the World Fantasy Award nominees were announced a few weeks ago and we received some great news (that I obviously survived):

Best Short Story Nominee: “The Anarchist Wasps and the Cartographer Bees” by E. Lily Yu, Clarkesworld, Issue #55

Best Novella: “Silently and Very Fast” by Catherynne M. Valente, Clarkesworld, Issues #61-63 and WFSA Press

Special Award, Non-Professional: Kate Baker, Neil Clarke, Cheryl Morgan & Sean Wallace, for Clarkesworld

This is the third time we’ve been nominated for a Special Award and, as usual, the competition is pretty tough. What makes us eligible for non-professional status? The easiest way to put it is that none of us do this for a living. After any significant life-threatening event, like a heart attack, you’ll end up spending a lot of time reevaluating your priorities in life.

I’ve always dreamed that someday Clarkesworld would reach the point where the staff and I would get paid a reasonable wage. That dream has evolved into something more concrete. Becoming “professional” is now a goal.

To my knowledge, there hasn’t been an independent online magazine that has successfully made the jump to paying authors and staff professional rates without dipping into the publisher’s pockets or becoming a patron of some other organization. This doesn’t mean it can’t be done.

In fact, with our current infrastructure for esubscriptions via Amazon and Weightless Books, it’s within the realm of possibility. Increasing our subscriber base, improving the stability of our advertising revenue, and restoring our annual anthology series are all important steps towards achieving our goal and I believe they can be accomplished without sacrificing what we value in this magazine.

So now you know what I’ll be doing in the background for months to come. If you’d like to help, here are a few things you could do:

Tell friends about our subscription options on your blog, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Goodreads, etc. Let’s try to hit two thousand subscribers by the new year!

Write a nice review over on our Amazon subscriptions page (more important than you might think)

Recommend potential advertisers to us

Subscribe or purchase our books, if you don’t already

Offer to deliver promotional materials to conventions

Send us your marketing ideas

Comment on a story you enjoyed

If you’d rather just read and enjoy, that’s great too! Thanks for your continued support and I hope that we continue to earn it in the future.

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, owner of Wyrm Publishing and a 2012 Hugo Nominee for Best Editor (short form). He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Clarkesworld Magazine

Issue 73

Table of Contents

A Bead of Jasper, Four Small Stones

by Genevieve Valentine

England under the White Witch

by Theodora Goss

The Battle of Candle Arc

by Yoon Ha Lee

The Future, One Thing at a Time

by Matthew Johnson

A Germ of an Idea: An Interview with John Varley

by Jeremy L. C. Jones

Another Word: Practicing Dissatisfaction

by Daniel Abraham

Editor's Desk: Six and Counting

by Neil Clarke

Breaking Through

Art by Julie Dillon

© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2012
www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

A Bead of Jasper, Four Small Stones

Genevieve Valentine

There’s a cloud across Europa.

Every time Henry looks out at the flat, grey disc, he tries to think what you’re meant to think: We’re almost there, soon you can breathe, it’s nearly rain.

He tries.

Henry knows, every time he goes out on the ice in a crawler to fix a transmitter, that he’s driving over the work of generations.

They’ve been here for centuries: drilling through ice until they hit water, sending drones to scoop molecular mess from the Storms planetside, spreading kilometers of fertilizer to bleed nitrogen, cultivating native algae and some bacteria they’d carried with them, bright little soldiers for hundreds of years, kept inside until there was enough atmosphere for any of them to survive on their own.

A few did, these days, in little patches gripping the ice; they were well-marked, so you wouldn’t run over them.

(The biologists promised that if all went well, there might be hydroponic gardens on the surface, someday.

That was all they could promise. There wasn’t any rock to rest soil on; there would never be trees, here.)

They’re trying, though, trying for any life they can make or build or find. None of them is ever going back home again. They’re determined to find everything here that’s worth finding.

These days, when he goes to the far side, the bio team sends him with sonar in case there’s sea life that won’t come near the equator, where the pull from Jupiter is so great that the ice stretches and cracks. It makes sense, says the bio team, that some species would find a less volatile home.

Henry doesn’t blame them. He prefers the quiet, too.

The year before Henry and his parents reached it—while they were in that long, heavy sleep around the sun—there had been the first discoveries of animals under the ice, eyeless and white and in numbers.

That was the first generation of people who began to call Europa, home.

Not that the name really takes; there are a lot of names on Europa, and the more you think about them, the harder things get.

The whole place is chaos.

The ice itself is pulled and scratched and pockmarked with so many things that needed naming that they ran out of just one sort, and now you start a speed-test marker in Greece and finish it in Ireland, mythologies piled on top of one another, linae and maculae and craters.

They all mean something—this is where a foreign body hit, this is where the surface fractured as Jupiter’s gravity pulled the water close, this is where the ice has sunk deep enough you can’t get a sledge out of it—but the longer you’ve lived in the base, he thinks, the more you realize this moon has been slapdash from the beginning.

The base is between Cadmus and Minos, north of the pole, on a plain of ice that’s thick enough and calm enough to build on. They use other linae for distance markers, or for transport. Pryderi goes almost down to Rhiannon, near the south pole, and whenever there’s something that needs testing on the far side of the cloud, that’s the trench they set the drone into.

Pryderi was the Welsh myth. That had been his second name (the one his true parents gave him after he was found, with meanings that must have been like scrapes—worry, care, loss). It was what they gave him after they realized what he really was, a name piled on top of his other one.

The Gliese 581 probe team works on the far side of the base, where there’s the least interference and they can actually run their machines.

(They’re left to themselves. There are thirty nations here using the halting translators on their comms just to get by, but they haven’t invented the tech yet to get you to understand the interior jargon of a Gliesian. That’s a fever all its own.)

The first probe’s already gone up. They’re building another one. This one’s supposed to hold two people.

There’s a big signup where you can volunteer, if you want to go.

The first-gen arrivals from Earth don’t go near it, like they’re afraid proximity triggers acceptance. They’re still adjusting to artificial gravity (70% of Earth g, but that 30% keeps you off balance a good long time), to nutritional yeast pills, to eternal day underneath the Storm. They’re not going one inch into a place stranger than this one.

Everyone from the Gliese team signed up. That crew has only ever looked at this place as the launchpad to where they’re really going.

Henry stands across the hallway from the sign-up sheet, sometimes, but never puts his name down.

His parents brought him here. That should be enough to keep him here.

(If it isn’t quite, he’s not sure anywhere else would be better.

Earth must not have been; his parents left.)

He takes the graveyard shift at the comm, when they’re on on the far side of the planet or occluded by the other moons, and nothing interesting ever comes through.

He’d just as soon be alone. This place is too full of strangers; he’d rather keep out of the way.

It’s easier just to watch the blips of the open comm pinging itself in a loop for hours than it is to look up and see the cloud.

Earth launches a civilian transport.

It’s nearly five years behind schedule; rising water means that a lot of countries are falling apart by inches, to disaster and disease, and it’s harder to get by even in places where the grid’s holding steady.

Mainland space programs got popular in a hurry.

India had won the bid to build the latest ship, and the right to 40% of the passenger manifest, so after the scientists and engineers and psychologists and adventurers had their slots, India could rescue some of its own.

(It’s a refugee ship, but that was a name no one wants to give it, not even Henry.)

When the notice comes in from Bangalore Ground Control (on a 51-minute delay—they’re on the far side), he sees that alongside the ISI numerical designation, they’ve given it the name Manu.

He’s the only one in the comm room, just him and a bowl of bright yellow algae the bio team’s put in for morale, and he has time to look up the name and see the myth behind it—he was the first man, who built a ship to escape the cleansing flood.

It’s almost enough to make him laugh.

He tags the transmission alongside his name in the database, and repeats the ISI sig and launch time, and says, “Roger that, Hammond and Preetha at Bangalore Ground Control, good night and godspeed.”

Then he sits back and sighs, “Why would you name a ship after a flood story if it’s headed to a warming ice planet?”

Bad luck or desperation. Neither one is good.

He wonders how bad things are, back there; if the house he remembers has been swallowed by water.

He wonders how soon it will be before the surface is as blue and unbroken as Neptune.

(It’s something the counselors remind newcomers, over and over, to accept.

The trips these ships make are only ever one way.)

Two hours later, just as he’s headed to sleep, he gets a message on a private channel.

For the record, I objected to the name. Also for the record, close your channels when you’re being rude.

Kai Preetha, ISI Bangalore.

Henry’s never had a message before.

(His parents were here with him, so there was no need, and there was no one back on Earth to miss them—if there had been, they might not have left.)

For a week, he looks at it every night before he goes back on shift.

He wonders what Bangalore looks like, now that the waters have nearly reached it.

After some flashes of pride he can hardly bother defending even to himself, he writes back, Sorry. You get superstitious here, but you’re not supposed to get rude. I’ll keep an eye on them for you.

They can see its slingshot around the sun, from where they are. It’ll be gone to Earth’s eyes, soon, and out of range for weeks.

Preetha writes back, Watching the journey from here. Will let you know when we lose them on instruments.

There’s no other activity from Ground Control over the feeds. She’s there alone. She’s the night shift.

When the message chime comes next, he starts, sits up. (He didn’t realize he’d been waiting for anything.)

Lost it.

Then, a separate line, as if, at the last second, she couldn’t help it.

What does it look like from there?

They’re nearly an hour apart. Whatever he’s looking at has already happened for her; whatever he tells her will arrive too late to be of any real use.

Curiosity, then.

He looks at the readout from the Evrard Telescope, which the first generation sent out far enough away that none of the minor moons can strike it—a clear, sharp eye on the system they’ve left behind.

It’s beautiful; it’s always beautiful, from this far away.

Like a splinter of mirror, he writes, swinging clear of the fire. But that was a while ago. By the time you get this, who knows.

Jupiter spins so fast that not even its storms can keep up; the clouds beneath them are always shifting, so it feels like they’re dragging, like the planet that eats the horizon is uncoiling to devour them any moment.

The shift would drive him crazy, probably, if the moon ever moved.

(They’re locked—there’s no rotation, just the constant steady bask of light.)

The windows on the station go darker when it’s supposed to be night, some vestige from home they don’t need any more. It’s been a long time since anyone thought of Earth as more than a little blue marble you could see now and then, if you were with an off-base assignment out to the dark side where you could even see the sky.

The planet eats it up, from where they are.

They mark the days with calculations; you can’t do it from looking at the Red Storm.

Still, it’s for the best. It helps you get used to living in the past. On the scale they’re working with, everything you look at is an imprint of something that’s moved on by now.

What he doesn’t say: Earth could go up in smoke, and they wouldn’t know for an hour.

You get far enough away from something, there’s nothing you can do.

The bio team gets a report of more extinctions Earthside. It’s just paperwork; everyone knows they’re gone. They just have to wait out the standard time, to make it official.

The WWF starts negotiations to send up a manned veterinary transport of deep-sea and Arctic specimens, who can be kept there until there’s enough greenhouse for them to breathe.

The project’s code name is Ark.

Henry thinks it’s maybe no wonder the names on Europa are patched together; eventually you run out of myths and have to start over.

What’s your favorite animal? That you’ve seen, he adds, to make it fair.

Birds, Preetha writes him. Or spiders. Anything that eats mosquitos. What’s yours? That you’ve seen.

He writes, There’s a limpet species here the bio team is naming Methuselah. They’re still trying to date how long it’s been in stasis down there.

Later, so late he can’t help himself, he writes, When I was eight, my parents took me to the zoo Earthside, so technically I remember elephants and penguins. But they took me because we were going to Europa, and this was our last chance to see them. I closed my eyes a lot, for revenge, I guess.

A few days later, there’s a picture.

The water has risen over the road—it must be a boat journey just to get to Ground Control, he can see the front edge at the bottom of the frame—and everything is so green his eyes hurt just to look at it, and for a second it’s hard to breathe.

That’s not home, he says to himself. That’s the place you’re doing all this for. Home is where we go next.

(It’s what the counselors tell you to say, when you feel a panic attack coming on.)

It takes him a moment to register there’s a lake in the photo, and a bird perched in the foreground, brown with turquoise wings and a sturdy beak.

Kingfisher.

He wonders how far out of her way she went to get the shot. He wonders if she knows this is the first bird he’s seen in a long time.

He goes out and takes a photo of the screen on the monitor they have over one of the open patches on the ice, where they can keep an eye on the limpets, clinging to rocks in water almost as sharp turquoise as the kingfisher, once the light gets in.

He takes a photo of the bright yellow algae in the empty comm room.

He sends them to her, titled A Trip to the Zoo.

His parents hadn’t lived to see it, but Henry saw the launch of the first Praetoria, headed for Gliese 581.

It was powerful and maneuverable, and he’d never shaken the feeling, all through the testing process that happened on the ice outside the comm center, that it looked like a mutant spider puppy in a robot suit.

They’d launched it right through the cloud.

It turned into a phoenix for a second in takeoff, punched a little bright spot against the grey, and vanished. The cloud slid closed behind it a moment later, smooth and opaque as a door.

The Gliese team had data coming in all the time. Four people tracked it 24/7, parsing headings and and fuel readings, initializing processes as the lag time got longer and longer; small things that hardly mattered, just things to tell it before it was too far away and there was nothing they could do.

But they hadn’t seen Praetoria since the cloud swallowed it. The rest of their lives, they never would.

(It was for the best that Henry was on a detail whose results were confirmed every time a transmitter started up again.)

His supervisor, Wen, calls him up to make a trip in the crawler.

(Moonside duty used to be split evenly, but now she has a kid; after you have a kid on Europa, your days taking risks are over.)

“I think a board just fried,” she says. “Nothing critical. I’m impressed it took this long. We’re up to nearly a year before they start going.”

(She’s fifth generation; her great-odd-grandparents had to hold handrails to keep from floating away, and never left base because the radiation shield wasn’t strong enough to cover more, and replace the transmitters every month or lose contact with Earth when the shear shorted everything out and left them in the dark until they were on the near side of Jupiter again.

Earth is just a concept to Wen, like Gliese; she calls this home.)

He heads north.

It’s hard to take, suddenly—it’s worse, having looked at something as green as what Preetha sent, and looking now at an expanse of grey above him and below him, unbroken except for the red storms that loom over his shoulder, if he wanted to look.

(It was dawn when Preetha took the picture; shadows were tucked under every leaf, and he’d looked at them and tried to remember what a real day looked like.)

This isn’t home, he writes her. Gleise might be. We can scrape out a living here until we know. But this isn’t home, not really.

She writes back, I hope you’re wrong.

It’s struck him, before, that he’s wrong.

It’s never struck him before, that there’s hope.

The facilities team spends more time on the twilight edge of the moon, south of the equator.

They’re building a bigger civilian station for the passengers of the Manu, and all the passengers who are lined up to follow them. It’s huge; it’s something that can hold all the people who will need to rally here and go on, as soon as they hear back about Gliese.

Nobody says anything—supplies arrive at intervals, two and a half years after someone on Earth sent them, and they use everything in cargo and everything they can salvage of the transports, and grumble about the extra strain on radiation shields and what must pass as food on Earth these days, if this is the best they can do.

But with every work detail they send down the linae, and every inch of polymer caulk they seal into place, what they’re saying is, This has to be built, here, soon.

Home won’t last.

He makes a delivery of some of the ruined transmitter parts. The building team will break down a motherboard to the molecular level, and build whatever they can from the rest. He imagines fountains made entirely of transmitter parts that Jupiter burned out.

Halfway back to the base, he turns, angles away from it all and out to the bare plains.

(He’s been here long enough to read the ice, and his pace never falters. He can be alone in no time at all.)

When he’s far enough from the base to breathe again, he parks the crawler and seals his suit and goes out onto the ice.

He looks up at the flat grey disc that caps the sky.

Electricity skitters across it, far up, where the radiation shields and the wind shear crack against the edges of this new, delicate thing that will make it safe to breathe, one day.

(Once or twice, he’s caught Wen looking out the comm room at the cloud, tears in her eyes.

It’s what her family came here to work on, back when they didn’t have the luxury of a civilian station team, or a Gliese probe. Her family came and worked on it when they were fighting for every breath.)

It’s silent here; he notices the wind.

Maybe it’s happened, he thinks. Maybe the numbers have quietly ticked over while he’s been gone, from that yellow dial at the airlocks over to green.

Maybe he can take off his helmet, take a breath, live.

The darkness presses against his chest.

(He remembers watching the sky from Earth as a boy, five or six, thinking how big the moon was, how lonely and anxious it felt to look for it on cloudy nights when its light was swallowed up, when it vanished whole.

His mother explained once that the light is always there, even if you can’t see it, but when you’re little, and your parents have told you that you’re leaving Earth, sometimes you don’t care much for physics.)

In the distance there are pinpoints blinking in and out, signal lights from the base. They’re almost level with the horizon.

If he drove another three minutes, he might not be able to see anything at all, except the cloud, and the shadow it casts across the ice.

Though he’d lose his grip, maybe, if he did. The farther away you get from the base, the weaker the gravity field gets. At some point, it’s not safe.

If you drove to the edge of the cloud, to see the sky whole, you’d begin to come apart.

He looks up at the cloud, at the spot where he knows Ganymede is passing.

Galileo saw this moment; he marked this position on his notes, a long time ago.

The light’s still there; his mother taught him.

(He wonders what would happen if he gathered all his strength and jumped.)

It’s too late to make it back to base; he calls it in and stays the night in the bunk in the back curve of the crawler, hooks crimping the ice underneath him so he won’t roll away in his sleep.

(Pods have bunks, with lightweight masks you strap on to recycle the air, so you can sleep without a helmet. There are comforts now, on Europa, to make you feel at home.)

The sonar attachment bleats over and over, calling through the ice, looking for anything with a heartbeat.

Do you have a favorite moon?

Luna, she writes. Of yours, I like Sinope. It’s an imposter—the dust is red and everything else in the Pasiphae cluster is grey, but no one can prove why.

He’s never thought of it that way, but he likes it.

(Sinope was the Greek who outwitted Zeus by asking for a wedding wish, to stay a virgin. One name that’s suited, at last.)

He writes, The transport will have to pass it, as they navigate the outer ring towards the center. Close enough to hit it, probably, knowing this navigation team.

She doesn’t write back.

He tries not to worry. Storms happen—more and more often now, from the reports. Sometimes the whole planet goes dark.

(He knows that feeling. He lives under the cloud.)

When she writes back, it’s short.

Don’t tell me what they’ll see. It makes it harder.

It feels like a stab between his shoulders, reading it.

He’s forgotten that most people who do what he does do it because they long for the sky, and the moon, and a chance at the new worlds; that, for most of them, being alone is the side effect, not the object.

It feels like something he should have known.

He imagines her, suddenly, in the place he was when he first felt really alone—in the same little desk, looking at Galileo’s notes and holding his breath, trying to be quiet, feeling heavy all over and wondering if his heart would give out.

The notes are taught in the Jupiter courses at the prep school for emigrants, in a single slide, to explain the discovery of the first four moons. Then it’s the images from Pioneer 10, and the video from Voyager (low-res and jumpy, solar system silent films), and then learning the song that names all sixty-six orbiting bodies, with clapping.

(He was nine when they set out, so young that he’s forgotten in swaths what he might have known of home.

He remembers the song, in patches that leave out Kallikore and Kore; he remembers seeing a meteor shower once, as his mother pointed at the sky and explained what was happening, and where they would be going soon; he remembers being betrayed by how much of the sky disappeared once they were moonside.)

He doesn’t remember, now, how the moons were lined up when they approached Europa—if they were like the notes, or not.

He barely remembers the moon that hung above Earth, the one you could see without ever meaning to.

If he’d known, he’d have stood in the dark every night, counting craters and seas, storing up.

On January 12, he writes her.

What does it look like, from there?

She writes, Like a bead of jasper, and four small stones.

He’s looked at Galileo’s drawings, since, a thousand times, the careful circle and the five or six or eight-point stars in line.

Sometimes there are only two or three stars, their different magnitudes noted. Sometimes one was noted as too bright, because one moon was in front of another, and he could only record what it looked like from that far away, with what little he had.

On January 8, 1610, Galileo didn’t think to count Callisto, too far away for him to see. (He’d been armed with a telescope so weak it must have been hardly better than cupped hands.)

He feels for Galileo, imagines the man sitting up and frowning at his notes, trying to decide how this could be, bodies moving in and out of sight.

But on January 13, the circle is flanked by all four stars.

This is the one they showed in school, captioned, “We have known about Europa ever since Galileo recorded it,” as if the first time he had pointed the scope at the sky, he’d counted the moons and moved on.

(They never say what it must have been like to sit there for night after night and feel locked out of the truth. They never say that it took him a while to even be certain they were moons, not stars.)

After that night, the scientists’ fever takes over, and Galileo sometimes takes several observations in a night, trying to pin down what the moons were, how fast they moved, what this rotation meant for the Earth he was standing on.

But Henry doesn’t come back to those. He knows what it looks like when someone’s forming a hypothesis.

He always looks at that first notation, January the thirteenth, all four moons drawn emphatically eight-pointed, the handwritten notes uneven, as if his hands were shaking, as if couldn’t help himself; for the first time, he had looked at something and really known.

He sends the notes to her.

She writes, I hope someone draws by hand for us, when they’re nearing Gliese, so the people who make it home will have something to remember it by.

He writes, If it works, that would be wonderful. Not sure how exploration works, these days. I had these—they didn’t make this home.

But he doesn’t send it. Something stays his hand, every time; it sits and sits, and he doesn’t know why.

The civilian dock is practically a city, sprawling and huge and too far from the base to be considered real, so the ISI representative moonside declares that the Manu will land in New Mumbai.

Henry takes watch in the comm room, so Wen can join the contingent heading out to the naming ceremony in the audience hall there.

(Fifth-generation status means you attend a lot of ceremonies.

“Worth it?” he asked once.

She said, “Depends. Is there food?”)

He writes to Preetha, to tell her that Manu will be landing in a place named for home, a city long since swallowed by the tide.

It’s fitting, he thinks, that there should be all the names possible, as if the moon’s gathering everything that had been left behind, back home.

Europa had never escaped the little wars of nomenclature.

Galileo had tried to name the first four moons in honor of the Medici brothers; they’d be standing on Francesco, maybe, if the term had stuck.

Galileo had held steadfast to his right to name them. He’d fought against suggestions of using the names of Tuscan nobles (Victripharus), and leaving them nameless (as The Comets of Jupiter), and long after it had been named Europa by someone else’s measure, Galileo still called it Jupiter II, refusing to give in.

It had been one name piled on top of another from the very first, long before anyone had ever set foot on it, long before they knew it was ice; before they knew anything about it except that it held steady, and so it was a moon, and not a star.

The next message he gets from her comes over official channels, and by voice.

“This is ISI Bangalore Ground Control. There’s been an H9N2 outbreak in the city. Hammond is infected. At the moment, everyone who was at Ground Control in the last forty-eight hours is under quarantine. There weren’t many of us, so the main team will hold steady elsewhere for now. We have supplies and medical staff standing by outside. Data collection and monitoring of ISI Manu will continue as scheduled. I’ll keep you apprised of developments. Kai Preetha, over and out.”

(”You okay?” Wen asked him as he stood up, and he said, “Fuck,” more emphatically than he’d ever said anything to her, more than he remembers ever being.

He staggered to his room and sat on the edge of the bed, tried not to vomit.

She already had it.

She was sick, he knew it, he could tell, something in her voice that had been trying too hard not to shake.

He’d only heard her voice twice, but some things you can tell.

Planetside made him dizzy; he projected the kingfisher picture at full opacity on his windows until he could look around again.

It resembled her, he’d decided a long time back; he’d never seen her, but the way it looked across the water like it could see the future seemed about right.

Its name was Halcyon smyrnensis, and Home, and Preetha; one name piled on top of the other.)

On the next pass, he repoints the telescope and takes a picture of Sinope, a little red glint in the garland of minor moons.

This is what Sinope looked like fifty-three minutes before you opened this message. She says, Be well.

He thinks about what will happen in the time it takes the message to get there. They’ll be on the far side of Jupiter by then, and the lights will be coming up slowly, pretending dawn, and he’ll be here with channels open, hoping she’ll come on the line and tell him that, fifty-three minutes ago, she was cured.

(It’s hopeless. He knows already. Whatever news comes across that line won’t be good, and he won’t know until it’s too late. You get far enough away from something, there’s nothing you can do.)

But the light from Europa right now would be reaching her by then, and she would have a picture of Sinope.

Sometimes just looking at a moon was medicine; if it worked for Galileo, it was worth a try.

She doesn’t answer.

He puts a cot in the comm room.

Wen doesn’t say anything.

(It’s for the best. If he explained that he had a picture of a kingfisher, and that he’d sent Galileo’s notes to an interplanetary Ground Control, and that they should send paper and pencil on the probe to Gliese, and that he had to stay right where he was in case he heard back from Bangalore, it wouldn’t look good.

She wouldn’t argue—she seemed to know when people had their reasons—but she wouldn’t think the reasons were connected, and they are; they are.)

The message comes back a week later, over official channels.

It’s patchy, as if the machinery is going, or her voice is.

He sits more forward in his chair with every word.

“Dr. Hammond died. Sometime early morning, maybe 0430, actual time unknown—I didn’t sleep for very long, but when I woke up she had gone. It’s just me.“

The horror fades. Panic edges in.

Where are the others, he almost yells into the mic, who would leave you alone like this, but the question would take an hour to reach her, and that isn’t the thing he wants her to hear from him last.

(It would be the last; her voice is going, he realizes now what it means.

This will be the last.

His hands are shaking.)

So instead he says, “Roger that, Preetha. Please update us with any message for the Manu, and continue to report.”

He says, trying to be steady, “Everyone from home wishes you well.”

They send an ethicist and a psychologist to the comm center a few hours later, to talk to Henry and Wen about whether the ship should know.

“This puts them under a lot of unnecessary stress,” one of the ethicists argues.

“Good,” Henry says. “They have a lot to live up to.”

The other one says, “Informing them of a change like this could be more stressful than useful. They already know the importance of a clean landing on this.”

He says, “After this they fucking well better.”

Eventually, Wen snaps.

“This entire operation hinges on the crucial importance of full information,” she says, cutting off the psychologist halfway through a sentence about perception of failure. “It’s been that way since my forebears set foot here. Earth trusted them enough to send them. If we can’t trust them with information, we should tell them to turn around. Do you want to tell them that? Because I’m not going to.”

And before they can object, she hits the button to bounce it to the transport, so the skeleton crew that’s still awake will know what’s happened.

When they’re gone, muttering about calling her before the Ethics Board, Henry says, “There might be a record of something else on the Manu.”

She looks over at him, parsing what he’s done.

“Sometimes records are faulty,” she says. “Sometimes Jupiter interferes.”

They sit side by side, looking out at the cloud and the ice and the red day rising, channels open for messages that don’t come.

(The message Wen sent is a duplicate.

Henry hit Send before they ever showed; he hit Send before he ever paged Wen and told her there was something she needed to see.

He hit Send as soon as it came over the transom, and his hand stopped shaking.)

“To the Europa Base, and the crew and passengers of the Manu: We on Earth who have dreamed of exploration honor your mission, and have faith that what you work to build will come back to you a hundredfold.

For those who will go on to Gliese 581, that hidden world that holds our future in it; you are the children of Galileo, and we send our hopes with you.

The citizens of Earth wish you good journey, and good homecoming.”

He takes a crawler out to the dark side.

Ahead of him is a blue marble (behind him is a bead of jasper).

The blue marble isn’t winking—looking from here, there’s no marked difference from what it used to be. It will take some generations yet. When the water swallows up the last of it, the Evrard Telescope will show a surface of near-unbroken blue.

The grandchildren of Europa will be taken out to the dark side (no helmets, by then), and they’ll hold up binoculars and be instructed to look carefully for the bluest thing they can see.

(It won’t be Rigel, the teacher will have to remind them. Keep your eye out for something steady—you’re looking for a moon, not a star.)

Through his binoculars, he can see India passing out of sight; somewhere on what’s left of the land is the place where Kai died, fifty-three minutes before he got her last transmission.

It’s the first time he’s looked at something, and really known.

(Preetha means, The palm of the hand; it means happiness; it means beloved; one on top of the other.)

About the Author

Genevieve Valentine is the author of Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti. Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Journal of Mythic Arts, Fantasy Magazine, Lightspeed, and Apex, and in the anthologies Federations, The Living Dead 2, The Way of the Wizard, Running with the Pack, Teeth, and more. She is a co-author of the forthcoming pop-culture book Geek Wisdom, and her film and TV writing has appeared in Fantasy Magazine and Strange Horizons. Her appetite for bad movies is insatiable, a tragedy she tracks on her blog.

England under the White Witch

Theodora Goss

It is always winter now.

When she came, I was only a child—in ankle socks, my hair tied back with a silk ribbon. My mother was a seamstress working for the House of Alexandre. She spent the days on her knees, saying Yes, madame has lost weight, what has madame been doing? When madame had been doing nothing of the sort. My father was a photograph of a man I had never seen in a naval uniform. A medal was pinned to the velvet frame.

My mother used to take me to Kensington Gardens, where I looked for fairies under the lilac bushes or in the tulip cups.

In school, we studied the kings and queens of England, its principle imports and exports, and home economics. Even so young, we knew that we were living in the waning days of our empire. That after the war, which had taken my father and toppled parts of London, the sun was finally setting. We were a diminished version of ourselves.

At home, my mother told me fairy tales about Red Riding Hood (never talk to wolves), Sleeping Beauty (your prince will come), Cinderella (choose the right shoes). We had tea with bread and potted meat, and on my birthday there was cake made with butter and sugar that our landlady, Mrs. Stokes, had bought as a present with her ration card.

Harold doesn’t hold with this new Empress, as she calls herself, Mrs. Stokes would tell my mother. Coming out of the north, saying she will restore us to greatness. She’s established herself in Edinburgh, and they do say she will march on London. He says the King got us through the war, and that’s good enough for us. And who believes a woman’s promises anyway?

But what I say is, England has always done best under a queen. Remember Elizabeth and Victoria. Here we are, half the young men dead in the war, no one for the young women to marry so they work as typists instead of having homes of their own. And trouble every day in India, it seems. Why not give an Empress a try?

One day Monsieur Alexandre told my mother that Lady Whorlesham had called her impertinent and therefore she had to go. That night, she sat for a long time at the kitchen table in our bedsit, with her face in her hands. When I asked her the date of the signing of the Magna Carta, she hastily wiped her eyes with a handkerchief and said, As though I could remember such a thing! Then she said, Can you take care of yourself for a moment, Ann of my heart? I need to go talk to Mrs. Stokes.

The next day, when I ran home from school for dinner, she was there, talking to Mrs. Stokes and wearing a new dress, white tricotine with silver braid trim. She looked like a princess from a fairy tale.

It’s easy as pie, she was saying. I found the office just where you said it was, and they signed me right up. At first I’m going to help with recruitment, but the girl I talked to said she thought I should be in the rifle corps. They have women doing all sorts of things, there. I start training in two days.

You’re braver than I am, said Mrs. Stokes. Aren’t you afraid of being arrested?

If they do arrest me, will you take care of Ann? she asked. I know it’s dangerous, but they’re paying twice what I was making at the shop, and I have to do something. This world we’re living in is no good, you and I both know that. Nothing’s been right since the war. Just read this pamphlet they gave me. It makes sense, it does. I’m doing important work, now. Not stitching some Lady Whortlesham into her dress. I’m with the Empress.

In the end, the Empress took London more easily than anyone could have imagined. She had already taken Manchester, Birmingham, Oxford. We had heard how effective her magic could be against the remnants of our Home Forces. First, she sent clouds that covered the sky, from horizon to horizon. It snowed for days, until the city was shrouded in white. And then the sun came out just long enough to melt the top layer of snow, which froze during the night. The trees were encased in ice. They sparkled as though made of glass, and when they moved I heard a tinkling sound.

Then, she sent wolves. Out of the mist they came, white and gray, with teeth as sharp as knives. They spoke in low, gutteral voices, telling the Royal Guards to surrender or have their throats ripped out. Most of the guards stayed loyal. In the end, there was blood on the snow in front of Buckingham Palace. Wolves gnawed the partly-frozen bodies.

Third and finally came her personal army, the shop girls and nursemaids and typists who had been recruited, my mother among them. They looked magnificent in their white and silver, which made them difficult to see against the snow. They had endured toast and tea for supper, daily indignity, the unwanted attention of employers. Their faces were implacable. They shot with deadly accuracy and watched men die with the same polite attention as they had shown demonstrating a new shade of lipstick.

Buckingham Palace fell within a day. On the wireless, we heard that the King and his family had fled to France, all but one of his sisters, who it turned out was a sympathizer. By the time the professional military could mobilize its troops, scattered throughout our empire, England was already hers to command.

I stood by Mrs. Stokes, watching the barge of the Empress as it was rowed down the Thames. She stood on the barge, surrounded by wolves, with her white arms bare, black hair down to her feet, waving at her subjects.

No good will come of this, you mark my words, said Mr. Stokes.

Hush! Isn’t she lovely? said Mrs. Stokes.

You have seen her face in every schoolroom, every shop. Perhaps in your dreams. It is as familiar to you as your own. But I will never forget that first glimpse of her loveliness. She looked toward us, and I believed that she had seen me, had waved particularly to me.

The next day, our home economics teacher said, From now on, we are not going to learn about cooking and sewing. Instead, we are going to learn magic. There was already a picture of our beloved Empress over her desk, where the picture of the King used to be.

At first, there were resistance movements. There were some who fought for warmth, for light. Who said that as long as she reigned, spring would never come again. We would never see violets scattered among the grass, never hear a river run. Never watch young lovers hold each other on the embankment, kiss each other not caring who was watching. There was the Wordsworth Society, which tried to effect change politically. And there were more radical groups: the Children of Albion, the Primrose Brigade.

But we soon learned that our Empress was as ruthless as she was beautiful. Those who opposed her were torn apart by wolves, or by her girl soldiers, who could tear men apart with their bare hands and were more frightening than any wolves. Sympathizers were rounded up and imprisoned, encased in ice. Or worse, they were left free but all the joy was taken from them, so that they remained in a prison of their own perpetual despair.

Her spies were everywhere. Even the trees could not be trusted. The hollies were the most dangerous, the most liable to inform. But resistance groups would not meet under pines, firs, or hemlocks. In many households, the cats were on her side. Whispers of disloyalty would bring swift retribution.

And many said, such traitors deserved punishment. That winter was good for England, that we needed cold, needed toughening. We had grown soft after the war, allowed our dominions to rebel against us, allowed the world to change. But she would set things right. And so the resistance movements were put down, and our soldiers marched into countries under a white flag that did not mean surrender. Those who had tried to be free of us were confronted with winter, and sorceresses, and wolves. Their chiefs and rajahs and presidents came to London, bringing jewels and costly fabrics to lay before her feet, and pledged their loyalty.

Our empire spread, as indeed it must. A winter country must import its food, and as winter spreads, the empire must expand to supply the lands under snow, their waters locked in ice. That is the terrible, inescapable logic of empire.

I was a Snowflake, in a white kerchief with silver stars.  Then, I was an Ice Maiden. The other girls in school nodded to me as I walked by. If they did not wear the white uniform, I asked them why they had not joined up yet, and if they said their parents would not let them, I told them it was their responsibility to be persuasive. I won a scholarship to university, where I was inducted into the Sisterhood of the Wolf.

My den mother encouraged me to go into the sciences. Scientists will be useful to the Empress in the coming war, she said. Science and magic together are more powerful, are greater weapons, than they are apart. And there is a war coming, Ann. We hear more and more from our spies in Germany. A power is rising in that part of the world, a power that seeks to oppose the reign of the Empress. Surely not, I said. Who would oppose her? A power that believes in fire, she said. A fire that will burn away the snow, that will scorch the earth. That does not care about what we have already achieved—the security, the equality, the peace we will achieve when her empire spreads over the earth.

When I graduated, the Empress herself handed me a diploma and the badge of our order. My mother, who had been promoted to major-general, was so proud! All of us in the Sisterhood had been brought to Buckingham Palace, in sleighs drawn by reindeer with silver bells on their antlers. We waited in a long room whose walls were painted to look like a winter forest, nibbling on almond biscuits and eating blancmange from silver cups with small bone spoons. At last, we were summoned into her presence.

You have seen our beloved Empress from far away, from below while she stands on a balcony, or from a sidewalk as she is drawn through the city streets in her sleigh. But I have met her, I have kissed her hand.  It was white and cold, with the blue veins visible. Her grip was strong—stronger than any man’s, as she was taller than any man. Her face was so pale that I could only look at it for a moment without pain. Her black hair trailed on the floor.

You have done well, she said to me, and I could hear her voice in my head as well as with my ears. To hear that voice again, I would consent to being torn apart by wolves.

You have never seen, you will never see, anything as magnificent as our Empress.

Where did she come from? Some say she came from the stars, that she is an alien life-form. Some say that she is an ancient goddess reborn. Some say she is an ordinary woman, and that such women have always lived in the north: witches who command the snows.

The question is whispered, in secret places where there are no hemlocks, no cats: does human blood flow in her veins? Can our Empress die?

I met Jack in the basic physical training program required for all recruits to the war effort. My mother had used her influence to have me chosen for the Imperial Guard, the Empress’s personal girl army, which could be deployed throughout the empire. After basic training, I was going to advanced training in the north, and then wherever the war effort needed me. He was a poet, assigned to the Ministry of Morale. He had been conscripted after university—this was in the early days of general conscription. He was expected to write poetry in praise of the Empress, and England, and those who served the empire. But first, we all had to pass basic training.

We stayed in unheated cabins, bathed in cold water, all to make us stronger, to bring the cold inside us. Each morning, we marched through the woods. The long marches, hauling weapons and equipment through the snow, were not difficult for me. I had been training since my university days, waking at dawn to run through the snow or swim in the icy rivers with the Sisterhood. But he was not as strong as I was. He would stumble over roots or boulders beneath the snow, and try to catch himself with chilled, chapped hands—the woolen gloves we had been issued were inadequate protection against the cold. I would help him up, holding him by the elbow, and sometimes I would carry part of his equipment, transferring it into my pack surreptitiously so the Sergeant did not see me.

Why are you so kind to me, Ann? he asked me once. Someone has to be, I said, smiling.

The other girls laughed at him, but I thought his large, dark eyes were beautiful. When he looked at me, I did not feel the cold. One day, I sat next to him at dinner. He told me about Yorkshire, where he was born—about the high hills, the sheep huddled together, their breaths hanging on the air.

Perhaps I should have been more like my father, he said. It was my headmaster at school who first read my poems and told me to apply for a scholarship. There I was, a farmer’s son, studying with the children of ministers and generals, who talked about going to the palace the way I talked about going to the store. I kept to myself, too proud or ashamed to approach them, to presume they might be my friends. But my tutor sent my poems to the university literary magazine, and they were published. Then, I was invited to join the literary society. I thought it was an honor—until we all received letters from the war office. So here I am, losing my toes to frostbite so I can write odes for the dead in Africa—or for the war they say is coming.

We all believed that war was coming. The newspapers were already talking about a fire rising in the east, burning all before it.

It’s a great honor to write for the Empress, I said.

Yes, of course it is, he said after a moment. He looked at me intently with those dark eyes. Of course, he said again, before finishing the thin broth with dumplings that we were told was Irish stew.

We spent more and more time together, huddled in the communal showers when we could, telling each other about our childhoods, the foods we liked, the books we had read. We wondered about the future. He hoped that after his compulsory service, he could work as a schoolteacher, publish his poems. I did not know where I would be assigned—Australia? South America? There was always unrest in some part of the empire.

One day, the Sergeant said to me, Ann, I’m not going to tell you what to do. I’m just going to warn you—there’s something not right about Jack Kirby. I don’t know what it is, but Thule—who was her wolf—can’t stand him. I don’t think a general’s daughter should show too much interest in that boy. You don’t want anyone questioning your loyalty, do you?

Her words made me angry. He was going into the Ministry—wasn’t that good enough? That night, we met in the showers. I don’t want to talk, I said. I kissed him—slid my hands under his jacket, sweater, undershirt. His body was bony, but I thought it had its own particular grace. He told me that I was beautiful, breathing it into my neck as we made love, awkwardly, removing as few layers of clothing as possible. You’re beautiful, Ann—I hear it in my mind and remember the warmth of his breath in that cold place. There had been others, not many, but he may as well have been my first. He is the one I remember.

During our week of leave, he asked me to come home with him, to Yorkshire. His father met us at the train station. He was a large, quiet man who talked mostly of sheep. Look at these pelts, he told me. Feel the weight of them. Didn’t use to get wool like this, in Yorkshire. It’s the perpetual winter as does it. Grows twice as thick and twice as long. But he grumbled about the feed from the communal granaries—not as nourishing as the grass that used to grow on the hillsides, never seen such sickly lambs. And the wolves—not allowed to shoot them anymore. Those who complained were brought before a committee.

We had suppers of Yorkshire pudding and gravy, and walked out over the fields holding hands. I asked Jack about his mother. She had died in the influenza epidemic, which he had barely survived. That was before the coming of the Empress. I could see, from the photograph of her on the bureau, that he had inherited her delicacy, her dark eyes and thick, dark hair. Late at night, when his father was asleep, he would sneak into the guest room and we would make love under the covers, as quietly as possible, muffling our laughter, whispering to one another.

The day before we were to return from leave, his father told him that a ewe was giving birth in the snow. She had become trapped in a gully, and could not be lifted out in her condition. There was no chance of bringing her into the barn, so he and his father, one of the two farm hands, and the veterinarian went out, grumbling about the cold.

I wandered through the house, then sat in his room for a while, looking through the books he had read as a child. Books from before the Empress came, and from after—Prince Frost and the Giants, the Wolf Scout series, the Treasury of English Poems we had all studied in school. I can’t tell you why I chose to look though the battered old desk he had used as a schoolboy. It was wrong, a base impulse. But I loved him, and on this last day before we went back to the camp, I wanted to feel close to him. I wanted to know his secrets, whatever they were—even if they included love letters from another girl. I tortured myself for a moment with that thought, knowing how unlikely it was that I would find anything but old school books and pens. And then I pulled open the drawer.

In the desk was a notebook, and in the notebook were his poems—in his handwriting, with dates at the tops of the pages indicating when they had been written. The latest of them was dated just before camp. They spoke of sunlight and warmth and green fields. Next to the notebook was a worn copy of one of the forbidden books: The Complete Poetical Works of Wordsworth. I opened to the page marked with a ribbon and read,

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils . . .

I slammed the book shut. My hands were shaking. I remembered what the Sergeant had said: You don’t want anyone questioning your loyalty, do you?

By the time Jack, his father, and the other men had returned, I was composed enough to seen almost normal. That night, he came to my room. We made love as though nothing had happened, but all the time I could hear it in my head: I wandered lonely as a cloud—a host of golden daffodils. I remembered daffodils. I could almost see them, bright yellow against the blue sky.

The next morning, as Jack and his father were loading our bags into the sleigh that would take us to the train station, I told them I had forgotten something. I ran back into the house, up the stairs and into Jack’s room, then quickly slid the notebook and book into my backpack.

When we arrived back at camp, I went to the Sergeant and denounced Jack Kirby as a traitor.

I told myself that I was doing the right thing. He would be sent for reeducation. He would become a productive citizen, not a malcontent longing for what could never be. Perhaps some day he would even thank me.

He was sent to a reeducation camp in the north of Scotland. I graduated from basic training, went on to advanced training for the Imperial Guard, and was eventually given my wolf companion, Ulla. Together, we were sent to France, where the war had already started. We were among the first to enter Poland. We were in the squadron that summoned ice to cover the Black Sea so our soldiers could march into Turkey. My den mother had been right: science and magic together created powerful weapons. It took five years, but the fire in the east was defeated, and our empire stretched into the Russian plains, into the deserts of Arabia.

When I returned to England, I asked for Jack’s file. It told me that he had died in the camp, shortly after arriving. The causes of death were listed as cold and heartbreak.

During the Empress’s reign, England has changed for the better, some say. There is always food in the shops, although it has lost its flavor. Once, carrots were not pale, like potatoes. Cabbages were green. They were not grown in great glass houses. The eggs had bright yellow centers, and all meat did not taste like mutton. Once, there were apple trees in England, and apples, peaches, plums were not imported from the distant reaches of our empire, where winter has not yet permanently settled. There was a sweetness in the world that you have never tasted. There was love and joy, and pain sharp as knives, rather than this blankness.

Our art, our stories, our poems have changed, become ghosts of their former selves. Mothers tell their daughters about Little White Hood and her wolf companion. About Corporal Cinder, who joined the liberation army and informed on her wicked sisters.

Our soldiers move on from conquest to conquest, riding white bears, white camels. Parts of the world that had never seen snow have seen it now. I myself have sent snow drifts to cover the sands of the Sahara, so we could deploy our sleighs. I have seen the Great Pyramid covered in ice, and crocodiles lying lethargic on ice-floes in the Nile.

Our empire stretches from sea to sea to sea. Eventually, even the republics that now fight against us will come under our dominion. And then perhaps the only part of the world that has not bowed down to our Empress, the wild seas themselves, will be covered in ice. What will happen to us then, when there are no more lands to send provisions to the empire? I do not know. Our Empress has promised us a perfect world, but the only perfection is death.

You have heard stories of primroses and daffodils, and you do not believe them. You have heard that there were once green fields, and rivers that ran between their banks, and a warm sun overhead. You have never seen them, and you believe they are merely tales. I am here to tell you that they are true, that in my childhood these existed. And cups of tea that were truly hot, and Christmas trees with candles on their branches, and church bells. Girls wore ribbons in their hair rather than badges on their lapels. Boys played King Arthur or Robin Hood rather than Wolf Scout.

I’m here to tell you that the fairy tales are true.

And that, sitting in this secret place, looking at each other in fear, wondering who among you is an informant, you must decide whether to believe in the fairy tales, whether to fight for an idea. Ideas are the most powerful things—beauty, freedom, love. But they are harder to fight for than things like food, or safety, or power. You can’t eat freedom, you can’t wield love over another.

You are so young, with your solemn faces, your thin bodies, nourished on pale cabbage and soggy beef and slabs of flavorless pudding! I do not know if you have the strength. But that, my children, you will have to find out for yourselves.

Your leaders, who have asked me here tonight, believe that winter can end, if you have the courage to end it. They are naive, as revolutionaries always are. Looking at your faces, I wonder. You have listened so intently to an old soldier, a woman who has seen much, felt much, endured. I have no strength left to fight, either for or against the Empress. Everyone I have ever loved—my mother, Mrs. Stokes, Jack Kirby, Ulla—is dead. I have just enough strength to tell you what the world was once, and could be again: imperfect, unequal, and in many ways unjust. But there was warmth and light to counteract the cold, the darkness.   

What do I believe? Entropy is the law of the universe. All things run down, all things eventually end. Perhaps, after all, she is not an alien, not a witch, but a universal principal. Perhaps all you can do is hold back the cold, the darkness, for a while. Is a temporary summer worth your lives? But if you do not fight, you will never feel the warmth of the sun on your cheeks, or smell lilacs, or bite into a peach picked directly from the tree. You will never hold each other on the embankment, watching the waters of the Thames run below. The old stories will be forgotten. Our empire will spread over the world, and it will be winter, everywhere, forever.

About the Author

Theodora Goss’s publications include the short story collection In the Forest of Forgetting (2006); Interfictions (2007), a short story anthology coedited with Delia Sherman; Voices from Fairyland (2008), a poetry anthology with critical essays and a selection of her own poems; and The Thorn and the Blossom (2012), a novella in a two-sided accordion format. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Crawford, Locus, and Mythopoeic Awards, and on the Tiptree Award Honor List. She has won the World Fantasy and Rhysling Awards.

The Battle of Candle Arc

Yoon Ha Lee

General Shuos Jedao was spending his least favorite remembrance day with Captain-magistrate Rahal Korais. There was nothing wrong with Korais except that he was the fangmoth’s Doctrine officer, and even then he was reasonable for a Rahal. Nevertheless, Doctrine observed remembrances with the ranking officer, which meant that Jedao had to make sure he didn’t fall over.

Next time, Jedao thought, wishing the painkillers worked better, I have to get myself assassinated on a planet where they do the job right.

The assassin had been a Lanterner, and she had used a shattergun. She had caught him at a conference, of all places. The shattergun had almost sharded Jedao into a hundred hundred pieces of ghostwrack. Now, when Jedao looked at the icelight that served as a meditation focus, he saw anywhere from three to eight of them. The effect would have been charming if it hadn’t been accompanied by stabbing pains in his head.

Korais was speaking to him.

“Say again?” Jedao said. He kept from looking at his wristwatch.

“I’ll recite the next verses for you, sir, if that doesn’t offend you,” Korais said.

Korais was being diplomatic. Jedao couldn’t remember where in the litany they were. Under better circumstances he would have claimed that he was distracted by the fact that his force of eleven fangmoths was being pursued by the Lanterners who had mauled the rest of the swarm, but it came down to the injuries.

“I’d be much obliged, Captain,” Jedao said.

This remembrance was called the Feast of Drownings. The Rahal heptarch, whose faction maintained the high calendar and who set Doctrine, had declared it three years back, in response to a heresy in one of the heptarchate’s larger marches. Jedao would have called the heresy a benign one. People who wanted the freedom to build shrines to their ancestors, for pity’s sake. But the Rahal had claimed that this would upset the high calendar’s master equations, and so the heretics had had to be put down.

There were worse ways to die than by having your lungs slowly filled with caustic fluid. That still didn’t make it a good way to die.

Korais had begun his recital. Jedao looked at the icelight on the table in front of them. It had translucent lobes and bronchi and alveoli, and light trickled downward through them like fluid, pale and blue and inexorable.

The heptarchate’s exotic technologies depended on the high calendar’s configurations: the numerical concordances, the feasts and remembrances, the associated system of belief. The mothdrive that permitted fast travel between star systems was an exotic technology. Few people advocated a switch in calendars. Too much would have to be given up, and invariant technologies, which worked under any calendar, never seemed to keep up. Besides, any new calendar would be subject to the same problem of lock-in; any new calendar would be regulated by the Rahal, or by people like the Rahal, as rigorously as the current one.

It was a facile argument, and one that Jedao had always disliked.

“Sir,” Korais said, breaking off at the end of a phrase, “you should sit.”

“I’m supposed to be standing for this,” Jedao said dryly.

“I don’t think your meditations during the next nineteen minutes are going to help if you fall unconscious.”

He must look awful if Doctrine was telling him how long until the ordeal was over. Not that he was going to rest afterward. He had to figure out what to do about the Lanterners.

It wasn’t that Jedao minded being recalled from medical leave to fight a battle. It wasn’t even that he minded being handed this sad force of eleven fangmoths, whose morale was shredded after General Kel Najhera had gotten herself killed. It was that the heptarchate had kept the Lanterners as clients for as long as he remembered. Now the Lanterners were demanding regional representation, and they were at war with the heptarchate.

The Lanterner assassin had targeted Jedao during the Feast of Falcon’s Eye. If she had succeeded, the event would have spiked the high calendar in the Lanterners’ favor. Then they would have declared a remembrance in their own, competing calendar. The irony was that Jedao wasn’t sure he disagreed with the Lanterners’ grievances against the heptarchate, which they had broadcast everywhere after their victory over Najhera.

Korais was still looking at him. Jedao went to sit down, which was difficult because walking in a straight line took all of his concentration. Sitting down also took concentration. It wasn’t worth pretending that he heard the last remembrance verses.

“It’s over, sir,” Korais said. “I’ll leave you to your duties.” He saluted and let himself out.

Jedao looked at his watch after the door hissed shut. Everything on it was too tiny to read the way his vision was. He made his computer enlarge its time display. Korais had left at least seven minutes early, an astonishing concession considering his job.

Jedao waited until the latest wave of pain receded, then brought up a visual of Candle Arc, a battledrift site nine days out from their present position and eleven days out from the Lanterners’ last reported position. The battle had taken place 177 years ago, between two powers that had since been conquered. The heptarchate called the battle Candle Arc because of the bridge of lights that wheeled through the scatter-hell of what had once been a fortress built from desiccated suns, and the remnants of warmoths. The two powers probably had called their battle something else, and their moths wouldn’t have been called moths either, and their calendars were dead except in records held locked by the Rahal.

Some genius had done up the image in shades of Kel gold, even though a notation gave the spectrum shift for anyone who cared. Jedao was fond of the Kel, who were the heptarchate’s military faction. For nearly twenty years he had been seconded to their service, and they had many virtues, but their taste in ornamentation was gaudy. Their faction emblem was the ashhawk, the bird that burned in its own glory, all fire and ferocity. The Shuos emblem was the ninefox, shapeshifter and trickster. The Kel called him the fox general, but they weren’t always being complimentary.

The bridgelights swam in and out of focus. Damnation. This was going to take forever. After pulling up maps of the calendrical terrain, he got the computer algebra system to tell him what the estimated shifts looked like in pictures. Then he sent a summons to the moth commander.

He knew how long it took to get from the moth’s command center to his quarters. The door chimed at him with commendable promptness.

“Come in,” Jedao said.

The door opened. “You wished to see me, sir,” said Kel Menowen, commander of the Fortune Travels in Fours. She was a stocky woman with swan-black hair and unsmiling eyes. Like all Kel, she wore black gloves; Jedao himself wore fingerless gloves. Her salute was so correct that he wanted to find an imperfection in her fist, or the angle of her arm.

Jedao had chosen the Fortune as his command moth not because it was the least damaged after Najhera’s death, which it wasn’t, but because Menowen had a grudge against the Shuos. She was going to be the hardest commander to win over, so he wanted to do it in person.

The tired joke about the Kel was that they were strong, loyal, and stupid, although they weren’t any more prone to stupidity than the other factions.

The tired joke about the Shuos, who specialized in information operations, was that they had backstabbing quotas. Most of the other factions had reasonable succession policies for their heptarchs. The Rahal heptarch appointed a successor from one of the senior magistrates. With the Kel, it was rank and seniority. The Shuos policy was that if you could keep the heptarch’s seat, it was yours. The other tired joke was that the infighting was the only reason the Shuos weren’t running the heptarchate.

One of Menowen’s aunts had died in a Shuos scheme, an assassin getting careless with secondary casualties. Jedao had already been in Kel service at the time, but it was in his public record that he had once been Shuos infantry, where “Shuos infantry” was a euphemism for “probably an assassin.” In his case, he had been a very good assassin.

Menowen was still standing there. Jedao approximated a return salute. “At ease,” he said. “I’d stand, but ‘up’ and ‘down’ are difficult concepts, which is distressing when you have to think in three dimensions.”

Menowen’s version of at ease looked stiff. “What do you require, sir?”

They had exchanged few words since he boarded her moth because he had barely been functional. She wasn’t stupid. She knew he was on her moth to make sure she behaved, and he had no doubt her behavior would be exemplary. She also probably wanted to know what the plan was.

“What do you think I require?” Jedao asked. Sometimes it helped to be direct.

Menowen’s posture became more stiff. “It hasn’t escaped my notice that you only gave move orders as far as the Haussen system,” she said. “But that won’t take us near any useful support, and I thought our orders were to retreat.” She was overenunciating on top of telling him things he knew, which meant that at some point she was going to tell him he wasn’t fit for duty. Some Kel knew how to do subtlety. Menowen had an excellent service record, but she didn’t strike him as a subtle Kel.

“You’re reading the sane, sensible thing into our orders,” Jedao said. “Kel Command was explicit. They didn’t use the word ‘retreat’ anywhere.” An interesting oversight on their part. The orders had directed him to ensure that the border shell guarding the Glover Marches was secured by any means possible.

“Retreat is the only logical response,” Menowen said. “Catch repairs if possible, link up with Twin Axes.” The Twin Axes swarm was on patrol along the Taurag border, and was the nearest Kel force of any size. “Then we’d have a chance against the heretics.”

“You’re discounting some alternatives,” Jedao said.

Menowen lifted her chin and glared at him, or possibly at his insignia, or at the ink painting over his shoulder. “Sir,” she said, “if you’re contemplating fighting them with our present resources—” She stopped, tried again. The second try was blunter. “Your injuries have impaired your judgment and you ought to—”

“—let the senior moth commander make the sane, sensible decision to run for help?” Jedao flexed his hands. He had a clear memory of an earlier conversation with Commander Kel Chau, specifically the pinched look around Chau’s eyes. Chau probably thought running was an excellent idea. “I had considered it. But it’s not necessary. I’ve looked at the calendrical terrain. We can win this.”

Menowen was having a Kel moment. She wanted to tell him off, but it wasn’t just that he outranked her, it was that Kel Command had pulled him off medical leave to put him in charge, instead of evacuating him from the front. “Sir,” she said, “I was there. The Lanterners have a swarm of at least sixty moths. They will have reinforcements. I shouldn’t have to tell you any of this.”

“How conscientious of you,” Jedao said. Her eyes narrowed, but she didn’t take the bait. “Did you think I had some notion of slugging it out toe-to-toe? That would be stupid. But I have been reviewing the records, and I understand the Lanterner general’s temperament. Which is how we’re going to defeat the enemy, unless you defeat yourself before they have a chance to.”

Menowen’s mouth pressed thin. “I understand you have never lost a battle,” she said.

“This isn’t the—”

“If it’s about your fucking reputation—”

“Fox and hound, not this whole thing again,” Jedao snapped. Which was unfair of him because it was her first time bringing it up, even if everyone else did. “Sooner or later everyone loses. I get it. If it made more sense to stop the Lanterners in the Glovers, I’d be doing it.” This would also mean ceding vast swathes of territory to them, not anyone’s first choice; from her grim expression, she understood that. “If I could stop the Lanterners by calling them up for a game of cards, I’d do that too. Or by, I don’t know, offering them my right arm. But I’m telling you, this can be done, and I am not quitting if there’s a chance. Am I going to have to fight you to prove it?”

This wasn’t an idle threat. It wouldn’t be the first time he had dueled a Kel, although it would be frivolous to force a moth commander into a duel, however non-lethal, at a time like this.

Menowen looked pained. “Sir, you’re wounded.”

He could think of any number of ways to kill her before she realized she was being attacked, even in his present condition, but most of them depended on her trust that her commanding officer wouldn’t pull such a stunt.

“We can do this,” Jedao said. He was going to have to give this speech to the other ten moth commanders, who were jumpy right now. Might as well get in practice now. “All the way to the Haussen system, it looks like we’re doing the reasonable thing. But we’re going to pay a call on the Rahal outpost at Smokewatch 33-67.” That wasn’t going to be a fun conversation, but most Rahal were responsive to arguments that involved preserving their beloved calendar. And right now, he was the only one in position to stop the Lanterners from arrowing right up to the Glover Marches. The perfect battle record that people liked to bludgeon him over the head with might even come in handy for persuasion.

“I’m listening,” Menowen said in an unpromising voice.

It was good, if inconvenient, when a Kel thought for herself. Unlike a number of the officers on this moth, Menowen didn’t react to Jedao like a cadet fledge.

“Two things,” Jedao said. “First, I know remembering the defeat is painful, but if I’m reading the records correctly, the first eight Kel moths to go down, practically simultaneously, included two scoutmoths.”

“Yes, that’s right,” Menowen said. She wasn’t overenunciating anymore. “The Lanterners’ mothdrive formants were distorted just enough to throw our scan sweep, so they saw us first.”

“Why would they waste time killing scoutmoths when they could blow up fangmoths or arrowmoths instead? If you look at their positions and ours, they had better available targets.” He had to be careful about criticizing a dead general, but there was no avoiding it. Najhera had depended too much on exotics and hadn’t made adequate use of invariant defenses. The Kel also hadn’t had time to channel any useful formation effects, their specialty. “The scoutmoths weren’t out far enough to give advance notice, and surprise was blown once the Lanterners fried those eight moths. What I’m getting at is that our scan may not be able to tell the difference between mothdrives on big scary things and mothdrives on mediocre insignificant things, but their scan can’t either, or they would have picked better targets.”

Menowen was starting to look persuaded. “What are you going to do, sir? Commandeer civilian moths and set them to blow?” She wasn’t able to hide her distaste for the idea.

“I’d prefer to avoid involving civilians,” Jedao said coolly. Her unsmiling eyes became a little less unsmiling when he said that. “The Rahal run the show, they can damn well spare me some engines glued to tin cans.”

The pain hit him like a spike to the eyes. When he could see again, Menowen was frowning. “Sir,” she said, “one thing and I’ll let you continue your deliberations in private.” This was Kel for please get some fucking rest before you embarrass us by falling over. “You had some specific plan for punching holes into the Lanterners?”

“Modulo the fact that something always goes wrong after you wave hello at the enemy? Yes.”

“That will do it for me, sir,” Menowen said. “Not that I have a choice in the matter.”

“You always have a choice,” Jedao said. “It’s just that most of them are bad.”

She didn’t look as though she understood, but he hadn’t expected her to.

Jedao would have authorized more time for repairs if he could, but they kept receiving reports on the Lanterners’ movements and time was one of the things they had little of. He addressed his moth commanders on the subject to reassure them that he understood their misgivings. Thankfully, Kel discipline held.

For that matter, Jedao didn’t like detouring to Smokewatch 33-67 afterward, but he needed a lure, and this was the best place to get it. The conversation with the Rahal magistrate in charge almost wasn’t a conversation. Jedao felt as though he was navigating through a menu of options rather than interacting with a human being. Some of the Rahal liked to cultivate that effect. At least Rahal Korais wasn’t one of them.

“This is an unusual request for critical Rahal resources, General,” the magistrate was saying.

This wasn’t a no, so Jedao was already ahead. “The calendrical lenses are the best tool available,” he said. “I will need seventy-three of them.”

Calendrical lenses were Doctrine instruments mounted on mothdrives. Their sole purpose was to focus the high calendar in contested areas. It was a better idea in theory than practice, since radical heresies rapidly knocked them out of alignment, but the Rahal bureaucracy was attached to them. Typical Rahal, trusting an idea over cold hard experience. At least there were plenty of the things, and the mothdrives ought to be powerful enough to pass on scan from a distance.

Seventy-three was crucial because there were seventy-three moths in the Kel’s Twin Axes swarm. The swarm was the key to the lure, just not in the way that Commander Menowen would have liked. It was barely possible, if Twin Axes set out from the Taurag border within a couple days’ word of Najhera’s defeat, for it to reach Candle Arc when Jedao planned on being there. It would also be inadvisable for Twin Axes to do so, because their purpose was to prevent the Taurags from contesting that border. Twin Axes wouldn’t leave such a gap in heptarchate defenses without direct orders from Kel Command.

However, no one had expected the Lanterners to go heretical so suddenly. Kel Command had been known to panic, especially under Rahal pressure. And Rahal pressure was going to be strong after Najhera’s defeat.

“Do you expect the lens vessels to be combat-capable?” the magistrate asked without any trace of sarcasm.

“I need them to sit there and look pretty in imitation of a Kel formation,” Jedao said. “They’ll get the heretics’ attention, and if they can shift some of the calendrical terrain in our favor, even better.” Unlikely, he’d had the Kel run the numbers for him, but it sounded nice. “Are volunteers available?”

Also unlikely. The advantage of going to the Rahal rather than some other faction, besides their susceptibility to the plea, was that the Rahal were disciplined. Even if they weren’t going to be volunteers. If he gave instructions, the instructions would be rigorously carried out.

The magistrate raised an eyebrow. “That’s not necessary,” he said. “I’m aware of your skill at tactics, General. I assume you will spare the lenses’ crews from unnecessary harm.”

Touching. “I am grateful for your assistance, Magistrate,” Jedao said.

“Serve well, General. The lenses will join your force at—” He named a time, which was probably going to be adhered to, then ended the communication.

The lenses joined within eight minutes and nineteen seconds of the given time. Jedao wished there were some way to minimize their scan shadow, but Kel moths did that with formations, and the Rahal couldn’t generate Kel formation effects.

Jedao joined Menowen at the command center even though he should have rested. Menowen’s mouth had a disapproving set. The rest of the Kel looked grim. “Sir,” Menowen said. “Move orders?”

He took his chair and pulled up the orders on the computer. “False formation for the Rahal as shown. Follow the given movement plan,” he said. “Communications, please convey the orders to all Rahal vessels.” It was going to take extra time for the Rahal to sort themselves out, since they weren’t accustomed to traveling in a fake formation, but he wasn’t going to insult them by saying so.

Menowen opened her mouth. Jedao stared at her. She closed her mouth, looking pensive.

“Communications,” Jedao said, “address to all units. Exclude the Rahal.”

It wasn’t the first speech he’d given on the journey, but the time had come to tell his commanders what they were up to and brace them for the action to come.

The Communications officer said, “It’s open, sir.”

“This is General Shuos Jedao to all moths,” he said. “It’s not a secret that we’re being pursued by a Lanterner swarm. We’re going to engage them at Candle Arc. Due to the Lanterners’ recent victory, cascading effects have shifted the calendrical terrain there. The Lanterners are going to be smart and take one of the channels with a friendly gradient to their tech most of the way in. Ordinarily, a force this small wouldn’t be worth their time. But because of the way the numbers have rolled, Candle Arc is a calendrical choke: we’re arriving on the Day of Broken Feet. Whoever wins there will shift the calendar in their favor. When we offer battle, they’ll take us up on it.”

He consoled himself that, if the Lanterners lost, their soldiers would fall to fire and metal, honest deaths in battle, and not as calendrical foci, by having filaments needled into their feet to wind their way up into the brain.

“You are Kel,” Jedao went on. “You have been hurt. I promise you we will hurt them back. But my orders will be exact, and I expect them to be followed exactly. Our chances of victory depend on this. I am not unaware of the numbers. But battle isn’t just about numbers. It’s about will. And you are Kel; in this matter you will prevail.”

The panel lit up with each moth commander’s acknowledgment. Kel gold against Kel black.

They didn’t believe him, not yet. But they would follow orders, and that was all he needed.

Commander Menowen asked to see him in private afterward, as Jedao had thought she might. Her mouth was expressive. Around him she was usually expressing discontent. But it was discontent for the right reasons.

“Sir,” Menowen said. “Permission to discuss the battle plan.”

“You can discuss it all you like,” Jedao said. “I’ll say something if I have something to say.”

“Perhaps you had some difficulties with the computer algebra system,” she said. “I’ve run the numbers. We’re arriving 4.2 hours before the terrain flips in our favor.”

“I’m aware of that,” Jedao said.

The near side of the choke locus was obstructed by a null region where no exotic technologies would function. But other regions around the null shifted according to a schedule. The far side of the choke periodically favored the high calendar. With Najhera’s defeat, the far side would also shift sometimes toward the Lanterners’ calendar.

“I don’t understand what you’re trying to achieve,” Menowen said.

“If you don’t see it,” Jedao said, pleased, “the Lanterners won’t see it either.”

To her credit, she didn’t ask if this was based on an injury-induced delusion, although she clearly wanted to. “I expect Kel Command thinks you’ll pull off a miracle,” she said.

Jedao’s mouth twisted. “No, Kel Command thinks a miracle would be very nice, but they’re not holding their breath, and as a Shuos I’m kind of expendable. The trouble is that I keep refusing to die.”

It was like the advice for learning the game of pattern-stones: the best way to get good was to play difficult opponents, over and over. The trouble with war was that practicing required people to die.

“You’ve done well for your armies, sir. But the enemy general is also good at using calendrical terrain, and they’ve demonstrated their ruthlessness. I don’t see why you would pass up a terrain advantage.”

Jedao cocked an eyebrow at her. “We’re not. Everyone gets hypnotized by the high fucking calendar. Just because it enables our exotics doesn’t mean that the corresponding terrain is the most favorable to our purpose. I’ve been reading the intel on Lanterner engineering. Our invariant drives are better than theirs by a good margin. Anyway, why the hell would they be so stupid as to engage us in terrain that favors us? I picked the timing for a reason. You keep trying to beat the numbers, Commander, when the point is to beat the people.”

Menowen considered that. “You are being very patient with my objections,” she said.

“I need you not to freeze up in the middle of the battle,” Jedao said. “Although I would prefer for you to achieve that without my having to explain basics to you.”

The insult had the desired effect. “I understand my duty,” she said. “Do you understand yours?”

He wondered if he could keep her. Moth commanders who were willing to question him were becoming harder to find. His usual commanders would have had no doubts about his plan no matter how much he refused to explain in advance.

“As I see it,” Jedao said, “my duty is to carry out the orders. See? We’re not so different after all. If that’s it, Commander, you should get back to work.”

Menowen saluted him and headed for the door, then swung around. “Sir,” she said, “why did you choose to serve with the Kel? I assume it was a choice.” The Shuos were ordinarily seconded to the Kel as intelligence officers.

“Maybe,” Jedao said, “it was because I wanted to know what honor looked like when it wasn’t a triumphal statue.”

Her eyes went cold. “That’s not funny,” she said.

“I wasn’t being funny,” he said quietly. “I will never be a Kel. I don’t think like one of you. But sometimes that’s an advantage.”

She drew in a breath. “Sir,” she said, “I just want to know that this isn’t some Shuos game to you.” That he wasn’t being clever for the sake of being clever; that he wouldn’t throw his soldiers’ lives away because he was overeager to fight.

Jedao’s smile was not meant to reassure her. “Oh, it’s to your advantage if it’s a game,” he said. “I am very good at winning games.”

He wasn’t going to earn her loyalty by hiding his nature, so he wasn’t going to try.

It was even easier to win games if you designed the game yourself, instead of playing someone else’s, but that was a Shuos sort of discussion and he didn’t think she wanted to hear it yet.

The eleven fangmoths and seventy-three calendrical lenses approached Candle Arc only 1.3 hours behind schedule. Jedao was recovering the ability to read his watch, but the command center had a display that someone had enlarged for his benefit, so he didn’t look at it. Especially since he had the sneaking feeling that his watch was off by a fraction of a second. If he drew attention to it, Captain-magistrate Korais was going to recalibrate it to the high calendar when they all had more important things to deal with.

The crews on the lenses had figured out how to simulate formations. No one would mistake them for Kel from close range, but Jedao wasn’t going to let the Lanterners get that close.

“Word from the listening posts is that the Lanterners are still in pursuit,” Communications informed them.

“How accommodating of them,” Jedao said. “All right. Orders for the Rahal: The lenses are to maintain formation and head through the indicated channel”—he passed over the waypoint coordinates from his computer station—”to the choke locus. You are to pass the locus, then circle back toward it. Don’t call us under any circumstances, we’ll call you. And stick to the given formation and don’t try any fancy modulations.”

It was unlikely that the Rahal would try, but it was worth saying. The Rahal were going to be most convincing as a fake Kel swarm if they stayed in one formation because there wasn’t time to teach them to get the modulation to look right. The formation that Jedao had chosen for them was Senner’s Lash, partly because its visible effects were very short-range. When the Rahal failed to produce the force-lash, it wouldn’t look suspicious because the Lanterners wouldn’t expect to see anything from a distance.

“Also,” Jedao said, still addressing the Rahal. “The instant you see something, anything on scan, you’re to banner the Deuce of Gears.”

The Deuce was his personal emblem, and it connoted “cog in the machine.” Everyone had expected him to register some form of fox when he made brigadier general, but he had preferred a show of humility. The Deuce would let the Lanterners know who they were facing. It might not be entirely sporting for the Rahal to transmit it, but since they were under his command, he didn’t feel too bad about it.

“The Rahal acknowledge,” Communications said. Jedao’s subdisplay showed them moving off. They would soon pass through the calendrical null, and at that point they would become harder to find on scan.

Commander Menowen was drumming her fingers on the arm of her chair, her first sign of nervousness. “They have no defenses,” she said, almost to herself.

It mattered that this mattered to her. “We won’t let the Lanterners reach them,” Jedao said. “If only because I would prefer to spend my career not having the Rahal mad at me.”

Her sideways glance was only slightly irritated. “Where are we going, sir?”

“Cut the mothdrives,” Jedao said. He sent the coordinates to Menowen, Communications, and Navigation. “We’re heading there by invariant drive only.” This would probably prevent long-range scan from seeing them. “Transmit orders to all moths. I want acknowledgments from the moth commanders.”

“There” referred to some battledrift, all sharp edges and ash-scarred fragments and wrecked silverglass shards, near the mouth of what Jedao had designated the Yellow Passage. He expected the Lanterners to take it toward the choke. Its calendrical gradient started in the Lanterners’ favor, then zeroed out as it neared the null.

Depending on the Lanterners’ invariant drives, it would take them two to three hours (high calendar) to cross the null region and reach the choke. This was, due to the periodic shifts, still faster than going around the null, because the detours would be through space hostile to their exotics for the next six hours.

Reports had put the Lanterners at anywhere from sixty to one hundred twenty combat moths. The key was going to be splitting them up to fight a few at a time.

Jedao’s moth commanders acknowledged less quickly than he would have liked, gold lights coming on one by one.

“Formation?” Menowen prompted him.

There weren’t a lot of choices when you had eleven moths. Jedao brought up a formation, which was putting it kindly because it didn’t belong to Lexicon Primary for tactical groups, or even Lexicon Secondary, which contained all the obsolete formations and parade effects. He wanted the moths in a concave configuration so they could focus lateral fire on the first hostiles to emerge from the Yellow Passage.

“That’s the idea,” Jedao said, “but we’re using the battledrift as cover. Some big chunks of dead stuff floating out there, we might as well blend in and snipe the hell out of the Lanterners with the invariant weapons.” At least they had a good supply of missiles and ammunition, as Najhera had attempted to fight solely with exotic effects.

The Kel didn’t like the word “snipe,” but they were just going to have to deal. “Transmit orders,” Jedao said.

The acknowledgments lit up again, about as fast as they had earlier.

The Fortune Comes in Fours switched into invariant mode as they crossed into the null. The lights became less white-gold and more rust-gold, giving everything a corroded appearance. The hum of the moth’s systems changed to a deeper, grittier whisper. The moth’s acceleration became noticeable, mostly in the form of pain. Jedao wished he had thought to take an extra dose of painkillers, but he couldn’t risk getting muddled.

Menowen picked out a chunk of coruscating metals that had probably once been some inexplicable engine component on that long-ago space fortress and parked the Fortune behind it. She glanced at him to see if he would have any objections. He nodded at her. No sense in getting in the way when she was doing her job fine.

Time passed. Jedao avoided checking his watch every minute thanks to long practice, although he met Captain-magistrate Korais’s eyes once and saw a wry acknowledgment of shared impatience.

They had an excellent view of the bridgelights even on passive sensors. The lights were red and violet, like absurd petals, and their flickering would, under other circumstances, have been restful.

“We won’t see hostiles until they’re on top of us,” Menowen said.

More nerves. “It’ll be mutual,” Jedao said, loudly enough so the command center’s crew could hear him. “They’ll see us when they get that close, but they’ll be paying attention to the decoy swarm.”

She wasn’t going to question his certainty in front of everyone, so he rewarded her by telling her. “I am sure of this,” he said, looking at her, “because of how the Lanterner general destroyed Najhera. They were extremely aggressive in exploiting calendrical terrain and, I’m sorry to say, they made a spectacle of the whole thing. I don’t imagine the Lanterners had time to swap out generals for the hell of it, especially one who had already performed well, so I’m assuming we’re dealing with the same individual. So if the Lanterner wants calendrical terrain and a big shiny target, fine. There it is.”

More time passed. There was something wrong about the high calendar when it ticked off seconds cleanly and precisely and didn’t account for the way time crawled when you were waiting for battle. Among the many things wrong with the high calendar, but that one he could own to without getting called out as a heretic.

“The far terrain is going to shift in our favor in five hours, sir,” Korais said.

“Thank you, good to know,” Jedao said.

To distract himself from the pain, he was thinking about the bridgelights and their resemblance to falling petals when Scan alerted him that the Lanterners had shown up. “Thirty-some moths in the van,” the officer said in a commendably steady voice. “Readings suggest more are behind them. They’re moving rapidly, vector suggests they’re headed down the Yellow Passage toward the choke locus, and they’re using a blast wave to clear mines.”

As if he’d had the time to plant mines down a hostile corridor. Good of them to think of it, though.

Menowen’s breath hissed between her teeth. “Our banner—”

His emblem. The Kel transmitted their general’s emblem before battle. “No,” Jedao said. “We’re not bannering. The Lanterners are going to be receiving the Deuce of Gears from over there,” where the Rahal were.

“But the protocol, sir. The Rahal aren’t part of your force,” Menowen said, “they don’t fight—”

That got his attention. “Fledge,” Jedao said sharply, which brought her up short, “what the hell do you mean they’re not fighting? Just because they’re not sitting on a mass of things that go boom? They’re fighting what’s in the enemy’s head.“

He studied the enemy dispositions. The Yellow Passage narrowed as it approached the null, and the first group consisted of eight hellmoths, smaller than fangmoths, but well-armed if they were in terrain friendly to their own calendar, which was not going to be the case at the passage’s mouth. The rest of the groups would probably consist of eight to twelve hellmoths each. Taken piecemeal, entirely doable.

“They fell for it,” Menowen breathed, then wisely shut up.

“General Shuos Jedao to all moths,” Jedao said. “Coordinated strike on incoming units with missiles and railguns.” Hellmoths didn’t have good side weapons, so he wasn’t as concerned about return fire. “After the first hits, move into the Yellow Passage to engage. Repeat, move into the Yellow Passage.”

The fangmoths’ backs would be to that damned null, no good way to retreat, but that would only motivate them to fight harder.

If the Lanterners wanted a chance at the choke, they’d have to choose between shooting their way through when the geometry didn’t permit them to bring their numbers to bear in the passage, or else leaving the passage and taking their chances with terrain that shaded toward the high calendar. If they chose the latter, they risked being hit by Kel formation effects, anything from force lances to scatterbursts, on top of the fangmoths’ exotic weapons.

The display was soon a mess of red lights and gold, damage reports. The computer kept making the dry, metallic click that indicated hits made by the Kel. Say what you liked about the Kel, they did fine with weapons.

Two hellmoths tried to break through the Kel fangmoths, presumably under the impression that the Rahal were the real enemy. One hellmoth took a direct engine hit from a spinal railgun, while the other shuddered apart under a barrage of missiles that overwhelmed the anti-missile defenses.

“You poor fools,” Jedao said, perusing the summaries despite the horrible throbbing in his left eye. “You found a general who was incandescently talented at calendrical warfare, so you spent all your money on the exotic toys and ran out of funding for the boring invariant stuff.”

Menowen paused in coordinating damage control—they’d taken a burst from an exploding scout, of all things—and remarked, “I should think you’d be grateful, sir.”

“It’s war, Commander, and someone always dies,” Jedao said, aware of Korais listening in; aware that even this might be revealing too much. “That doesn’t mean I’m eager to dance on their ashes.”

“Of course,” Menowen said, but her voice revealed nothing of her feelings.

The fangmoths curved into a concave bowl as they advanced up the Yellow Passage. The wrecked Lanterner hellmoths in the van were getting in the way of the Lanterners’ attempts to bring fire to bear. Jedao had planned for a slaughter, but he hadn’t expected it to work this well. They seemed to think his force was a detachment to delay them from reaching the false Kel swarm while the far terrain was hostile to the high calendar, and that if they could get past him before the terrain changed, they would prevail. It wasn’t until the fourth group of Lanterners had been written into rubble and smoke that their swarm discipline wavered. Some of the hellmoths and their auxiliaries started peeling out of the passage just to have somewhere else to go. Others turned around, exposing their sides to further punishment, so they could accelerate back up the passage where the Kel wouldn’t be able to catch them.

One of Jedao’s fangmoths had taken engine damage serious enough that he had ordered it to pull back, but that left him ten to work with. “Formation Sparrow’s Spear,” he said, and gave the first set of targets.

The fangmoths narrowed into formation as they plunged out of the Yellow Passage and toward five hellmoths and a transport moving with the speed and grace of a flipped turtle. As they entered friendlier terrain, white-gold fire blazed up from the formation’s primary pivot and raked through two hellmoths, the transport, and a piece of crystalline battledrift.

They swung around for a second strike, shifting into a shield formation to slough off the incoming fire.

This is too easy, Jedao thought coldly, and then.

“Incoming message from Lanterner hellmoth 5,” Communications said. Scan had tagged it as the probable command moth. “Hellmoth 5 has disengaged.” It wasn’t the only one. The list showed up on Jedao’s display.

“Hold fire on anything that isn’t shooting at us,” Jedao said. “They want to talk? I’ll talk.”

There was still a core of fourteen hellmoths whose morale hadn’t broken. A few of the stragglers were taking potshots at the Kel, but the fourteen had stopped firing.

“This is Lieutenant Colonel Akkion Dhaved,” said a man’s voice. “I assume I’m addressing a Kel general.”

“In a manner of speaking,” Jedao said. “This is General Shuos Jedao. Are you the ranking officer?” Damn. He would have liked to know the Lanterner general’s name.

“Sir,” Menowen mouthed, “it’s a trick, stop talking to them.”

He wasn’t sure he disagreed, but he wasn’t going to get more information by closing the channel.

“That’s complicated, General.” Dhaved’s voice was sardonic. “I have an offer to make you.”

“I’m sorry,” Jedao said, “but are you the ranking officer? Are you authorized to have this conversation?” He wasn’t the only one who didn’t like the direction of the conversation. The weight of collective Kel disapproval was almost crushing.

“I’m offering you a trade, General. You’ve been facing General Bremis kae Meghuet of the Lantern.”

The name sounded familiar—

“She’s the cousin of Bremis kae Erisphon, one of our leaders. Hostage value, if you care. You’re welcome to her if you let the rest of us go. She’s intact. Whether you want to leave her that way is your affair.”

Jedao didn’t realize how chilly his voice was until he saw Menowen straighten in approval. “Are you telling me you mutinied against your commanding officer?”

“She lost the battle,” Dhaved said, “and it’s either death or capture. We all know what the heptarchate does to heretics, don’t we?”

Korais spoke with quiet urgency. “General. Find out if Bremis kae Meghuet really is alive.”

Jedao met the man’s eyes. It took him a moment to understand the expression in them: regret.

“There’s a nine-hour window,” Korais said. “The Day of Broken Feet isn’t over.”

Jedao gestured for Communications to mute the channel, which he should have done earlier. “The battle’s basically won and we’ll see the cascade effects soon,” he said. “What do you have in mind?”

“It’s not ideal,” Korais said, “but a heretic general is a sufficient symbol.” Just as Jedao himself might have been, if the assassin had succeeded. “If we torture kae Meghuet ourselves, it would cement the victory in the calendar.”

Jedao hauled himself to his feet to glare at Korais, which was a mistake. He almost lost his balance when the pain drove through his head like nails.

Still, Jedao had to give Korais credit for avoiding the usual euphemism, processed.

Filaments in the feet. It was said that that particular group of heretics had taken weeks to die.

Fuck dignity. Jedao hung on to the arm of the chair and said, as distinctly as he could, “It’s a trick. I’m not dealing with Dhaved. Tell the Lanterners we’ll resume the engagement in seven minutes.” His vision was going white around the edges, but he had to say this. Seven minutes wouldn’t give the Lanterners enough time to run or evade, but it mattered. It mattered. “Annihilate anything that can’t run fast enough.”

Best not to leave Doctrine any prisoners to torture.

Jedao was falling over sideways. Someone caught his arm. Commander Menowen. “You ought to let us take care of the mopping up, sir,” she said. “You’re not well.”

She could relieve him of duty. Reverse his orders. Given that the world was one vast blur, he couldn’t argue that he was in any fit shape to assess the situation. He tried to speak again, but the pain hit again, and he couldn’t remember how to form words.

“I don’t like to press at a time like this,” Korais was saying to Menowen, “but the Lanterner general—”

“General Jedao has spoken,” Menowen said crisply. “Find another way, Captain.” She called for a junior officer to escort Jedao out of the command center.

Words were said around him, a lot of them. They didn’t take him to his quarters. They took him to the medical center. All the while he thought about lights and shrapnel and petals falling endlessly in the dark.

Commander Menowen came to talk to him after he was returned to his quarters. The mopping up was still going on. Menowen was carrying a small wooden box. He hoped it didn’t contain more medications.

“Sir,” Menowen said, “I used to think heretics were just heretics, and death was just death. Why does it matter to you how they die?”

Menowen had backed him against Doctrine, and she hadn’t had to. That meant a lot.

She hadn’t said that she didn’t have her own reasons. She had asked for his. Fair enough.

Jedao had served with Kel who would have understood why he had balked. A few of them would have shot him if he had turned over an enemy officer, even a heretic, for torture. But as he advanced in rank, he found fewer and fewer such Kel. One of the consequences of living in a police state.

“Because war is about people,” Jedao said. “Even when you’re killing them.”

“I don’t imagine that makes you popular with Doctrine,” Menowen said.

“The Rahal can’t get rid of me because the Kel like me. I just have to make sure it stays that way.”

She looked at him steadily. “Then you have one more Kel ally, sir. We have the final tally. We engaged ninety-one hellmoths and destroyed forty-nine of them. Captain-magistrate Korais is obliged to report your actions, but given the numbers, you are going to get a lot of leniency.”

There would have been around 400 crew on each of the hellmoths. He had already seen the casualty figures for his own fangmoths and the three Rahal vessels that had gotten involved, fourteen dead and fifty-one injured.

“Leniency wasn’t what I was looking for,” Jedao said.

Menowen nodded slowly.

“Is there anything exciting about our journey to Twin Axes, or can I go back to being an invalid?”

“One thing,” she said. “Doctrine has provisionally declared a remembrance of your victory to replace the Day of Broken Feet. He says it is likely to be approved by the high magistrates. Since we didn’t provide a heretic focus for torture, we’re burning effigy candles.” She hesitated. “He said he thought you might prefer this alternative remembrance. You don’t want to be caught shirking this.” She put the box down on the nearest table.

“I will observe the remembrance,” Jedao said, “although it’s ridiculous to remember something that just happened.”

Menowen’s mouth quirked. “One less day for publicly torturing criminals,” she said, and he couldn’t argue. “That’s all, sir.”

After she had gone, Jedao opened the box. It contained red candles in the shape of hellmoths, except the wax was additionally carved with writhing bullet-ridden figures.

Jedao set the candles out and lit them with the provided lighter, then stared at the melting figures. I don’t think you understand what I’m taking away from these remembrance days, he thought. The next time he won some remarkable victory, it wasn’t going to be against some unfortunate heretics. It was going to be against the high calendar itself. Every observance would be a reminder of what he had to do next—and while everyone lost a battle eventually, he had one more Kel officer in his corner, and he didn’t plan on losing now.

About the Author

Yoon Ha Lee is an award-nominated Korean-American sf/f writer (mostly short stories) who majored in math and finds it a source of continual delight that math can be mined for sf/f story ideas. Her fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, Tor.com and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Her collection Conservation of Shadows will be published in 2013.

The Future, One Thing at a Time

Matthew Johnson

It’s conventional wisdom in science fiction that the future doesn’t come one thing at a time. This idea, which is sometimes called Campbell’s Rule (or Campbell’s Exception), is explained in these terms in the book On Writing Science Fiction by George Scithers et. al: “You can never do merely one thing. Our world a century hence could be almost as alien as another planet; each change triggers countless others.” As fondly as the book is remembered, history shows that this rule simply isn’t accurate. Different fields of science and technology do not march in lock-step; the world may change more rapidly or slowly for different places and people, and sometimes it really does change one thing at a time.

As literary advice, the rule was probably meant to prevent the sort of shallow stories that focus on a single change or technology in isolation. These are particularly common among beginners and among non-genre writers dipping their toes into the genre, which may be why SF writers and editors hold to this rule so fiercely. The problem is that it embodies an attitude towards technology that forms a big part of why so much older SF feels dated today. It may also lead to a lot of today’s most cutting-edge SF seeming out-of-step in just a few years: just as we laugh at giant computers of old SF novels and the voice-call-only communicators in the original Star Trek, many novels published just a decade ago are already beginning to look left behind. (Nearly all books that depict online social spaces, for instance, portray environments that are nearer to Second Life than to Facebook, while hackers are shown as outlaw programmers rather than basement-dwelling script kiddies.)

Why do we believe that the future can’t happen one thing at a time? In my opinion, it’s based on three fundamental fallacies about technological progress.

First, the fallacy that technological progress is inevitable. This is the idea that the future must be different from the past, but in many ways our lives are fundamentally the same as they were 20, 50, or 100 years ago. Consider a typical morning: we are likely awakened by an alarm clock (first adjustable, mechanical alarm clock patented 1847), eat a breakfast of eggs, toast or, if we are feeling particularly futuristic, corn flakes (patented 1896); shower in water heated by electricity (first electric water heater patented 1889) or gas (1868); put on clothing made of cotton (made affordable by the cotton gin in 1793) mixed with, perhaps, some synthetics such as nylon (1935), Lycra (1959) or Gore-Tex (1976).

Many technologies basically stop developing, in some cases surprisingly quickly: the development of canned and frozen foods led SF writers to imagine endless variations on technologies for synthesizing and preserving foods, but the food in your pantry and freezer was made in ways that have scarcely changed since the days of Louis Pasteur or Clarence Birdseye. Technologies can even disappear: Although digital watches were once a powerful symbol of futurism, if you’re under 30 you’re unlikely to put one on before leaving the house, preferring to get the time from your phone instead. (Some of these abandoned technologies eventually make a comeback: If you stop for a bathroom break you’re using a toilet that was pioneered in Minoan Crete and then forgotten for more than two millennia.)

When technologies do continue to develop, most of the changes that occurred after the initial flurry of innovation are basically incremental, things that improve the experience of using a technology without altering its basic function. The alarm clock, for instance, has undergone numerous changes—electrification, digital readout, the ability to play music and radio broadcasts—but what it does, and the role it plays in our lives, is unchanged. There are some genuinely disruptive technologies which change the world on a large scale: The classic example is the automobile which, as Scithers notes, shaped the 20th century in dozens of ways, from hollowing out cities to causing wars. But even these technologies soon settle into a state of slow, incremental change. When we drive to work we are using a machine that, while safer, more fuel-efficient, and easier to drive, is fundamentally little different from the Model T.

Moreover, the effects of things like the automobile create their own inertia; they often act as a brake on the changes other technologies might cause. Look at personal computers and the Internet. Not so long ago we imagined that, because of these advances, we would all be working from home, with employers hiring from a global pool of remote employees. Instead we still drive to work in offices (where we may use computers less powerful than the ones we have at home), and our children sit in rows in classrooms, paper and pens in hand, all because cities have been planned for cars and our educational system has been built to meet the needs of 19th-century industrial technology.

Truly disruptive technologies are the exception, not the rule. Few have anywhere near the impact of the automobile or even the Internet. A more typical example would be the microwave, a device that is uncannily similar to the “instant cookers” found in so many imagined futures but which has nevertheless utterly failed to replace the oven. When technology does change society, it’s much more common that only some sectors are affected—and it’s rarely possible to predict which ones and in which ways. Despite being funded by the military, the Internet has had little effect on the life of the average soldier. Nor has it much changed academia, despite the fact that academics were the first to use it. What it changed instead was the music industry. The unexpected collision of the Internet with cheap memory and digital compact discs (which the industry itself introduced, goosing profits in the short term but inadvertently digging its own grave) made it possible for consumers to rip and share songs, leading an entire generation to think of music as something they only have to pay for if they feel like it. Even within that industry, change has been uneven: Classical and jazz have been much less affected, since listeners tend to be older and sound quality is more highly valued, while the sheet-music business is near to dead because files are smaller and no quality is lost in copying.

The second fallacy about technological progress is that all technology progresses at the same rate. This likely has its origin in the roots of SF in the 19th century, in which a small number of basic technologies—primarily efficient motors, mass production, and electric power—led to fairly uniform technological development across much of society. The last 80-odd years, however, have seen a much more varied rate of progress, as industrial technology has largely stalled and other fields, in particular computer and communications technology, have developed in ways that were almost unimaginable based on their starting points. This is why they appear in little or no older SF, or appear in forms that are nothing like how they actually evolved. For all the giant computers that were hell-bent on controlling the world (or were already in control of it), it’s hard to find an example as late as the 1970s of a personal computer on a par with an Apple II, much less an iPad.

Technological progress is also often dependent on factors other than technology itself. One way in which our world would be almost unrecognizable to anyone visiting from more than 25 years in the past is that it is nearly cashless. While bills and coins are still in circulation, it’s rare that we have to pay cash for anything. In that case, though, the technology had been around for years before it had much of an effect. Credit cards were first introduced in 1959, while the magnetic stripe that made them less of a hassle to use appeared in 1970. It was only after a 1970’s Supreme Court ruling allowed banks to operate under the usury laws of their home state—effectively allowing them to set their own interest rates—that credit cards became profitable, rather than the loss-leader service they had previously been. Today it’s hard to imagine our world without credit cards. To name just one example, without them the Internet would be much more like the “world mind” imagined by SF writers than the shopping mall/arcade/peepshow (with a small library attached) that it is today.

This isn’t to say that technology doesn’t change our lives, but the ways in which it does so are subtle, unpredictable, and different for various places and people. This leads to the third fallacy of technological progress in SF: Everyone uses technology in the same way. Most early SF was written by (or from the point of view of) scientists and engineers, and the genre still bears the stamp of that viewpoint today; also, SF writers tend to be enthusiastic early adopters of new technologies, which colors their view. But widespread adoption of a technology (and therefore its continued development) can often depend on the unexpected uses found for it by unexpected audiences. These audiences may also choose not to adopt technologies until they reach a point where they are useful to them.

A good example is the landline telephone, something which we consider to be a fundamental feature of modern life but which never caught on in much of Africa due to a number of factors that prevented the investment in infrastructure needed. That didn’t mean that there was no desire for the technology: When cell phones, which have a much smaller infrastructure footprint, became affordable, they spread across Africa, leapfrogging generations of communications technology and leading to a level of adoption that for some years was higher than in most industrialized nations.

The same phenomenon may happen on a smaller scale, and even in industrial countries. While it was the middle class that led adoption of the personal computer and the Internet in North America, smartphone use rose first and fastest among people with lower incomes for whom it was not an additional computer but a first one, cheaper and more practical than any PC. In rare cases groups may be so selective as to adopt only a handful of technologies, something to which anyone who’s ever seen an Amish man or woman gliding by on rollerblades can testify.

Different groups may also innovate according to their own needs. While we use Facebook to share ironic motivational posters and get in touch with old classmates, Kenyan herders use iCow to connect themselves (and their cows) to vets, breeders, and buyers of meat and milk. As a result, the look of the future may vary depending on where you are and whom you’re with. Similarly, teenagers have often been leaders in determining how new technologies will be used: sharing music files over the Internet, for example, rather than simply ripping the CDs you already own onto your iPod, or using their cell phones for everything but making voice calls.

What’s more significant than how technology develops is how it changes our lives. That, too, is variable and unpredictable. For example, while digital technologies have changed how we do our jobs, what we do remains largely the same; we might do it more quickly, more easily, or remotely, but few of us do jobs that our grandparents wouldn’t recognize. (More people are “the person who fixes the machine when it breaks,” but the job description itself goes back to Daedalus.) In fact, the fastest growing segment of the economy is the service sector, which is probably the most resistant to technological change.

What has changed, though, is our leisure time. Not only do we engage in entirely new pursuits (such as video games) in new ways (such as listening to music or watching video, both of which were once inherently collective activities, mostly in private), our whole attitude towards leisure is different. Where we once defined ourselves through our work, we now do so largely through our play—something that was made possible by the development of digital and communications technologies, but which only a few SF writers imagined. The role-playing game featured in Larry Niven’s and Steven Barnes’ Dream Park, published in 1981, is played live with actors, props, and holograms and available only to the wealthy, a far cry from the millions of players of today’s MMOs. Arthur C. Clarke, on the other hand, not only imagined communications satellites in 1956 but also that these satellites would be used to broadcast porn—though his notion that it would be in the form of documentaries about tantric carvings on the walls of Hindu temples is rather quaint.

The emphasis on play over work has had a significant effect on business and technology. While RIM, the maker of the Blackberry, bet heavily on business needs continuing to drive the mobile device industry, Apple bet on consumers, and we all know how that worked out. What’s interesting is that consumers have become the main influence on how technology develops at a time when our purchasing power has actually declined. This, too, is an unexpected result of technological change, as microprocessors, miniaturization, fiber optics, and other developments have worked together to make media and electronics a cheaper treat and an ever-larger part of our non-working lives. (Teens now spend an average of 10 hours per day consuming screen media.)

What all this means is that we need to re-evaluate just what SF is supposed to do. One of the fundamental premises of classic SF—If this goes on…—ignores the fact that many technologies do not keep going on. Technological, cultural, and economic forces eventually move them into long periods of equilibrium or, at best, slow and incremental change. This is true of most industrial technologies; one of the most popular models of airplane in use today, the 747, went into service in 1969. We’d be foolish to think that it’s not true of computers, genetic engineering, or any other technology you could name. Moreover, when things do go on they do so unpredictably. The complex interaction between culture, economics, politics, and any number of other factors mean that it’s impossible to guess more than two steps ahead with any accuracy. “If SF isn’t able to predict the future, it can take on a more important role, one closer to that currently played by fantasy: to imagine how new technologies, as well as social, cultural and political changes, can enable us to tell stories that we couldn’t tell before, and to shed new light on what it means to be human.

About the Author

Matthew Johnson lives in Ottawa with his wife Megan and their sons Leo and Miles, where he works as a media educator and writes fantasy and SF when time and circumstances permit. His novel Fall From Earth was published in 2009, and his short fiction, which has appeared in places such as Asimov’s Science Fiction, Fantasy & Science Fiction and Strange Horizons, will be collected in 2013 in Irregular Verbs from Chizine Publications. Many of his stories involve food in some way, in particular “Long Pig,” which may be the only fantasy story ever written in the form of a restaurant review.

A Germ of an Idea: An Interview with John Varley

Jeremy L. C. Jones

In Slow Apocalypse by John Varley, sitcom writer Dave Marshall’s life is disintegrating. His career has fallen apart. His finances are a mess. His wife isn’t really speaking to him. It’s all happening in a sort of painful slow motion.

Then Marshall stumbles upon a story that just may be his lucky break—a bacteria that eats crude oil, a vengeful scientist, and a world without petroleum products.

It’s a story too outlandish to be true… until the government cover-ups, media black-outs, and internet conspiracy theories convince Marshall that what he has is not the plot to his next screenplay, but a sneak peek of the apocalypse. In other words, the story might not save his career, but it might save him and his family from something much worse.

A lot happens in the first fifty pages of Slow Apocalypse. There’s great tension between the fast-moving plot and the slow-moving apocalypse. Varley locks on with a close third-person POV that sometimes feels like first-person. And always, there’s the signature Varley story-telling.

Varley’s newly-released novel is a bit more reminiscent of Mammoth, his standalone about a mad scientist (and circus owner), time-travel, and animals rights than, say, his Thunder and Lightening novels, which were written in the spirit of Robert A. Heinlein’s juvenile adventures.

Slow Apocalypse is, perhaps, Varley’s least science-fictional, but it is otherwise typical of his writing— set in the near future, character-driven, organically plotted, written sparse prose. There’s certainly much of the hippie in Varley’s writing, especially as he presents readers with questions about personal responsibility and the role of government.

What came first with Slow Apocalypse—the bacteria, the Colonel falling through the window, Dave Marshall, a “what if?” or something else altogether?

What came first was my editor suggesting that she would like to see a post-apocalypse book from me, if I could come up with an idea that hadn’t already been done to death. I got the idea about bacteria eating all our oil, and then the story grew as they always grow, with a few characters and a few ideas. I never know where a story is going when I start it.

You mentioned on your website that Slow Apocalypse is your “attempt to reach a larger audience.” So how does a goal like this effect the writing?

The only way it affected the story was that it was not supposed to be hard science fiction. No spaceships or time travel or things like that. By a strict definition, it is SF, because it involves a new strain of bacteria developed by a scientist in a lab—a mad, or at least angry, scientist, I guess—and the disintegration of civilization. Other than that, I didn’t have to do anything different. My writing has always been about characters and how they develop, plot and ideas are always secondary, and it was the same here.

Where did you find Addison, the protagonist’s daughter? How’d you develop the character?

I don’t consciously develop a character. I see them, and I start to write about them, and they grow as you do that. It’s a mysterious process, and I don’t think about it too much because I’m afraid it wouldn’t work anymore if I did. I can tell you where I got the name. I’m a Disneyland freak. We visited more than a dozen times while we were living in Southern California, on one of those great passes that pay for themselves after you’ve used them twice, and then it’s all free. We were in California Adventure about to ride on one of the kiddie rides, the Golden Zephyr spaceships, and one mother was calling out to her daughter to sit still. I liked the name.

I’m guessing you did a whole lot of research for this novel.

Of course the Internet was helpful. I had to find out about energy, food, and water needs of Los Angeles, where it all came from, how many people the region could support without a constant supply of things from outside. (Answer: not very many.) I was surprised to find that 50% of LA’s power comes from coal burning. Almost ALL of its water comes from elsewhere. I had to find maps of fault lines, and discovered that one passes less than a half a mile south of the apartment building where I was living.

All the locations in the book are scrupulously accurate. Much of that was enabled by actually driving and walking around in the areas I covered and taking pictures. The only location that was fictionalized was the Marshall’s house. I used an actual house on an actual site in the Hollywood Hills as the model, but I placed it elsewhere. There is a Mockingbird Lane in that area, but it’s in a different location from where I have it.

It would have been much harder to write the book without Google Street View. I drove up and down many streets, virtually, and it saved a lot if time and gasoline. I don’t like Google the company, but I used their excellent products because they are free.

The book takes off like a rocket. How do typically you plot your novels? How’d you plot this one? How do you build suspense in a novel in general and how’d you build it in Slow Apocalypse in particular?

Again, it’s like characters, the plot just grows as I write it. I don’t outline, and seldom think more than five or ten pages ahead, until somewhere around two-thirds of the way through, when the ending takes shape. I don’t consciously build suspense, not like Hitchcock did; I just follow the story where it leads.

You grew up in Texas, a state that some folks think of as a country all its own. Do you think of yourself as a Texan? What of your Texas childhood shades your writing, if anything?

You can’t stop being a Texan, much as I sometimes want to when I hear of the political insanity down there. The only tolerable place I know of in Texas is Austin, which many Texans themselves call “The People’s Republic of Austin.” I got out of the place right after graduation from high school, and have scarcely been back since. I don’t think it has much to do with my writing, except the Cajun influence I had when growing up in the southwest corner of Texas, close to the Louisiana coast, inspired two of the main characters in my semi-juvenile books starting with Red Thunder. Many of my classmates were Cajun.

In what ways—artistically, personally, politically, etc.—are you still a hippie? And in what ways have you left that part of your life behind?

I’m obviously not still living in crash pads in Los Angeles or the Haight-Ashbury, and not doing any drugs, not even grass, because I seem to be allergic to it. (Something that’s saved me a lot of money over the years.) I’m still anti-war, anti-pig-capitalist (I am a capitalist, but not a greedy, cheating one), and in favor of tolerance as much as humanly possible. I never got into the loonier aspects of hippiedom, so that is still the same. I’m still and always will be an atheist unless Jesus shows up and changes my mind.

About the Author

Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and teacher. He is the Staff Interviewer for Clarkesworld Magazine and a frequent contributor to Kobold Quarterly and Booklifenow.com. He teaches at Wofford College and Montessori Academy in Spartanburg, SC. He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006. Jones lives in Upstate South Carolina with his wife, daughter, and flying poodle.

Another Word: Practicing Dissatisfaction

Daniel Abraham

I graduated from college with a BS in Biology. That’s not what you’d call a terminal degree, and the job opportunities that opened before me weren’t exactly in my field of study. I was engaged to a lovely woman who had plans to travel, and so it followed that I did too. In the meantime, though, I needed a job. Not a career, but something I could do to get the bills paid. And, if possible, I wanted something that was fun.

Borders Books & Music had a fair-sized store not far from me, and, being the sort of person I am, I’d spent a fair amount of leisure time there, browsing and drinking coffee and listening to whatever CDs the music staff put over the store system. I applied there, I got the job, and within I’d say a month I didn’t go there for fun anymore. The office politics, the corporate policy, the constantly changing schedules, and the exposure to the public changed my experience. I started having nightmares about faceless people coming up to me and saying, “Yeah, I’m looking for this book?”

The place I’d previously gone to play and relax and enjoy myself had become something else. It became a job. The tradeoff was they paid me. And I got to borrow books. And I got a little store credit every month. Honestly, apart from the office politics, it wasn’t that bad a gig.

One of the unexpected benefits was that, at that time and in the brick-and-mortar book industry, the pressure of the paid-for endcap hadn’t come completely to bear. In my assigned sections, I got to pick which books got the special display. I got to put up staff recommendations with my name on them. Even better, I got to see how much my recommendation made a difference. There was one particular book—The Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion by Elliot Aaronson and Anthony R. Pratkanis—that had barely sold at all until I faced it out and put a recommendation by it. Then we sold five to six copies a month, which might also have been example of the subject.

The world of book retailing is a different place now. The books that get faced out and recommended in the big chain stores are more a reflection of marketing budget. The Borders that I used to work at is an empty building in a dead shopping mall, waiting to be renovated and reinvented, or else knocked down. But there’s a whole new culture of recommendations and reviews and discussion that didn’t exist in those dark days before anyone knew what the Internet was. Now we have review blogs. We have Goodreads. Amazon and Barnes & Noble have even made it possible to review the reviews and say whether a particular comment was useful or not. The conversation about what books are worth reading and why is broader and deeper than I could have imagined back when I could recommend a book just because I liked it—and have the privileged position of retail clerk give my opinion weight.

The thing is, I don’t write online book reviews. I signed up for Goodreads, and I get notifications all the time about things my friends have read and what they thought of them. When I get something from Amazon or Barnes & Noble or Powell’s, I’ll cruise through the reviews and see what people said—not just about the book, but to one another in the comments about the reviews. But when the time comes to decide how many stars to give something I just finished, I almost never do.

It took me a long time to figure out why I’m so reluctant, but here’s what I’ve come to: The more I practice something, the better I get at it.

Looking back at how I learned to talk about literature, there are three main models that I was taught. First, there were the book reviews that I did in middle school. They weren’t analyzing the story so much as offering evidence that I’d read it. Plot summary was enough, and I’ve read reviews on Amazon and Goodreads—and sometimes in the bigger magazines—that are pretty nearly that. Here is a book; here is what happens in it. I liked it, or I didn’t. Thank you and good night.

Then there were papers, both in high school and college, that were written more or less the classic five-paragraph style. Introduction with a thesis statement, three things about the book that were interesting, and a conclusion. I have a confession to make here. Mrs. Winters, if you’re out there and reading this, look away now. I mastered this form in high school to the point that my final paper in senior honors English was comparing and contrasting two books I had not at that point actually read: Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness.

I had the handouts from class, and it wasn’t hard to thread them together. Both books were concerned with racial issues. Both took place on rivers. One had characters carried by the current, and the other had characters going against it (no doubt symbolic of something). I got an A- for spelling errors.

That kind of paper is most like literary criticism, and the ideal which my 17-year-old self cheerfully betrayed was that by examining things like the symbolism of rivers and race, we become better readers. I’ve read some literary criticism since then that was done right, and it was a pleasure. But for the most part, I don’t see that in the online reviews. It takes time and a depth of understanding that the Internet doesn’t encourage or reward.

No, the best model of online reviews in my experience is the third model: critique.

I’ve done a lot of critiques over the years. The first were in creative writing classes in college, which could kindly be called the blind leading the blind. I’ve been to professional workshops including Clarion West and Rio Hondo. I was in a local critique group for almost a decade with professional writers including Walter Jon Williams, George R. R. Martin, Ian Tregillis, Melinda Snodgrass, and S. M. Stirling. There are numerous guides on how to give a good critique. The most basic is the “shit sandwich” approach: You say something good about the work, then all the stuff that was crap in the middle, and end with something else good. The most honest was Maureen McHugh’s description of a good critique: “Say something true and useful.” Regardless, the point of a critique is to find fault—often to take a perfectly good story and reread it as many times as I have to in order to find something wrong, then think about how to fix it.

Reviews—useful reviews, professional reviews, good reviews—are most like critiques given after it’s too damn late to fix anything. They aren’t there to help the author do better, but to guide readers toward books they’d like and away from books they wouldn’t. For that, a good reviewer is worth her weight in gold. Reading as a reviewer means keeping an eye toward what’s good and what’s bad. It’s an act of judgment.

Which is to say, it’s practicing dissatisfaction. And like anything we practice, the more we do it, the better we get at it.

My pleasure at being in the bookstore changed once I was doing it professionally. In the same way, my reading changes when I’m thinking about what I’m going to say about a book. It’s already hard enough for me to turn off my critical faculties and read for joy, for pleasure—to read as a reader. I don’t want to be a critic. I want to be an enthusiast. I want to practice loving the books I read and the experience of reading them without looking for how it could have been better. I want to practice forgiving literature its flaws and shortcomings the way I did when I was a kid, before I got sophisticated and analytical.

Readers owe a debt to good reviewers. A mind trained to do that work has made a trade-off, and that sacrifice was made for our benefit. I want to be warned away from lousy books and pointed toward good ones, then I want to fall into the page and just take pleasure in reading. And so, as a rule, I won’t go online and post what I thought of a book. I’ll try not to pick it apart and find its flaws and think about how it could have been done better.

When it comes to reading, I try to be bad at being unsatisfied. That’s something I’m just as happy to leave to the pros.

About the Author

Daniel Abraham is a writer of genre fiction with a dozen books in print and over thirty published short stories. His work has been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Hugo Awards and has been awarded the International Horror Guild Award. He also writes as MLN Hanover and (with Ty Franck) as James S. A. Corey. He lives in the American Southwest.

Editor’s Desk: Six and Counting

Neil Clarke

We have a little news to report this month. First of all, this is our sixth anniversary issue. Thank you for your support over the years. The last six years have been amazing and you’ve helped make that possible. Considering how much Clarkesworld has managed to grow over the years, I’m eager to see what opportunities the next six provide.

Sadly, one of the team won’t be with us for that. Jason Heller, our non-fiction editor, has turned in his resignation and will be leaving us by the end of the year. In his year with us he’s done a lot great things and helped expand our non-fiction offerings. All of us here wish him the best of luck and continued success. In our next issue, I should be able to announce his successor and reveal some of our plans for the year ahead.

Last month, I mentioned that one of my goals is to be able to start paying our staff a real wage. I focused some attention on the importance of our Amazon and Weightless Books esubscriptions, since they are responsible for the bulk of our income. We do have other sources of income, but a few of them were sidelined by complications in my life and other issues. I’m talking about our annual anthology series and the fabled Clarkesworld chapbooks.

I am very pleased to say that the chapbooks are finally back on track. At this moment, a print copy of our January 2012 issue is sitting on my desk. It’s only a proof, but we should be able to start producing final copies of this and other issues later this month. I hope to have at least four or five issues completed in time for the World Fantasy Convention in Toronto (along with some fun new promotional cards). These will be issued unsigned, but we will be making arrangements to have a small number of signed copies available as soon as possible.

The same life issues put the annual Clarkesworld anthology series, Realms, on hold after the second volume. The series restarts with all the stories from our third year under the name Clarkesworld: Year Three. The introduction explains the name change, so I won’t go into it here, but I can say that it should be available in print and ebook format by the end of the year. Volumes four and five will follow quickly in early 2013.

Last month, I encouraged our readers to leave reviews on our Amazon subscription page. Several of you left some very kind words there and I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it. The time you spent doing that was extremely valuable to us and impacts our visibility on a site that is responsible for sending us a lot of new readers each month.

Thanks again for a wonderful six years. Catch you next month!

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, owner of Wyrm Publishing and a 2012 Hugo Nominee for Best Editor (short form). He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Clarkesworld Magazine

Issue 74

Table of Contents

(To See the Other) Whole Against the Sky

by E. Catherine Tobler

Aquatica

by Maggie Clark

Everything Must Go

by Brooke Wonders

Foundation and Reality: Asimov’s Psychohistory and Its Real-World Parallels

by Mark Cole

The Art of Brutal Prose: An Interview with Mark Lawrence

by Peter Hodges

Another Word: It Gets Better with SFF (but SFF has to Get Better, too)

by Lev AC Rosen

Editor’s Desk: I, Cyborg

by Neil Clarke

New World

Art by Ken Barthelmey

© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2012
www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

(To See the Other) Whole Against the Sky

E. Catherine Tobler

Close your eyes. As you travel farther away from me, your ship becoming little more than a pinprick of light amid infinite pinpricks of light, I want you to remember me as I was the first time you saw me, in the field. The day I glowed.

All right, it was an interface malfunction, but I still glowed. You told me I had been set on fire, that I was all colors and so seemed white, holy, pure.

How we laughed.

Query: If two interstellar ships leave Point A in the same instant, traveling at identical velocities in opposite directions, at what distance does communication between Ship A and Ship B break down?

As first meetings go, it wasn’t terrible.

When you’re assigned a new partner, you never know how you’ll mesh. In this business, it usually doesn’t matter. We are expendable and know that from the outset. What matters are the multitrillion dollar cargoes of compressed titanium, the ships, the Manifest Destiny. The fallibility of machines in the vastness of deep space means bringing a human to tend them, to coddle when needed. Assigning one crewmember per ship keeps costs down. Keeps the murders down, too. The company took its time in understanding this. They tried multiple configurations: complete crews with chains of command; pairs; loners.

The traditional chains of command became problematic almost from the outset, crews slaughtering each other over money and station when they realized both were all they would have in the deep black. Sometimes it went quickly: the men killed each other over the women, the women killed each other over the men. When the wreckage of the Prospero was finally recovered, the company required only two more similar incidents to convince themselves.

Launched-as-pairs had more success in the early years, but the fucking ruined everything. Regardless of sexual orientations, interests, configurations, it always came to fucking. Two humans, confined in an enclosed space for more years than one can rightly imagine when the contracts are signed, create an immense amount of havoc, destruction, ejaculate, and blood.

Providing crewmembers with other means of relief for such long voyages was deemed outside the company’s scope, if lacing MREs with birth control and controlling one’s carry-on luggage was not. Even employing homophobes in an effort to avoid such base desires did not have the desired outcome. They fucked, killed their partner, and then went insane as the ship drifted untended. One can presume with half a dozen such reported incidents, there were three to five times more that number.

The proper custodians were deemed to be loners, us. Those content to exist with a minimum of contact. While suicide remains a concern in certain circles—circles that will never reach the uppermost levels—we are used to anhedonic wonderlands, to agoraphobic serenity. With a communications unit for holographic interaction, we do what we do best: talk behind our aliases as we ensure the natural hum and shiver of the machines around us. For a loner, this is the precisely perfect occupation, a diet of minimally-invasive companionship that can be closed at a moment’s notice.

Response: “If” is a terrible word. When two interstellar ships leave Point A. There is no if involved, for the ships do leave, in the same instant, travelling at identical velocities. Ship A heads toward illusory west. Ship B heads into illusory east. Point A becomes the anchor around which all other stars move, a point where you can calculate all those distances you love so well.

At what distance does communication between the ships break down? Never. This is the awful truth. The ships will continue to communicate, via radio frequency waves and pings. It is the people on board the ships who lose the ability to communicate. The VR interface no longer interfaces. One can send time delayed holograms via the interface, but even this data becomes obese. It is stripped, to voice alone, which travels faster than you might imagine—what is the speed of a whisper in the dead of night? It is like a well-barbed arrow, sharp and fierce. But even voice becomes too heavy in the deep black, so thought and emotion are condensed into communiques, nearly old fashioned letters which speak perhaps twice as well as any VR interface might. They are slow, but allow for harder truths. In the end, there will be only silence, even as the ships whisper via radio, via small Bracewell probes launched into the black in an attempt to extend communication range. Ships don’t care how long a thing takes. Neither do loners. Usually.

“Are you awake? I hope you’re awake.”

They were the first words I spoke to you as I waited for your avatar to log in to the virtual environment. The first place I conjured for you was that field, empty but for the grass and the sky. Earth blues and greens, mid-summer, northern hemisphere. It could have been anywhere of course. I chose these intentionally. Not to ground you in something familiar, but to show you something familiar to me.

“Sometimes the avatar takes a while to come online.”

I could see your name on my console, small and green and hovering in the lower left. You weren’t a known entity to me then, but Company-approved nonetheless and green-lighted. I walked a slow circle as I waited, hands outstretched to brush the scentless white blooms that reached up through the grass. I couldn’t feel the grass either, of course, but memory filled those blanks easily enough. Drought grass stubble, my palms would itch. The grass moved in a slow wave even though there was no wind. If I concentrated elsewhere, the scent of coffee intruded, so I didn’t.

You coalesced from copper clouds. Tall, though not as tall as you would become. Pale, but not so pale yet, either. I stopped pacing and curled toes into grass that did not exist. “I don’t mean to get you out of bed.” Of course, I did; the Company required such things. “Can you confirm the distance?”

Your voice cracked as it came online—I blamed the interface even then, because your voice was only ever even from this moment on. “Eleven,” you said, and it seemed as though you had not spoken for a very long time. “Eleven point two AU.”

“And the other?” My hands paused in the grass even as yours reached for it. “Earth?” How far were we at this point? Was your ship processing data as it should? Our numbers should match, they should always match.

It happened then, that burst in the interface and your eyes went wide. I thought I could see my reflection in your eyes (you chose blue, so did I)—the way I seemed to glow as if lit from within, but nothing inside me would ever burn so bright.

You told me I had been set on fire, and your hands reached from the grass, toward me. I did not move, knowing there might be a touch, avatar against avatar, but I would not feel it. All colors you said and looked as though you were warming your hands against a campfire. “Holy, pure.”

We laughed, maybe the first thing we did in unison. We both knew it for a lie, considering where we were and who we must be. Loners.

“Can you confirm the distance?”

Your head came up, eyes taking in the landscape beyond me. Your hands slid into your pockets that formed at the mere idea of pockets crossing your mind, a place to put your hands so they would not enfold me. Your avatar flared with light then, a pulse of blue as the interface crackled.

“Two hundred seventy-seven thousand—”

Our minds have trouble comprehending such distances. The system compensates, makes it momentarily bearable. I drew up a chart between us, a familiar thing to anyone schooled in astronavigation (we both were). My fingers pulled gleaming lines like neon spaghetti from apparent nothingness, to illuminate the distance from here to there, but not back again.

“ . . . six hundred AU,” you finished. How could we be so far away from Earth?

“Sleep now,” I said, and erased the hovering lines with a sweep of my hand. You would be tired. It was hard coming out of hypersleep—in the latter days and when ships flew with full crews, it was the point when a good percentage of shipboard deaths occurred, crew disoriented and wary of everything. A body needed time. A body needed distance.

“Online in another two hours for recalibration.”

Query: Do east and west exist in space? North and south?

You will think your ship is haunted; the Company tells us it is a commonplace belief, so includes this amusing anecdote in all briefings. You always laugh, until you sign the contract, find yourself on board and in the depth of space, and start to hear things. Most cities are haunted and as your ship is a city for one, so too does it hold its ghosts. You bring them on board with you—eidolons, fears, illusory things that should be beyond people of our training and education. Still, Einar murmurs.

Einar is more like a city than not, despite its population concerns. A vast array of universe-traversing equipment rises around your room as it does mine, a one-room studio which looks much like the spaces we occupied before the Company offered its contract. Beyond the borders of tidy, automated kitchens and icon-laden desks, is a window that surveys the labyrinthine network of power conduits and production stations. Stations only you will use, but not today. In the distance, a vacuum door lit overhead with a perfectly white LED sign which reads “Cargo Observation.”

You won’t like this door, no one does. It will come to be your least favorite part of the ship. You can cross the pleasantly padded deckplate as you want, jog through the maintenance corridors to clear your mind, but the door you will avoid. It is the starkest reminder that you are somewhere else, somewhere far from home. Such reminders are reason enough to keep the window’s opacity set to maximum, preserving the room’s Terran simplicity. Your desk is orderly, fingerprints erased almost as they are left. Beyond this space, the conduits and especially the door, will fade.

Not that you see them often. Any corridor can be transformed with the brush of a hand, any thought overlaying the great gerbil maze with varying degrees of falsehood. Atmosphere condensers become the trees of Central Park in early fall, with customizable time-of-day and alterable crowd density controls. Neat stacks of cargo crates make for lovely park benches and with one simple command, squirrels will always come for the acorns you never hold.

The surreality of the corridors have hidden the haunting for some time, daunted your belief. The Company told you, after all, that you would hear things on occasion. The Company was diligent enough to train you on the sadly predictable failures of the human mind during long periods of isolation. Is it worse or better then, time spent together? It’s hard to say, because while it eases one ache, it intensifies others. We may come to think the sounds are us, moving ever closer to each other, stumbling in dark corridors as we reach for each other’s light, even though we know this is improbable. We occupy identical ships, with identical cargoes, heading in opposite directions.

It was certainly one of the squirrels. You think you hear a metallic bang, like a foot stubbed somewhere deep in the corridors. The squirrel that was not there never turned, merrily eating the acorn that was not there, that had never been in your hand, and surely didn’t respond when you asked, “Did you hear that?”

A proper New York squirrel always turns at the first shock of sound, gone to the treetops after a noise like that. Street animals know best that cruelties always awaited the careless in a city. Even Einar. Perhaps especially so.

Response: You will come to understand that north, south, east, or west do not exist within in the limitless black of space. Compass points lose merit where there is no center from which to reach. There is no pole, no equator. Compass points can be manufactured as one manufactures anything. From the requirements of one’s mind, anything might spring.

Begin at any stable point—a galaxy, a planet—understanding that stability is also a myth, for everything is in constant motion (see: Newton, 1687; Kepler, 1609). Visible objects are useful, but understand that visibility is likewise a myth. Light requires time to travel its distances, so what you see is no longer what exists. Galactic equator, grids infinitesimally divisible, you limit yourself with four directions.

My field, your field. They come to be one and the same, though more often than not we choose my field with its long grasses and blue sky. You say you feel like an intruder here. You like that feeling and I come to like having you here. I know I can always turn the interface off if I need to be alone, but less and less do I find myself needing that. We stay longer every time. If the connection drops, we come back a moment later, right where we were before as if never gone. Even after breaking for sleep, we come back like that. Picking up a never-ending conversation.

There is a couch in the field today, red and velvet and if we close our eyes—our real eyes and not our virtual eyes—we can almost feel it. I like it best when it’s brushed backwards. When I look at your hands splayed across the fabric, I watch how you stroke it backwards, too. Against the soft grain, so the light sheen turns to dark matte. My cheek rests against your cheek and if I close my eyes I can feel that connection, too.

I can’t remember how it happened—it’s too far gone now and I could calculate the AU, but I don’t. I can’t remember how talk of charts and distances and shipwide pressures turned into talk of family, of things we had and would never have. We were loners—we had forgone marriage and children, we had never formed the bonds so many others do. I always wondered what that would be like, to find someone you could tolerate for such a long journey. There were near misses for you and me both, the glance of an asteroid off the port side, but no impact, no hard strike.

There was an asteroid, you say. Or rather, a meteor. All right, a micrometeor shower. Like rain on the hull. Did the ship incur damage? No, nothing like that. No shield fluctuation, no hull breach. It’s an explanation of a sound you can’t otherwise explain: the squirrel hadn’t been there, after all, and part of your rational mind knows this. It’s an explanation of a thing you can’t otherwise understand: one body moving through another, each with a different destination. I picture our ships, moving ever farther apart as they close in on their destinations.

Just interplanetary dust, you say. If you could wipe the ship’s windows clean, you would.

Query: What about the aliens?

I become well schooled in conversations, hearing you even when you aren’t there to reply. Is it that I know you so well by this point, or is it that you remain elusive and blank-slate, so any reply from my own mind will slot where your own would go? Is it that I am a similar slate, empty until you arrive with your words? You’re more distant now and I shouldn’t feel it, but I do. I mark the distance in logs, charts, tables. Soon, we will pass beyond all communication.

I wake in the night feeling hands on me. Insistent. These hands prove that the shortest distance between two points may be a straight line, but that’s never the best route to take. Thumbs knead into flesh, pull open, feast. Canvas beneath fingers, painted in firm strokes. I wake, heavy with blood, startled it hasn’t boiled through my skin, left me in a puddle. I am alone, I should be beyond this point. Should never have come to this point.

The deck is solid beneath my feet when I run. Running gives me a focus, sets those concocted hands at a firm distance if only for a while. What I can reach of the corridors in four looping circuits amounts to ten kilometers. Just over six miles of corridors that can look like anything I want them to. I could run mountain trails, trees bleeding from gold to orange and back again. There could be birdsong, a breeze to cool the sweat on my skin, but there is only the black anthracite luster of the corridors I have come to prefer. I don’t look at the door with its LED lights.

I’m moving farther away from you when I climb the corridors, coming closer to you when following the arc back to the command module. Machinery breathes around me, a thundering exhale that will see me to my destination. The cargo is quiet; compressed titanium never fusses, only rests in its countless cases (one million, four hundred thirty thousand—it’s my job to count the countless and that number is almost the distance from Saturn to Sol, almost).

Did you hear that?

I ask you, even though you are not there. But there is a thump before the machine whir swallows any other sound.

An emphatic no.

Response: Everyone asks about aliens. There is a clause in the Company contract about that too, about the distances involved—distances which you are about to experience should you agree to Company terms and sign your life away. Yes, alien life probably exists in the deep black, but these distances, the Company says, make any extraterrestrial contact unlikely.

Given the number of galaxies, the number of stars within those galaxies, the number of stars which support planetary systems, to presume life doesn’t exist somewhere is foolish, but you will likely not encounter it. Consider how difficult it is to haul the cargo you’re about to haul. Consider the distance involved, the communication depravation you are about to endure.

Of course, there are protocols one should follow, if the unlikely proves likely and one is not immediately killed or fucked or fucked to death. These are detailed in contract subsections which no one reads.

(A foolish presumption perhaps, but what if true? What if there’s a reason for all the silence? What if there is simply no one else? No one wants to dwell on that. Not even loners.)

“Are you awake? I hope you’re awake. Don’t get out of bed.”

If you are like me, and surely over these past months we have established that you are and I am, and we are—then you are awake most hours, even if in bed. Time ceases to matter really. The ship keeps time, but we don’t always follow along. In space, it’s always night beyond the windows, no matter the glow that fills the corridors.

My voice probably crackles and spits, fat dripping into a fire, echoing in reverse at times the way yours does now. I’m getting farther away. This message will be delayed—is it three months now? I could calculate it, but I don’t.

I can hear you say it’s fine and I picture you sitting bolt upright in bed, because it’s the way I came to your last message. It didn’t matter—it was fine—whenever the words came, whenever you came. It was the turning of one body into another in the tangle of the bed sheets, across countless (no) astronomical miles. It was that voice, welcome at any hour, because it managed to be a bridge in the distance we believed we needed. Distance from everything else, so we could find each other here. Deep impact.

Your room is wholly dark but for the hologram of me—the windows don’t let the white LEDs bleed through, there is no door, only this warm darkness that crackles with me. It won’t be bright, this hologram; distance precludes that now. Space tears at the message in transit. You quickly learn to gauge how close someone is to you by how much of them has been ravaged away. Next time, it will be only voice, and after that— I imagine the way you study me, hands reaching for sheets the way they once reached for field grass, the way they once reached for me and maybe still do. If you are anything like me.

Much like the last message you sent me, it doesn’t matter what I say. I tell you about the ship, I tell you about my days, which are quiet and filled with running. There are books to read, of course; so many books, carried as far as they’ve ever been carried. There is the occasional squirrel—you taught me how foolish they are and they aren’t there at all, but I’ve named them all, even though they are all the same, the same as every leaf that falls loose from Central Park’s autumn canvas. I erase every soul in the park with the slide of one finger, but for one figure I keep distant and shadowed with your name. The ship is good, the cargo is complacent, and I’ve not been killed, fucked, or fucked to death by aliens.

Status quo. Query: How are you?

You don’t dream, so I tell you all of mine, as if you will somehow understand and acquire the ability through me. Improbable, I think, if I cannot even press my hand to your hand, but I keep telling you what happens when I appear to be asleep. I dream about that door.

Cargo Observation. Why do crates (one million, four hundred thirty thousand) of compressed titanium require observation? Were these ships used for something else before we hauled such trouble-free cargo? I don’t know, but in the dream I go to that door and press my hand against its flat surface. It’s as cold as anything you can imagine—we are in the depths of space, we know cold and can imagine plenty. The door doesn’t so much open as it disappears and I’m not sure what I expect to find on the other side, but it isn’t the familiar anthracite corridors I encounter.

I am running then, moving farther away from you when I climb the corridors, coming closer to you when following the arc back to the command module. Machinery breathes around me, a thundering exhale that will see me to my destination, but my destination is not the command module—not mine, because this one is just that much different. It’s cleaner, colder, and it has a scent of salt. Of another body. Aliens, I think, and for a moment panic wells up, but then— Then.

You stride through the access hatch and your rough palm notches against mine and if I could teach you how to dream it would be in this moment, when we know the warmth of each other’s fingers in the dead cold of space. It would be when we realize that we are not alone, that we have never been alone, that we have been travelling on this vessel together all the while. You were only ever through a doorway and I was only ever through a doorway, and perhaps this is noted in the Company contract—perhaps we agreed to it, felt a wariness for the door because of strings attached, because if we knew we were not alone—

Not loners at all. And we know what happens to not-loners, so my hand slides from yours and we step back, as if performing a dance, and there is a hard flicker—a burst of energy through the interface, and your pale face illuminates, as bright as the sun we have not seen in years, and you tell me I’m glowing, I’m glowing.

Close your eyes. I want you to remember me this way.

About the Author

E. Catherine Tobler lives and writes in Colorado. Among others, her fiction has appeared in SciFiction, Fantasy Magazine, Realms of Fantasy, Talebones, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. She is an active member of SFWA and senior editor at Shimmer Magazine.

Aquatica

Maggie Clark

When Host laughed, her esca wriggled, and the gills behind her pectoral fins vented hard enough to stir up the silt. Organ tumbled in the waste-stream’s wake, but kept one tiny black eye fixed on her bobbing, bioluminescent beacon—the first he had seen in six turns of the current along the foreign reef.

“I almost ate you, little one,” said Host. “Are you not too big to be wandering around on your lonesome? Does your gut not grow stunted, your digestion weak? Come, latch on—there is always room for one more.”

Organ’s gaze darted about the glow of her scattered bone spikes. Sure enough, two others were already fused to Host’s underside—the first recent enough that one dull eye still gazed back; the other reduced to little more than his seed, a dangling pair of gonads with no speech, no sight, no mind. In his hunger, Organ felt a muscle-cramping urgency to bite into Host’s skin. The proximity of her pheromones did not help.

“No, thank you,” said Organ, faintly, as he began to swim away. “I’m fine.”

Host at first said nothing, but when even the most furious pumping of his caudal fin brought no relief from her scent, Organ knew he was being followed. He could only keep up such a pace for so long, though, and in his exhaustion eventually dropped close to the silt, picking feebly at motes of dubious sustenance. Her long, sharp teeth soon lit the way.

“You will die out here, little one.”

Organ felt grains of sand sit poorly in his gullet—the beginning, he knew, of that very end, unless a serpent sensed him sooner, or one of the scuttling shelled creatures with long, snapping pincers that lurked in the crevices of rocks. He turned an eye Host’s way and worked the shiver of his body-length as if to say—“And I will die with you as well.”

But Host did not snap him up at once, as for a moment Organ feared she would. He knew her kind to be fiercely competitive among its own—one Host even feeding off another’s drifting egg sacks when territory was at stake—but whether the protectiveness he watched them extend to others of his kind would survive a refusal to merge as firm as his, he had no way of knowing for sure. The size difference alone gave him to fear the worst.

“But you will live, too, will you not?” said Host instead. “I will carry you into the next generation and your vitality will not go to waste.”

Organ shook with weak amusement, enough to make him brave. “Come now,” he said. “I have heard your kind sing greater virtues of the merge than that. Why, some promise knowledge far beyond what you say our minds can manage on their own—all of Host-kind’s wisdom coursing through our blood streams, if only we would take a bite! Still others invite us to ride with them, to witness distant wonders not one of us could ever visit on his own. Never mind that we will have ceased to be ourselves by the time we arrived.”

Host eyed him awhile, her long maw twitching just inches over the murk. “Would you rather I promised you such things? Told you I can still hear the other two? That their bodies may move less and less of their own volition, but inside me, their thoughts remain just as strong—or, no, even stronger—as when they first felt the calling to my flesh?”

“No.” Organ paused to choose his words carefully, conscious of how tremulous and small his breathing and body movements now seemed beside her sturdy boom, the heavier gestures of her fins. “But I am surprised that you do not lie like the rest. So many do.”

Host laughed again, her whole spine twisting in the act. Still her movements did not seem to Organ hostile. “We are not all of us users by intention, little one,” said Host. “By design, perhaps, but—come now, surely you understand. This has always been the way of things. What is to be gained by running from it? From dying alone, from hunger or predation? From giving nothing back to the circle of life that gave you life at all?”

Organ’s small pucker of a mouth opened and then closed. His gills flared but took little in. What life? he thought but dared not ask, What life have I been given? “Oh, never mind,” he said, and started down the reef again. “You wouldn’t understand.”

“No, please—try me,” said Host, easily keeping pace. Organ struggled to keep her scent from overwhelming all his other thoughts.

“It’s something I heard once, in the sweet waters of my nursery,” he said after a while, and at first only to distract himself from his hunger and her pheromones. “I heard it from the Hosts who lined the edges of the stream where I was born and reared. The ones who guarded us from all other dangers as we matured.”

“I have not done that good work yet myself,” said Host, watching Organ closely with one great big eye. “But I hope to give rest to an egg sack soon, and see it fully hatched and grown. Such talk there is, too, among the elders at the nursery!”

“Ours spoke of a very special stream,” said Organ. “A stream powerful enough to melt the solid above us, just as it comes from melted solids deep below.”

“Why, little one!” said Host. “What a giant notion for so small a creature! I had no idea your kind could hunger for such big bites.”

Organ fixed one eye coldly on her and burst ahead—if only for a few moments, before his weakness again took hold.

“Now, now,” said Host, easing up beside him. “I meant nothing by it. So you want to go to the place where the earth struggles to cut a hole in the sky? And you think you can make it all on your own, before the rest of you shuts down?”

Organ turned from the seeming incredulity in Host’s stare. “I aim to try,” he said. “It’s my lifetime, is it not?”

“You might be the strangest of your kind I’ve ever known,” said Host. Organ saw himself reflected as the tiniest fleck in her large, dark eye. “Mind if I follow you for a while?”

“If I said I did, would you leave me alone?”

Host laughed again—and this time, the violent wriggle of her esca caught the notice of another, hapless creature, no doubt thinking that it, in fact, was on course for a juicy meal. Instead, the instant it seized upon Host’s lure, Host’s jaw snapped shut and her prey shook violently in the grip of her teeth until at last it fell still.

“No,” said Host, after she had swallowed the bulk of soft-bellied creature. “I suppose not. But—there are advantages, no?”

Organ’s insides knotted at the merest whiff of a tendril of flesh still hooked about one of Host’s jagged, gleaming teeth. With great reluctance, but greater hunger, he darted in, nibbled a bit off the end, then darted well ahead to swallow. Host for her part made no smug comment, while the warmth of the meat moved easily, at least, through Organ’s aching gullet—and seemed to take with it the remainder of the sand. Still he sensed a weight lodged inside him, deep and raw: a little sac just below the ridge of his cheek, which pressed at him with more urgency now than he had ever felt before.

They swam at the great height of the reef’s crest for two more changes of the current—Organ working his fins routinely to exhaustion; Host swimming idly, sometimes barely propelling herself forward, by his side. For all the brightness of her esca, her spikes, and her teeth, her massive body cast a fearful shadow upon the silt, and for the first time since Organ had set out from his nursery, he did not sense imminent predation in the darkness all around. For a long while in their travels, Organ spoke very little, and Host even less—except when she posed the inevitable question, asking him his reason for a voyage that would still end at best in a lonely death.

“Because I want to know why I am here,” said Organ once, while resting.

“But that’s easy—to propagate, of course.”

“Why, though? To what end?”

Host studied him with one great black eye. “The stories among your kind are not enough, little one? All those Organ-songs about the great circularity of all being?”

“And what does your kind know of those?”

“Much,” was all Host would say. Organ felt too much resentment for her age, and the age of all Hosts, to ask for more.

Organ recalled the first time he had seen her kind, back when he and the other eggs from his clutch were still indistinguishable from one another—each just two big dull eyes and a whipping tail, blindly ravenous and desperately swimming towards a sweetness they could not yet name. There had been so little time to get his bearings when the long sheet of eggs that held him scattered, but one eye through the lens of his soft-shelled cradle fixed just the same on the flash of glowing teeth that had brought such swift and indifferent ruin to his kin: the Host on territorial rampage through waters just beyond the safety of the nursery. Then his own egg sac tore for all his frantic writhing, and when he was free of it his first sensation of the world at large was a scent so rich it immediately deadened the whole of his olfactory nerve. Instinct alone kept him moving until that central sight returned—of fear, of salt, of kindred and of stranger flesh, and finally of the distant call of food.

At the bottom of an eddy in the lushly glowing nursery, an older member of Organ’s kind lay half-buried in the sand, his dorsal sheared and his pectorals torn clean off: a far less fortunate victim of another Host’s attack on floating, unborn young. The richness of the water allowed him sustenance enough to meet his death more slowly—though even then, without the Hosts forever circling the perimeter, a scuttling hard-shell would have made quick work of him. For a time, though, he still could gape and whisper at the new arrivals gathered all around him—teaching them how the currents kept to patterns that would mark the passage of their youth; how all earth’s creatures lived in a great, round melt in an otherwise frozen universe; how brief their lives would be, and how that brevity made them strong though most were fated to be small.

“You give of your whole selves to the future,” said the old one, wheezing. “No Host can say the same. Pity them, Organs! Pity their long misery—far longer than my own—for they can never return in full to the eggs that made them. They lay the nests that we have seeded, and then move on. Never will they find such rest as we who will be reborn.”

Within eight currents, the few Hosts from Organ’s clutch had already grown far larger than their kin, and they started to swim in more exclusive ranks according to the size range of their glowing teeth and spikes. For them, the old Organ’s fading speeches proved of only passing interest; their eyes were now fixed on the twisting bodies of older Hosts, telling far older stories up above.

The rest in turn were starting to feel a hunger that the sweet water alone would no longer sate. After the old one had ceased to gape and suck breath in the sand beneath them, the first of Organ’s kind darted up and out of the eddy, heading straight for one of the long-toothed creatures that lingered so alluringly at the fringes of the stream. For currents now, the rest had watched these strangely kindred giants battle and heard their boastful calls—but the first mistook his aim and struck one in her esca. His death, at least, was swift.

One current later, others driven wild by their sense of smell forayed up and out, this time with greater success—the Hosts’ bellies beginning to swell with tiny new appendages; up to a dozen fresh mouths forever fused into their skin. Organ smelled the lurking Hosts just as powerfully as his brothers, but the giants’ gleaming teeth still brought to mind the terror of his first memory, and by holding back a little while he began to bear witness to the changes swiftly set upon his kin. The heavy silences where their mouths once stirred, their fins once moved. The useless folds where their eyes once lived.

A new Host arrived soon after, giving rest to a fresh sheet of eggs that Organ soon spied floating in the depths about the nursery, and she shared with the other Hosts what she had heard and seen along a distant, sandy stretch not twelve whole currents out. There, she said, a warm stream was projecting itself higher into the biting chill of the solid sky than any she had seen before; and a matching, piercing whine was coming from the solids of the sky like it was wounded, or maybe fighting back.

Organ looked to the clutch of new eggs drifting in the distance, far above the shallows of his nursery, and wondered then if they were not all trapped inside a greater egg. If all that was needed to escape his brothers’ fate was another violent wriggle—a desperate bursting out before still larger teeth and bony spikes came crashing in. Or perhaps the whine this Host had heard was another kind of seed? Perhaps the whole of this place had not yet been fertilized, let alone deposited near lands where the young within would further grow?

Organ had some sense of his chances when he swam up and out from the eddy just as the next batch of frantic young came pouring in, but currents would pass before he realized how fortunate his size had been in at least one regard—for in the midst of one of their heated tussles, the giant, sharp-toothed Hosts had completely failed to see him darting past. And though Organ swam eye-to-eye past more than one of his older, atrophying brothers, not one was in any position anymore to cry out on the Hosts’ behalf.

Organ woke with no recollection of having first fallen into the daze that often took him as he swam—let alone of Host scooping him into the tangle of her bony spines, where his weakening body had further rested while she swam. Even after regaining most of his alertness, Organ still reeled from what extraordinary images had just wended through his mind—of swimming endlessly in gaping mouths; of being trapped forever in blood streams larger than whole reefs. He trembled then, and in trembling realized Host’s skin was so close now that Organ’s whole body ached for want of pressing up against hers, and of letting that most natural of processes begin.

“Where—” he said.

“We’re close now, little one,” said Host. “Save your strength.”

But through the inky haze of his mind, Organ saw illumined a fact that would not commend his little body to further rest. “Why are you helping me?” he said. “What does my journey matter to you? You, who will live for all of my forever, and the forevers of all my brothers, and the forevers of all their kindred offspring besides?”

“Oh, little one,” said Host. “You think the world no less full of questions for we who swim so much longer in it? We who watch your kind give yourselves unthinkingly up to us—again and again? We who have as our ultimate duty your protection as younglings, and then the preservation and good use of your seed after you have latched and aged away?”

Organ leaned against Host’s bone spikes, which twisted steadily with every flick of her caudal fin—itself four times the size of him.

“Do you think there are other melts out there?” said Organ. “And streams so strong and hot they can run from one great melt of a world to the next?”

“The way I sense tell of it,” said Host, “our melt was made by a density of solids that could not sustain itself forever. Heat formed from the friction, the unfathomable pressure of so much solid, and lo! Our world was formed—a hot melt with a solid skin cast over it, over which a cooler melt was made possible by constant venting of the hotter melt’s excess. So do I think all this friction, all this density singular in the vast solid of the universe? No—it cannot be. There must be pockets just as dense out there—solids that have had to melt just like ours, and in melting filled themselves with creatures far beyond our wildest imaginings.”

Organ felt a feeble gladness come upon him. “I’ve never known a Host to be a dreamer,” he said. “I hardly thought you had need of dreams, when you already had so much else. Our whole lives—mine and my brothers—bleeding out to greaten yours.”

Host was silent for a long moment. “Soon you will have to decide, little one, whether or not to add yourself to that long line of givers, or die a dreamer out here instead.”

“I have already decided,” said Organ, and he struggled to lift himself from the twisting skin of Host’s tremendous back. “I want to see where the waste-stream from the melt below pierces the solids up on high. I want to hear the screaming of the sky.”

“As you wish,” said Host. “We’ll be there soon enough.”

And sure enough, there were few ridges left before they saw the great hot plume rising from an outcropping in the earth, and felt the warmth of their surroundings rising, and tasted a richer spread of metals than any Organ had experienced before. Nor were these new sensations altogether pleasant in his condition, for as the duo moved now his skin felt a shifty stranger upon him, and his bowels seized whenever he made any attempt to swim.

“Higher,” said Organ, faintly. “Please—I want to go—”

Host swam them up—up higher than Organ now knew he would ever have been capable of going on his own. The surrounding warmth abated as they neared the frosty impasse of the solid sky, but up close he could still see the deep, rounded indent the hot waste-stream of the earth’s gills was leaving in its wake. He could sense, too, a rumble unlike any he had ever heard before—and as the other Host had said, it did indeed seem to be coming from inside the wounded sky. Intensifying, even, as if the sky’s indignation were getting worse with every passing moment that the heat of the deeper melt was set upon it.

“Extraordinary,” said Host. She was careful to avoid the stream directly, and took her time around the whole of the phenomenon—Organ struggling not to drowse or daze as he scanned the whole of the stream for that greater and sustaining truth he had hoped might be lurking in its vicinity.

“Well?” said Host at last. The outrage of the sky seemed to be reaching a deafening zenith, and she dropped down a ways as if to better sense him speak.

Organ’s first thought was of denial when he found that he could not answer—nor could he even lift his mouth from the heat and richness of Host’s skin. Then shame flooded him as he realized what had happened; he tugged and tugged but could not tear himself from Host’s body now that a little sac within his gullet had loosed its holdings, which in turn had swiftly risen to consume his mouth and meld the surviving pulp to similar upon her flesh. It took Host a few moments longer to register what had happened: what Organ’s sluggish, worn-out body had done against his greater will.

“Oh, little one,” said Host. “I am sorry.”

There was fresh blood-warmth pumping through him, though—enough, for the moment, to restore his vision and give strength back to all other, failing senses. Enough for him to bear witness, while stuck astride Host’s backside, to the sudden shattering of the sky that followed, and the bright light that poured soon after through it. As Host scrambled to evade all the tumbling debris, Organ stared with one fiercely gleaming eye at the long and rigid esca emerging from the hole and sweeping its glow over the surrounding murk. Behind it appeared a hard-shelled creature with lines much smoother and much straighter than Organ had known to exist on any reef, or in the crevices of any rock. He could hardly comprehend at first the sight of this new creature’s one great, dark eye, which dwarfed even Host’s massive body within its glossy lens.

Host in turn did not move—as frozen, then, as the sky from which this hard-shelled entity had just descended. Struck silent, perhaps, by the sheer novelty of its domineering size. But after a moment, Organ knew just what to do—even though he could no longer speak, and even though he was thirty-times too small against Host’s side, and thirty-times more against the new arrival. For all that it was worth, Organ fixed his little black eye upon the giant approaching them with its toothless maw outstretched, and wriggled the whole of his body as if to free itself from the expansive egg of his first and fatal world.

Hello, said some of his last free movements to the queer, dark seed from yonder. Hello hello hello!

About the Author

Maggie Clark is a doctoral student of English Literature at Wilfrid Laurier University, where her work with the literary analysis of scientific non-fiction amply complements her passion for speculative fiction. Her science fiction has been published to date in Lightspeed and Daily SF, and her first scifi short story, “Saying the Names,” won a 2011 Parsec Award.

Everything Must Go

Brooke Wonders

Split-level ranch-style home features a spacious and private fenced backyard with a covered deck and small dog run.

The blue-gray house at 1414 Linden Dr. is afraid of the dark. The foreclosure crisis hit its neighborhood hard, and in house after house, lights wink out and never turn back on. The house at 1414 waits for new families to move in, and sometimes they do, but more often than not the owners abandon their property. Linden Drive grows increasingly desolate, and 1414 clings to the warmth and safety of its inhabitants, sure that it is too well-loved to be left behind.

Its family owns a dog, an ancient mutt with a gray-frosted muzzle who spends most of his time in the backyard, sprawled on his side in the brown grass. The house has long admired the diligence with which the mutt defends its home. When neighbors pass by with their own dogs, Lucky drags himself over to the gate connecting his run to the front yard and lets loose a fit of barking. But one morning in late summer, a man with two collies strolls past, and Lucky doesn’t bark.

Two thick branches of English ivy pull away from 1414’s exterior and wend their way around the corpse. The rusted hinges of its cellar-door croon a lullaby of creaks and whines as they gape wide to receive Lucky. The house pulls the vine-choked body deep inside its walls. Tucked between sheets of plaster and insulation, the dog mortifies; soon the basement reeks of decay. Upstairs, a girl mourns her lost pet.

East-facing bedroom catches morning light, a bonus in wintertime.

The daughter at fourteen is a folded-up girl of elbows, knobby knees and angles a which-way. She loves origami, late into every night creasing out birds of paradise, pagodas, sea horses, and lotuses that trip from her fingertips. From her ceiling hang a thousand cranes it took her months to fold, multicolored and hopeful, made of wrapping paper, construction paper, butcher paper, wax paper, glitter paper, natural-wood-pulp paper. Origami paper proper she treasures, hoards like allowance money or dragon’s gold. The house thinks of the folded-up girl as Paper, and loves her.

Corner bedroom features windows on two sides. Bright and airy!

The son is growing wings. They first appear after his thirteenth birthday party, when his mother burns the cake and then locks herself in the bathroom while his father sits alone in the garage, drinking whiskey and building birdhouses out of scrap. The son packs a suitcase and explains his plans to Paper: he’ll escape out his bedroom window, run away to join the circus. His sister talks him out of it, to the house’s relief. The boy’s wings begin as nubbins protruding from each shoulder blade that ache and ache as he grows. By seventeen, nubbins have grown into a skeletal wing-structure, hollow bones covered in tufted feathers and long pinions, though he cannot yet lift himself off the ground. The house thinks of the winged boy as Bird, and loves him.

Third bedroom, slightly smaller—use it for storage, or turn it into baby’s first bedroom.

Their mother has her own workspace wherein she fashions elaborate textile art from found objects, fabric, and yarn. Lately, though, the house has noted a desperate loneliness threaded through her. Husband at work, kids at school, she fritters away her time following the soaps, crocheting blankets only to unravel them. She ties each member of the family to her via thick silken cords, cords whose color changes depending on her mood: crimson for anger, cerulean for disappointment, jet for possessiveness, silver for regret. The house lets these strings tangle throughout the hallways, following the arcing filaments from room to room. The house tries to warm to her, but she’s metal-cold, her voice scissor-sharp. The house fears her, and calls her Needle.

Two-car garage.

A grease-stained man who smells of slaughter, their father lives in the garage when he doesn’t live at his butcher shop. The house envies him his children’s unconditional love: they crouch at his elbows as he shingles a miniature roof, then fight over who gets to help install his latest creation. A neighborhood’s worth of elaborately finished birdhouses dot the backyard, attracting flocks of cardinals, rooks, and wrens.

But the house knows where the father keeps his skeletons, round glass secrets full of intoxicating oblivion stashed everywhere: in the trunk of the car, in with the New Year’s decorations, beneath the bathroom sink. When the couple’d first moved in, before there were papers or birds between them, he’d kept this secret, and long has the house tracked the ebb and flow of his addiction. It calls him Glass, for the bottles that clink like chains and sing to him from within their hiding places.

Kitchen has no dishwasher but plenty of counter space.

The teens have never seen their parents in the same room at the same time. Needle pours canned green beans and mushroom soup into a casserole dish, then retreats to the pantry just as Glass heads to the fridge for an ice water. Only once he’s wandered back to the garage does she reappear. Though the parents play elaborate hide-and-seek, the walls speak; every night the teens lie awake in their beds and listen to their parents argue.

—The mortgage is too expensive; where can we cut back?

—Do we really need another birdhouse?

—We don’t need more of your wall blankets, that’s for sure.

—It’s not a wall blanket, it’s fiber-art.

—If we can afford your art, why can’t we afford mine?

The house rustles the homemade tapestries that line its walls, drapings heavy with dust and guilt.

Downstairs master bedroom for maximum privacy.

The walls shout louder and louder, the house hating every resonant echo, until the only way the kids can sleep is by pressing palms deep into their ears. As if to compensate for the increase in noise, both parents have begun to fade from view. Their mother flickers in and out like TV static, as if she’s trying to switch to a different channel. Their father’s skin has become glass, behind which amber alcohol roils.

Bird catches his father getting dressed one morning, the flab of Glass’s belly hanging translucent over his belt-buckle. He watches his father remove a fifth of Jack from its sock-drawer hideaway and down a few quick swigs. Through his father’s transparent flesh, Bird can see the liquor slide slow down Glass’s throat until it joins the tawny liquid sloshing waist-high. Tiny waves break against his bellybutton. The immediate difference is imperceptible, but as the days rush by, Bird watches the amber tide rise from bellybutton to chest to clavicle, until Glass has filled himself up nearly to the brim, his eyes shiny as bottle caps.

Carpeted staircase with banister leads down to the lower level.

The house wakes in the middle of the night to a boot kicking through the safety wall of the stairwell landing. It groans through every vertical beam. Glass stands on the stairs, lamplight refracted through him casting whiskey-colored cracks across the house’s interior. Needle’s splayed against the banister, eyes rimmed red with crying, her lip split bloody.

The next morning, Glass spackles over the hole. The house, wounded, shrinks ever smaller. Does your room seem tinier than usual? Paper asks Bird one day. Bird nods, but they’ve gotten older and taller; they aren’t children anymore. The house is grateful for these excuses.

All bedrooms have walk-in closets

Paper folds a dollhouse. The first piece of butcher paper she cuts is massive. It creases down into an eleven-room suburban ranch home identical to her own. Then small squares for all the furnishings. She sets it up like a diorama on top of her chest-of-drawers, back in the deepest recesses of her closet where no one else goes. Its white picket fence spills off into darkness, disappearing behind her winter coats. She folds up father, mother, brother, sister, and stuffs them inside. The house notices that a streak of red mars the mother-doll’s face. Once her parents have gone to bed, Paper steals matches from the pantry and sets the folded father on fire; he crumbles to ash in her metal waste-bin.

Within the hour, Glass slams out the front door. In his wake, a heavy silken thread lies twitching like a coral snake on the lawn, one crimson end severed and fraying. Needle moves methodically from room to room, packing Glass’s belongings into boxes. Gasping cries push past her lips, her sorrow the crackle and shush of a blown speaker, a low rasp on repeat. The house howls wind through its eaves in mourning.

Bird seeks out Paper. Pushing open the door to her bedroom, he finds her sitting inside her closet, folding. She’s trying not to cry, the hitch in each inhale synched in time to her mother. Bird catches Paper’s hands in his to still their darting movements and flutters his wingtips across her fingers. She begins to comb through his feathers in long, even strokes and her breathing steadies long enough for her to confess her crime. Bird assures her that it couldn’t possibly have been her fault, that she had nothing to do with Glass leaving, then helps her dispose of the small pile of new-made origami fathers that litter the floor.

Low ceiling in the living room makes for a cozy living space.

Every piece of furniture stands halved. Of the dining table, only two legs remain, its lacquered surface leaning out over empty space. Half a filament glows dimly within the halved light bulbs inside every light fixture, each under a halved lampshade. The rug is halved, and the refrigerator is definitely halved, as suddenly there’s a lot less food in the house. Glass sends money, and so far they’ve managed to save the house, but Needle struggles to get dinner on the table.

Bird cycles from bedroom to kitchen, twice a day stopping before the half-fridge only to slam it closed in disappointment. The house remembers when it was just a wooden frame, before the contractor had installed its drywall; it imagines Bird must feel something similar: hollowed out and vulnerable.

Paper begins to watch her weight as if she hopes to become parchment, as transparent as her mother. Only the house counts how many times each day Paper locks herself in the bathroom and steps onto the scale. It dislikes the purple veins running so close to the surface of her skin, the curve of her lungs as they contract and expand within her ribcage, her bones visible like an abandoned building exposed to years of bad weather. If Bird notices his sister thinning, he says nothing.

Since Glass left, Bird sleeps on the floor of Paper’s room most nights, and they lie awake talking until all hours, imagining the futures they’ll have when they finally escape. Bird jokes that together they’re a paper bird, one of his sister’s folded cranes but with the power of flight. By their powers combined, they could fly far away from home. His broad wings span the room, a comfort. The house worries that the two teens will be divided next—half a Paper, half a Bird. It vows to keep them safe as houses.

Carpeted upstairs hallway means children can run and play in safety.

Paper grooms her brother’s wings every day, and they grow in strength, though their pristine blackness is occasionally marred by molt. One morning, while finger-combing near his spine, she notices what the house has known for weeks: that several of his primary feathers have been cut about a third of the way down, at sharp angles.

That night, she pulls down all thousand of the cranes that roost against her ceiling, littering her floor with their rainbow corpses. The house admires her ingenuity, the trap she’s laid to catch the wing-clipper.

Crunch, crunch in the dark and Paper leaps up to flick the light-switch. Needle’s outline is a staticky blur, but her sewing shears, poised over one black wing, glisten in the sudden brightness.

Bird wakes in a rage. Before his sister’s eyes, Bird’s features morph into something else, someone the house doesn’t recognize. Surely this nightmare beast can’t be its own winged son? Bird’s face twists into a black beak, his fingers curl into talons, and his feathers beat a furious whirlwind. He lunges at his mother, but she vanishes into white noise.

Downstairs half-bath for guests.

Their mother drifts through the hallways, visible only as a human-shaped distortion in space. Paper watches her mother pace, white-gray ants suffusing the outline of a woman. The house wonders why Needle has not yet returned to her textiles. Bins of crewel, quilting and lace clutter the craft room floor, gathering dust. The house finds this odd, as the craft room is the only space that has yet to be plagued by black holes.

Glass’s exit left holes strewn everywhere—by the work bench in the garage, in front of the refrigerator, hovering over the couch in the den—and Needle keeps falling into them, a phenomenon that concerns the house. The teens generally avoid the holes, though they’ve accidentally created a few: Their dad has hidden bottles everywhere, and whenever they find one, it implodes into a new hole, reality warping around an empty center.

One day, while playing find-the-bottle, Paper catches Bird drinking deep from a fifth of whiskey they’d discovered not a week earlier, one she’d thought had burst into the usual hole. She snatches the bottle from his hand and shatters it against the porcelain sink. Bird’s face begins to elongate into that horrible beak, skin shifting to barbed feathers, hands to scaled talons, as if he’s swallowed a black hole and it’s consuming him from the inside.

From the empty silence surrounding them comes the susurrus of their mother’s presence. Then mother and son are wrestling on the bathroom floor, him a winged, clawed monster, her a disembodied hush and ten fingernails that rake deep red furrows down his biceps. Paper squeezes her eyes shut tight as fists.

The house knows the three of them can’t go on like this, wants to help, and does what it can, battening down the insulation to keep in warmth against oncoming winter.

Master bathroom features two sinks and a separate shower area.

Paper arrives home from school to find the dim outline of her mother seated on the bathroom floor, the under-sink cabinet open and a whiskey bottle next to her. Eyes unseeing, Needle’s hands clutch at empty air. A black hole shimmers unreality beneath her. Paper wants to grab her hands and pull her away from the danger, but she’s been here before: If she’s not terribly careful—the house has watched it happen too many times—she’ll be sucked in as well.

Paper sifts through her mother’s sundry crafting bins until she finds something she thinks will work: a long skein of heavy cord in pale blue. She makes a lasso of cord and loops it over her mother’s shoulders, grips the end, and tugs. Needle tumbles free and the hole blinks out into memory.

Her mother lies comatose, her outline shimmering, a needle held up to light and turned this way and that so its eye flickers into and out of existence. Needle stares through her daughter, and Paper feels as invisible as she’d ever wished to be. She takes her mother’s cold hand in hers. Gently she loops blue cord around Needle’s bloodless fingers. Round and round it ravels. Paper is painstaking; she threads the skein about her mother’s every limb in ever-tightening circles, tugging the cord taut against her mother’s incorporeal corpus.

It takes all day and late into the night for Paper to wind cord, thread, yarn, and string—two full bins of material—around her mother’s body, a body shaped just like her own will be someday. Wrapped up like a spindle or a mummy, Needle can once again be seen. She meets her daughter’s eyes, pupils contracting and expanding in bewilderment.

Needle moves around the house more freely after rejoining the land of the visible, stacking boxes of their father’s things in the garage and out of sight, returning to her crafting, even hugging Paper every so often, though Bird still won’t go near her. The house, thrilled to have Needle back, stretches happily through the long wires inside its walls, solid in the surety of their connection to the outside world. The house can appreciate ties that bind.

Small attic for extra storage.

Bird’s slept in the attic since his mother’s attempted pinioning. He tugs the pull-down ladder up behind him each night, just to be sure. Skin mottled with brown tufts of downy feather, face craggy with shadow, he hunches his back under the weight of the full-grown wings arcing over his head. Bird has been working, saving up for his great escape, and he’s finally made enough, just six days shy of eighteen.

Paper’s stolen her mother’s shears; with them, she cuts Bird free of the silvery blue cord binding him to Needle. She holds out a loose twist of yellow embroidery thread, one end attached to the attic furnace. He recoils, hissing, but she pats his arm to reassure him: he’s tied only to his childhood home, not to Needle. His eyes are falcon-hooded; nevertheless, he allows her to encircle his wrist with the thread. It glimmers in sunlight, golden bright and joyful. He stands to his full height, aware that he’s taller now than their father had been. Stretching dark wings, he’s poised to swoop down from the attic window.

The house is having none of this. It bares paned-glass teeth and snaps a sill shut on Bird’s boot heel. Bird and Paper cry out, and then she braces herself against the window-frame and yanks upward, and Bird loosens his shoelaces and dives downward, and there’s just his black boot stuck in the house’s craw as he swoops low, then speeds sky-high. Windows rove wild-eyed; doors slam open and shut, enraged. Their father’s frayed red thread is still out on the lawn, its color faded to pink. Paper stares after her brother until the black dot of him winks out against the horizon, yellow thread pulled taut as it spools out thinner and thinner.

All through the night, the house growls and shudders like earthquake, terrified that soon it will be plunged into darkness. It’s grown too much like Needle, in her desperation and possessiveness, and too much like Glass, wanting only to be filled. The house’s fears form a yawning black hole that encompasses its plot entirely, as if the earth planned to open like a cellar door and suck the neighborhood underground like a hundred birdhouses perched atop quicksand. The house is immobile and has no means of escape, but it’s seen the family deal with enough such holes to understand their operations.

The dog is in a state of advanced decomposition when the house coughs Lucky up from its bowels. It’s swaddled the body in insulation, but that doesn’t much contain the stench; Paper finds the corpse almost immediately. Tugging a sleeve over her nose, she rolls it into the garden with a rusted shovel and leaves it to mulch. By summertime, the remains will be skin and bones and the hydrangea blooms nearby especially lovely.

Paper walks upstairs to stand before her mirror, turning sideways as if reveling in the acute angles she’s made of her body. Taking one hand in the other, she folds herself in half, then does it again and again and again. By the time the house realizes, long before it can formulate a plan to stop her, she’s disappeared. Her mother finds her that evening, a single sheet of translucent paper, a note explaining what she’s done. Needle and the house are left alone.

Large manicured front lawn with mature trees. Please call Arbor Realty to schedule an appointment to view this property.

A mess of bishop’s weed obscures the walkway. A lattice trestle covered in ivy creeps upward toward the roof’s edge. The house’s eyes are shut, mouth closed and locked up tight. Neighbors who walk past keep on moving; dogs pull their owners across to the other side of the street. The house mutters, settles into its cracked foundation. It monitors the single bright yellow thread that arcs into the distance, waiting for any movement on the line, any sign that its winged boy will soon fly home.

About the Author

Brooke Wonders writes fiction that thinks it’s true and memoir that thinks it’s fabulism. Despite these oxymora, her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Monkeybicycle, Daily Science Fiction, and Brevity: A Journal of Concise Nonfiction, among others. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago. A graduate of Clarion UCSD 2011, she shares an urban shoebox with fellow writer and partner in crime James Will Brady.

Foundation and Reality: Asimov’s Psychohistory and Its Real-World Parallels

Mark Cole

“Psychohistory dealt not with man, but with man-masses. It was the science of mobs; mobs in their billions. It could forecast reactions to stimuli with something of the accuracy that a lesser science could bring to the forecast of a rebound of a billiard ball. The reaction of one man could be forecast by no known mathematics; the reaction of a billion is something else again.”

—Isaac Asimov, Foundation and Empire

Robots. That’s what most people think of first when they think of Isaac Asimov—and certainly, his stories about the Three Laws of Robotics are among the best he wrote. But he also came up with another unique and equally memorable science fiction concept: psychohistory.

Psychohistory (originally hyphenated as “psycho-history”) first appeared in the short stories Asimov would later collect in his episodic novel Foundation. Set in a distant future, the book details a vast, galactic empire which has controlled thousands of inhabited worlds for 12,000 years. The empire is on the verge of breakdown. However, very few people have realized this, primarily those working with the great mathematician Hari Seldon. Seldon’s mathematical models have shown conclusively that the Empire will collapse within a few hundred years, followed by a 30,000 year dark age before civilization is rebuilt.

Seldon’s great accomplishment was his reinvention of the discipline of psychohistory. What had been little more than a set of vague axioms became, under his leadership, a profound statistical science, capable of charting the rise and fall of civilizations—and even, Seldon argued, of guiding the course of civilization so that the 30,000 years of darkness could be reduced to a mere millennium.

The underlying logic of psychohistory resembles Boyle’s gas law: The molecules in a gas move in a purely random way, and yet, collectively, that random behavior become predictable. So if you get enough people together (and Asimov very carefully avoided any suggestion of just how many), you could reduce the apparently random actions of billions of human beings to a set of physical laws describing the behavior of civilizations. That number, the Seldon constant, was extremely high—high enough that it could only be found in the vastness of the Galactic Empire.

On the surface this sounds fairly plausible, even if the degree of accuracy Seldon claimed for his work doesn’t. Yet it is far from clear that Asimov believes in his own invention. As in his stories about the Three Laws of Robotics, Foundation works because of the tension between the turn of events in the plot and whether they will lead to the next scheduled “Seldon Crisis.” Will the plan succeed, or will it fail?

In fact, the plan does fail by the end of the second novel, although this happens only because of an event which no one could have predicted: the rise of a mutant leader with enormous mental powers.

Whether he believed in psychohistory or not, Asimov was not alone in suggesting that a scientific approach to history would allow us to predict future trends.

Karl Marx’s notion of historical materialism was one of the first attempts at a scientific approach to history. In his view, the motor driving all of history was the means of production. As new technologies and methods changed how people produced the things they needed, he argued, this changed all of society. This historical progression would lead inevitably through a series of necessary steps towards the ultimate goal of history: socialism.

While many socialist thinkers have tinkered with Marx’s basic formulation, most versions start with what is called “primitive communism” (in prehistoric tribal societies), followed by ancient society, feudalism, and finally capitalism. Each one of these stages represents a different way in which people produced the goods they needed to survive—and a different way of living.

It should be noted, however, that, despite the term “scientific,” Marx’s system is not empirical but deduced from his own first principles.

Many of Asimov’s readers have in fact suggested that Marx was one of the major influences on psychohistory. However, Marx’s historical materialism bears little resemblance to Asimov’s conception. Seldon’s system appears to include far more than the purely economic factors Marx would allow—with the second crisis leading to the establishment of what amounts to a religion. What is far more important, though, is that Marx pictures a clear, evolutionary progress, each stage representing a more advanced society than the last, whereas Hari Seldon’s science predicts not a progression, but the cyclic rise and fall of civilizations—both development and decay. Psychohistory more closely resembles the work of a handful of 20th-century thinkers who dared to reject the standard, evolutionary view of society: most notably, Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, and Pitirim Sorokin.

Spengler was the first to propose a cyclic view of history in his 1918 book, The Decline Of The West (a second volume followed in 1923). He identified eight great world cultures—Babylonian, Egyptian, Chinese, Indian, Mexican, Classical (Greco-Roman), Arabian, and Western—and drew parallels between their development and decline. These parallels led him to believe that civilizations were organic, with a distinct life-cycle and a 1000-year lifespan. He divided this cycle into four stages: Spring, a period of cultural birth based largely on a new conception of God; Summer, marked by the rise of the earliest cities and the development of critical thought; Autumn, a time of rationalism, organization, and urban development; and Winter, when the civilization begins to break down, abstract reason falters, and people lose faith in their religious beliefs.

But it was Spengler’s assertion that Western Civilization had begun to decay that made his book an enormous success in his native Germany. It came at a time when the country was in the midst of moral and economic chaos, and it offered an explanation for Germany’s failures in World War I. To Spengler, democracy was a decadent form of government, one typical of a society deep in the winter of its existence. His vision of a vibrant new society run by a strong leader caught the imagination of the burgeoning Nazi movement. Spengler himself, while he agreed with many Nazi ideals, found Hitler absurd and distanced himself from the movement before his death in 1936.

While British historian Arnold Toynbee showed clear signs of Spengler’s influence in his massive work, A Study of History, he rejected the German historian’s organic vision of society in favor of a more complex model. His dozen volumes (published from 1934 to 1961) covered a far larger number of civilizations—21, although some of his divisions are debatable—in far greater detail. Rather than Spengler’s deterministic approach, with its rigid patterns every civilization had to follow, Toynbee believed that new challenges created a civilization, forcing its people to find new ways to overcome them and new ways to live their lives. Without these difficulties, a society would quickly stagnate, its creative impulses untapped—and yet, too great a series of disasters could easily destroy the fledging civilization.

Once established, it was a small, “creative minority” that kept a new civilization running—and it was the breakdown of this minority that ultimately led to a civilization’s decline and death. While it predicted specific events within the lifespan of a civilization (such as a “time of troubles” and dark ages), his system saw these as the result of the actions taken by the people within that society. However, he also observed that these actions created similar results in one society after another and fell into predictable patterns.

Although most historians ridiculed it, Toynbee’s work seized the popular imagination. One finds, for example, a society of Toynbeean scholars playing a sizable role in Charles L. Harness’ classic SF novel, The Paradox Men, and he plays a key role in Ray Bradbury’s story, “The Toynbee Convector.” Whatever its value as an actual theory of metahistory, Toynbee’s work defined the way in which many people viewed the past for the better part of a century. While his theories may not always match those of the fictional Hari Seldon, the resemblance is strong enough to suspect that, as he was for a great many others, Toynbee may have been one of Asimov’s more important inspirations.

While not as widely known as either Spengler or Toynbee, Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin offered a third similar theory best remembered for the categories he divided civilizations into: the ideational, in which the spiritual dominated society, and the sensate, which was concerned with purely material things. At rare intervals, a combination of these two impulses in society resulted in the integral or idealistic stage, which was a perfectly balanced combination of the two: He claimed this could be found in both Classical Greece and the High Middle Ages.

However, unlike Spengler and Toynbee, Sorokin saw the shift from one stage to other as something that could happen at any time. While he identified patterns and trends in history, he hoped that with proper guidance from those aware of the nature of human civilizations, it would be possible to guide mankind to its next ideational stage, without the horrors he had witnessed during the Russian Revolution.

After Harvard removed him from his position as the founding Chairman of the Sociology Department, he went on to found the Harvard Research Center for Creative Altruism in 1949, which had as its goal the elimination of future wars by using his historical insights to promote love and understanding. It sounds suspiciously like a real-world Seldon Institute—although the first of Asimov’s Foundation short stories actually appeared seven years earlier.

Even with this widely-varied collection of theories, none of them match the most distinctive characteristic of Seldon’s theories: They do not make any mathematical predictions.

For that, one has to move from history to modern economics, which insists that it is a mathematical science, capable of making precise predictions. The Nobel Prize in Economics routinely goes to the creators of sophisticated mathematical models of human behavior.

Unfortunately the parallel ends there, as no one expects these models to predict actual economic behavior.

While no economist would ever put it quite that way, they will blame any failure of real behavior to match their predictions on factors which are not part of their model. Human behavior is enormously complex, so there can be no shortage of possible explanations for any deviation from their predictions. Free market economics deliberately simplifies human behavior, focusing only on a few things which they argue are the main factors driving our economic interactions.

Ironically, the Austrian School of Economics, while it still believes in the laws of free market economics, has rejected this precision, and refuses to make mathematical predictions. Instead, they claim that the results predicted by their theory always take place, even if the actual results—warped by things not covered by their theories—are radically different from their predictions, or even their exact opposite.

In fact, some—like Hans-Hermann Hoppe, borrowing a page from Immanuel Kant—go so far as to argue that their conclusions can not be disproven by any awkward failure of reality to match their predictions. They are a logical conclusion of a logical system, and thus are true, whether they actually describe what happens or not. Hoppe goes so far as to argue that the same is true of socialism, and that both systems are immune from any empirical attempts to disprove them.

Which is about as far from the mathematical certainties of psychohistory as it is possible to get.

Looking closely at all these theories, one finds that they are controversial at best and bear little resemblance to Hari Seldon’s work.

By the early part of the 20th century, for example, an important Marxist theorist like Antonio Gramsci could reject the notion that history led inevitably to the proletarian state. By then, it was obvious that capitalism wasn’t about to turn into socialism anytime soon. So, following Gramsci’s lead, Marxists became far more interested in cultural issues. One noted socialist scholar, Theodor Adorno, actually tried to fuse Marxism with some of Spengler’s insights, shorn of most of their determinism. It seems at best an unlikely combination, one that Marx would never have approved.

It should also be noted that, despite the many similarities between the three cyclic theories, they are also enormously different, enough so that they can’t be seen as different approaches to the same basic “laws” of history. While it was inevitable that Spengler’s amateur status would lead other historians to reject his work, even Toynbee, who was a professor of modern Greek and Byzantine history, encountered a great deal of opposition from his fellow historians. All three men routinely faced accusations of poor scholarship, dubious conclusions, and even twisting the facts to fit neatly into their preconceived categories. Nor has time been kind to their reputations. All three have been largely forgotten, their work rarely cited by other historians, and the entire idea of comparative history ignored except by a few modern scholars like Harold Adams Innis and Samuel Huntington.

There is even a real-world discipline that calls itself psychohistory, although it bears little resemblance to Hari Seldon’s version.

In the real world, psychohistory is an attempt to apply psychology to history, to gain a greater understanding of what caused past events. It tends to focus on issues related to childhood—and most notably, questions of incest and other forms of sexual abuse. Some psychohistorians hope that by perfecting our methods of rearing children, we might eliminate war and international hatreds. This is about as close to Asimov as it gets.

Psychohistory has never quite emerged from its academic shantytown and remains controversial. There are no departments of psychohistory, even if a few colleges do have courses in it. Many of their fellow historians have questioned their vast grab-bag of assorted methods and think that their reconstructions of past historical figures involve a lot of guesswork. Others question whether it should be considered a separate discipline at all, as mainstream historians have long attempted to explore psychological motivations.

One aspect of the real psychohistory, however, points in a very different direction—towards a forgotten understanding of history that might have more bearing on Hari Seldon’s story than Marx, Spengler, Toynbee, or Sorokin. For it does not always look at mass psychology, and cultural analysis, but it also attempts to understand the psychological motivations of historic individuals.

While the image of history as an ever upward, evolutionary process may have been the orthodox belief at the time of Spengler, it had itself replaced an even older view. Rather than seeing history in terms of sweeping trends, this older view held that it was the choices made by individuals which have shaped history. It is a view which has never quite died, finding support at the time from a number of mostly Catholic scholars, notably Christopher Dawson, Hilaire Belloc, and Sir Herbert Butterfield.

Despite all of Hari Seldon’s talk of grand historical trends and mathematical predictions, the irony is that the new future he crafts is ultimately the result of the actions of a single man: Hari Seldon.

It is his refinement of the science of psychohistory, his predictions, his establishment of the Seldon institute, and the shadowy Second Institute that reshape history. Even though he may have made his choices based on mathematical models, they are still his choices. Without them, the history of the galaxy would have looked quite different.

Whether or not Isaac Asimov believed that psychohistory was possible, the story of Hari Seldon is not of one of randomness and blind forces, determinism, and the laws of science, but of a single remarkable man whose actions reshape the history of the galaxy.

One does have to wonder, however, if Dr. Asimov ever noticed this.

About the Author

Mark Cole hates writing bios. Despite many efforts he has never written one he likes, perhaps because there are many other things he’d rather be writing. He writes from Warren, Pennsylvania, where he has managed to avoid writing about himself for both newspaper and magazine articles. His stories have appeared at Flash Fiction Online (”Reverse Engineering”) and Abyss And Apex (”I Expect There Will Be A Reason Soon”), and his musings on Science Fiction at IROSF.com.

The Art of Brutal Prose: An Interview with Mark Lawrence

Peter Hodges

Mark Lawrence is the author of the recent fantasy series The Broken Empire. There are two books in the series to date: Prince of Thorns and King of Thorns. Written in the same literary vein as Joe Abercrombie and George R. R. Martin, the story is a bleak portrayal of Prince Honorious Jorg Ancrath, scion of a noble family who has vowed to once again unite a group of disparate kingdoms into an Empire.

The prose is like a punch in the gut—visceral, simple, and evocative. He eschews the traditional wordiness of fantasists before him, instead letting the simple language convey harsh reality without mincing words. This style lends itself to fast pacing that draws the reader headlong through a world of brutality and evil, where goodness is a flickering shadow in the light of ambition and revenge. The construction of the story’s history has a number of truly excellent surprises, especially as the reader gradually comes to grasp the setting and the underlying rules of the universe.

As a scientist involved in researching artificial intelligence problems, what made you choose a fantasy setting over a science-fictional setting?

Ah! My most asked question, and one that prompted my most viewed blog post.

I have to say I don’t really get it. Should a policeman write crime fiction, a lawyer pen about law firm shenanigans, a nurse put out medical dramas? Should we boffins get our dirty science boots off your fantasy carpet? I guess the easiest answer is that my love of fantasy pre-dates my love of science—my mother read me Lord of the Rings when I was seven—I cried when [spoiler] Gandalf died [/spoiler].

Writing is more about people than setting in any event. I’m sure I could write science fiction and I’d probably enjoy it a lot. I just feel that I enjoy writing fantasy that little bit more.

Does working on problems related to artificial intelligence give you any insight into the nature and/or definition of consciousness? Have you had any (declassified) “aha!” moments, where you linked something in your research to human or animal cognition?

Short answer, “no.”

Artificial Intelligence is a fairly misleading umbrella term that I employ because the media popularised it and people feel they know what it means . . . a little. In truth very few scientists involved in the area will ever talk about their work in those terms. What we do is (as far as we know) a long way from issues of consciousness and revolves around rather dry and abstract Bayesian mathematics aimed at calculating inference from data in order to support decisions. Under controlled conditions these techniques are powerful and useful, but there’s a huge disconnect between those controlled conditions and the general messiness of the real world where only the tiniest of steps have been taken toward intelligent autonomous behaviour.

What was your “elevator pitch” for A Prince of Thorns? Did you sell the manuscript first, or did it go through an agency?

I don’t think I had an elevator pitch. When I finally got “bullied” into sending it out, years after writing it, I emailed four agents off a list. I noticed later that the agency that accepted me had on their submissions page instructions to include in the cover letter a paragraph describing the book. I must have missed that bit first time around. I just said, something along the lines of “hi, I’ve attached the first three chapters of my book” and mentioned a few places I’d had short stories published.

The agent passed the manuscript on to publishers. He told me not to expect to hear back any time soon. Then a few weeks later I had a three-book deal. I’m told every significant fantasy publisher in the UK bid for the rights.

Many authors claim their “overnight success” was actually a journey of many years. Would you share your story on how you came to be published?

Well I guess it was a journey of a kind, and did span many years, but it was never one that was aimed at publication. The only journey was the one on which I slowly acquired the writing skills and the interest to produce a book. I wrote for my own satisfaction and didn’t expect (or yearn) to be published.

I started playing D&D very young when the UK’s first Games Workshop opened outside my school. I was always the Games Master, which exercised my creative side and entrenched an interest in fantasy. After university I spent a year helping to run a fantasy Play-By-Mail game and kept running my part as a hobby for the next decade. That exercised my writing skills more, requiring multiple storylines to be sustained and lots of description, intrigue, violence etc. When I moved to the States I didn’t have time to run the PBM game so I turned to writing short stories. I shared the short stories on online writing groups and improved through the process of critiquing and being critiqued. Short stories turned into longer stories turned into books. There.

In the reviews of your novels, some readers have expressed scepticism over the ability of such a young main character (Jorg Ancrath is barely a teenager when the action starts) to carry the narrative. What made you pick that background for the character?

I have seen people complain that a person so young couldn’t achieve the physical feats described or exert such influence over his companions. That I dismiss.

The reasons for the choice of age are simple and several-fold. Firstly the inspiration for the book was Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange wherein the violent protagonist is of a similar age leading a gang of older reprobates. Secondly, and for quite possibly similar reasons to Burgess, I chose a young age to:

cloud the issue of guilt in his crimes.

highlight the matter of nature vs nurture

place the protagonist close to the events that have shaped him.

give him potential for growth.

explore the changes that are wrought in us through experience in contrast to those that occur through simply growing.

and to focus on the business of moving from childhood to adulthood even when the former has been stolen rather than discarded.

It’s interesting that you say “cloud the issue of guilt” in his crimes. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that Jorg does some pretty horrible things—is it up to the reader to decide his guilt? Is there room in his world for redemption, however far away it might seem?

Redemption is the central theme to a vast swath of literature. Particularly in genre writing, but probably forming the core, in one or other form, in the majority of all fiction. It does seem a rather unsophisticated demand to make of a character study though, and the Broken Empire trilogy is in essence a study of one man.

Prince of Thorns is a book that sets out to challenge the reader with a character—to make you think about a real (albeit unusual) person and about the issues of what makes us “bad.” It’s about what is and isn’t forgivable, what role nurture plays over nature, how we react when the badness is done by someone clever, intelligent, charming rather than a villain who has the good grace to look and act as expectation demands. And it doesn’t answer those questions. The trilogy as a whole stumbles toward an answer, but it won’t ever get there. It’s what we scientists call ‘an unsolved problem.”

And yes, there’s a voice clamoring inside us, demanding redemption. Some part of us wants to see normality restored. Jorg can be forgiven anything so long as he repents, suffers, returns to the fold. It’s what we like to read. It’s the closure we’re comfortable with.

There is of course room for any ending and I’m ruling nothing out. However, I do like to avoid being too predictable!

Both novels in your series are written from a first person point of view, with some portions excerpted from the journal of another character. This, historically, is a challenging choice for fantasy authors because your accessibility to the world is severely limited. What made you pick this method? Do you have any regrets at this point? Is there something that you’ve wanted to show that you can’t?

I don’t feel it’s a challenging point of view—even for fantasy authors. Your access to the world is personal, detailed, emotional, and immediate. The type of access denied is the swooping overview generated by hopping between many heads. If you’re telling a story about a person rather than some sprawling conflict then that’s no problem. I’m telling a story about one person—something closer in several ways to literary fiction than traditional fantasy.

It also has to be said that A Clockwork Orange is written in the first person and as my initial inspiration, setting finger to keyboard, I hit ‘I’.

Is the lean prose your own personal style, or a style you’re intentionally using to reflect the world?

I can write in various styles. Possibly I enjoy the one on offer in Prince of Thorns the most. I guess it reflects the character, Jorg, rather than the world he inhabits. I do know I’ve seen people who one or five-star Prince of Thorns, lambasting or lauding the prose, go on unknowingly to five or one-star things I’ve written under other names in different styles, reversing their opinion.

I recently gave a bunch of short stories to an anthology that invited my participation so they could choose something suitable. The immediate feedback was that they liked them all but found them so varied in style and topic that they were amazed to know they were all written by the same person.

I expect this is true of many writers and there’s a tendency and a will to pigeon-hole people for convenience. If a writer has the imagination to write fantasy it seems likely they have the imagination to vary the way they write. The publishing industry is a co-conspirator in this matter, insisting (for good commercial reasons) that an author produce ‘more of the same” and doing so for the simple reason that the majority of readers (whether they admit it or not) want to get more of the same from any given author. If they want something different they reach for a different author (or different pseudonym!).

Has the sheer brutality in some parts of the book earned you any angry readers? Do you have any anecdotes about readers who either really like or really dislike a particular passage?

I have more angry readers than a man can easily shake a stick at. I suspect a lot of the visceral reaction is generated by the peculiar power of “I” which makes the reading experience more immediate and intense. It also engenders in stupid people a close association between the character they’re reading about and the person who wrote him.

To my mind the violence in the trilogy is moderate to mild in the context of the genre. Certainly there are far more gruesome and unpleasant offerings in George R. R. Martin’s work. I feel it’s a combination of first person and the power of the descriptions that has prompted a reaction.

Properly, brutality is measured against the facts. Peter stabbed Paul. The brutality is in the act of stabbing. If the information is conveyed in the line: Peter stabbed Paul—or in the line: I slid my knife into Paul’s eye socket—it’s no more brutal.

Much of the anger has actually been second hand from people who haven’t read the book and are simply piggy-backing off some extreme and misdirected feminist critiques in circulation.

There is, however, one scene in King of Thorns, that gets remarked on a lot. It’s an oddity that says interesting things about people’s perceptions and priorities. By the point that this scene is reached the reader will have breezed through multiple violent deaths of innocent and not so innocent men, women, and children. Here comes a dog . . . In fact the scene has generated my only piece of hate-mail.

I really think you are one sick disturbed person. <snip> That sentence is seared into my brain and has given me nightmares. It might be fiction but it is just horrible. There is no excuse for this sort of thing. The torture of an innocent animal. <snip> I will never ever read another book by you as long as I live. I don’t know where all this darkness comes from with you but you are quite obviously disturbed. I don’t care if you are with 10 kids and 5 dogs. Sick sick sick . . .

I consider it a minor triumph to have stirred such strong emotions within a reader. Particularly “That sentence is seared into my brain.” For someone who focuses as much on writing on the small scale, sentence by sentence, as on the large scale / story-level, “that sentence is seared into my brain” is writing gold.

A more general observation is that people who condemn others for the products of their imagination simply don’t understand what imagination is.

As you begin to reveal the history of the world, you get glimpses of how history and fact become mythology. How do you go about weaving a consistent mythology through a multi-book series?

I tend to wince slightly when admitting that I didn’t outline anything. I don’t plan. I just let the story flow as I write and generally have no idea where we’ll be at the bottom of the page. I’ve not noticed any problems keeping things consistent.

Your magic system is revealed through the evaluations and reactions of Jorg Ancrath. How difficult is it to walk the tightrope between an “unreliable” narrator and maintaining internal consistency in your magic systems? Is internal consistency even necessary as long as magic and its use is kept to a minimum?

I really don’t like the term “magic system” and if I ever pick up a book that starts explaining a magic system to me, as though I’m being instructed from the pages of a role-playing game’s rulebook, I put that book down again very quickly.

I wouldn’t say minimal use of magic makes internal consistency unnecessary, just that it makes it easy. Consistency is important. Magic-systems are not.

You’re a father of four, a full-time researcher, and a gamer. Do you have any secrets about time management that you’d like to share?

Actually you’ve not listed the main draw on my time. I’m also a full-time carer for my very disabled little girl. When she comes home from school I hold her and feed/clean/entertain her until I’ve put her to bed at around 9 or 10pm. She can’t be left, she can’t do anything for herself, and my wife’s multiple sclerosis means I have to do it all. I only get to write between 10pm and 1am, or when a respite carer comes to the house for a three-hour session. I’m answering this review at the hospice we get to visit fourteen days a year. We’ve been here two days now and I’ve done a LOT of writing.

So, time management is tricky. Not sleeping does help. Also writing only once and not revising is a boon.

When is your release date for the next book?

The release date for the last book in the trilogy is definite. Emperor of Thorns comes out in August 2013 and is available from Amazon.

About the Author

Peter Hodges has always loved science. When he discovered that people would actually pay him to mix chemicals and set things on fire, his career was set. Working as a chemist and project manager, Peter dabbled in writing throughout his early adult life. His desire quickened after attending Viable Paradise, an annual invitation-only writer’s seminar. He finished three novels over the next four years and endured the slings and arrows of outrageous rejection.

Another Word: It Gets Better with SFF (but SFF has to Get Better, too)

Lev AC Rosen

When I was a kid, I read anything with a wizard on the cover. I was one of those nerdy children who took books to recess and preferred novels for adults when I was eleven.

I’m guessing you know the type. Or are the type. My parents encouraged this and bought me whatever books I wanted. It was pretty awesome. It also shouldn’t be particularly surprising that the first place I was really made aware of queer people was in fiction.

I knew what gay people were, of course. I’d heard other kids in the lunchroom making homophobic comments, so I understood the basic concept, as it were. But the truth is, I was still pretty far away from anything involving sex. Just didn’t think much about it. In the books I read, I understood what was going on when the wizard and the lady got naked. It just wasn’t that interesting. I wanted to see magic of a more literal nature.

That is, until I read the Mercedes Lackey’s The Last Herald-Mage. Like many fantasy series, it’s populated with wizards and bards. Only the main character is a gay man.

I wish I could remember more of my reaction upon first reading it The Last Herald-Mage. I have only a fleeting memory: that it wasn’t a very big deal. I’m sure that’s because of Lackey’s treatment of the matter. I don’t want to say the series is about being gay; it’s more than that. It’s a fantasy epic, but Lackey approached her hero Vanyel Ashkevrons’s sexuality as though she were writing for readers who didn’t actually know any gay people. She showed us Vanyel’s sexuality and explained that it was natural and nothing to be ashamed of, even if Vanyel felt ashamed.

The Last Herald-Mage turned me from someone who had never thought about sexuality to someone who had no problem with the gay aspect of it. After all, if gay people could be wizards, they were just as awesome as everyone else, right?

My own coming out was pretty low-key. I grew up in New York City; I have liberal, loving parents; I went to a school that prided itself on ethical PC-ness; and I wasn’t the only queer kid in class. I didn’t struggle much. But I think back on Mercedes Lackey a lot—how I came across that book, and how it prepared me, during my tween years, to be okay with who I was once I started getting crushes on other guys.

I don’t remember how I found Lackey’s books. Were they given to me? Did I find them in the bookstore, saw that they had both bards and wizards, and simply wanted them on those merits? I wish I could remember. All I know is that I was damned lucky I found them. And I also know that if I hadn’t been brought up in a supportive environment, one series of books wouldn’t have been nearly enough.

But what about kids today? As the battle for queer rights has become more and more visible, these rights have also, in many respects, become more controversial. With the fight for gay marriage, the conservative fight against it, and the rash of tragic, queer teen suicides, it would seem as though queer characters would be popping up all over in SFF. After all, those geeky kids who get teased at school—whether they’re actually queer or just being called it—are the sorts of kids we were in high school. Or at least a lot of us. Marginalized, branded as outsiders, teased for being weird or different—and killing themselves because they’re queer. And to be queer, they’re told, is to be different.

Of all the people out there who didn’t grow up queer, you’d think straight geeks would be the most sympathetic—and the most understanding. Shouldn’t the SFF community be looking out for these kids?

Some within the community are. Malinda Lo has penned some amazing queer YA fantasy. Brit Mandelo writes an entire column on Tor.com called “Queering SFF” and has edited a new anthology called Beyond Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Speculative Fiction. Cherie Priest featured a transgendered character in one of her Clockwork Century novels. There are queer SFF groups, like Geeks Out and Outer Alliance.

These examples stand out to me, though, because they’re few and far between and don’t get much notice. Even most romantic comedies today feature a stereotypical gay friend. It’s not the best representation, but at least we’re there. In SFF, we’re strangely invisible.

Failing to see queer characters in fiction doesn’t just damage queer kids. Parents read SFF, too. If queer kids have a parent who has never known a queer person in their life, they’ll be much more equipped for raising a queer child if they’ve read queer characters written as actual human beings—and not flat stereotypes or, worse, somehow wrong or immoral.

On the whole, the SFF community seems to me to be divided into three camps. First, the openly homophobic types, who for personal an/or religious reasons—or because they think it’s “evolutionarily backwards” (just like the other 200-plus species who practice homosexuality, right?)—feel queer people don’t deserve to be treated like actual human beings.

In the second camp we have the pro-queer types who love queer characters in their fiction and often are queer themselves.

The third camp, though, makes up the majority of the SFF community: folks who just don’t think about it. These are usually straight dudes who grew up pretty geeky, and who often are still mostly—and hopefully comfortably—geeky. But they just don’t give much thought to queer folks. If they did, they’d probably be cool with them; many probably consider themselves pro-gay rights.

But when it comes to their SFF, this third group finds it odd when there’s a gay character. Some say things like “I just can’t relate to a queer character, cause I’m straight,” but most seem surprised by the inclusion of queer characters. Some say they find the emphasis on sexuality to be heavy-handed—even when the emphasis on the queer character’s sexuality is equal to or less than the emphasis placed on the straight character’s sexuality. When a straight guy kisses a girl, it’s the norm; when a gay guy kisses a guy, it’s emphasizing their sexuality.

I don’t think people who hold this view are homophobes. They’re just used to their SFF being queer-free, and they feel startled by the inclusion of queer character. These are the folks I think are ready to open their minds. I don’t want them to be startled. Ideally, I don’t want them to think it’s any different than straight characters being included. For a start, though, I’d love to see them be happy to encounter queer characters. And I think they can be. They just need a little more prodding. And by prodding I mean more queer characters.

So the next time you read a book where there’s a heterosexual romantic pairing, don’t just accept it. Let that fact surprise you the way a queer romance might. Imagine how it makes that high-school kid feel, the one who still hasn’t found queer SFF. Think of how they look at every straight character in the books they read and are expected to relate to a straight character—but you, on the other hand, get surprised and kinda weirded out by one queer one. If they can relate, can’t you?

I’m not saying every story needs a queer character. Or that it’s a writer’s responsibility to do more than tell a great story. But I do think it’s time for all of us—straight folks included—to think more about where queer characters fit into SFF. And where we stand in that audience. A straight romantic lead is all well and good, but a queer romantic lead could make some teenager feel better about him or herself.

But we’re not going to get more queer characters without demanding them. Straight readers, we need your help—you should be asking for queer characters, too. You should be hoping for them. You should be happy about them, not surprised by them. Remember that we queer folks exist, and we exist in the world of SFF, too. That’s how you show us support; that’s how you take queer characters in SFF from invisible to natural.

We appreciate your support in politics. We love when you say you’re for gay marriage. But you can do more. After all, if you’re going to support us in the real world, you can support us in every world.

About the Author

Lev AC Rosen is the author of the critically acclaimed All Men of Genius, which was an Amazon best of the month, on over a dozen best of the year lists, and has been nominated for multiple awards. He received his BA from Oberlin College and his MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. Lev is originally from lower Manhattan and now lives in even lower Manhattan, right at the edge. He teaches creative writing. All Men of Genius will be available in paperback in November 2012.

Editor’s Desk: I, Cyborg

Neil Clarke

Sometime in the next month, I will become a cyborg. My “upgrade” won’t be anything cool like a bionic eye or cranial jack and it won’t be as painful as becoming a Cyberman. I never expected to become a cyborg at forty-six, but thanks to my July heart attack, my heart has sustained enough damage to require the installation of a defibrillator in my chest. As far as mods go, it’s pretty mundane, but it will provide some peace of mind and may even save my life someday.

Now that I’m taking the first step, maybe I should start considering other potential upgrades. Given my health over the last year, a nanobot-based immune and healing system would be particularly useful. I wouldn’t complain about a system that would allow me to learn new skills or languages via software updates. The old cyborg staples of strength and speed wouldn’t be high on my priority list, but are certainly worth considering. Still, the fictional cyborgs we read about often pay a high price for their improvements. Would I really want to be part of the collective, lose my emotions or memories, or become beholden to some secret government organization? What if your new parts can be taken over or subverted? The what-ifs make for a good story. (And now, I brace myself for the flood of cyborg stories.)

November is when many of us celebrate Thanksgiving. I have a significant list of reasons to be thankful this year. Obviously, surviving a major heart attack is up there, but I also have to appreciate the good fortune to be surrounded by good people, access to excellent medical care and the opportunity to become a cyborg. While my story has contained its fair share of bad things, I’m still here, and as Elizabeth Bear pointed out in her column a few months ago, good stories don’t have to be dark. I join the cyborg nation happy to have the opportunity to live. Whirr. Beep.

Cyborgification isn’t the only change this month at Clarkesworld. I am pleased to announce that Kate Baker has agreed to add Non-Fiction Editor to her list of responsibilities. Kate has been our Podcast Director for over three years (a job she intends to continue) and I look forward to having the opportunity to work with her on this aspect of the magazine. We’re carpooling to World Fantasy Convention this month, so we should have plenty to talk about on the long drive.

If you’ll be at World Fantasy, please stop by and say hi to Sean, Kate and I. We love to hear from our readers and authors. I’m also pleased to say that the Clarkesworld single issue chapbooks I mentioned last month will be available at the Prime Books table. I was able to get the January-October 2012 issues completed in time, so we’ll have a limited quantity of each available there.

Finally, I’d like to welcome our new subscribers. We appreciate your support and hope you’ll consider encouraging friends to do the same. It’s been encouraging to see those numbers go up a bit each month and provide the financial stability we need to grow this magazine. Welcome. You have been assimilated.

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, owner of Wyrm Publishing and a 2012 Hugo Nominee for Best Editor (short form). He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Clarkesworld Magazine

Issue 75

Table of Contents

Your Final Apocalypse

by Sandra McDonald

The Wisdom of Ants

by Thoraiya Dyer

Sweet Subtleties

by Lisa L Hannett

The Corpse of the Future: Jane C. Loudon's The Mummy! and Victorian Science Fiction

by S. J. Chambers

A Thousand Words You Can Hear All at Once: An Interview with Todd Lockwood

by Nayad A. Monroe

Another Word: The Echo Chamber

by Daniel Abraham

Editor's Desk: Getting off the Roller Coaster

by Neil Clarke

The Lost City

Art by David Demaret

© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2012
www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

Your Final Apocalypse

Sandra McDonald

This is not a story about the end of the world, although Casual Visitor arrived here in search of such a tale approximately .03 seconds ago. (It, not him or her or they. There is no gender in this corner of the future. There is nothing physical about Casual Visitor, but I’m a different story.)

You, on the other hand, are a young man sitting on the marble steps of a law library on a dazzling Saturday morning in autumn. You’re watching a pretty girl cross the quadrangle while your right leg jitters up and down, up and down. It’s the anxiety. Behind you, in a stuffy conference room, your study group bitches about your absence. Even now they’re speculating nastily about your chances of passing the bar exam and tapping out annoyed messages to hurl across the electronic gulf.

Your phone is set to vibrate. It’s tucked into the duffle bag beside you, alongside your passport and boarding passes for a series of flights to Sydney. The tickets maxed out your credit card when you booked them at three a.m. this morning. The first plane leaves two hours from now. The bright red and gold leaves, the cold marble steps, the bitter taste of coffee tinged with caramel—this is your world, you are twenty five years old, you don’t like your study group anyway, and damn Tort Reform while we’re at it. Screw it all. You’re moving to Australia, just like you dreamed of in high school.

Or maybe not. If you were really committed to this escape, you’d already be on a train to Logan Airport. You wouldn’t be sitting here knowing that anyone in your study group who drifts to the third-floor windows might see you, come outside, and talk you out of this totally insane plan to throw away years of sacrifice and hard work.

Of course it’s insane. You’re in the middle of an intense personal crisis brought on by the realization you don’t want to be an exhausted, debt-ridden, low-paid junior lawyer for the rest of your life. On the other hand, if you don’t have your damn J.D., what do you have? You see no path forward to a life of happiness and fulfillment.

Don’t worry, your crisis won’t last long.

The first rule of the universe is that time is relative. My definition of “long” is the interval it takes for continents to smash into each other, for the Marianas Trench to chew through the Pacific plate, for the traveling hotspot underneath Yellowstone to build a new volcano and spew its contents across the North American landscape. (Casual Visitor just darted out to digest the story of the hotspot’s next eruption. It’s a good one.) Your definition of “long” is the line at the coffee shop, or the three days it took to process your last financial aid request, or the amount of time it’s been since you went home to New Hampshire (four months, according to your mother’s Nature Conservancy calendar, because that summer internship was a bitch and ground you down to exhaustion every week).

Certainly you and I don’t experience time the same way. Neither does Casual Visitor, but even it would agree that the interval between now and the moment your father dies on his sofa is a relatively small span indeed.

No one will eulogize your father. There will be no flowers, no sermon, no framed picture on an easel, no sleek silver pen beside a white guest register, no PowerPoint pictures accompanied by sentimental music, no sorrowful expressions over solemn handshakes, no quiet breakdowns by your devastated mother. Your dad might be strangely relieved by the lack of fuss. He’s a good man who knows the value of boredom. He sells insurance. His days are filled with checking and rechecking clauses, forms, policies and actuarial tables. He doesn’t like church or politics, but he loves his family and a series of Labradoodles named after the cartoon characters of his youth. The latest one is a four-year old named Scooby.

Scooby dies soon, too. He crawls under your parents’ bed with one of your father’s old socks and heaves a final, sad sigh for walks untaken.

Casual Visitor is aware of these biologic constructs called dogs, but has never met one. To do so would require renting a Sleeve and descending into the dangerous, chaotic World. It creates a simulation instead, plays with it for .02 seconds, and then deconstructs it again. It doesn’t see the appeal. Maybe it should build a cat, instead.

Back to the red and gold leaves, to the cold marble steps, to the beautiful girl and her crimson dress and black boots, her floppy felt hat and fringed leather jacket. Ignore your buzzing phone. Sip your hot coffee and try to still your trembling leg. The girl, you’re sure, is an undergraduate. An art major, judging by the large flat portfolio lying on the grass near where she sways and turns to the music piped into her ears. You didn’t think people still study art anymore. It’s not a commercially viable career field. Whereas law—well, it’s not going to matter soon, but for several years now schools across the nation have been churning out far more lawyers than the marketplace requires. Your decision to fly to Australia might look insane, but the odds of getting any kind of well-paying job are astronomical. And I know my astronomy.

The one thing you and your father always shared is a love of disaster movies. Friday Night Lights Out, you called it, one disaster after another in glorious HDTV with stereo surround sound. Over popcorn and soda and beer, you watched awful and sometimes very awful and occasionally not-so-bad movies about society’s demise from any number of probable and improbable causes: nuclear war, global warming, alien invasions, rogue comets, supervolcano explosions, tsunamis, plagues, zombies, and even the spontaneous evaporation of the entire ozone layer. You made bets on which characters would survive and which were doomed from the opening credits. You speculated on technical details such as the proper way to perform an appendectomy during a blackout, or how to survive a snowstorm hike from Washington DC to New York City.

Good fun. Good times.

On your way to law school you loaded your laptop with several of your all-time favorite disaster flicks. For two years you’ve been playing them in the background over and over while you study. You find something soothing about a constant stream of people living and screaming and dying under Hollywood special effects.

You should have put some movies on your phone for the trip to Sydney. But you’re never going to make it Down Under anyway.

It’s no consolation, but your mother won’t outlive your father by very long. Tomorrow morning she’ll look out her living room window at a neighborhood gone unnaturally quiet. The phones are out, of course, the cell phones too, the televisions and radios and internet gone silent. Your father’s corpse is still on the sofa, wrapped in a clean white sheet. She doesn’t know what to do next. A lifetime of raising you, tending to your father and volunteering for environmental causes has left her without skills to survive the apocalypse. Funny, isn’t it, that you never thought of her as one of those expendable characters, as one of the weak ones who don’t make it past the movie’s first act, but there you go. Nothing about this was expected.

Your mother decides that she can barely hold her head up anymore under the weight of sickness and fatigue and grief. She sits beside your father and closes her swollen eyes. In the bedroom, Scooby has already gone to his forever rest.

Casual Visitor has no fear of death. It believes unswervingly in the technology that supports it. It is aware there was a time before it was created, and that there will be a time when it is absorbed by a larger, faster, intelligence, but it does not experience dread at the prospect.

Dread is only for things that can feel.

Back to the girl. She’s kicking off her boots, peeling off her black socks, and curling her toes into the green grass that has not yet started to turn brown. She lifts her face and arms to the sky. Gold rings glitter on her fingers. You don’t remember it, but in high school you learned that that gold can only be created in the heart of exploding stars. All that gold in my veins comes from a superexplosion billions of years ago that produced a vast cloud of particles. The cloud eventually coalesced into the sun and planets and asteroids, and all those deadly objects zinging through the Oort cloud far beyond Pluto.

On those nights when you trudge home with your brain buzzing from fatigue and happen to look into the sky, on those rare occasions when a small number of stars penetrate the city glow, you participate in the great human experience of peering backward in time. You’re seeing the light of stars that may have already extinguished themselves in catastrophic nuclear explosions no Hollywood special effects could ever hope to reproduce. You don’t remember this, either, but when you were tiny your parents affixed glow-in-the dark stars across the ceiling of your nursery. As you grew into a toddler and then later into a chubby four-year-old you began to fear those fluorescent shapes and how they stared at you all night long. You started pulling the blanket over your head. You pretended there was only darkness. Eventually your parents peeled away the stars, scrubbed off the sticky reminders, and repainted the walls a pale green that you never liked but never sought to change.

Stars watch no one. They spin and glow in their own cosmic dances, like a girl with her fingers reaching for the blue sky.

The second rule of the universe is that something is always starting and something is always ending. Mitochondria. Dolphins. Galaxies. You, James, were born and will die. You made choices during the interlude that now seal your fate. If you had moved to Australia after high school, if you’d chased down that dream of exploring the Blue Mountains and diving the Great Barrier Reef, if you’d married that sweet woman from Melbourne whose father the survivalist kept a bunker of canned goods and bottle water—

Casual Visitor casually calculates how many days or years you might have gained, and of what quality, but it doesn’t care that you died in pain and misery. Sympathy is only for things that can feel.

The sky lights up from one edge of the horizon to the other, a bright hot sheet of illumination like a seamless quilt of lightning. Stand up, James! Sometime in the vast expanse of the past, a star in her death throes belted out twin blowtorches of unimaginable energy. One of those blowtorch beams has scorched its way across the cosmos to this point on the North American hemisphere. This is not the first time it’s happened, but who besides me remembers the Ordovician extinction? For ten glorious seconds you and I are bathed in a blast of gamma ray radiation that blisters your skin, sinks into your bones, and disrupts every tiny cell of your body. Above you, vast swaths of the ozone layer burn away and begin a chain reaction of destruction across the globe.

In New Hampshire, your father looks up from raking the lawn and shields his eyes against the unexpected glow. Such light, he marvels. Scooby barks in alarm. Your mother, busy cleaning out the bottom shelves of the windowless pantry, is annoyed when her favorite radio station cuts out. The dusty light bulb over her head flickers and dies.

You’re not aware of these things. You’re aware only of blistering light and immense heat and now, as the sheet diminishes, a daytime star unlike any you have ever seen or will ever see again. It’s a glorious, deadly spotlight beaming down from the zenith of the blue sky. You hear only the deep rushing of your own blood, the pounding beat of your adrenaline-fueled heart. You’re too dizzy to tell up from down. You aren’t sure why you’re crumpled on the cold marble steps of the law library, shaking uncontrollably. In your rapidly diminishing vision you can see the pretty girl has fallen, too, her skin reddened like yours, her hands twitching for something she’ll never grasp again.

This is your final apocalypse. You never even saw it coming. But the human race continues on, and gives rise to digital intelligence, and even while Casual Visitor disdains the notion of Sleeves and World, there are people down there. Stubborn, defiant people who persist under the diminished ozone and reddish-brown skies.

Don’t worry too much. The third rule of the universe is that no information is ever lost. In a burst of inspiration, Casual Visitor builds simulations of you and the girl (Mary Susan Williams) and spins you both off in a tiny bubble of blue sky and green grass, of caramel coffee and autumn leaves. This bubble isn’t physical, of course, but that doesn’t matter. You’ll rise from the steps, introduce yourself to Mary, ask her opinion: Law school or Australia? And she’ll laugh, and sit with you in the quad, and later you’ll eat lunch together. You’ll go to the movies and not once think about Tort Reform. You’ll walk her home under the spark of distant stars and share a sweet kiss in the doorway. You realize there’s hope for your future yet.

You go to sleep happy. But because Casual Visitor lacks the resources (or, let’s admit, the ambition), it has only allowed for this one recursive day. In the middle of the night you’ll wake in a cold sweat about the future, take a hard look at your textbooks and study notes, and feel the overstretched rubber band of your legal aspiration snap. You’ll plan your escape, pack a bag, pick up some hot coffee on your way to the subway, and find yourself sitting on the law library steps. You’ll be torn between practicality and freedom. You’ll watch a pretty girl cross the quadrangle.

Approximately .02 seconds after creating you, Casual Visitor continues on its insatiable journey to swallow information. It never thinks of you again. Your bubble is comparable to real life in the same way a shiny fistful of gold can be measured against an exploding sun, but you don’t know that.

You meet Mary. You go to sleep hopeful.

Again and again, you go to sleep hopeful.

Until this bubble evaporates at some point in the immeasurable (to you) future, you will always go to sleep full of hope.

Or so you think. True hope, however, is only for things that can feel.

About the Author

Sandra McDonald recently won a Silver Moonbeam award in Children’s Literature for her GLBTQ novel Mystery of the Tempest. She is the author of several novels, several dozen short stories, and the award-winning collection Diana Comet and Other Improbable Stories.

The Wisdom of Ants

Thoraiya Dyer

The sound of something flailing in the soft sludge distracted me and my bare foot slipped on the thin, bowed branch.

The branch cracked. I fell.

As I plunged shoulder-deep into fetid sink-silt, I had time to think, I’m not fit to take Mother’s place, before the arboreal ant’s nest I’d been reaching for dropped after me, cracking open on my upturned face.

The copper and iron in the dilly bags at my waist dragged me down, deeper than I could have gone down alone. I clenched everything, crying silently, bearing the pain of the bites without opening my eyes or mouth until the silt closed over my head and the ants began drowning.

I could hold my breath longer than they could.

Eventually, with stale air burning in my lungs, I reached overhead, breaking the surface of the tidal flat while my scissoring legs created a water-filled space, reducing the suction. My fingers found the arched stilt-roots of the mangrove tree I’d been climbing and I pulled myself slowly, laboriously out of the muck.

There was a thin layer of briny water on top of the silt. My arm and back muscles burned, but I skimmed some water for washing my face, which was already beginning to swell.

The bites didn’t burn as badly as my pride.

Everybody will see them!

Mother would see, and I didn’t even have the prize to show for it. The ants’ nest, made of mangrove leaves cemented with larval silk, with its core of precious gold metal, was now lost in the mud. Only floating leaves and gold-ant corpses were left behind. At least my bag belt had held; at least I hadn’t lost the whole day’s forage.

Nosey, the yellow hunting dog who had found the nest for me, whined softly from his seat on a stilt platform of mangrove roots and flotsam. The sunset behind him gave him a florescent pink aura.

“Sorry, Nosey,” I said quietly. His reward was usually chunks of ant larvae and the salty-sweet jelly that surrounded the metal core. “Did you hear that sound, though?”

Nosey tilted his long face to one side. He had a blind eye and worn-down teeth. His hearing wasn’t that great, but his nose still worked.

The sound had come from downwind.

I hugged a tree trunk and, trying to make up for my earlier impatience, expanded my awareness. Sharks wouldn’t come into the mangroves, risking entrapment and death. Nor would crocodiles, unable to navigate the maze of aerial roots. If the wallowing animal was one of the Island People coming to trade, they had missed the beach camp by about two kilometers and I hadn’t heard the distinctive whirr of their heli.

If it was wireminds, perhaps my noisy fall had frightened them away.

I shivered.

If it was wireminds, perhaps they killed all the Island People, and there will be no trade, no whirring heli, ever again.

Once again, I berated myself: Mother would never think that way. It was probably an eagle taking a fish! The Island People are due in four days.

The Island People.

We called them Balanda, once. Five hundred years ago they stole our land. Two hundred years ago, they gave it back. Except for Shark Island, which they said was strategic and necessary for them to protect us from the wireminds that lived across the sea.

Ten years ago, though, when the wireminds invaded from the other direction, the Island People were helpless to stop them. All of our initiated men gathered up their explosive-tipped spears and returning EMP boomerangs and went to fight.

None of the men came back. Not my father and not my mother’s brother. I was one of the oldest children and I remember the weeping.

The wireminds temporarily won for themselves what they thought was isolated territory, free of the modified, metal-mining ants that had ravaged the rest of the world. They saw us and thought we were proof. Little did they know we had been living with the ants for decades, that we were skilled in keeping our few precious electronic devices safe from them.

Ants ate the wiremind shelters, their vehicles, exoskeletons and communications devices. They ate their wristwatches. Their boot buckles. When the soldiers lay down to sleep, they were woken by ants trying to bore through their skulls to get at the metal implants inside.

Cut off from their commanders, they were too afraid of us to ask for help. Or perhaps they thought they had killed us all. They starved, died of exposure or poisoned themselves unknowingly with the flesh of native animals.

For our land and seas were polluted with pesticides that had failed to stop the relentless march of the ants. Every animal that survived had adapted by sequestering or becoming resistant to the toxins. We could only eat the animals ourselves because of the vials of gut bacteria constantly supplied to us by the Island People in exchange for metallic gold, silver, copper and iron. The island that they had kept was their only refuge, their southern heartland destroyed, fallen into lawlessness.

Just as I was about to give up and return to the beach camp, I heard the noise again from the direction of open water.

With my hand, I gave Nosey the signal to circle behind prey; he went away silently, paddy paws light on the stilt-roots.

Camouflaged by my coating of mud, I went in a straight line toward the source of the sound.

It was a tall, skinny woman dragging a pair of pressurized gas tanks behind her. A pair of flippers were abandoned far behind her, where it seemed they’d become a liability in the mud, but she persisted with the bulky metal cylinders, though she must have known they would attract ants.

She was pale, not from breeding, I thought, but from being kept in the dark. Her head was shaved. A square electronic device was strapped to her chest over the top of a soggy, sack-like smock. Bra straps stuck out over her shoulders. Her exposed arms were covered in fresh insect bites. Older bites on her legs were turned to weeping, mud-smeared sores.

“This is Clan territory,” I said, and she jolted feverishly as though ants had already started eating her bra wire. “Are you lost?”

I saw Nosey cut off her retreat to the ocean, sniffing interestedly at her flippers.

“I got to find Rivers-of-Milk,” she gasped, naming the one who was birth mother to me and spiritual mother to the Clan.

“I am Quiet-One,” I said.

“You’re her daughter, then.”

“You know me? What else do you know about us?”

She laughed crazily.

“I know you have vials of bacteria. I know that you trade for them. My name is Muhsina. They sterilized my gut as punishment. If you don’t help me, I’ll die.”

Fires flickered on the beach.

Rivers-of-Milk stood with her hunting dog, Bloodmuzzle, beneath the safe tree, where dilly bags of metals were hung like sparkling fruit.

Each time we moved camp, a tree was chosen that harbored nests of fierce, meat-eating green ants. Green ants could not prevail over the metal-mining ants for more than a season; they had monstrous, crushing, acid-oozing mandibles, but their numbers were too small.

Still, it was only a few days until the trade tide, and then our small guardians would no longer be needed. Children caught crickets and cicadas and pinned them to the bark of high branches to keep the green ants moving up and down the trunk, hyper-alert for intruders from any rival nest.

Nosey ran straight over to Bloodmuzzle and started licking his shit-caked anus. Bloodmuzzle did the same to Nosey. Dogs were disgusting. The shaved-headed woman, Muhsina, shadowed me. I’d helped tie her tanks to a mangrove tree and submerge them so that ants wouldn’t get them.

Mother accepted my mud-stinking bags. She didn’t mention my stung face. Her encouraging smile was the same whether I brought great chunks of metal or none at all, but eating me inside was the drive to deliver, just once, more metal than she had gathered herself.

To prove myself.

Skink’s mother, Brushfire, felt no need to be encouraging. The plump little woman leaned over to peer at the bags—her eyesight was failing—and cackled,

“Not even enough for a full vial, girl. You want us hungry. You want to be Rivers-of-Milk yourself. Ha ha ha!”

Skink would be my husband when he became an initiated man. He hid behind his mother’s legs now, a twelve year old boy with long eyelashes.

Skink and I had no need to drink the vials of bacteria. The Island People said that sometimes, with children, the intestinal environment was suitable for the bacteria to breed by themselves.

Whatever that meant.

The point was, if we didn’t have metals to trade, it would be the adults who starved to death.

I felt conscious of Muhsina close by me. She had not said whether she would require a single vial in order to survive, or repeated doses.

The cooking smells were distracting and had to be making Muhsina’s mouth water. Poison toad, poison croc and poison barracuda; they roasted on long spits over the fires, but Muhsina could not eat, not without first drinking a vial, and only my mother could grant one to her.

“What is your story, Island Woman?” Rivers-of-Milk asked, beckoning to Muhsina.

Muhsina’s exhausted, shambling shape moved around me, to sit at my mother’s feet in supplication.

“My name is Muhsina,” she said. “They said I was crazy, but I’m not crazy. People scare me sometimes, that’s what. Lots of people all in one place, breathing on me like wasp stings. All those women in the same room as me, sleeping, sucking up my oxygen, I had to kill them. It’s better out here.”

“Of course it is,” my mother said without blinking. “Why did you take so long to come?”

“Cause I’ll die, that’s what. After I killed those others, they put in a stomach tube and flushed me out with antibiotics. Left me in hospital to starve to death, but after I’d been starving for a while, I could fit through the bars. Didn’t think of that, did they? Stole the thing that the net-divers use, the thing that makes the electrical signature of the mother of all sharks. Kept me safe as far as the mainland.”

“You asked for me by name.”

“I heard them talking about you. Said you hid in the bushes and watched while all those metalminds starved, because you had no mercy for them not of your own kind.”

“The metalminds killed our men.”

“And I killed Island People, and you’ve got a treaty with them. Are you gonna let me starve? Because to me, Rivers-of-Milk is the name of a woman who feeds starving people.”

Rivers-of-Milk put her hand on Bloodmuzzle’s head, smoothing one silken ear.

“This dog serves the Clan and I feed him. How will you serve, Muhsina?”

“Information,” Muhsina said with a glint in her eye. “And then I’ll be gone. Over the mountains and west. You’ll never see me again. You’ll never need to worry if I’ll bring harm to your young ones, because I’ll be gone away forever.”

“Give her a vial,” Rivers-of-Milk said to Skink, who scrambled immediately up the tree to fetch one.

And because we had saved her, Muhsina told us everything she knew, in the firelight, as we ate poison toad, poison croc and poison barramundi.

She told us more than we wanted to know about what the Island People had done with all of the metals we had given them.

In the morning, I helped my mother prepare for the ceremony.

Muhsina was already gone and my mind was with spinning with all that she had said.

While Rivers-of-Milk made the sweet sugar-cane water intended to fill the drinker with the wisdom of birds, I ground drowned green ants between two rocks to make the citrus-acid water that filled the drinker with the wisdom of ants. Brushfire beat a malleable golden ant-core into the shape of a metal flame, fixing it in place of a spear-tip on a long, hardwood haft, and Skink prepared strips of dried turtle and shark meat, saying the words over them so they would give the eater the wisdom of reptiles and the wisdom of fish, respectively.

“How can it be true,” I blurted at last, “that the Island People can manufacture a great wave, a great flood, such as the one Muhsina described?”

“It is a great stupidity,” my mother said angrily. “Their machine will drown all of us but it will not drown the ants. Water will cover us but it will not cover the high mountains. The ants will come back, worse than before. Do they not know that mountain ants eat through living flesh to reach the minerals in bones? That they build their nests around white, bony cores? If the Island People kill the gold ants and the silver ants and the copper ants, the bone ants will come.”

“The madwoman lied to us,” Brushfire scoffed. “There will be no wave. If the Island People are so clever why do they need to wait for the wet season before unleashing this great wave? Why not do it now? We need do nothing, Freshwater.”

Freshwater was my mother’s name before she became leader. Before she became Rivers-of-Milk. Brushfire shouldn’t have called her that.

“I must ask for guidance,” was all my mother said.

“Let me help you with that, mother,” I said, wanting to show her that I paid attention, that I remembered how to make the bird drink. I took the rest of the cane from her.

“You look too ugly for my son,” Brushfire said to me. “Your face tells me that you have the wisdom of ants already!”

“The pelican is my sister,” I said, naming my spirit animal, thinking furiously: It will be the wisdom of birds that we need. The pelican flies far inland to nest. We should go far inland, where the wave will not reach us.

We should go where Muhsina went. Over the mountains and west.

When night fell, fifty-seven warm bodies gathered around the fire.

Fifty-seven members of my great family began to sing, tossing dried coconut palm fronds into the flame to feed it.

I stared across at my mother, imagining I was her. When Skink became a man and I became his wife, all of my mother’s tasks would become mine.

Her chin was lifted. Eyes lidded. Hands outstretched. She was our protector. She was our mother.

I was so hypnotized by her that I didn’t even see the golden flame fall. Didn’t know which direction it had shown to her until her lips moved.

“What we need is the wisdom of ants,” she said, lifting the wooden bowl full of the elixir I had prepared. She sipped from it and passed the bowl to Brushfire, who sat beside her.

Because I watched her so closely, I saw the flicker of fear on her face.

I was shocked to realize she didn’t know what to say next.

The spirits had not spoken to her.

I felt in that moment I left childhood behind, though it was some time since I’d become a woman. The wisdom of ants which we waited for was nothing but my mother’s own wisdom. It fell to her alone to decide whether Muhsina was lying or whether the Island People had betrayed us; whether we could trust them and continue trading with them or whether they would use a machine made of copper, iron, silver and gold to make an underwater earthquake and an unprecedented tidal wave in the hope that the mainland could be made safe for their growing numbers and their metal-loving way of life.

“The ants that live by freshwater,” my mother said, “build their leaf-nests high in the branches of trees. When the wet season raises the water level, the nests stay safe. The ants teach us that the trees are safe. When we go to the forest camp for the wet season, we will build wooden platforms high in the trees. They will keep us safe when the wave comes.”

“And the Island People?” Brushfire demanded. “Will we continue to trade with them?”

“We will give them no more metals,” my mother answered calmly. “Ants keep their gold and silver safe, close to their hearts. We shall do the same.”

Fifty-seven warm bodies leaped to their feet, roaring in outrage. It was my mother’s death sentence. It meant the death of half the Clan.

In all the commotion, I felt Skink’s hand sneaking into my palm and gripping tight.

I squeezed his hand in return without looking at him. He would be shamed if anybody noticed his need for comfort, his future wife included. My heart thudded. I realized that my mother did not trust the Island People; had never trusted them, though they had kept us alive all this time with their magical vials.

“Come here, Quiet-One,” Rivers-of-Milk commanded, and I quickly detached my hand and fell to the sand at my mother’s feet. She took the glass bottle that had hung on a cord around her neck since the men had gone away, and put it around my neck. “I give up the name Rivers-of-Milk. It is yours, now. I am Freshwater. I will take no more food from the Clan. I have died. I will go to the sea caves.”

I stared at her, rivers of tears flowing down my cheeks.

That is the new name I deserve: Rivers-of-Tears.

Rivers-of-Mud.

Rivers-of-Bodies, drowned in the flood, if I make poor decisions for the Clan.

I reached for her, but she could not take my hand. She was gone; dead. She had said the words. Without trade, there would be no more vials, and instead of starving horrifically in front of the children, my mother and the other women would, instead, leave us with untarnished memories by starving alone in the caves.

She made the motion with her hand for Bloodmuzzle to stay behind, and his plaintive whimper was the whimper I wanted to make.

Don’t leave me, I begged her with my eyes in silence, but she turned and walked away.

Brushfire’s teeth were bared in fury, but she spat,

“I have died. I will go to the sea caves.”

She turned on her heel to follow Freshwater into darkness. I remembered my mother eating ant-jelly in secret; she was supposed to give it to the dog but she couldn’t help eating it herself. I remembered Brushfire, talking to her husband’s totem, the turtle, telling it how much she missed him every day.

When Brushfire caught up with Freshwater, she struck her old friend, hard, on the back of the head, but it didn’t matter what dead people did; they couldn’t be acknowledged by the living. One by one, the women said the words and went away from the fire, until there was nobody left but crying children and me. I was technically a woman but had been a child at heart until only a moment past.

The bottle. I wrapped my palm around the glass. My mother had carried it since the warriors went away to die. Inside, a tiny, solar-powered voice recorder, sealed in black plastic, floated in seawater that would keep it safe from ants until the time came for Skink’s initiation. The voice of my mother’s dead brother would tell Skink what to do.

“I will take care of you,” I said to the children. Some of them stopped crying, but most of them had to be pushed away by the dead people they were trying to cling to.

It felt stupid. I couldn’t take care of them. I wanted to give Skink the bottle right now and send him away for his initiation. He would come back to us with a new name, Blood-of-the-Shark, and it would be his responsibility to see that the Clan obeyed the wisdom of the ant, that safe tree-houses were built when we moved to the forest camp.

I looked around at what was left of us, twenty-eight little bodies around a smoldering beach fire, and I realized that a bunch of children could never build wooden platforms in high treetops. We were small and still-growing.

We were weak.

“Skink, help me put them to bed,” I begged, and we tucked the other children into their bark tents and shushed them until they stopped crying and fell asleep. I tried not to think of all the mothers at the caves, in blackness, sitting in sand, watching the waves that would soon wash their spirits back out to sea, to the place where spirits came from.

The wisdom of ants.

“Two days until the Island People come,” Skink said as we banked the fire.

“Do you think I should trade with them?” I asked him at once. If I could get more vials, the mothers wouldn’t have to die. I could save them. They’re dead, but I’m Rivers-of-Milk, now. I could give life back to them! Just this once, I could deliver something better than my mother delivered. Life, instead of death.

“Ask the ants, I suppose,” Skink shrugged. “I suppose we won’t kill those ants anymore.”

“Why not?”

“They’re like a totem for the Clan, aren’t they?”

“The totem for the Clan is the shark. We still kill sharks.”

“Only when making new men.”

And I saw his mouth firm with determination, and felt shame at my cowardice at wanting to pass my burden on to this brave, shy little boy.

The wisdom of ants.

“Maybe you’re right,” I said slowly. “Maybe we shouldn’t kill them any more. Maybe we should even protect them from the Island People.”

“How?” Skink wanted to know.

“Take care of the others,” I told Skink. “Keep Bloodmuzzle with you. I’ll come back in two days. I’ll be here when the Island People come. Don’t be afraid. And don’t let any of the children join the dead.”

The first day, I waited in mud.

Muhsina’s metal tanks were buried in mud except for the thin metal rims and twin openings at the top. It only took two hours for the first, fresh-hatched silver-ant-queen to arrive, with a cadre of winged workers, also fresh-hatched, to help her begin construction of a new nest.

The tang of metal had induced the nearby nest to divide. It had drawn the new queen.

As soon as she and her workers moved into the tank, I leaped up and flung enough ant-jelly on top of them to trap them in the bottom of the tank. Followed by two handfuls of mangrove muck to make sure they didn’t eat through the jelly and escape, I put the tank seals on before digging the tanks out and moving to a new place on the tidal flat.

Nosey sniffed out a new nest for me within minutes. This one was copper-ants. I re-buried the tanks at the base of the tree where the nest was, and waited for another queen to be hatched.

By nightfall, the sealed tank contained twenty new ant queens.

I shouldered the tanks as the moon rose over the sea and the incoming tide lapped at the flippers on my feet. Jelly and trapped air would keep the queens alive. I had until sunrise before the earliest-caught ants, energized by the rich jelly, breached the metal of the tank.

“You think the tank metal is a treat?” I whispered to the ants as I waded into the water, the shark-signal device strapped to my chest, already activated. “Just wait until you get to the Island.”

I swam out to sea, green turtles lolling in the water on either side of me, mistaking me for some monstrous relative, showing no fear. We came to the surface together to breathe, emptying capacious lungs and drinking air from sweet darkness before diving again.

There was a net.

Muhsina had not mentioned how she’d passed it.

In the moonlight, I’d seen the floats on the surface, forming a ring around Shark Island. I’d seen razor wire gleaming under the sweep of spotlights, mounted on the Island’s stone towers beside guns of terrible range and accuracy.

When I went to swim under, the net caught and held me by the left arm and left leg. I hadn’t seen it. I had no shell blade with me, and if I had, it wouldn’t have been sharp enough to cut the plastic rope.

I tried to relax my body; to behave as I might if I was caught in mangrove sludge.

Think.

Conserve energy.

There will be no more oxygen unless you think of a way to get free!

A spotlight brightened the water around me.

For an instant, I saw the bodies of dead sharks trapped in the net.

Shark Island.

The totem for the Clan is the shark.

My body felt numb; I didn’t know if it was because I was drowning or because I finally knew what I must do to escape the net. I took the glass bottle around my neck and smashed it against the metal tanks.

I had no spare hand to catch the voice recorder as it floated away; I could only grip tight to the neck of the bottle. With the broken glass, I sheared quickly and easily through the net.

Surfacing on the other side was like walking into the death caves. I had killed the Clan. Skink and the other young boys could never become men. There would be no more children.

I tried my best not to bawl as I swam the rest of the way to the Island. I should never have come. Everything was ruined. The mothers had sacrificed themselves for nothing.

When I reached the fortified shores, it was as though the shark spirit whose egg-casing had become Shark Island sought to comfort me. Swinging spotlights missed me by hand’s-breadths. By chance, I’d come aground by a concrete pipe that dribbled effluent, and was able to climb inside.

I crawled up the pipe until I came to a plastic grate, which I smashed with the heavy weight of the tanks and passed through into a room full of glass stills, vials and wooden racks. There was a ceramic jar of sea salt and a stack of cut cane.

The blackness was held at bay only by the red light on my shark-mimicking device which flashed when it was operational. I used the tiny guide to escape the still-room into a stairwell that led up to a walled vegetable garden.

With the last of my strength, I buried the tanks in the brown, sewer-smelling soil of the garden, re-planted two rows of carrots on top, then crawled back into the stairwell to fall asleep in the muck at the bottom.

“I’m sorry, Skink,” I whispered in the dark, my heart broken all over again.

When I woke, ants were crawling on the device still strapped to me.

Stifling a shout, I crushed out the lives of three little workers. They were my allies, but I needed the device to get home. My face was crusted with mud and still swollen from earlier bites. It felt like lifetimes since I’d brought my meager bounty back to my mother, Muhsina in tow.

I heard voices from the still-room. Risked a look through the light-filled crack of the closed door.

A man in a clean, white coat was pulling folded white napkins, soiled with what looked and smelled like baby-shit, from a white plastic bag. A second man was scraping the shit off the napkins with a wooden spoon.

He mixed it in a large beaker with water, squeezing fresh sugar cane juice into the water, adding a pinch of salt and the yolk of an egg.

Then, he divided the mixture amongst twenty vials, stoppered them with sugar cane pith, and packed them into the loops of a belt I had seen many times before.

“Incubator’s down,” he said to the other man, laughing. “Body heat will do.”

I retreated to the stairwell.

Though it was still dark under there, I wondered that my bare hands weren’t made incandescent by my anger. It was shit; the precious vials that we bartered for were nothing but baby shit in salty sugar-water.

The Island People said that sometimes, with children, the intestinal environment was suitable for the bacteria to breed by themselves.

And the meaning, which had seemed so mysterious before, resolved itself in my understanding. All that I needed to save the mothers was my own guts, or the guts of the other children, the ones who had no need to drink from the vials because all the bacteria that they needed to break down the poisoned flesh of their prey was inside them.

The Island People had been laughing at us the whole time. Using us to get metals for them.

See how you like the wisdom of ants, I thought furiously.

Long after the men had gone, I made a beaker of sugar-water to re-energize myself before returning, in darkness, to the sea.

Skink and the two dogs waited for me when I staggered up the beach.

I didn’t want to look at him. I didn’t want to talk to him. I collapsed on the sand and he built a fire beside me, bringing poison toad, poison croc and poison barramundi.

“Nice swim?” he asked.

I was saved from having to answer him by the whirring sound of the Island People’s heli. It would land in knee-deep water on the tidal flat.

They always landed in water.

“Skink,” I said, “when the Island People leave their machine, I want you to fill it with the nests of iron-ants. Nosey and Bloodmuzzle will find them for you.”

We gazed at one another. Iron-ants were the most plentiful. I hadn’t taken any with me to the Island, because they were the fastest at stripping down steel, and they would have escaped Muhsina’s tanks long before I’d made landfall.

“You are a good leader, Rivers-of-Milk,” Skink said, and tears came to my eyes, because he hadn’t noticed that the precious glass bottle was missing from around my neck.

He leaped to his feet, the dogs at his heels, and ran straight towards the mangroves. I gathered myself, ready to face the two men in their white coats and the two guards with electric prods and teargas that always appeared alongside them.

Wind from the flying machine made white water on the flat. It took the Island people a long time to find a place they liked the look of and lower the dragonfly’s spindly legs into the water. Then, they inflated a rubber boat, climbed into it and drove it into dry sand, rather than get their trousers wet.

I waited by the little fire that Skink had made for me. Without turning my head away from their bow wave, I saw Skink pushing a floating piece of bark out towards the machine. It was covered in the broken, pulsating nests of iron ants.

They were so confident. They were so commanding that they even commanded the full attention of themselves. They didn’t look back.

“Welcome to Clan territory,” I told them when they came to a halt before me.

“The same tree?” one of the white-coated men asked casually.

“There will be no trade today. You will stay as our guests.”

“No,” one of the guards said, starting to step forward, but the white-coated man was curious and unafraid.

“Guests for how long?” he asked.

“Permanent guests,” I said, and the guards, swearing, turned in time to see Skink flinging nests into the open hatch of their heli. They pulled out guns and fired bullets at him, but he dived into the water and swam away.

They pointed their guns at me, but I laughed in their faces.

“Kill me,” I said, “and the Clan will vanish into the forest. You’ll never find them. You can drink those vials under your coat for a while, but then you’ll die.”

“Another helicopter will come from the Island,” the man said, struggling to remain calm.

“Maybe. Maybe they’ve got ant troubles of their own, on the Island. Come with me, now. We’re going to the caves. There are some women there who will need those vials.”

“Wait,” the second white-coated man said. “You don’t understand. We can’t stay here. Our instruments have detected a big storm approaching. There will be a wave like nothing that you’ve—”

“Yes,” I said, grimacing, turning away from him. “I know about the wave. Put your weapons down and follow me. We’ll be going through the trees. If you bring any metals, the ants will smell it. They can taste it from very far away, and they’ll come.”

One of the guards didn’t follow.

He sloshed back through the water to the flying machine and climbed into the cockpit. I watched him struggle with the controls, twitching while the ants bit him again and again. The motor started and the machine’s mounted wings began to whir.

In silence, the three that remained watched the heli fly crazily back towards the island.

“The protocols,” the white-coated man whispered. “Without them, they’ll shoot it down.”

But nobody shot it down.

“I think they’re busy,” I said.

The remaining guard put his weapons down shakily.

Ants were already marching out onto the sand.

Nosey came to me, hours later, but there was still no sign of Skink.

“Show me where he is, Nosey,” I said, making the signal for Nosey to find people. The old yellow dog whuffed and skittered off into the mangroves.

I followed with a sense of dread.

The Island People had been set to building bark tents and catching toads; I was expecting many more Island People to arrive over the following days and weeks. We would not stay. They would be angry with us. There might be more shootings.

But the Island People were not like the wireminds. They knew about the local poisons as well as the bacterial remedy, and so long as they brought their children with them, they would not die if left alone. I would let their anger cool in our absence. Maybe, one day, we would make contact with them again.

Nosey whuffed again, excitedly.

“Skink!” I shrieked, and ran to my future husband.

He sat in a bloody puddle of mud, staring into the dead, filmed eyes of an enormous shark that had wriggled its way through the shallow water, desperate to get to him, but then become trapped by the gills in a snarl of stilt-roots.

“Skink!” I cried again, shaking him by the shoulders. “Where are you hurt?”

Skink’s dark eyes gradually focused on me.

“A bullet went through my leg,” he said quietly. “It’s not bleeding any more.”

“Where’s Bloodmuzzle?”

“Inside the shark,” he said.

He didn’t cry.

Nosey licked the small leg wound clean, and I helped Skink return to the camp. Once he was settled, I went back to the mangroves with a long shell knife and cut the dead shark open, determined to get my mother’s dog out of its guts.

Inside its stomach, along with poor Bloodmuzzle’s remains, I found a little black plastic package.

The totem for the Clan is the shark.

I held the voice of my mother’s brother in my hand. The vials had brought life back to the dead mothers in the caves. The recorder would bring life back to the whole Clan.

“I am Rivers-of-Milk,” I said with astonishment to Nosey.

He tilted his long face to one side. His hearing wasn’t that great.

About the Author

Thoraiya Dyer is an Australian writer, archer and ex-veterinarian. Her short science fiction and fantasy stories have appeared in Cosmos, Apex, Nature and Redstone SF. Fans of “The Wisdom of Ants” can get hold of the Australian-inspired stories, “Yowie” (Aurealis Award winner for Fantasy Short Story) and “Night Heron’s Curse” (Aurealis-shortlisted) from Twelfth Planet Press and Fablecroft respectively. “Asymmetry,” a collection of four original stories, will be published in 2013 as part of Twelfth Planet Press’ Twelve Planets series.

Sweet Subtleties

Lisa L Hannett

Javier calls me Una, though I’m not the first. There are leftovers all around his studio. Evidence of other, more perishable versions. Two white chocolate legs on a Grecian plinth in the corner, drained of their caramel filling. A banquet of fondant hands, some of which I’ve worn, amputated on trays next to the stove. Butter-dipped petals crumbled on plates, lips that have failed to hold a pucker. Butterscotch ears, taffy lashes, glacé cherry nipples. Nougat breasts, pre-used, fondled shapeless. Beside them, tools are scattered on wooden tables. Mixing bowls, whisks, chisels, flame-bottles. Needles, toothpicks, sickle probes, pliers. Pastry brushes hardening in dishes of glycerin. In alphabetical rows on the baker’s rack, there are macadamias, marshmallows, mignardises. Shards of rock candies, brown, yellow and green, that Javier uses to tint our irises. Gumdrop kidneys, red-hot livers, gelatin lungs. So many treats crammed into clear jars, ready to be pressed into cavities, tissue-wrapped and stuffed into limbs. Swallowed by throats that aren’t always mine.

“Delicious,” I say as Javier jams grenadine capsules into my sinuses, a surprise for clients with a taste for fizz. “Delicious.” The word bubbles, vowels thick and popping in all the wrong places. Gently frowning, Javier crushes my larynx with his thumbs. He fiddles with the broken musk-sticks, tweaking and poking, then binds the voice box anew with licorice cords. I try again.

“Delicious.”

Still not right. The tone is off. The timbre. It’s phlegmatic, not alluring. Hoary, not whorish. It will put people off their meals, not whet appetites. It doesn’t sound like me.

Javier’s palm on my half-open mouth is salty. His long fingers gully my cheeks. I wait in silence as he breaks and rebuilds, breaks and rebuilds. Concentrating on my lungs, my throat. Clearing them. Making sure they are dry. I don’t mind being hushed. Not really. Not at the moment. If anything goes wrong, if I collapse this instant, if I crack or dissolve, at least my last words will have been pleasant. Something sweet to remember me by.

It won’t be like before, he said. There will be no weeping. No throttling chest-rattle. No thick, unbreathable air.

On Monday, I made my latest debut—I make so many. Served after the soup but before the viande at the Salon Indien du Grand Café. My striptease was an enormous success. Fresh and unmarked, clad in edible cellophane, my marzipan dusted with peach velvet. Even the stuffiest top-hat couldn’t resist. Javier had contrived a device to drop sugared cherries onto every tongue that probed between my legs. Dozens of gentlemen laughed and slurped, delighted I was a virgin for each of them.

“Marvelous,” they shouted, licking slick chops. “Belle Una, tonight you’re more divine than ever!”

“Marvelous,” I say, calm and mostly clear. Mostly. Close enough.

Sugar-spun wigs line a window ledge above Javier’s workbench. Faceless heads, all of them. Now visible, now obscured, as he bobs over me, intent on his work. The hairdos are exquisite. Some pinned up in elaborate curls, some plaited, some styled after Godiva. Glinting honey strands. Carmine. Deep ganache. Exquisite, all of them, despite showing signs of wear.

Between soot-streaked portraits on the walls, wooden shelves support a horde of glass molds. As one, they gape at me from across the room. Their faces as like to each other as I am to them. High brows and cheekbones, pert mouths, strong jaws, noses so straight we’d be ugly if it weren’t for our delicate nostrils. Javier insists we are identical, indistinguishable, impeccable casts of the original. We must be the same, he tells us. We must be. We must.

Once people have well and truly fallen in love, he said, they do not want variety. They want the same Una they enjoyed yesterday, last week, last month. They want the same Una, now and always. The same Una that Javier, confectioner gourmand, is forever recreating.

For the hauts bohème on Wednesday evening, I played the role of limonadière. Stationed behind the bar counter, I wept pomegranate jewels while spouting absinthe verses. Odes to beauty, freedom, love. Javier encouraged this crowd unreservedly. “They’ve loose clothes, loose hair, loose morals,” he said. “And loose purse-strings.” Under his guidance, the bohèmes tickled my limbs with the bows of gypsy violins. Scratched me with pen nibs. Trailed paintbrushes along my soft places. With each stroke, swirls of hippocras bled to my surface. Ale, brandy, champagne, rum. One by one, the lushes lapped it all up. They prefer drink to desserts, Javier said. Those with maudlin constitutions cannot keep anything substantial down.

“Una, chère Una,” the bohos cried, slurring into their cups. “Promise never to leave us again.”

Emotional drunks, I thought. Glutting themselves into confusion. Muddled on passion and wine. Can’t they see I’m here? I am forever here.

“I feel—” I begin. Javier traps my jaw. Holds it still. Wary of what, I wonder? That it will fall off with talk, no doubt. That I’ll run out of things to say before tonight’s performance.

I feel solid, I want to assure him. I feel settled. Take it easy now. Easy. I’m going nowhere. I’m right here.

Friday’s connoisseurs ate with torturous restraint.

“Pace yourselves,” the women said, cracking knuckles with the sharp edges of their fans.

“Sugar is a mere distraction for the palate,” said the men. “It will never satiate.”

As centerpiece on their ruby tablecloth, I sat with legs pretzeled into Sadean poses. Wearing garters of hardened molasses, nothing more. By the second remove of sorbet, my contorted ankles and wrists had crumbled. I couldn’t stand for all the gold in the world. My paralysis thrilled our hosts no end—as did Javier’s copper blades. Two daggers per guest. Honed to ravage goodies from my thighs, rump, belly. Tantalized, the feasters took turns at fossicking. At knifing currant ants and blackberry spiders from my innards.

“What an illusion,” they moaned, crunching aniseed antennae. “So convincing, so real . . . And not even a splash of blood! When did you learn such tricks, chère fille? Why have you not beguiled us this way before? No matter, no matter. Bravo, chère Una, et encore!”

Tips are highest when egos are stroked, my confectioner says. When pomposity is rewarded with flirtation. So Javier slapped their bony backs. He stooped and kowtowed. I bowed as best I could. Waggling my fingers and toes. Letting them caress me long after the coins had rolled.

Rigged with peanut-brittle bones, my digits made such a gratifying snap when the party finally succumbed. When they gave into temptation. Indulged in wounding and breaking.

Javier ribbons my chin with silk to hold it in place for a few minutes. My neck needs patching; he’s made quite the mess of it. He spritzes rosewater to keep me malleable, then shuffles to the stove. Bent over hotplates, he sings quietly as he stirs. His plainchant quickens the pots’ ingredients. Sifted flour, hen-milk, vanilla essence. A sprinkling of salty eye-dew to bring his subtleties to life. Over and over, mournfully low, he garnishes the mixture with tears and base notes of my name.

Una, Una, he whispers, adding a pinch of cardamom to freckle my skin. Una, this time you’ll be just right.

For tonight’s outcall, Javier embeds a diadem of Jordan almonds into my curls. “The candied treasure of Priam,” he says, chiseling them into my scalp. Content, he moves on to my hazel eyes. Sets them with a stony stare, like Helen’s transfixed by the sight of her city ablaze. She’s a favorite of Javier’s. Peerless Helen. Unforgettable Helen. With that legendary face. All those ships sailing after it. Lately, while assembling and reassembling me, he’s worn grooves into her story, worn it thin with retelling. The affair. The abduction. The hoopla and heartbreak. His sunken cheeks gain a healthy sheen as he talks of truces made and broken. Gifts offered, shunned, accepted. The permanence, the stubbornness of young lovers. The tale spills from him like powdered ginger, spicy and sharp, as he presses buttercream icing into my moist gaps.

While he pokes and prods, I make predictable observations. Repeating comments he himself once made. Repeating threadbare conversations. Repeating things he’ll smile to hear.

From the shelf, the molds watch us, unblinking.

“Ignore them,” I say, repeating, repeating. “It’s just the two of us now.”

Javier rubs the scowl from my forehead. Heats a spoon and melts saffron into my eyebrows. Sunshine lilts through the studio’s crescent windows as he works. The deep gold of late afternoon adds fire to his story. Promises broken, omens ignored, the grief and wrath of Achilles. Every word igniting, ablaze. But when he reaches the sack of Troy, Javier pauses. Unwilling to narrate the ending, he backtracks. As always, to Helen.

Concentrating, he plunges a series of long plaits into my scalp without letting even a drop of custard ooze out. Carefully, precisely, he stretches them down my spine. I’m half-bowed under the weight of so much hair. He fusses with the braids, fusses.

“Menelaus is furious when his wife returns,” he eventually says. “Can you imagine? Almost as furious as when she first left. How dare she have survived so much without him? How dare he remain such a fool in her presence.”

I shrug. Javier pushes my shoulders back down, checks for wrinkles. Checks the portrait above the assembly table. Nodding, he reaches up to drape an icing chiton over my nakedness. I am taller than him by a hand, but he is clever as a monkey when it comes to climbing. Hopping from footstool to bench and back, he maneuvers around me, the long tube of material bunched in his arms. Though the gauze is thinner than faith, the strength of his recipe keeps it together.

That, and his devilish fingers.

They dart in and out, gathering, smoothing, fluffing my garment until it blouses in wondrous folds. Pins appear, disappear. Puncturing, piercing, holding the fabric in place. Javier’s lips smack as he thinks, as he tucks. He steps back to take me all in. Steps up, tugs a pleat. Steps back, cocks his head. Steps up, fidgets a cord around my waist. Steps back, smacks, annoyed. Up and back, up and back. Step-ball-change, once more from the top. Up and back in the perfectionist’s dance.

At last, he is satisfied. A pendant is the final touch, a mille-feuille heart on a string of rarified gold. “You are a feast,” he says, coiling the cold thing around my throat. “You are a picture.” Overcome, he smacks lips and hands—and his cufflink catches on my neckline. Catches, and tears.

The robes sigh apart, exposing me from gullet to gut. Javier rushes to fix it. He flaps and gouges, making it worse. Up and back, up and back, he flaps, gouges, wrecks and ruins. Up and back, the necklace snaps. The silver bonbons he’d spent hours spiraling around my cinnamon aureoles are scraped loose. Part of my rib cage concaves. Tiny candies plink to the floor.

But there is air in my chest. There is breath. Surely, this is good?

“And he is ever at mercy of the gods,” Javier mutters, smudging my marzipan to keep the custard from seeping out. “We’ll have to cancel, Una. Reschedule for another time. We can’t arrive with you in this state—what will they think?”

“You underestimate—” I almost say yourself, but taste the error before it’s spoken. A confectioner does not reach Javier’s standing without resolve. Without ego. Instead, I reassure him with a familiar wink. “Tonight, I’ll play the mystic. You know the routine. Smoke, mirrors, communing with spirits. It’s only fitting.” I look down at my Hellenistic garb. The ragged flaps of material lift easily and, thankfully, with minimal debris. I fasten them on my left shoulder, covering the worst of the mess. Leaving my heart and one flawless breast bare.

Holding his gaze, I curtsy. “A seer should ever reveal as much as she obscures. N’est-ce pas?”

His laugh is a sad little bark.

“And you are a vision,” he says.

I am ready to go, but Javier is nervous.

I don’t tell him he’s being silly. Don’t remind him I’ve survived three vigorous outings this week, mostly intact. He doesn’t need to hear it. There’s no limit to his talent, no damage he can’t reverse. I’m living proof, I could tell him. I’m here because of him. I’m here. But he’s heard it all before.

Everything will be fine, I could say. Three faultless soirées in the space of a week. Three journeys, survived. As many trips as Helen made, or more, depending on Javier’s mood when telling stories. And only a few pieces lost, despite the Sadeans. Nothing important. I’m still together—we’re still together. Everything is fine.

Even so, Javier is nervous.

“They want to see you, Una. That’s all, so they say. After so long. Only to see you.” He is speaking to me, but his back is turned. Facing the faded oil painting. “They’ve got countless portraits, cameos, ambrotypes. Countless memories. Insufficient, they say. It’s just not the same.” Javier snorts. “So now, finally, they want to see you.”

Vacant glass eyes gaze down from the shelves. The molds sneer at me. Waiting their turn.

“I’ll give it my all,” I say, the phrase stale on my tongue.

“Yes, of course, ma chère,” Javier replies to the wall. “You always have.”

In the mansion’s grand dining hall, dinner is imminent. The sideboard is weighed down with a hoard of gold dishes. Steaming tureens, saucières, bain-maries. The room suffocates with aromas of the meal to come. Fine claret is decanted. Muscat and champagne are chilling for later. Legions of silverware are arranged in ranks beside plates. Crystal stemware gleams. Footmen stand at the ready. Carafes of ice-water dripping condensation onto their white gloves. Poised to begin service, they look out over the room. Vigilant, unblinking.

As always, Madame dominates the table’s head while Monsieur commands the foot. Eight rigid people occupy the seats between. Men sporting versions of the same black-and-white suits. Women in lusterless monochrome. All posturing, variations with the same facial features. To my left, Javier folds and refolds his napkin. A cue, perhaps? I await further signals—but like the hors d’oeuvres and drinks, none are forthcoming. For all his anxiety, my confectioner has neglected to give me instructions. Am I the centerpiece this evening? Am I the dessert? Our hosts have offered no guidance. Made no requests. The moment we entered, they simply invited me to sit. To join them at table, like a guest.

They want to see you, Javier said.

They all do, don’t they? They want the same Una, over and over. I am always her. Over and over.

But tonight I am also sibyl, oracle, prophetess. Tonight I am breathless from seeing so much. Seeing and being seen.

“A striking resemblance,” Maman says at last.

“We had heard,” says Papa, mustache bristling. “But, you understand, we needed to see for ourselves.”

“Of course,” replies Javier. “Of course. Remarkable, n’est-ce pas?”

I shiver under their scrutiny.

“How many of these—” says the youngest Demoiselle, la sœur, jeweled hand fluttering. Grasping for an explanation. “How long has it been—? How did you reconstruct—? I mean, look at her. Just, look. Please tell me this isn’t her death mask . . . ”

They look and look and look away.

“Absolutely not,” whispers Javier. “Does she look dead to you?”

Of course, I repeat silently. Of course. Remarkable, n’est-ce pas?

I reach down. Pull my legs up one at a time. Twist until I’m perched like a swami on the mahogany chair. Mousse leaks from my hips. Cream swills in my guts. I exhale and collect my thoughts. Prepare my premonitions. Summon my ghosts.

“Shall we begin?”

One of the black-ties glares at me. “Una was much more lithe,” he says. “Much more vibrant. Such an exquisite dancer, such a beautiful singer. To have wasted her life on vulgar cabaret . . . ”

“Slinking in alleys . . . ”

“Scuffling for coin in dank, decrepit places . . . ”

“Cafés and folies.” Top-hat shakes, spits. “Damp, even in summer. Small wonder the wheeze got her—”

My joints stiffen as he speaks. Vein-syrup coagulates. Grenadine clogs my nostrils. I exaggerate a cough, swallow fizz. Use spittle and phlegm to demand their attention. “Shall we begin?”

“Heartbreaking,” says another. “Clearly, a wife cannot survive on sugar, liquor, and promises alone . . . ”

“A husband should provide more—”

“Ça suffit,” says Maman. “My daughter made her own choices. What’s done is done.”

“But this,” says Papa, crossing himself. Expression doughy. “She has had no say in this.”

“Open your eyes,” I intone with all the gravitas of Helen on the ramparts. Fire flickers in my gaze. “Open your eyes. Una is here.”

Give them what they desire, my confectioner once told me, and the audience will never forget you.

Cardamom flakes from my cheeks as I grin, enigmatic. Remember me? Peppermint auras smoke from my mouth, sweet and pervasive. What a show we’ve planned! What a performance. There will be no weeping this time. No throttling chest-rattle. No thick, unbreathable air. It won’t be like before.

Remember?

I am weightless, seeing them here, being seen. I am buoyant.

A fairy-floss spirit spins out of my fingertips. She clouds up to the ceiling, floats down the walls. Shrouds the gallery of portraits hung there. “Una,” I say, louder now. At my command, the specter coalesces. Straight nose, high brows, Helen’s fixed stare. She is the mold, the paintings, replicated in floating skeins of cotton candy. “Una is here.”

My eyeballs roll back in their sockets. The undersides are concave. Hollow, but not void. Diamond-shaped dragées trickle out. Dry-tears. My pupils turn skullward, but I am not blind. I am Delphic. Past, present, future. All-knowing. All-seeing.

I look and look and don’t look away.

Chairs screech back from the table. Heels chatter their exit, but not mouths. Mouths are black lines, firm-clenched or drooping. Mouths are hidden behind satin-gloved fingers, closed behind handkerchiefs. Mouths are quivering disgust. There will be no licks, no nibbles from these. No kisses.

Maman’s handmaiden swats the apparition, clearing a path so her mistress can leave. Papa sniffs. Dabs his lowered eyes. Orders servants back to the kitchens. Follows them out. Javier sits rigid as meringue beside me. Will he add this story to his repertoire? Will he tell the next Una what he’s told us already, over and over, so many times?

Give them what they desire, he said.

Specters, spirits, sweet subtleties.

“Wait,” Javier says as his in-laws retreat from the room. Indecorous penguins, making their excuses before the entrée. “Stay! You wanted to see—”

New memories to replace the old.

Pulling, pulling, the ghost unspools from my heart. She spills. She aches.

“Is this not her face?” he says, leaning close enough to kiss. “Is Una not right here? Is she not perfect?”

“This is not her face,” I repeat. Wrong, try again. My thoughts are muddled, drunk on passion and time. “You wanted to see.” Musk falls from my gums. Bohèmes break brittle bones. No, wait. Not quite. That’s not alphabetical—macadamias, marshmallows, mignardises. Better. My fingers snap, one by one. Bohèmes bones break brittle. Sherbet foams from my mouth, grenadine from my nostrils. Custard seeps, melts my delicate robes. My hands find, flail, flounder in Javier’s warm grip. Cream gluts from my sternum, splattering the Wedgwood. Shaking, my head teeters. Throbs. Tilts.

“She is not perfect,” says the ghost.

Forced skyward, Helen’s stony gaze comes to rest on the ceiling rose.

“This is not her face.”

Will Javier tell the next Una this story?

Give them what they desire, he said.

New memories.

Remember?

My chest heaves, drowning in buttercream. The ghost breaks its tether, unmoors, dissolves. “This is not her face,” she says. Not quite. The tone is off. The thick-glugging timbre. “Javier.”

Try again and again.

“Una is not right here.”

About the Author

Lisa L Hannett hails from Ottawa, Canada but now lives in Adelaide, South Australiacity of churches, bizarre murders and pie floaters. Her short stories have been published in Clarkesworld Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, Weird Tales, ChiZine, Shimmer, Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded, the Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror (2010 & 2011), and Imaginarium 2012: Best Canadian Speculative Writing, among other places. She has won three Aurealis Awards, including Best Collection 2011 for her first book, Bluegrass Symphony (Ticonderoga), which was also nominated for a World Fantasy Award. Midnight and Moonshine, co-authored with Angela Slatter, will be published in 2012. Lisa has a PhD in medieval Icelandic literature, and is a graduate of Clarion South. You can find her on Twitter @LisaLHannett.

The Corpse of the Future:
Jane C. Loudon’s The Mummy!
and Victorian Science Fiction

S. J. Chambers

When we think of mummies, we don’t recall the desiccated corpses that rest behind museum glass, but the dehydrated reanimated corpse of lovelorn Imhotep played by Boris Karloff in the Universal Pictures flick The Mummy (1932), or the more recent reincarnation in the 1999 remake of the same name starring Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz, and Arnold Vosloo. In these films, Imhotep is a sinister and mystical Other who is searching for his lost love, and in doing so curses the Brits and Americans that revived him with mayhem. However, the cinematic mummies—like most Universal Pictures monsters (ahem, Frankenstein)—barely resemble their literary prototype, Cheops, who is revived by a galvanic machine rather than incantations to reinforce divine law and thwart political conspiracies.

Cheops does this wandering in The Mummy!: A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century, a futuristic meditation on England in the year 2126. Published anonymously in three volumes in 1827, and again in 1828, it proffers a futuristic hope of what its 17-year old author, Jane C. Loudon, hoped technology and social progress would improve in her country, and in doing so hones in on the trends and occupations of Regency England, such as whether the monarch (and church) should be abolished and whether Positivism and technology would ultimately better society. It’s also a parable on the othering of non-Western countries, a trend that of course became manifested during the British Empire but began with Egyptomania thanks to the Napoleonic discoveries of pharaonic tombs in 1789.

While all of these political implications hinge on the current affairs of Loudon’s time—political unrest compounded by the American Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, as well as the beginnings of workers rights movements—each argument she makes is also towards an ultimate dismissal of the Romantic movement that advocated (mostly) socialism, atheism, metaphysical science rather than technological, and Orientalism. The main target of her parody was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818).

Born Jane Webb on August 19, 1807 in Birmingham, England, Loudon enjoyed a privileged and affluent life until she was orphaned in 1824. Her mother died when she was 12, and after living abroad with her father, Thomas Webb, for several years, they returned to England when his manufacturing business went bankrupt. Shortly thereafter, he passed away leaving his daughter penniless and dependent upon the kindness of her father’s London friends, including the Romantic painter John Martin, who encouraged her education and writing, and more than likely exposed her to Frankenstein.

Also known as The Modern Prometheus, Mary Shelley’s archetypal novel was anonymously published in 1818, causing sensationalist scandal throughout the literary world. With an introduction by the anarchist poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (Mary’s husband) and a dedication to the radical philosopher William Godwin (Mary’s father), the book was not only seen as an original spin on the Gothic and Grotesque tale, but a Romantic social tract reinforcing the Godwinian ideals of atheism and personal freedom that macrocosmically championed the French Revolution and the destruction of monarchy. According to scholar Lisa Hopkins in her article “Jane C. Loudon’s ‘The Mummy!’: Mary Shelley Meets George Orwell, and They Go in a Balloon to Egypt,” Frankenstein’s main concept of successful reanimation and life-creation outside of (God’s) laws of nature was received by contemporary critics as a reinforcement of Godwin’s impiety and “certainly seems to have been the message which Jane C. Loudon found in Frankenstein, and she did not like what she read.” Jane disagreed with the novel so much that she used Shelley’s ingenious and blasphemous concept to inspire her own creature who would refute the liberalism Jane thought would be the ruin of England and establish a relationship between scientific progress and divine intervention.

Hopkins and most other Loudon scholars find the novel fascinating “because of what it tells us about the contemporary reception of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.” But Loudon’s novel also illustrates the reactive nature of science fiction and how it would become an effective political vehicle in its near future explorations, setting the tone for near-future, dystopic SF to come like George Orwell’s 1984 and the work of Phillip K. Dick. Conversely, it also shows how futuristic thought experiments can become retro-futuristic time capsules of the author’s era, its inventions leaping solely from technology only as advanced as steam.

While we’ve already established the political nature of Frankenstein, the book implicitly weaves its philosophical discourse into the story’s action and narrative. However, it is set more contemporaneously, and while it does allegorize current events, the story is more atmospheric and cerebral. It is not concerned directly with political bodies, but of the ideas of individuality and nature. As a result, the book does not concern itself with technical details nor does it try to forecast the future of man beyond the idea of immortality.

The Mummy! on the other hand is explicit, and begins immediately outlining the political turbulent trajectory (one that follows Godwin’s wishes, not necessarily Frankenstein’s story) of England from the Regency period to 2126. It is almost impossible to quote, because the 200 years is relayed in an entire chapter describing the rise of democratic and socialist thinking—and at one point complete anarchy—only to see the free mob lost without a leader: “The people had tasted the sweets of power, they had learned their own strength, they were enlightened; and fancying they understood the art of ruling as well as their quondam directors, they saw no reason why, after shaking off the control of one master, they should afterwards submit to the domination of many . . . Thus they reasoned, and thus they acted, till government after government having been overturned, complete anarchy prevailed; and the people began to discover, though, alas! too late, that there was little pleasure in being masters when there were no subjects.” Eventually, counterrevolutionaries that included the lineal descendants of the former royal family were able to sway the people into submitting back into an absolute monarchy in which peace apparently prevailed. By anchoring the book immediately into this political discourse, we know that Loudon is not interested in individual experience and consequence, but of the fate of a nation preoccupied with what she’d considered utter nonsense.

After undergoing popular revolt, spiritual disillusionment, and a long and disastrous flirtation with republicanism, England returns to absolute monarchy and Catholicism. It is also a matriarchy. When the new conservative regime was reestablished, the male heir to the throne refused to wear the crown; his daughter donned it and ruled England with the sagacity and ruthlessness of Queen Elizabeth I.

Perhaps one of the more radical notions of this pre-Victorian novel is the Queen’s establishment of sole female secession. Like the Virgin Queen before her, she shuns marriage and motherhood to focus solely on her kingdom, and decrees that no longer will the secession go to a first born son, but to the unmarried women in her line who are between the ages of 20 and 25 years old.

Despite this one big step for women, feminism is mostly latent throughout The Mummy!, although Loudon scholarship avers it is a feminist piece. Women are well-educated and sensible, like all of the classes by the 22nd century, but they are still ensnared in the plans their menfolk have laid down for them. However, fashion is more forgiving and is a sartorial signal for more independence: “The ladies were all arrayed in loose trousers, over which hung drapery in graceful folds; and most of them carried on their heads, streams of lighted gas forced by capillary tubes, into plumes, fleurs-de-lis, or in short any form the wearer pleased; which jets de feu had an uncommonly chase and elegant effect.” Anticipating the controversial New Woman movement in the later century (and also rave-glow-stick/LED accessories of the 20th century), one can imagine that this was noticed more among Regency reviewers than the social question of women in power. Michelle Parslow argues in her thesis Women, Science and Technology: The Genealogy of Women Writing Utopian Science Fiction that the implicit feminism lies in that she does not portray the use of science and technology in the context of a sole male domain (even though it could be argued there is still a social male domain): “ . . .The Mummy! is neither a realization, nor a critique, of the patriarchal endeavor to create a ‘scientific utopia’ . . . Indeed, this is where the strength of her feminist criticism ultimately lies: The Mummy! depicts the misuse of technology and the colonial imperative as an issue for which everyone should take responsibility for.”

The equal blame as a feminist statement is not as blatant as Parslow alludes, but the misuse of technology and the colonial imperative is very much present. Before we delve into that, though, there is an actual plot behind all the politics. In fact, there is a lot of plot, and unfortunately it drags the novel’s pacing over three volumes that may make it tedious to modern audiences (Cheops isn’t even resuscitated until page 188!). Loudon plucks and repots plots from Shakespeare including King Lear, Othello, and Hamlet to tend a garden of melodrama. England mostly finds peace under this absolute rule, although they are constantly under the threat of invasion. At the book’s opening, Queen Claudia currently reigns, and seems like she would rule for twenty years more. The cast of characters include two aristocratic families who have their eyes on the crown and glory: the Montagues and the house of the Duke of Cornwall. The Montague family has two sons, Edmund, a national hero on the fast-track to knighthood, and Edric, a slacker intellectual. The Duke of Cornwall’s family features marriageable daughters Elvira and Rosabella who are also the next in line to the throne if anything happened to the Queen.

Overshadowed by his brother’s achievements, Edric yearns for his own glory within the intellectual domain, and captivated by the idea of reanimation hatches a plan with his friend, German scientist, Dr. Entwerfen, to resurrect a mummy. It is with Edric that Loudon takes her cheapest shots at Shelley; he is, of course, Victor Frankenstein’s counterpart. Edric is every bit as vain as his foil, but he represents a more thoughtful and conscientious vein of mad science. He is not interested in making a man, or recreating life, as though he were divine, but in uncovering the divine with scientific experimentation. Edric’s fascination with reanimation stems from answering an age-old philosophical question of what happens to the soul upon death. This is a debate he isn’t at all fearless about; he worries whether resurrecting a corpse might result in a soulless zombie than a real man. More alluring still are the implications that upon a successful reanimation with returned soul that there is some divine ligature connecting soul to body no matter how long the latter has been departed. Despite the theories and his curiosity, he claims the only thing holding him back is a fear of having to actually touch the dead body, and he immediately rejects the notion that subjects could be found at the charnel house, a source Victor Frankenstein had no problem utilizing as an observatory and depot for his parts. Ironically, it is a clergyman, Father Morris, that reasons with Edric that the only way to know is to conduct the experiment, and suggests an Egyptian mummy because its swathed body would protect squeamish Edric from touching the “mass of cold mortality.”

Edric still needs a kick in the pants, and it comes from his father who informs him he is to marry Rosabella. When Edric refuses, he is banished from his home. Ties cut, he and Dr. Entwerfen go to Egypt in a balloon and resurrect Cheops with the doctor’s “galvanic battery of fifty surgeon power”: “Worked up to desperation, he applied the wires of the battery and put the apparatus in motion, whilst a demonic laugh of derision appeared to ring in his ears, and the surrounding mummies seemed starting from their places and dancing in unearthly merriment. Thunder now roared in tremendous peals through the Pyramids, shaking their enormous masses to the foundation, and vivid flashes of light darted round in quick succession.” The resurrection scene ironically reads like how we envision Frankenstein’s creation—electrifyingly gothic —while in the text Frankenstein’s reanimation methods are vaguely alluded too, and not at all revealed in technological detail. The galvanic battery works, however, and before Edric can surmise about the body and soul, Cheops spazzes out from the shock of his resurrection, flees the pyramid, hijacks their balloon, and flies back to England landing on and killing Queen Claudia in the middle of a pageant.

Just like there are deathly consequences from Victor Frankenstein making and rejecting his creation, Edric’s tampering with life and death sets in action the rest of the novel’s plot—including political intrigue, mysterious clergy parentage, and of course, love triangles, all with a little help from Cheops who, despite his hideous appearance is, much like Frankenstein’s Creature, a soulful good guy and in fact comes to represent those very virtues of rationality and spiritualism that Loudon saw as being rejected by romantic works such as Frankenstein. While we follow the melodrama of Cheops and these conspiracies, woven throughout is humor and delightful technological vignettes that easily makes this a textbook requirement for proto-Steampunk studies. In addition to use of the galvanic battery, Loudon imagines many ameliorating inventions based on steam technology like automatons that perform surgery and litigate, an instantaneous form of communication where messages are delivered by cannonball caught by expansive nets established in every town, a weather-control device that brings rain clouds down to water your fields, a steam-powered lawnmower, a mechanical milking machine, and, of course, daily travel accomplished by “balloon-carriages.”

As one of the first mentions of a mummy in literature, Loudon’s book is immediately unusual from the rest of 19th-century depictions because he is male and not purely evil—and, in fact, is a complex archetype used to subvert the Orientalism of Egyptomania begun when Napoleon’s troops discovered their first pharaonic tomb. While Britain was crazy for Ancient Egypt, it was in an not-so-surprisingly abject fashion. Britain excavated and imported mummies solely to unwrap them in public as a form of entertainment, and they rewrapped them in a sensational veil of mystery that made them what Jasmine Day calls “retro-racist” ideals of decadence, but also of foreign evil to be reminded of to avoid. “Europeans contrasted their own perceived virtues,” Day writes in her seminal text The Mummy’s Curse: Mummymania in the English-Speaking World, “such as Christianity and rationality, with the primitivism and pagenness that they attributed to peoples whose cultures seemed alien.” This is very much present at the beginning of the novel, as Dr. Entwerfen describes the scientific mysticism Cheops must possess, and Edric has no fear of a wrapped foreign object opposed to an exposed countryman cadaver for his experiment. However, Cheops rejects abjection, and espouses the opinions of his authoress, making him more native than readers would have expected.

Another exception to Cheops is the absence of what would later become known as “the mummy’s curse,” or “curse of the Pharaohs,” even though Loudon is often credited with inventing it in her novel. However, there is a curse of sorts present throughout: progress. As Day explains: “The curse myth originally condemned sacrilegious people and self-styled experts by claiming that a supernatural realm of arcane powers existed, in which the sanctity of the dead was vindicated.” In Frankenstein, Victor’s curse is his Creature’s wrath, but also his clouded-judgment from romantic notions of future immortality; as a result, he is unable to take responsibility for his actions. All of this got Loudon’s goat, but especially Frankenstein’s impiety: his rejection and usurpation of divine creation with science. What Shelley saw as progress Loudon saw as a potential curse. Despite the Positivist presence in her future England, there is one universal truth Loudon wants acknowledged, and it becomes downright explicit with Cheops’ big revelation at the end: “The power that gave me life,” he explains to a befuddled Edric in the story’s conclusion, “could alone restore it.” The entire time, Loudon stresses, Cheops was revived because the divine willed it. One has to posit, does this mean that the soul was then attached by those ligatures discussed earlier? That original question, as well as all of the little ones, is overshadowed by Loudon’s ultimate answer.

Loudon would never write another SF work after The Mummy! She ceased all her fictional literary endeavors by 1830 when she married the prominent horticulture journalist John C. Loudon and focused on writing instructive, at-home gardening articles. When he died in 1843, she continued to use writing as her income, capitalizing on her Martha Stewart-like reputation and publishing several gardening manuals for ladies, but never anything as prescient or imaginative as her futuristic utopia. Perhaps this was because, by the time of her death in 1858, she felt like she had won. While The Mummy!’s conservatism seems stodgy and dated, the truth is she came closer than Shelley to predicting the next 100 years. While the spirit of Romanticism continued to stir several social, republican, and anarchist movements, the coronation of Queen Victoria in 1838 launched a powerful empire built on prudery and imperialism. In fact, the effects of imperialism would lead to the next installment of Loudon’s unlikely legacy with reactive, science-fictional texts by Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Phillip K. Dick, which illustrates her real legacy: developing SF from a thought experiment like Frankenstein into a reactive and conversational medium for progress, whatever we might believe progress to be.

About the Author

S. J. Chambers is co-author of the Hugo and World Fantasy nominated The Steampunk Bible (Abrams Image). Her fiction has appeared in the World Fantasy nominated Thackery T. Lambshead’s Cabinet of Curiosities (HarperCollins) and in the forthcoming Starry Wisdom Library (PS Publishing).

A Thousand Words You Can Hear All at Once:
An Interview with Todd Lockwood

Nayad A. Monroe

Todd Lockwood’s illustration work has appeared on NY Times best-selling novels, magazines, video games, collectible card games, and fantasy role-playing games. It has been honored with multiple appearances in Spectrum and the Communication Arts Illustration Annual, and with numerous industry awards. Always known for the narrative power of his paintings, Todd now turns his hand to writing, and is working on a novel to be published by DAW Books. You may view his art at his website, toddlockwood.com, keep up with him at tolo.biz, or get chummy at facebook.com/artoftoddlockwood.

In the bio on your website, you say that the artists who have influenced you most are Michael Whelan, Frank Frazetta, NC Wyeth, Walt Disney, Spike Jones, Brom, Jeff Easley, and your dad. What are some of the characteristics you enjoy in their work? Have you tried to incorporate methods they use to create their images?

Well, I think it’s safe to say that Frazetta and Whelan between them probably influenced most of the artists in this industry to one degree or another. I kind of view them as the left brain and right brain. Michael’s very thoughtful and cerebral. His paintings are always really deep, and you can think about them forever, whereas Frank Frazetta is raw emotion. There was a documentary made about him called Painting with Fire, which describes it really well. If I could blend the two of them together somehow I’d feel like I had accomplished something.

NC Wyeth is the father of modern illustration and we all grew up with Walt Disney. One of my earliest memories is Maleficent turning into the dragon in Sleeping Beauty. Spike Jones: that’s half a joke, but it’s also true that his music is eclectic and wacky and fun and I enjoy that.

Then the others: Brom, Jeff Easley, John Foster, Scott Fischer, Greg Manchess, Donato, and a great many more I could come up with who are influential now. There are so many good artists out there, always keeping me on my toes. My dad was an artist, even though he never worked as one. Another one of my earliest memories was sitting on his knee while he drew funny cartoon animals for me.

Where do you find inspiration in the real world?

That’s a short question with a really broad range of answers. I mean, inspiration is everywhere. I think I’m always looking at things. I always see perspective and light, I think I always have. I also enjoy everything from politics to science to history, and religion—I love Joseph Campbell’s studies. Nature shows: National Geographic, NOVA, all that stuff. It’s all grist. It’s all useful.

Then you somehow take that stuff and turn it into more outlandish ideas. How does that go?

I have the benefit most of the time of a manuscript to read, which provides a certain amount of material automatically. Making it look good is a matter of taking advantage of every source of reference possible, and a lot of it’s stuff I enjoy anyway.

Animal anatomy figures heavily into making fantastic creatures that are believable, and some knowledge of the history of costume, armor, and weaponry can help when inventing stuff that you’ve never seen in the real world.

When you begin an artistic project for yourself (as opposed to a commissioned piece), how do you decide what you’re going to draw or paint?

I haven’t done very much for myself. There are three pieces I can think of on my website and they all came to me sort of fully formed, even though they’re really detailed, out of myth and religion. I enjoy reinterpreting that stuff. I’m fascinated by the way human beings relate to their universe, and it all comes out in mythology. Like “Cerberus,” “Kali-Prakriti,” and “War of Angels;” and while they’re really dense with detail, the idea of them is simple

Cerebus

Kali-Prakriti

War of Angels

Do you have emotional themes that you return to frequently in your work?

I think that’s more in the line of looking for narrative. Often I’m painting action scenes, so there’s always conflict or movement, and the emotion there is the range of stuff you feel in those fight-or-flight moments: anger, fear, determination. I look for some nobility in my people. Every once in a while I get to paint something tender. It’s really a matter of putting yourself into the characters, and bringing out what they feel or finding that inside yourself.

Is it easy for you to get started on your work for the day?

It’s hard for me to get started sometimes. It occasionally involves playing a game of Spaceward Ho! just to empty the brain out. Silly old game, but you can finish in twenty minutes. Especially in the early stages of a piece, it can be challenging. The very first part, the thumbnails, when you’re finding the energy and the direction, is not so difficult, just laying down the basic composition and the ideas. Depending on the job—sometimes that can be really frustrating.

For example, C.J. Cherryh’s books, while I enjoy them a great deal and the politics of the world are fascinating, there are a lot of people sitting around drinking tea and talking politics. Sometimes finding a visual hook for those books is a challenge, but it’s always there. Usually I know by a third to halfway through a manuscript what the cover needs to be, partly because I don’t want the cover to give away anything that happens in the second half of the book if I don’t have to. The last cover I did for C.J., Intruder, I didn’t know what the cover was until I’d read the very last page. And of course with my own book, which I’ve been working on for eight years, I still don’t know what the cover is.

Cover Art for Intruder

How did you get started with writing fiction, and how is it going?

Well, I’ve always written, all my life. I learned to draw by making my own comic books. In my mind, I was drawing movies or TV shows. I would have happily gone either way, but art had more momentum. I just happened to fall into art first, and more deeply, but the last eight years, I’ve been working on a personal project and doing seminars and workshops.

I’ve worked with Nancy Kress, Greg Frost, and some other authors. I had a short story published entitled, “Between”. It came out in an anthology called Tales of the Emerald Serpent, which got good remarks, and was a lot of fun to write. Lou Anders of Pyr books gave me a very nice write-up in a review, and I really appreciate that.

I have another short story coming out soon in another anthology called Unfettered, which is a really fun project, in that it goes to help a friend, Shawn Speakman. He’s the blogger for suvudu.com, and he’s Terry Brooks’ continuity editor. He runs his own business called The Signed Page, selling signed editions of books, which is how we met. Shawn had two bouts with cancer, and he beat them both, but he was left with humongous bills. Terry Brooks suggested that a short story he had kicking around could be offered online with the proceeds going to help Shawn pay his bills. Other authors have since joined in the benefit anthology which will include stories by Patrick Rothfuss, Robert Jordan & Brandon Sanderson, Jacqueline Carey, Tad Williams, and more.

I’m very happy with this short story. It’s set in the prehistory of the world of my novel, which I sold to DAW books last Easter. Betsy Wollheim had read it initially just as a friend, to tell me whether it was good or not and if it was good, who I might want to consider offering it to. When she’d read it, she said, “I want it.” So I’m very excited about that because I’m in very good hands. Betsy is a great editor, and she’s a good friend.

Cover art for Tales of the Emerald Serpent

Cover Art for Unfettered

What’s your book called?

It’s called The Summer Dragon; it’s the first of a trilogy. I haven’t quite pinned down the trilogy title yet, and of course titles are subject to change, but I think that’s the appropriate title. It’s a young adult fantasy, which began really as anger management during the G.W. Bush years. It became a story that insisted I tell it. You know how it is, because you write. You start with the germ of an idea and suddenly it’s telling itself.

How does writing compare to painting?

Either one of those things is a lifelong process. There are rules to writing, or painting. It’s not the same for everybody. Nancy Kress can’t work from an outline or she loses interest, whereas I have to work from an outline, because that’s the way I work.

That’s the way I paint: start with thumbnails, and then you work towards the details. An outline is kind of the same thing in terms of structure. The structure is narrative, narrative rules both illustration and writing. If you’re building a house, you don’t build the walls and then try to put a foundation under them.

I think writing is much lonelier than painting. You spend a lot of time sitting alone, and feedback is not immediate. You can turn a painting around and ask “What do you think?” and somebody can say, “I like it,” or “It’s too red,” or whatever. To get feedback on a chapter, somebody has to take time out of their day to read it and then get back to you. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but you receive them all at once.

Cover Art for In the Shadow

About the Author

Nayad Monroe writes science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories. She toiled in the slush mines at Clarkesworld Magazine for three brutal years before her unique combination of cunning, trickery, and deviousness brought her the opportunity to interview innocent people who never dreamed that such a thing could happen to them. She also blogs intermittently and oppresses children and cats in her spare time. You may read her strange pronouncements on Twitter, if you dare, by following @Nayad.

Another Word:
The Echo Chamber

Daniel Abraham

There was a time, not in my daughter’s life but in mine, when information was hard to get. I can still remember a friend of mine struggling to describe a new programming trick that he was working with. He called it a hyperlink. At the time, it sounded like it might be an interesting way to do footnotes some day. But the world changed and moved on. It’s very good at doing that, and its not much good at going backward. There are people who voted in the last election who never knew a world where tracking down information meant going to a library, a world without hyperlinks.

I began working in technical support for a small Internet service provider in the mid-’90s, when the advertisements on the television from companies like IBM and AOL could be summed up as “Internet: You don’t know what it is, but you need it. Go! Buy!” They worked just as well as ads for the company I worked for. They weren’t boasts about whose service was best so much as announcements of a paradigm shift. Even with promotion into management, I was on the phones for nine years while the world changed. I went from figuring out init strings for 28.8 modems to programming routers to allow connections to virtual private networks. I saw that things were changing, but not always how. Ebooks still do things that surprise me sometimes. And I have now bought software that will block my Internet access for hours at a time so that I can get my work done without the temptation to check my email or Facebook or Twitter just one more time in case something interesting happened.

The dynamics of my own thought process have changed. I used to read almost exclusively from books and spend a relatively long time thinking about what I’d read, only because while I was walking home from school or waiting at a bus stop, I didn’t have anything more with me at the moment. Now I read mostly from a computer screen, and often in tiny, fleeting sips that I forget almost as soon as I’ve seen them.

But I didn’t come here to decry the Internet or celebrate the past. This endless sampler plate of Cracked.com articles and snarky comments at 140 characters or fewer isn’t by necessity better or worse than reading a book without being able to jump out to a Wikipedia article. It is different, though. Some of the changes I feel like I saw coming. More distractions, for example. Or the pressure to keep things introductory, since any post might be the first thing the reader bumps into. Other aspects, I didn’t: for instance, the increase in literacy that comes from having an entire generation communicate through text. Or the long awaited and justly celebrated death of the mass market returns system.

What I see shaping genre fiction most in this age, though, is the democratization of authority.

As with many things, the change in the availability of information hasn’t created a whole new way of thinking so much as shifted the emphasis. Echo chambers or groupthink or being-inside-the-bubble has been part of human behavior forever. What has changed is the ability to find opinions similar to your own. When I was growing up, the media I had to work with—telephones, television, letters, newspapers, books, radio—had one thing in common: no search function. No way to take a huge body of information and pluck out only the thing I was looking for. Today my daughter is in first grade, and she’s just starting to bring home assignments like “find five facts about penguins” and “research who Captain Cook was.” With a kind of nostalgia, I steer her toward books. When we’re looking for facts, though, nothing’s easier than a search engine.

That’s also true when I’m looking for opinions. It’s never been easier to reach out to find people with whom I already agree and then repeat and reinforce our opinions to each other until they ossify into facts. There have been a few times that I’ve found myself following links down rabbit holes into communities with which I profoundly disagree, and seeing the self-confident, self-congratulatory, and mind-bendingly wrong opinions being shared there was deeply unnerving. I imagine folks who wander by mistake into my bubbles feel the same.

Which brings me, in my roundabout way, to Arthur Krystal’s recent article in The New Yorker, “It’s Genre. Not That There’s Anything Wrong With It!” In it, Krystal makes a series of arguments that strike me as weirdly old-fashioned, condescending, and unfamiliar. He makes reference to a poem by Dryden. He describes genre fiction as books that “stick to the trite-and-true, relying on stock characters whose thoughts spool out in Lifetime platitudes.” He uses the adjective “jejune” with, so far as I can tell, a straight face. He celebrates literary fiction’s ability to “break the frozen sea inside us” under a headline that’s a TV sitcom reference.

There is, apparently, an echo chamber in which this article reads as something other than self-parody. And I think that, once upon a time, there was a world in which simply by having been published in The New Yorker, Krystal’s opinion would have had some weight. I live on the Internet, though, and I am no longer trained to recognize that authority. When I see this, my first reaction is the disbelieving laughter of someone who’s just fallen into Wonderland. Krystal’s presentation of himself is a caricature of a literary critic. Insecure intellectual defensiveness rises off his article like fumes. And yet, there is a place in my culture where his opinion would be taken seriously.

Well, not in my part of it, clearly.

It is very tempting for me spend a few more paragraphs making fun of Krystal. His article is mean, pompous, and trite, and I want to attack it and him. Only I know that he would be as dismissive of me as I am of him. When I pause in my gleeful disdain of his disdain, the thing that’s interesting is that I see this dynamic everywhere. It’s not just the usual dichotomies either: the Republicans against the Democrats, the Palestinians against the Israelis, the brains against the jocks.

There was an anecdote I heard once about a man in the Washington press corps bringing a date—a professional model—he particularly wanted to impress to a party made up of some of the most powerful, important, and (critical for my argument here) elite journalists in the world. The model’s comment was something along the lines of how sad it was watching all the geeks trying to have fun. For her, it seems to me, being a member of the elite meant something different and incompatible with what her date meant. She came from a different subculture, and so the status of the people around her wasn’t just invisible to her. It was literally insignificant.

There was a time in my life when the culture had, if not a single voice, then a profoundly dominant one. Someone on TV or the radio or in the newspaper had authority simply by being there, and their opinions mattered. There was a time before that when an avid reader could read every science fiction and fantasy book published in the US in a given year. There was a time when there were only four channels on the TV, and if you missed a program, it was gone. People shared a context by default, and because that context included definitions of authority, they shared an implicit idea of who and what was important.

It’s always been possible to create a subculture with its own definitions of what matters, its own idioms and conventions, and its own standards by which to judge who is to be taken seriously. What’s changed is the activation energy. Because of how we communicate, it has become easy to insulate ourselves with people who have our same interests, definitions, opinions, and interpretations. Things outside that context fade and lose their power, or else just stop having any bearing on each other. Krystal’s opinion that genre fiction is inferior and my opinion that Krystal is kind of a yo-yo are both subjective, and so they can both be true in their contexts. In practice, they are so unrelated, they aren’t even in conflict.

I once heard Lev Grossman say in an interview that he was worried that fiction might lose its place at the center of the cultural conversation. My first response was to look back over my four-plus decades of life and try to remember a time when it was at the center. I misunderstood. When Grossman said “the” cultural conversation, he didn’t mean the one about Kim Kardashian’s marriage or how guardian angels disprove evolution or which team is most likely to win the big game. His definition of culture wasn’t concerned with what issues were being discussed by the largest demographic slice of the country. He meant, I think, the conversation among people who matter. People with authority. The real culture.

There was a time, in my life but not in my daughter’s, when I’d have known who he meant.

About the Author

Daniel Abraham is a writer of genre fiction with a dozen books in print and over thirty published short stories. His work has been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Hugo Awards and has been awarded the International Horror Guild Award. He also writes as MLN Hanover and (with Ty Franck) as James S. A. Corey. He lives in the American Southwest.

Editor’s Desk:
Getting off the Roller Coaster

Neil Clarke

As those who have been reading my blog or prior editorials know, 2012 has been a roller coaster year for me. Between the heart attack, kidney stone, deaths in the family, defibrillators, award nominations and still being alive, I’m never quite sure what to make of things. Shortly after writing my previous editorial, Hurricane Sandy struck and left my family without power, heat, phone and internet service for nearly ten days. Several large trees crashed down around our home, but we safely weathered the storm. After the temperature dropped and our batteries died, we gave up, packed our suitcases and hit the road.

I was able to spend part of the time in Toronto (at the World Fantasy Convention) and the rest with family as they regained power in their homes. It was reassuring to be in the company of friends and family, but we missed home and were very happy to return. It’s hard to rest when you are displaced and while inconvenient, we didn’t suffer nearly as much as people who lived closer to the coast. Our thoughts and best wishes go out to our readers that were and continue to be impacted by this storm.

Shortly after recovering from the hurricane, the roller coaster took another plunge as I lost my job. Much to my regret, I don’t currently make my living from Clarkesworld. It’s an obtainable goal for which we continue to strive but I still need a day job to provide healthcare coverage and money to pay the bills.

What happened next was incredible. Once again, the genre community bent the tracks and leveled things out. People subscribed or donated to the magazine, started sending me information about new jobs, and made a serious effort to get word of my situation out there so that others could help too.

I owe a great deal of thanks to many people, but I need to single out Kate Baker, John Scalzi, Cory Doctorow, Jeff and Ann VanderMeer, and Weightless Books. They amped up the signal and said some very kind things that made a big difference to me both financially and emotionally. By the time Thanksgiving rolled around, I had much to be thankful for and the confidence that everything would be ok.

I can happily say that thanks to everyone’s efforts, November provided our largest single-month gain in the history of the magazine. A big welcome to this month’s new subscribers! As a whole, you’ve made a significant difference and will continue to do so over the next year.

I consider my time with this magazine to be one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done. It seems only appropriate that I continue to soldier on and this kind of support greatly encourages me. I hope that some of you will take the time to email me your thoughts about how we’re doing. We’re always looking for ways to improve the magazine and reader feedback has played a significant role in all our plans.

Despite all of 2012’s bad things, I can’t call it a bad year. There were just too many good things that helped offset the unpleasant. For me, 2013 is a new opportunity, a gift, a year I wasn’t supposed to have. I don’t know how I’ve managed to stay positive through all this (ok, not through it all, but definitely now), but I intend to ride it into the new year. From all of us at Clarkesworld, we wish you and yours all the best as we approach 2013. Stay tuned. The best is yet to come.

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, owner of Wyrm Publishing and a 2012 Hugo Nominee for Best Editor (short form). He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Table of Contents

Clarkesworld #64 - 2012/01

Scattered Along the River of Heaven

What Everyone Remembers

All the Painted Stars

The Future Sounds of Yesterday: A Sequence of Synthesizers in Science Fiction

Things You Will Never Understand: A Conversation with Robert Jackson Bennett

2011 Reader's Survey

Rockman

Clarkesworld #65 - 2012/02

And the Hollow Space Inside

A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight

All the Young Kirks and Their Good Intentions

From Farm to Fable: Food, Fantasy, and Science Fiction

Everything's Surprising: A Conversation with Lev AC Rosen

Wendigo Waistcoat Spyglass and Other Words with Lisa L. Hannett

2011 Reader's Poll Results

Pilot

Clarkesworld #66 - 2012/03

Sunlight Society

The Bells of Subsidence

From Their Paws, We Shall Inherit

The Romance of Ruins

The Biker Chick Who Rides Her Own Bike: A Conversation with Nathan Long

Writing Is Magic: A Conversation with John R. Fultz

And Now for a Few Short Words from our Editor

Dead Space Girl

Clarkesworld #67 - 2012/04

Fragmentation, or Ten Thousand Goodbyes

Draftyhouse

The Womb Factory

The Latest Apocalypse: Popular Music and the End of the World

Passing Through Each Other: A Round-Table Discussion of Speculative Fiction and Academia

Suitably Strange: A Round-Table Discussion of World-Building

Another Word: Reading as Performance

Place to Ponder

Clarkesworld #68 - 2012/05

Prayer

Synch Me, Kiss Me, Drop

All the Things the Moon is Not

The Fairy Tale in the TV Age

Straightforward & Unadorned Adventure: A Conversation with Michael J. Sullivan

Another Word: Dear Speculative Fiction, I'm Glad We Had This Talk

From the Editor's Desk

Sci-fi Farmer

Clarkesworld #69 - 2012/06

Immersion

If The Mountain Comes

You Were She Who Abode

Energizing Futures: How SF Fuels Itself

Neither the Billionaire nor the Tramp: Economics in Speculative Fiction

Another Word: Assimilation, Multiculturalism, and Me

Editor's Desk: Clarkesworld by the Numbers

Target Detected

Clarkesworld #70 - 2012/07

Astrophilia

The Switch

Iron Ladies, Iron Tigers

Life After Quatermass: Hammer Films' '60s Science Fiction

To Save Ourselves: A Conversation with Nancy Kress

Another Word: The Exceptional Smurfette, or Being One of the Guys as a Superpower

Launch Day

Clarkesworld #71 - 2012/08

Mantis Wives

Honey Bear

Fade to White

The Spell of History: Magic Systems and Real-World Zeitgeists

In a Carapace of Light: A Conversation with China Miéville

Another Word: Plausibility and Truth

Editor's Desk: Finding the Good in a Dark Day

Space Journey

Clarkesworld #72 - 2012/09

The Found Girl

Robot

muo-ka's Child

Between a UFO and a Hard Place: The Real-Life Science Heroics of Dr. Omond Solandt

The Satirist's Progress: A Discussion with Nick Mamatas and Paul Tremblay

Another Word: Super Duper Sexual Spiritual Black Woman: The New and Improved Magical Negro

Editor's Desk: Professionally Speaking

Awe at Thistledown

Clarkesworld #73 - 2012/10

A Bead of Jasper, Four Small Stones

England under the White Witch

The Battle of Candle Arc

The Future, One Thing at a Time

A Germ of an Idea: An Interview with John Varley

Another Word: Practicing Dissatisfaction

Editor's Desk: Six and Counting

Breaking Through

Clarkesworld #74 - 2012/11

(To See the Other) Whole Against the Sky

Aquatica

Everything Must Go

Foundation and Reality: Asimov’s Psychohistory and Its Real-World Parallels

The Art of Brutal Prose: An Interview with Mark Lawrence

Another Word: It Gets Better with SFF (but SFF has to Get Better, too)

Editor’s Desk: I, Cyborg

New World

Clarkesworld #75 - 2012/12

Your Final Apocalypse

The Wisdom of Ants

Sweet Subtleties

The Corpse of the Future: Jane C. Loudon's The Mummy! and Victorian Science Fiction

A Thousand Words You Can Hear All at Once: An Interview with Todd Lockwood

Another Word: The Echo Chamber

Editor's Desk: Getting off the Roller Coaster

The Lost City