Driftings

Ian McDonald

A hat, a deer and a plastic truck came in on the swell of the ocean. The hat was a yellow hard-hat; an engineer’s, a construction worker’s hat. Its foam inserts had buoyed it across wide waters. The deer was a Puchie Baby miniature with a skull-and-crossbones patterned hide. Adorable, small. The truck was really a tiger-design kid’s trunki, but the wheels still turned, after so long in the gyre.

The truck was the last one, the difficult one. Picking his way along the shore, squinting at the bright steel horizon, he had glimpsed an ear of color between grey of sky and grey of sea. Squint. An edge of sea-scabbed orange, lolling in the lap. He splashed out into the waves. The cold cut through the steamer suit and he was chilled already from the fight to rescue the hard hat. The current could show you a thing and take it back into the gyre. It had teased him with the hard hat, luring him, then pulling it away, drawing him deeper than he wanted to go. The current that took a hat out to the gyre could take a man, even a fit, strong young man like Reith. A lunge, a splash, and it was his. He waded up out of the surf-line, the yellow, oil-scabbed hat on his head.

In the clear water he saw geometry beneath the triangle of orange plastic and guessed what lay low in the swell. Here was a kid’s ride-on luggage trunk, a tiger-face still discernible. Thigh-deep, waist-deep. His. He towed it to shore.

The girl sat on a mound at the edge of the foot-worn path to the road. Her knees were pulled close to her body, her arms wrapped around her shins. Reith peered to see if she was watching him drag the kiddie-trunk along the beach, salt water trickling from its seam.

She was watching him. He was the only watchable thing.

Her sleeves were pulled down over the backs of her hands. They were her sole concession to the weather. Low grey clouds streamed in from the ocean and caught on the tops of the trees, unfurling thin drizzle. The cloud could sit like that for weeks. A thin print dress and a cardigan were not clothes for this shore.

He wanted to open the plastic trunk there and then, at his bivouac, but he could feel the girl’s eyes on him. He didn’t want her to see him greedy and excited, forcing the catch, spilling out the salt-spoiled treasures he hoped were inside. You work uneasily when the only eyes for miles are on you. He packed up the bivouac, pulled the hoodie on over the wet-suit, loaded the sea-things into a plastic box.

“What makes you take them?” The girl’s voice was soft but carrying.

“Feeling there’s a loss in it,” Reith said. “Feeling there’s a story and a hurt.”

Japanese, not Chinese, Reith reckoned. Skin so smooth; hair falling to the small of her back, hair-product straight and shiny. Ocean cold was beginning to infiltrate the wetsuit but the slump of a wave, the side-slip of a gull on the air, the sudden hiss of eddying drizzle; all said stay, speak.

“Aren’t you cold?”

“I don’t really get cold. But it would be worth it. I love it here.”

Reith looked to the pull-in among the trees. His pickup was the only vehicle.

“How did you get here?”

“I got dropped off.”

“You will get cold. It’s not good. I can give you a ride back to town, if that’s where you’re at.”

“They’ll pick me up again.”

Reith knew she was not telling the truth but you can’t call someone on that in the ninth sentence you exchange with them. The girl knew that he knew because she combed her hair back behind her ear and smiled.

“I’ll be fine. Really.” Mist lay in minute silver pearls on the fibers of her woolen cardigan but did not cling to her hair or skin at all.

So she was in town. Reith liked that. They might meet again, by chance or by design.

He looked back from the door of the pickup. She was still there, on the edge of drop from the tree-line down to the driftwood. Again he looked, as he turned back on to the highway. He half expected her to have vanished. She was still there, grey on grey. He turned the heater up full to blow some warmth back into his legs.

A fleece-fiber scarf. A bucket of plastic zoo-animals. A drinks cup with spout. A sea-rotted cardboard picture book. A child’s things.

Driving in the pickup he saw her walking on the side of the road. She moved lightly, barely connected to the earth at all. The same light print dress and cardigan. The clouds were lower today, catching on the flagpole outside the junior school and the eccentric carpentered spires and shingles of the old wooden hotel where Roosevelt was supposed to have stayed. You could reach up and grab a fistful of rain. He turned in the road and drove beside her.

“Hi.”

“Oh. Hi.”

“I’m, uh, thinking about grabbing a coffee. Can I get you one?”

She scraped her hair behind an ear. She smiled by not quite looking at him.

“That would be good.”

“Do you want a ride?”

“Is it far?”

“No, just across from the old Roosevelt hotel.”

“I know that. I’ll walk.”

She had arrived by the time he had turned the car across the traffic.

“You’re not in the wetsuit today.”

“I will be later.” It was in the back of the truck, with the bivouac and the rest of the beach-combing equipment. The same westerly driving the raft of cloud could also push the entire gyre, hundreds of miles across, closer to the coast. Westerlies were good foraging winds.

“I like guys in wetsuits. They make them look vulnerable. Cute.”

Reith blinked and hid his blush in a sip of coffee. Retched. Spat.

“Jesus.”

“Are you okay?”

“Sorry. Salt. I must have put salt in instead of sugar.”

“There is no salt on the table.”

She tipped white crystals into the palm of her hand, dipped a lip-moistened finger, offered it to Reith to lick. Reith drew back.

“Oh, I’m sorry.” She licked her finger. “Yes, sweet.”

“You asked yesterday, at the beach, what made me take them,” Reith said. The lick of sugar from her finger had roused him. “Come and see.”

Again she dipped her head and looked away to hide a smile.

“I’d love to, thank you.”

Why had he offered to show her the Driftings? The westerly was blowing, the gyre was turning. He should be ten miles down the coast, scanning the break line with binoculars. Not offering to show her the studio; not stopping in the street to invite her to coffee, salt coffee.

Life and work were a foreclosed house a mile and a half up on the forest road. The agency had been only too happy to let it long term, cheap. They had no prospect of ever selling it on. Roosevelt had been the last big thing to happen in the town and it was now in the terminal stages of a century-long decline. The council had hoped to catch the dark wave of the Twilight business but had dithered too long and missed its crest. Bella’s coffee-shop had closed two months ago. Its coffee had been horrible. Reith reckoned he would need another house soon. The Driftings were forcing him back, like a whelk withdrawing into its shell, into smaller and smaller rooms. The realtors were only too eager.

“It’s kind of cluttered in here.”

As the girl went past him into the house, Reith caught a sudden smell of the shore; rotting weed and sun-crisp crab, salt and sand-scab, so strong he almost gagged. For a moment, a breath; then he smelled her: clean skin, fabric conditioner, hair conditioner, something lightly floral.

The Ningyo Drifting occupied all of the main room apart from a narrow passage to the kitchen area.

The Ningyo Drifting: dolls, toys, transforming robots toy cars plastic zoo animals, those perverse vinyl figurines that have no other purpose than to be collectible by adults, toy soldiers, anime action figures, monsters and dinosaurs. Over four hundred of them now. The Puchie Baby deer would likely join them. Welded and melded, dismembered and re-membered, heads growing from alien torsos, from other heads, from shoulder stumps, multiple faces grafted on to a single head, like a Hindu deity; thickets of arms; transplanted legs; robot heads on toy dog bodies; all joined together into a coral tree.

The girl looked up at the branches of warped toys reaching over her head. Her mouth opened a little.

“This was my first piece. It’s the one I’ve been working at longest as well. I think maybe it won’t ever be finished. I certainly won’t ever sell it.” Reith touched a Kokeshi at the junction of two spreading antlers. “This was the first one. I was out on the peninsula with friends and picked it up at Taylor Point. Someone said it was Japanese, that there was a huge slick of stuff all sucked out to sea after the tsunami and it was moving slowly towards the west coast. The day after that the bit of dock washed up in Oregon. That kind of started it. No, I don’t think I’ll ever sell this one.”

Reith hadn’t eaten in the kitchen for months. He didn’t like having food around the ocean-things. Oils and hydrocarbons, tars and wastes. The whole house might be a little radioactive. He didn’t want to think about that. The kitchen had become the work room until it clogged up with beach-combings. The floor was filled to work-top height with ideas in progress. There was no room for feet, but it gave the best perspective on the Kanagawa Driftings in the dining area.

Things that open, built into a pastiche The Great Wave off Kanagawa. Bento boxes opening out of snap-fit kitchen containers opening out handbags opening out of lunch boxes out of plastic storage boxes out of rolling luggage out of fishing crates. Color-coordinated to recreate the deep wave blue and the breaker white of the Hokusai print. Reith would fit the trunki here, with thought. He had removed the ceiling light to accommodate the uppermost fractals of the plastic wave.

“Don’t you think it’s kind of . . . wrong?” the girl said. “I mean a wave made out of tsunami stuff?”

“There’s no fishing boat,” Reith said. “That would be wrong. But it’s not about the wave, or the tsunami. Really. It’s about how we see when we look across the ocean to Japan, how we fetishize it, how we import kawaii, or cosplay, and turn them into our own thing without ever trying to understand them.”

“I’m not sure I can always understand you,” the girl said. Her fingers felt out the nested links of plastic containers. “What was inside?”

“Most of them, nothing. The gyre grinds a lot of it up.”

“But something, sometimes.”

“Sometimes.”

A fleece-fiber scarf. A bucket of plastic zoo-animals. A drinks cup with spout. A sea-rotted cardboard picture book.

“It’s the inside things that have the story and the hurt,” the girl said. “Put-away things are loved things.”

The Kanagawa Drifting rattled as a rig, heavy with long lumber, passed down from the high forests.

The clouds had dipped lower when he came back from town, ragged handkerchiefs sliding through the trees. Spills and spoils from the moiling cloud base. She had wanted to be left where he found her, outside the Axel’s Coffee Place. He was past the intersection on the forest road when Reith remembered that he had not remembered, or had never asked, her name. By the time he was on to the forest road he was driving through cloud.

Death town. Dying slowly and inelegantly. Urban senility. Grey sky grey sea grey people. Every mile he had driven west from the ferry, drawn by the haunt of plastic detritus of apocalypse, he felt the grey settling heavier from him, smothering every energetic or creative thought. His first few weeks—thirty, twenty, however many dollars he could afford a night in the Roosevelt hotel; the obese Hunter day-trading in the back office; sure there’s a shared bathroom but no one’s had to share it in five years—he had to physically drag himself out of sleep and run up and down the corridor to the bathroom a dozen times to Wake! Up! Every creative thought was trawled from pelagic deeps. Baked-good breakfasts in Axel’s Coffee Place; brown-food dinners in the sports bar. Things hauled from the cold north-west sea, tsunami-things, piling up under the tarpaulin in the back of the pickup. Days of deep grey lull. Notion by notion, ideas emerged from the fog of apathy.

Reith started out of a doze at the flash of lights, followed moments later by the blast of the logging truck, passing at speed. He had been drifting across the line. Many of the truckers scorned headlights in the fog and constantly blared their titanic air horns. The fog was so dense he could hardly see the road markings. A sudden, intense smell of sea, salt, weed invaded the pickup through the air vents. Reith snapped them shut. The fog left white streaks on his windshield, gritty smears flecked with tiny white crystals. The wiper blades squeaked.

At the house he could taste salt on his tongue, ionic, iodine taste of salt, feel its sting on his lips, its astringency on his face. In the few steps it took to reach the porch his hair, skin, clothes were briny as if he had stepped out of the sea. The air was heavy with sea-smell. Reith blinked salt mist out of his stinging eyes.

Shower. Reith could feel the grit of salt against his scalp. He stood a long time under the run of hot water, trying to scrub the sea from his skin. Salt fog.

In the morning the cloud had lifted but windows, porch, yard, car were freckled with salt-specks, a million tiny crystal sparkles.

A baked-goods breakfast in the Axel’s before heading down to Ruby Beach. A good day’s beach-combing. Like the early days. That would be the thing. Axel’s Coffee Place had changed hands, sold candles, had a book-swap scheme, free Wi-Fi, occasional tarot readings and singer-songwriter nights but all such regime changes were temporary in this town. Their Danish were good, their pain au chocolat too doughy.

“What about that fog?” Lauren said as she brought Reith a refill. “It like completely rusted up the locks. Just one night. Insania.”

“The girl.”

“The one you were in with yesterday?”

“What do you know about her?”

“Oh, you mean . . . ” Lauren broke off, pouted, puzzled. “You know, I’m not sure she told me her name. What do you want to know?”

“Where’s she staying?”

“Over at the Roosevelt. Doesn’t everyone?”

“She’s not. I checked. She’s not up at the Westwood Lodge either.”

“That’s a little bit stalkery, Reith.”

Lauren was not a friend and never a lover, but there was a tie between Reith and her; a thing of tattoos and piercings, dreads and hair coloring. Counter-culture was their mutual gravity.

“I’m just interested, that’s all.”

“Oh really.”

“Lauren, that’s not necessary.”

The door bell clanged. Hunter from the Roosevelt came in for his caffeine hit before going back to losing money online. Reith had not noticed that the low cloud had become rain. His flannel shirt was soaked through in the few steps across the road. He shook his head, manically scraped water from his face and eyes.

“Goddam,” he said. “Goddam thing.”

He grabbed a paper towel from the table dispenser and furiously wiped his eyes.

“Goddam,” he said again. “Can it do that?”

Lauren poured him coffee at his usual booth.

“Do what, hons?”

“Rain sea water.”

She stood in the salt rain, watching Reith and the courier driver load the truck.

“Geez, what is this?” the driver had said, blinking sea-sour out of his eyes as Reith answered the door. He came up once a month from the city to pick up installations Reith had sold from his website. He was a peninsula man and took the opportunity to catch up with family. Installations did not spoil and were not time sensitive. He could dawdle with his relatives. Reith liked that even though he did not appreciate the Driftings, he was mindful of them. Even bubble-wrapped and taped, they were delicate; frail corals, tsunami-foam.

“It’s been doing it for a day and half now,” Reith said. “I’ve had to garage the pickup. Things rust while you’re looking at them.”

“Evil smell,” the driver said. “Like dead crabs. Have you got a theory?”

“What?”

Reith had broken the Marine Boy Drifting down into three sections to get it through the door. Instructions and a video were included for its precise re-assembly at the gallery in Denver. Each Drifting landed a little further from Reith’s door than the last.

“Everyone needs a theory. Do you know what I think? It’s some kind of water-spout. Things get sucked up and deposited hundreds of miles away. There’s been rains of fish and frogs—all well-accounted for. Newspapers and all. God knows what’s going on out in that ocean.”

“You think it’s going to start dropping plastic toys on my head?”

“It’s all in Charles Fort, my friend. A wise man would read and heed.”

Then he saw her, in the rain, at the place where the pavement met the grass. The rain dripped from the ends of her long, straight hair, but seemed to Reith to run off it without wetting it. Raindrops dewed the fibers of her cardigan.

“Can you handle this?” he asked the driver.

“Just sign the waybill and she’s on her way.”

The girl stood in a circle of drips beneath the fractal fronds of the Ningyo Drifting. She dabbed at herself with the offered towel.

“You should really have a shower, get that salt off you. It’s not good for you.”

“I seem to have missed most of it. But it’s nice to be out of it.” The towel was dry. “Can I ask a question?”

“You can ask anything you like.”

“At the beach, the things I saw you bring out of the sea, what have you done with them?”

Reith did not show works in progress to people. Sharing broke the unity. People put ideas onto things that were not theirs. Opinions demanded recognition. And some were too big, too long, too diffuse in their evolution, to make any sense before the moment when he decided that to add one thing more would start to subtract. When he videoed them for his YouTube channel, he never showed the build, the Drifting, the explanation; just long, swooping orbits of the details.

So he said, “oh, yeah. Here.” He rested a finger on the Puchie deer. He had picked apart its rear end, flayed and splayed it and grafted it on to the chest of a Barbie doll. “Come up pretty good once I got the salt off. That vinyl finish can crack if you don’t treat it like skin. There’s stuff you get for shining up auto interiors, works good on it. Nice piece.”

The hat was in the former best bedroom with all the headgear. He had not developed an idea for the Drifting that pleased him. But the conceit was faces, a few simple lines in black marker pen, loosely connected to his imagining of the hat’s purpose, drawn on the inside of the hat. This yellow hard hat, Reith had decided, belonged to a longshoreman, who had worked ocean-going barges. In a few strokes the inverted face showed hard-weather, resignation, peace and toughness.

The child’s trunki had made it to the plastic-well in the kitchen, to the top of that heap, to the work-top for assimilation into the Kanagawa Drifting. It had faltered there.

“I’m not sure about this one. I think this one is complete. I can’t see how it would fit. It may be the start of something else. I’m thinking about children.”

The girl ran long fingers over the sand-scratched plastic.

“What did you do with things inside?”

“I didn’t throw them away. Nothing gets thrown away. That’s the idea. Nothing is ever lost.”

A fleece-fiber scarf, a bucket of plastic zoo-animals, a drinks cup with spout, a sea-rotted cardboard picture book sat in a clear plastic box. The animals had been spilled from their bucket. Reith saw the girl inhale very slowly as she bent over the box to closer examine the little castaway menagerie. Her long fingers walked through the lost things.

“Here’s a story. There once was a little girl but she’s dead now. She drowned. She was in the car with her parents and her big brother. They all brought one thing; that was all they had time for before the sea came. So she brought a thing with things in it. They drove fast but no matter how fast you drive you can only go where the road leads you and the water didn’t need roads. I think we forget how fast water can be. Water has weight and water has mass. The road wouldn’t take them away from the water and it just swept them off the road and tumbled them over and over and spilled everything out and they drowned. I know this story.” She trailed her fingers across the still-sodden pulp of the children’s book. “It’s called Mouse Heart Robot. It’s about a robot who was last to be built before the factory closed, and so they forgot to give him a heart. He just stood there, looking, thinking. Then a family of field mice moved in to the place where his heart should be, and he came to life and looked after them, but when they grew up and moved away, he went dead again. Mice have such short lives. I used to get read that story. The poor robot. I felt so sad for him. There, that’s a story inside a story. Something with a story and a hurt. Give it back.”

Reith gave a small start. “What?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you’ve had so much. Like you said, nothing is ever lost. Things have memories. Maybe give some of them back.”

The door bell rang. A second startle.

“Just as well I looked,” the courier said. He presented the waybill. “You forgot to sign it.”

“I’m sure . . . ” Reith took the pen. The space for the signature was blank. Over the courier’s shoulder, he could the see the girl, walking away, already a distance down the road, very straight and upright, in the salt rain.

The plants were dying. The floral borders outside Driftwood Crafts, Gifts and Pots; the flower tubs and baskets at the McLaren Realty; the raised beds outside the Westwood Lodge were shriveled. The lawns of 3rd Street were scabbed with brown patches. The tougher shrubs were browning at leaf tip and blossom. The trees shed needles, drift upon drift.

For five days the salt rain had fallen. Salt water rushed in the gutters, sheeted across roads, clogged drains with rafts of brown needles.

“Half the dogs in town are sick,” Lauren said pouring coffee for Reith. “And things are coming out of the forest looking for water. Axel chased deer away from the back door. Dead birds all over the place. And he says the propane tank is rusting bad. Why haven’t we made the television news yet?”

The mail boxes, the barbecues, the garden seats, the swings and chain fences, the kids’ bikes, the garden tools, were turning to rust. The gas station canopy, the elementary school climbing frame, the cell phone relay, the electrical step-down transformer, the oil and gas tanks, the cars, scabbed with creeping rust.

“And the stink. I just can’t get it out of my hair, my clothes. Off my skin. I smell like a harbor. Like a dead seal.”

Reith splashed out across the streaming salt-water to the pickup. The air was thick with salt, weed, ozones and ions and briny, iodinic sourness. He gagged. He drove up to the house as around him the town crumbled to ochre rust. Endless parade of low, curdled clouds marched in from the ocean; endless, endless salt rain.

He thought he glimpsed the girl in the rear-view mirror, standing on the roadside at the edge of the dying forest, arms long at her side, her hair so straight and glossy. When he looked over his shoulder she was not there. Of course.

He could feel the salt caking on his skin, itching, desiccating in the few steps from the car to the porch. A shower. Fresh water on his body. Cleaning, cleansing, sanctifying. He strewed salt-sodden clothes along the path between the Driftings. The stench was in the house; rotting weed, brine, deep water. He was naked by the time he reached the bathroom door. He closed his eyes and waited for the anointing gush of warm and pure.

Sea-rot gusted in his face, so strong Reith retched. Salt water blasted in his face, hot salt water filled up his eyes, his ears, his nostrils, his open mouth. He gagged, spat, dived to the water-cooler. He drained a plastic cupful. Reith choked, sprayed water across the room, heaved and heaved; dry, retching, wracking heaves.

Sea water.

Reith plunged into the surf line; knee-deep, the water heavy around his thighs; waist-deep, pushing against the resistance of an entire ocean; wading out chest-deep, slow now, every step ponderous and buoyed at the same time. The rain fell steadily, pocking the glassy surface of the slow swell. He held the trunki over his head. Towed behind him on a surf-board line, it would have filled with water and become unmanageable. Held high, it was an offering to the things of salt-water.

Give it back. Each time he had spoken with the girl, she seemed startled by her own words, as if she were not in control of them, as if other voices formed them.

Give it back.

It had to be the beach where he had found it. He drove through grey rain half blind, half-crazed, the wipers throwing handfuls of salty, gritty water from the windshield, the pickup squeaking and creaking as the brine wore into its struts and bones. He slipped-slid down the path between the stark, rain-grey trees to the shore. The driftwood like looked like the bones of the ocean, heaved on to the solid world to see the sun and die. He was sick, so sick of the reek of rot and weed and sea in his sinuses. Into the ocean.

Reith stood a moment, the plastic child’s trunk held high. He had packed it with the painstaking care of a Drifting maker. The fleece scarf washed and freshened with fabric conditioner and folded. The zoo animals returned to their plastic bucket-Ark, battened down beneath the lid. The drinks cup cleaned and sterilized and filled with Minute-maid. A libation. One thing he had omitted; the book. It was unsalvageable, the story all but erased to patches of Kanji and bright color on grey board: a robot’s head, a mouse paw, a heart-shaped hole. Mouse Heart Robot. It touched him, it made him remember and feel things long washed out. She had loved that story, she used to have it read to her. She felt so sorry for the poor robot. A hole for a heart. The image excited him. Filling holes. Secret chambers, hidden hearts. He could feel the nature of the Driftings changing, from huge assemblages, whip-stitched frankensteins; to small juxtapositions.

Give it back. It had given to him. The ocean closed around him; grey before and grey behind, above and below, the circle of the waters. Easy to become disoriented, to strike out into open ocean believing horizon line was shore line; drawn out by those tows and currents to join the gyre. Human flotsam.

“It’s yours!” he shouted. The words were thin and pointless. But he still said, “Thank you!” Then he hurled the trunki as far as he could out into the ocean. It splashed, bobbed, each bob taking it lower in the water as the sea jetted in through the imperfect seal. Reith watched until all that could be seen was a single plastic tiger ear, stealing out to sea, drawn back into the great gyre of tsunami-things.

Reith drove back slick as a seal in his wet-suit. As he stepped out of the car the air caught him, breath to sigh to near-sob. Clean. Fresh. He turned his face to the clouds and let pure, sweet water fill up its hollows and stream from its angles.

Mouse Heart Robot: he had a pure, sweet idea for it.

Reith opened the door.

The living room was filled with hair. Long, sleek, black hair, hanging from ceiling to floor, sleek black hair, dripping with sea water. The door closed behind Reith. The wet hair rippled, as if someone were moving through it.

About the Author

Ian McDonald is the author of many science fiction novels, including The Dervish House, Ares Express, Brasyl, River of Gods, Cyberabad Days, Desolation Road, King of Morning, Queen of Day, Out on Blue Six, Chaga, and Kirinya. He has won the Philip K. Dick Award, the BSFA Award, and a Hugo Award, and has been nominated for the Nebula Award and a Quill Book Award, and has several nominations for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. He lives in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Variations on Bluebeard and Dalton’s Law Along the Event Horizon

Helena Bell

The First Wife

When I am told well, the shade of my husband’s beard is a word for longing. A robin’s egg, deep water below the coral reef, the night sky against the glow of a dying flashlight. A fooling color so I will not know his plans for me until the first door is opened and my neck is sliced: the thin edge like fresh cut paper.

In these stories I have a courtship, a wedding, a ring of flowers whose speed of wilting is an inside jest. In some tellings there is a disagreement, an escalation, a sense that all those who follow will be an attempt at reconciliation. In others there is no tenderness. In others there are no questions. In others there are only answers: many doors and each one I pass is the curve of desire. It builds until I will open nothing without proscription. I open his drawers, his pockets, the last box of cereal. I keep my fists closed when he passes the salt. On our wedding night, and each thereafter I tell him nothing. No endearments, no cries, not even my own name. Slowly my legs close too, a fusion of flesh and scaled distaste. A mermaid’s tail, and he with his skinning knife.

When I am told less well, I am not mentioned at all. I am merely one of a row of bodies. Perhaps I am described like fruit or hanging clothes. Perhaps I am so far in the distance you cannot even see me, do not know that I am there. I am neither naked nor clothed: a mountain bathed in blue light. Atmospheric perspective, they call it. One of three, one of six, one of ten thousand brides lined like British soldiers whose red coats have fallen to the ground to stain the next girl’s silken shoes and the indiscreet brass key. Is it brass? I do not know. When I am told by Frenchmen, I am given neither explanation nor warning for the guillotine. Rhyming morals concerning curiosity and prenuptial agreements, the efficacy of protective brothers are left for others. I have no family; no one ever looks for me; I am nothing and no one; forgotten.

The Second Wife

He wished I was like his first wife: queen, domestic goddess with the small hands and curling eyelashes. Neck like a willow branch. His beard turned blue with lamentation: I cannot talk, nor cook, nor breathe like she.

I purged her slowly. The drapes were shredded and resown in patterns of crass aesthetic then sold at auction. How poor her taste must have been, I told the others. It’s no wonder he remarried. I gave away the silver she touched, a parting gift to her former servants. Her kin in town were moved. Any tastes we shared, I changed. She liked dogs? I stuffed the menagerie with cheetahs, plucked fathers off her squawking parrot and shoved it naked into my cats’ teeth.

He resisted at first: all men do. Shifted her belongings to the fourth hall closet, barred the entrance. Doubted my will. But I would not rest until there were no rooms left.

The Third Wife

Sometimes I am a painting on the wall, admired from a distance and ordered by post, like a political match or salad spinner. It largely depends on the century in which I am dressed: leather, feathers, silk brocade. A suit of white fabric with hard joint bearings, a glass hat. Whether I have white gloves or bare wrists, a tattoo of iron gates from knuckles to clavicle. I am zoftig or slight, depending on the fashion, but always the moment’s desire in the dark.

I am also: first loser to the first loser. Pinned to a horse I am the color of piss, the quick hump before four.

Here is a secret only I can tell you: I sat quietly in the hall with the key in hand. I did not open it; I was pushed.

The Fourth Wife

The morning after my husband first tries to kill me, his former wives join me for breakfast. Always they tie scarves around their wounds, dip their fingers in rouge so each touch to the furniture, the linens, my cheek, leaves russet stains which smelled faintly of spice. Sometimes they do not wear clothing—only the wisp of silk below their chins—and in these versions I fear I must be imagining their touch: the explanation for the dark red blooming upon my flesh.

My husband never interests me. The only reason we marry is so that I may come here, to this moment, though it always goes in ways I do not wish it to.

In each version, I think they like me at first. The one with black and gold in a windsor knot, she smiles and ducks her head when I reach out to grasp her hand. We are like fresh burns or blisters, bubbling over and longing to touch ourselves, each other.

“There are enough of us now,” I say and the one with white rabbits clucks her tongue and shakes her head.

The others look less sure. “Do you know how to fight?

“Can you shoot? Can you poison? Do you know how to evade the constable, the copper, the polygraph? Have you a swamp in which to hide the body, a furnace which heats to a thousand degrees? What is our means of escape? The horses? The car? The black hole looming outside the starboard window?”

The conversation never changes, only the number of mornings like this one. The consumption of bread and tea, the women’s bodies pressing in like so many eager accomplices.

Later, in the closet, I remember the clink of metal on metal as their fingers tapped in feigned boredom. I would ask what it means but we have no mouths here, and it is time for the next.

Five through Sixteen: Optional

These girls have been added over time. Some say they are to pad the body count, others to establish the subtle patterns of a psychological profile. There are rumors that Wife Fourteen staved the moment of her execution for three years by slowly revealing a complex quadratic equation for the attainment of eternal youth. She began with a history of decompression: the white goats of Haldane falling to their knees with each expansion of depth and time ratios. She draws parallels between fractal theory and time travel. Some say this is an example of distraction like Scheharazade. Her cleverness should be lauded, held as an example to all women who must deal with difficult men. Others are less sure.

The Seventeenth Wife

I do not appear until the thousandth telling, but I am there for every one thereafter. I am dropped in without warning, an elision of motivation and necessity. I am the first wife with metal skin and wiring but am given incontrovertible rules of behavior such that they are of little use.

There are other versions of me too who come later, but though we are all called the Seventeenth, we do not think of ourselves as the same. One of us has yellow buttons for eyes, an analog radio mouth. We suppose we could deconstruct ourselves, interchange our organs of rocket thrusters and screens of pulsing data. Or perhaps lay our skins out, our alveoli and cortexes, hard limbs (do we have these things? we must have these things if we are to breathe and to think and calculate the integral of our breasts) to blanket the entire galaxy.

It occurs to us occasionally that we could stop our husband from killing us, we could raise our arms and the blade would find no purchase in the deep paunch of our necks. But at least it is a quick death. Clean, uncompromising. Sometimes we think we prefer it.

Nineteen

Eventually it comes to pass that those who tell the story insert themselves into its fabric. There is the green-skinned housekeeper who hands me a tangled knot of thread when I first enter the house and warns me of a monster at the center of the maze. I believe she is confused with other constructions, other stories which are being told and retold in other places, at other times and I (and we all who come after) are too embarrassed to tell her so.

I am the first who can see outside: the black hills and black sun, the blue limbed trees which sway in winds too warm for brittle skin. I take the thread and tie it to the door anyway, shed my shoes and run as fast as I can in any direction. The air fills with a fine silt and it is hours before I realize I am not breathing it in.

I breathe nothing in.

I do not breathe.

When I wake, I am lying beneath the crystal chandelier in the entrance, the green-skinned housekeeper who speaks in clucking syllables and waves her many arms and legs in gestures of emphatic apology, hands me a ball of tangled thread. I believe she is confused; I am too embarrassed to tell her I am already dead.

Nineteen (after many more tellings)

Eventually it comes to pass that I learn to expand and contract my diaphragm. When I meet the housekeeper, I ask her for a mask, for cylinders, and boots made of thick rubber and hard soles. I clip lights and lines, learn to turn my regular on and off in the dark. I keep a journal with times and distance and SAC rates. If ever one of us is to escape, I feel it must be through me.

My husband and I spent every anniversary in Mexico. Once, as he carried my gear down the wooden steps, where the snorkelers were gathered, he asks the name of the place. Nahoch Nah Chich, I tell him.

Giant birdcage. He laughed. Why do we name such things, but out of fear, or longing.

I do not remember marrying him. I do not remember how we met, or where I was born, my mother’s face, the ten page checklist of mission objectives.

Tying the thread to the door, I feel a familiarity in my fingers. I bend my legs at the knees, floating above the alien world and it is not alien at all: white fingers of limestone drip down and all is quiet save the sound of my own breathing. It is a different cave each time. Different jumps and line arrows; the thread never pulls me back, but eventually I fade.

Thirty

A woman made entirely of bees introduces me to my husband. She sits us both down and explains, in as few words as possible, that I am here to be murdered by him. The story says it must be so. There would be time to come to it naturally, a progression of intimacies and arguments, tests of will as we circled each other like dogs, but everything is running slower than expected. He must do it now. Quickly.

My husband argues with her. He says he does not wish to kill anyone. He has never wished to kill anyone and could he please simply go home. He laments the destruction of free will, the confines of destiny. Why is his role never examined, the contextual analysis of his decisions given more than cursory glances.

The woman of bees grows large and small before him. “The things that I could show you would make you piss yourself in fear.”

My husband is undeterred. “You brought us here. This is all on you.”

“We did not make you,” she says.

There are glimpses within her form, planets and stars I do not remember, and I reach out without thinking. If the universe had formed in an infinitesimally different way, had a molecule collapsed or grown larger, had a butterfly been squished beneath a hunter’s boot, my life would not exist.

I hold stardust in my palm, I think, as a few crushed bees twitch and tickle against my skin.

I do not think this one small act has the power to affect great change. We are not at the beginning after all and the universe is expanding too quickly to catch up with it now. How insurmountable the arrogance that a crushed insect could change a presidential election (I do not believe I have ever seen an election, besides).

Four Hundred Thirty Seven

On our first date I tell the man who will one day be my husband how in 1994 Sheck Exley drowned at 925 feet in Zacatón cenote trying to see what the bottom was like. I linger on the ideal percentages in his gas mixture and tell him how the total pressure exerted by a mixture of gases is equal to the sum of the pressures that would be exerted by each of those gases if they alone were present and occupied the volume. I calculated the distance and ascent rate of an exhalation on a cocktail napkin to explain how when the last of his bubbles breached the surface, Sheck’s wife must have known he had died a full ten minutes before.

“But didn’t she jump in after him?” he asks.

“It would have been pointless,” I say.

Our relationship becomes a study of inverse calculations. Pressure and volume. My love for him is a steel cylinder, over-pressurized. Quantifiable, divisible into clean fractions, calculable for the prevention of oxygen toxicity and nitrogen narcosis. I do not enter a cave unless I am sure I have enough to get out. But he is decompression: a slow release of frustration and longing. Mathematically imprecise.

“What is the most scared you’ve ever been,” he says and I tell him of the Blue Holes in the Bahamas, how a woman there likes to follow the cave divers inside, flips their line arrows around to discourage them from returning.

“There are places one may reach,” I say, “where all exits point back to the self.”

“So that happened to you?” he asks and I shake my head.

“But all of us suffer the same fears. Even though I have never seen that place, I can still feel her eyes on me in the dark. Kindred spirits. Like the myth of twins who can feel when the other is in pain, or dies.”

“In this story, are you the lost diver? Or are you the one who traps them inside, so they will never return?”

“Can’t I be both?”

“Why are all the mad ones women,” he laughs. “Medusa, Lusca, evil queens and scorned ex-wives.” He smiles at me and I remember smiling. I remember agreeing. I remember being foolish in a great many ways.

Later, when I cannot clean the tell-tale blood from my hands he snaps my neck. The last thing I hear is the key hitting the floor. A small sound, less than leaves breaking, and I see there are two of him behind his eyes. One I will never understand, and the other who whispers It was a kindness.

The Husband’s Last Will and Testament Left on His Brother’s Answering Machine Before Lift-Off Which the First Wife Sometimes Whispers to Wife 1001 Like a Greeting, or a Prayer

Please take care of the dogs. Keep the house, or sell it—by the time we get back there won’t be a house left. If we get back. Tell your kids I’ll name whole galaxies after them.

I’ve left you all our books save one. It’s her favorite and I’m thinking of sneaking it up there by hiding it in my jumpsuit. We’re not supposed to take any unauthorized items, and they tell us the sum of human history is in the computer if we get bored. But just the two us, willing to float out there alone for centuries, how can they say no?

The Penultimate Wife

I enter the story knowing my husband’s plans for me. He weeps as he does it; he begs forgiveness. We can be so much better than the sum of what has come before.

He mistakes my disinterest for his guilt as evidence that I do not know what I am, what we are, where we have been and where we were headed. It know it was a moment’s sentiment when the knife glanced against my throat and failed. A miscalculation of time and distance, a desire to wait until the last possible second.

He believes it is my story he is telling, dividing me into ten thousand forms, variation after variation and in this way he can keep us both alive. My consciousness hangs like silt stirred by the breath of unknown women. He hopes the sum of us will equal the whole, but looking into my eyes he must know the tiniest parts of me have been discontinued

I’m sorry, he says I’m sorry. I promise not to do it again.

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.

Effigy Nights

Yoon Ha Lee

They are connoisseurs of writing in Imulai Mokarengen, the city whose name means inkblot of the gods.

The city lies at the galaxy’s dust-stranded edge, enfolding a moon that used to be a world, or a world that used to be a moon; no one is certain anymore. In the mornings its skies are radiant with clouds like the plumage of a bird ever-rising, and in the evenings the stars scatter light across skies stitched and unstitched by the comings and goings of fire-winged starships. Its walls are made of metal the color of undyed silk, and its streets bloom with aleatory lights, small solemn symphonies, the occasional duel.

Imulai Mokarengen has been unmolested for over a hundred years. People come to listen to the minstrels and drink tea-of-moments-unraveling, to admire the statues of shapeshifting tigers and their pliant lovers, to look for small maps to great fortunes at the intersections of curving roads. Even the duelists confront each other in fights knotted by ceremony and the exchange of poetry.

But now the starships that hunt each other in the night of nights have set their dragon eyes upon Imulai Mokarengen, desiring to possess its arts, and the city is unmolested no more.

The soldiers came from the sky in a glory of thunder, a cascade of fire. Blood like roses, bullets like thorns, everything to ashes. Imulai Mokarengen’s defenses were few, and easily overwhelmed. Most of them would have been museum pieces anywhere else.

The city’s wardens gathered to offer the invading general payment in any coin she might desire, so long as she left the city in peace. Accustomed to their decadent visitors, they offered these: Wine pressed from rare books of stratagems and aged in barrels set in orbit around a certain red star. Crystals extracted from the nervous systems of philosopher-beasts that live in colonies upon hollow asteroids. Perfume symphonies infused into exquisite fractal tapestries.

The general was Jaian of the Burning Orb, and she scorned all these things. She was a tall woman clad in armor the color of dead metal. For each world she had scoured, she wore a jewel of black-red facets upon her breastplate. She said to the wardens: What use did she have for wine except to drink to her enemies’ defeat? What use was metal except to build engines of war? And as for the perfume, she didn’t dignify that with a response.

But, she said, smiling, there was one thing they could offer her, and then she would leave with her soldiers and guns and ships. They could give her all the writings they treasured so much: all the binary crystals gleaming bright-dark, all the books with the bookmarks still in them, all the tilted street signs, all the graffiti chewed by drunken nanomachines into the shining walls, all the tattoos obscene and tender, all the ancestral tablets left at the shrines with their walls of gold and chitin.

The wardens knew then that she was mocking them, and that as long as any of the general’s soldiers breathed, they would know no peace. One warden, however, considered Jaian’s words of scorn, and thought that, unwitting, Jaian herself had given them the key to her defeat.

Seran did not remember a time when his othersight of the city did not show it burning, no matter what his ordinary senses told him, or what the dry pages of his history said. In his dreams the smoke made the sky a funeral shroud. In waking, the wind smelled of ash, the buildings of angry flames. Everything in the othersight was wreathed in orange and amber, flickering, shadows cinder-edged.

He carried that pall of phantom flame with him even now, into the warden’s secret library, and it made him nervous although the books had nothing to fear from the phantoms. The warden, a woman in dust-colored robes, was escorting him through the maze-of-mists and down the stairs to the library’s lowest level. The air was cool and dry, and to either side he could see the candle-sprites watching him hungrily.

“Here we are,” the warden said as they reached the bottom of the stairs.

Seran looked around at the parchment and papers and scrolls of silk, then stepped into the room. The tools he carried, bonesaws and forceps and fine curved needles, scalpels that sharpened themselves if fed the oil of certain olives, did not belong in this place. But the warden had insisted that she required a surgeon’s expertise.

He risked being tortured or killed by the general’s occupation force for cooperating with a warden. In fact, he could have earned himself a tidy sum for turning her in. But Imulai Mokarengen was his home, for all that he had not been born here. He owed it a certain loyalty.

“Why did you bring me here, madam warden?” Seran said.

The warden gestured around the room, then unrolled one of the great charts across the table at the center of the room. It was a stardrive schematic, all angles and curves and careful coils.

Then Seran saw the shape flickering across the schematic, darkening some of the precise lines while others flowed or dimmed. The warden said nothing, leaving him to observe as though she felt he was making a difficult diagnosis. After a while he identified the elusive shape as that of a girl, slight of figure or perhaps merely young, if such a creature counted years in human terms. The shape twisted this way and that, but there were no adjacent maps or diagrams for her to jump to. She left a disordered trail of numbers like bullets in her wake.

“I see her,” Seran said dryly. “What do you need me to do about her?”

“Free her,” the warden said. “I’m pretty sure this is all of her, although she left a trail while we were perfecting the procedure—”

She unrolled another chart, careful to keep it from touching the first. It appeared to be a treatise on musicology, except parts of it had been replaced by a detritus of clefs and twisted staves and demiquavers coalescing into a diagram of a pistol.

“Is this your plan for resistance against the invaders?” Seran said. “Awakening soldiers from scraps of text, then cutting them out? You should have a lot more surgeons. Or perhaps children with scissors.”

The warden shrugged. “Imulai Mokarengen is a city of stories. It’s not hard to persuade one to come to life in her defense, even though I wouldn’t call her tame. She is the Saint of Guns summoned from a book of legends. Now you see why I need a surgeon. I am given to believe that your skills are not entirely natural.”

This was true enough. He had once been a surgeon-priest of the Order of the Chalice. “If you know that much about me,” he said, “then you know that I was cast out of the order. Why haven’t you scared up the real thing?”

“Your order is a small one,” she said. “I looked, but with the blockade, there’s no way to get someone else. It has to be you.” When he didn’t speak, she went on, “We are outnumbered. The general can send for more soldiers from the worlds of her realm, and they are armed with the latest weaponry. We are a single city known for artistic endeavors, not martial ones. Something has to be done.”

Seran said, “You’re going to lose your schematic.”

“I’m not concerned about its fate.”

“All right,” he said. “But if you know anything about me, you know that your paper soldiers won’t last. I stick to ordinary surgery because the prayers of healing don’t work for me anymore; they’re cursed by fire.” And, because he knew she was thinking it: “The curse touches anyone I teach.”

“I’m aware of the limitations,” the warden said. “Now, do you require additional tools?”

He considered it. Ordinary scissors might be better suited to paper than the curved ones he carried, but he trusted his own instruments. A scalpel would have to do. But the difficult part would be getting the girl-shape to hold still. “I need water,” he said. He had brought a sedative, but he was going to have to sponge the entire schematic, since an injection was unlikely to do the trick.

The warden didn’t blink. “Wait here.”

As though he had somewhere else to wait. He spent the time attempting to map the girl’s oddly flattened anatomy. Fortunately, he wouldn’t have to intrude on her internal structures. Her joints showed the normal range of articulation. If he hadn’t known better, he would have said she was dancing in the disarrayed ink, or perhaps looking for a fight.

Footsteps sounded in the stairwell. The woman set a large pitcher of water down on the table. “Will this be enough?” she asked.

Seran nodded and took out a vial from his satchel. The dose was pure guesswork, unfortunately. He dumped half the vial’s contents into the pitcher, then stirred the water with a glass rod. After putting on gloves, he soaked one of his sponges, then wrung it out.

Working with steady strokes, he soaked the schematic. The paper absorbed the water readily. The warden winced in spite of herself. The girl didn’t seem capable of facial expressions, but she dashed to one side of the schematic, then the other, seeking escape. Finally she slumped, her long hair trailing off in disordered tangles of artillery tables.

The warden’s silence pricked at Seran’s awareness. She’s studying how I do this, he thought. He selected his most delicate scalpel and began cutting the girl-shape out of the paper. The medium felt alien, without the resistances characteristic of flesh, although water oozed away from the cuts.

He hesitated over the final incision, then completed it, hand absolutely steady.

Amid all the maps and books and scrolls, they heard a girl’s slow, drowsy breathing. In place of the paper cutout, the girl curled on the table, clad in black velvet and gunmetal lace. She had paper-pale skin and inkstain hair, and a gun made of shadows rested in her hand.

It was impossible to escape the problem: smoke curled from the girl’s other hand, and her nails were blackened.

“I warned you of this,” Seran said. Cursed by fire. “She’ll burn up, slowly at first, and then all at once. I suspect she’ll last a week at most.”

“You listen to the news, surely,” the warden said. “Do you know how many of our people the invaders shot the first week of the occupation?”

He knew the number. It was not small. “Anything else?” he said.

“I may have need of you later,” the warden said. “If I summon you, will you come? I will pay you the same fee.”

“Yes, of course,” Seran said. He had noticed her deft hands, however; he imagined she would make use of them soon.

Not long after Seran’s task for the warden, the effigy nights began.

He was out after curfew when he saw the Saint of Guns. Imulai Mokarengen’s people were bad at curfews. People still broke the general’s curfew regularly, although many of them were also caught at it. At every intersection, along every street, you could see people hung up as corpse-lanterns, burning with plague-colored light, as warnings to the populace. Still, the city’s people were accustomed to their parties and trysts and sly confrontations. For his part, he was on his way home after an emergency call, and looking forward to a quiet bath.

It didn’t surprise him that he should encounter the Saint of Guns, although he wished he hadn’t. After all, he had freed her from the boundary of paper and legend to walk in the world. The connection was real, for all that she hadn’t been conscious for its forging. Still, the sight of her made him freeze up.

Jaian’s soldiers were rounding up a group of merry-goers and poets whose rebellious recitations had been loud enough to be heard from outside. The poets, in particular, were not becoming any less loud, especially when one of them was shot in the head.

The night became the color of gunsmoke little by little, darkness unfolding to make way for the lithe girl-figure. She had a straight-hipped stride, and her eyes were spark-bright, her mouth furiously unsmiling. Her hair was braided and pinned this time. Seran had half-expected her to have a pistol in each hand, but no, there was only the one. He wondered if that had to do with the charred hand.

Most of the poets didn’t recognize her, and none of the soldiers. But one of the poets, a chubby woman, tore off her necklace with its glory’s worth of void-pearls. They scattered in all directions, purple-iridescent, fragile. “The Saint of Guns,” the poet cried. “In the city where words are bullets, in the book where verses are trajectories, who is safe from her?”

Seran couldn’t tell whether this was a quotation or something the poet had made up on the spot. He should have ducked around the corner and toward safety, but he found it impossible to look away, even when one of the soldiers knocked the pearl-poet to the street and two others started kicking her in the stomach.

The other soldiers shouted at the Saint of Guns to stand down, to cast away her weapon. She narrowed her eyes at them, not a little contemptuous. She pointed her gun into the air and pulled the trigger. For a second there was no sound.

Then all the soldiers’ guns exploded. Seran had a blurry impression of red and star-shaped shrapnel and chalk-white and falling bodies, fire and smoke and screaming. There was a sudden sharp pain across his left cheek where a passing splinter cut it: the Saint’s mark.

None of the soldiers had survived. Seran was no stranger to corpses. They didn’t horrify him, despite the charred reek and the cooked eyes, the truncated finger that had landed near his foot. But none of the poets had survived, either.

The Saint of Guns lowered her weapon, then saluted him with her other hand. Her fingers were blackened to their bases.

Seran stared at her, wondering what she wanted from him. Her lips moved, but he couldn’t hear a thing.

She only shrugged and walked away. The night gradually grew darker as she did.

Only later did Seran learn that the gun of every soldier in that district had exploded at the same time.

Imulai Mokarengen has four great archives, one for each compass point. The greatest of them is the South Archive, with its windows the color of regret and walls where vines trace out spirals like those of particles in cloud chambers. In the South Archive the historians of the city store their chronicles. Each book is written with nightbird quills and ink-of-dedication, and bound with a peculiar thread spun from spent artillery shells. Before it is shelved, one of the city’s wardens seals each book shut with a black kiss. The books are not for reading. It is widely held that the historians’ objectivity will be compromised if they concern themselves with an audience.

When Jaian of the Burning Orb conquered Imulai Mokarengen, she sent a detachment to secure the South Archive. Although she could have destroyed it in a conflagration of ice and fire and funeral dust, she knew it would serve her purpose better to take the histories hostage.

It didn’t take long for the vines to wither, and for the dead brown tendrils to spell out her name in a syllabary of curses, but Jaian, unsuperstitious, only laughed when she heard.

The warden called Seran back, as he had expected she would.

Seran hadn’t expected the city to be an easy place to live in during an occupation, but he also hadn’t made adequate preparations for the sheer aggravation of sharing it with legends and historical figures.

“Aggravation” was what he called it when he was able to lie to himself about it. It was easy to be clinical about his involvement when he was working with curling sheets, and less so when he saw what the effigies achieved.

The Saint of Guns burned up within a week, as Seran had predicted. The official reports were confused, and the rumors not much better, but he spent an entire night holed up in his study afterward estimating the number of people she had killed, bystanders included. He had bottles of very bad wine for occasions like this. By the time morning came around, he was comprehensively drunk.

Six-and-six years ago, on a faraway station, he had violated his oaths as a surgeon-priest by using his prayers to kill a man. It had not been self-defense, precisely. The man had shot a child. Seran had been too late to save the child, but not too late to damn himself.

It seemed that his punishment hadn’t taught him anything. He explained to himself that what he was doing was necessary; that he was helping to free the city of Jaian.

The warden next had him cut out one of the city’s founders, Alarra Coldly-Smiling. She left footsteps of frost, and where she walked, people cracked into pieces, frozen all the way through, needles of ice piercing their intestines. As might be expected, she burned up faster than the Saint of Guns. A pity; she was outside Jaian’s increasingly well-defended headquarters when she sublimated.

The third was the Mechanical Soldier, who manifested as a suit of armor inside which lights blinked on-off, on-off, in digital splendor. Seran was buying more wine—you could usually get your hands on some, even during the occupation, if your standards were low—when he heard the clink-clank thunder outside the dim room where the transaction was taking place. The Mechanical Soldier carried a black sword, which proved capable of cutting through metal and crystal and stone. With great precision it carved a window in the wall. The blinking lights brightened as it regarded Seran.

The wine-seller shrieked and dropped one of the bottles, to Seran’s dismay. The air was pungent with the wine’s sour smell. Seran looked unflinchingly at the helmet, although a certain amount of flinching was undoubtedly called for, and after a while the Mechanical Soldier went away in search of its real target.

It turned out that the Mechanical Soldier liked to carve cartouches into walls, or perhaps its coat-of-arms. Whenever it struck down Jaian’s soldiers, lights sparked in the carvings, like sourceless eyes. People began leaving offerings by the carvings: oil-of-massacres, bouquets of crystals with fissures in their shining hearts, cardamom bread. (Why cardamom, Seran wasn’t sure. At least the aroma was pleasing.) Jaian’s soldiers executed people they caught at these makeshift shrines, but the offerings kept coming.

Seran had laid in a good supply of wine, but after the Mechanical General shuddered apart into pixels and blackened reticulations, there was a maddening period of calm. He waited for the warden’s summons.

No summons came.

Jaian’s soldiers swaggered through the streets again, convinced that there would be no more apparitions. The city’s people whispered to each other that they must have faith. The offerings increased in number.

Finding wine became too difficult, so Seran gave it up. He was beginning to think that he had dreamed up the whole endeavor when the effigy nights started again.

Imulai Mokarengen suddenly became so crowded with effigies that Seran’s othersight of fire and smoke was not much different from reality. He had not known that the city contained so many stories: Women with deadly hands and men who sang atrocity-hymns. Colonial intelligences that wove webs across the pitted buildings and flung disease-sparks at the invaders. A cannon that rose up out of the city’s central plaza and roared forth red storms.

But Jaian of the Burning Orb wasn’t a fool. She knew that the effigies, for all their destructiveness, burned out eventually. She and her soldiers retreated beneath their force-domes and waited.

Seran resolved to do some research. How did the warden mean to win her war, if she hadn’t yet managed it?

By now he had figured out that the effigies would not harm him, although he still had the scar the Saint of Guns had given him. It would have been easy to remove the scar, but he was seized by the belief that the scar was his protection.

He went first to a bookstore in which candles burned and cogs whirred. Each candle had the face of a child. A man with pale eyes sat in an unassuming metal chair, shuffling cards. “I thought you were coming today,” he said.

Seran’s doubts about fortunetelling clearly showed on his face. The man laughed and fanned out the cards face-up. Every one of them was blank. “I’m sorry to disappoint you,” he said, “but they only tell you what you already know.”

“I need a book about the Saint of Guns,” Seran said. She had been the first. No reason not to start at the beginning.

“That’s not a story I know,” the man said. His eyes were bemused. “I have a lot of books, if you want to call them that, but they’re really empty old journals. People like them for the papers, the bindings. There’s nothing written in them.”

“I think I have what I came for,” Seran said, hiding his alarm. “I’m sorry to trouble you.”

He visited every bookstore in the district, and some outside of it, and his eyes ached abominably by the end. It was the same story at all of them. But he knew where he had to go next.

Getting into the South Archive meant hiring a thief-errant, whose name was Izeut. Izeut had blinded Seran for the journey, and it was only now, inside one of the reading rooms, that Seran recovered his vision. He suspected he was happier not knowing how they had gotten in. His stomach still felt as though he’d tied it up in knots.

Seran had had no idea what the Archive would look like inside. He had especially not expected the room they had landed in to be welcoming, the kind of place where you could curl up and read a few novels while sipping citron tea. There were couches with pillows, and padded chairs, and the paintings on the walls showed lizards at play.

“All right,” Izeut said. His voice was disapproving, but Seran had almost beggared himself paying him, so the disapproval was very faint. “What now?”

“All the books look like they’re in place here,” Seran said. “I want to make sure there’s nothing obviously missing.”

“That will take a while,” Izeut said. “We’d better get started.”

Not all the rooms were welcoming. Seran’s least favorite was the one from which sickles hung from the ceiling, their tips gleaming viscously. But all the bookcases were full.

Seran still wasn’t satisfied. “I want to look inside a few of the books,” he said.

Izeut shot him a startled glance. “The city’s traditions—”

“The city’s traditions are already dying,” Seran said.

“The occupation is temporary,” Izeut said stoutly. “We just have to do more to drive out the warlord’s people.”

Izeut had no idea. “Humor me,” Seran said. “Haven’t you always wanted to see what’s in those books?” Maybe an appeal to curiosity would work better.

Whether it did or not, Izeut stood silently while Seran pulled one of the books off the shelves. He hesitated, then broke the book’s seal and felt the warden’s black kiss, cold, unsentimental, against his lips. I’m already cursed, he thought, and opened the covers.

The first few pages were fine, written in a neat hand with graceful swells. Seran flipped to the middle, however, and his breath caught. The pages were empty except for a faint dust-trace of distorted graphemes and pixellated stick figures.

He could have opened up more books to check, but he had already found his answer.

“Stop,” Izeut said sharply. “Let me reshelve that.” He took the book from Seran, very tenderly.

“It’s no use,” Seran said.

Izeut didn’t turn around; he was slipping the book into its place. “We can go now.”

It was too late. The general’s soldiers had caught them.

Seran was separated from Izeut and brought before Jaian of the Burning Orb. She regarded him with cool exasperation. “There were two of you,” she said, “but something tells me that you’re the one I should worry about.”

She kicked the table next to her. All of Seran’s surgical tools, which the soldiers had confiscated and laid out in disarray, clattered.

“I have nothing to say to you,” Seran said through his teeth.

“Really,” Jaian said. “You fancy yourself a patriot, then. We may disagree about the petty legal question of who the owner of this city is, but if you are any kind of healer, you ought to agree with me that these constant spasms of destruction are good for no one.”

“You could always leave,” Seran said.

She picked up one of his sets of tweezers and clicked it once, twice. “You will not understand this,” she said, “and it is even right that you will not understand this, given your profession, but I will try to explain. This is what I do. Worlds are made to be pressed for their wine, cities taste of fruit when I bite them open. I cannot let go of my conquests.

“Do you think I am ignorant of the source of the apparitions that leave their smoking shadows in the streets? You’re running out of writings. All I need do is wait, and this city will yield in truth.”

“You’re right,” Seran said. “I don’t understand you at all.”

Jaian’s smile was like knives and nightfall. “I’ll write this in a language you do understand, then. You know something about how this is happening, who’s doing it. Take me to them or I will start killing your people in earnest. Every hour you make me wait, I’ll drop a bomb, or send out tanks, or soldiers with guns. If I get bored I’ll get creative.”

Seran closed his eyes and made himself breathe evenly. He didn’t think she was bluffing. Besides, there was a chance—if only a small chance—that the warden could come up with a defense against the general; that the effigies would come to her aid once the general came within reach.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll take you where it began.”

Seran was bound with chains-of-suffocation, and he thought it likely that there were more soldiers watching him than he could actually spot. He led Jaian to the secret library, to the maze-of-mists.

“A warden,” Jaian said. “I knew some of them had escaped.”

They went to the staircase and descended slowly, slowly. The candle-sprites flinched from the general. Their light was almost violet, like dusk.

All the way down the stairs they heard the snick-snick of many scissors.

The downstairs room, when they reached it, was filled with paper. Curling scraps and triangles crowded the floor. It was impossible to step anywhere without crushing some. The crumpling sound put Seran in mind of burnt skin.

Come to that, there was something of that smell in the room, too.

All through the room there were scissors snapping at empty space, wielded by no hand but the hands of the air, shining and precise.

At the far end of the room, behind a table piled high with more paper scraps, was the warden. She was standing sideways, leaning heavily against the table, and her face was averted so that her shoulder-length hair fell around it.

“It’s over,” Jaian called out. “You may as well surrender. It’s folly to let you live, but your death doesn’t have to be one of the ugly ones.”

Seran frowned. Something was wrong with the way the warden was moving, more like paper fluttering than someone breathing. But he kept silent. A trap, he thought, let it be a trap.

Jaian’s soldiers attempted to clear a path through the scissors, but the scissors flew to either side and away, avoiding the force-bolts with uncanny grace.

Jaian’s long strides took her across the room and around the table. She tipped the warden’s face up, forced eye contact. If there had been eyes.

Seran started, felt the chains-of-suffocation clot the breath in his throat. At first he took the marks all over the warden’s skin to be tattoos. Then he saw that they were holes cut into the skin, charred black at the edges. Some of the marks were logographs, and alphabet letters, and punctuation stretched wide.

“Stars and fire ascending,” Jaian breathed, “what is this?”

Too late she backed away. There was a rustling sound, and the warden unfurled, splitting down the middle with a jagged tearing sound, a great irregular sheet punched full of word-holes, completely hollowed out. Her robe crumpled into fine sediment, revealing the cutout in her back in the shape of a serpent-headed youth.

Jaian made a terrible crackling sound, like paper being ripped out of a book. She took one step back toward Seran, then halted. Holes were forming on her face and hands. The scissors closed in on her.

I did this, Seran thought, I should have refused the warden. She must have learned how to call forth effigies on her own, ripping them out of Imulai Mokarengen’s histories and sagas and legends, animating the scissors to make her work easier. But when the scissors ran out of paper, they turned on the warden. Having denuded the city of its past, of its weight of stories, they began cutting effigies from the living stories of its people. And now Jaian was one of those stories, too.

Seran left Jaian and her soldiers to their fate and began up the stairs. But some of the scissors had already escaped, and they had left the doors to the library open. They were undoubtedly in the streets right now. Soon the city would be full of holes, and people made of paper slowly burning up, and the hungry sound of scissors.

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 Wine-Dark Sea: Color and Perception in the Ancient World

Erin Hoffman

“And jealous now of me, you gods, because I befriend a man, one I saved as he straddled the keel alone, when Zeus had blasted and shattered his swift ship with a bright lightning bolt, out on the wine-dark sea.”

—Homer, The Odyssey, Book V

Perception is a funny beast. Homer’s “wine-dark sea” has puzzled scholars for centuries, leading to such far-flung hypotheses as strange weather effects, air pollution, and mass Grecian color-blindness.

It’s a phrase repeated in the works of W. H. Auden, Patrick O’Brian, and Brian Jacques, among others. Reading it today, we naturally assume that it is intended as allegory, some evocative reference to the sea’s mystery, its intoxication.

We may never know for sure, but one peculiar fact casts the mystery in an interesting light: there is no word for “blue” in ancient Greek.

Homer’s descriptions of color in The Iliad and The Odyssey, taken literally, paint an almost psychedelic landscape: in addition to the sea, sheep were also the color of wine; honey was green, as were the fear-filled faces of men; and the sky is often described as bronze.

It gets stranger. Not only was Homer’s palette limited to only five colors (metallics, black, white, yellow-green, and red), but a prominent philosopher even centuries later, Empedocles, believed that all color was limited to four categories: white/light, dark/black, red, and yellow. Xenophanes, another philosopher, described the rainbow as having but three bands of color: porphyra (dark purple), khloros, and erythros (red).

The conspicuous absence of blue is not limited to the Greeks. The color “blue” appears not once in the New Testament, and its appearance in the Torah is questioned (there are two words argued to be types of blue, sappir and tekeleth, but the latter appears to be arguably purple, and neither color is used, for instance, to describe the sky). Ancient Japanese used the same word for blue and green (Ao), and even modern Japanese describes, for instance, thriving trees as being “very blue,” retaining this artifact (aoao toshita: meaning “lush” or “abundant”).

It turns out that the appearance of color in ancient texts, while also reasonably paralleling the frequency of colors that can be found in nature (blue and purple are very rare, red is quite frequent, and greens and browns are everywhere), tends to happen in the same sequence regardless of civilization: red : ochre : green : violet : yellow—and eventually, at least with the Egyptians and Byzantines, blue.

“Why then ’tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
—Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2

Blue certainly existed in the world, even if it was rare, and the Greeks must have stumbled across it occasionally even if they didn’t name it. But the thing is, if we don’t have a word for something, it turns out that to our perception—which becomes our construction of the universe—it might as well not exist. Specifically, neuroscience suggests that it might not just be “good or bad” for which “thinking makes it so,” but quite a lot of what we perceive.

The malleability of our color perception can be demonstrated with a simple diagram, shown here (http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/eyecol.html) as figure six, “Afterimages.” The more our photoreceptors are exposed to the same color, the more fatigued they become, eventually giving out entirely and creating a reversed “afterimage” (yellow becomes blue, red becomes green). This is really just a parlor trick of sorts, and more purely physical, but it shows how easily shifted our vision is; other famous demonstrations like this selective attention test (its name gives away the trick) emphasize the power our cognitive functions have to suppress what we see. Our brains are pattern-recognizing engines, built around identifying things that are useful to us and discarding the rest of what we perceive as meaningless noise. (And a good thing that they do; deficiencies in this filtering, called sensory gating, are some of what cause neurological dysfunctions such as schizophrenia and autism.)

This suggests the possibility that not only did Homer lack a word for what we know as “blue”—he might never have perceived the color itself. To him, the sky really was bronze, and the sea really was the same color as wine. And because he lacked the concept “blue”—therefore its perception—to him it was invisible, nonexistent. This notion of concepts and language limiting cognitive perception is called linguistic relativism, and is typically used to describe the ways in which various cultures can have difficulty recalling or retaining information about objects or concepts for which they lack identifying language. Very simply: if we don’t have a word for it, we tend to forget it, or sometimes not perceive it at all.

The famed neuroscientist Dr. Oliver Sacks (you might know him as Robin Williams’s character in Awakenings) described a poignant example of linguistic or conceptual relativism with regard to schizophrenia. Accounts of the disease prior to the 19th century are rare, and none at all exist in ancient literature (as opposed to “madness,” which was documented, but primarily concerned aimless wandering and spontaneous violence). The broad classification of “madness” persisted well through the 19th century, with schizophrenia identified in the early twentieth, and still considered rare through the middle of the century. When Sacks began practicing in 1965 in New York City, and in particular began studying disorders related to schizophrenia, he was shocked by a gradually increasing awareness that the disease was not nearly as rare as the science of the day claimed—especially among the homeless. Importantly, the clinical assumption that “schizophrenia is rare” was reinforcing the rarity of its diagnosis, to the point of blinding doctors to what was right in front of them. These blooms in diagnosis—we have been for the last ten years experiencing a bloom in autism recognition—have as much to do with clinical perception as they do with the actual physical incidence of the conditions.

On a lighter note, Sacks also recently recalled that the most magnificent thing he had ever seen in his life was a field of yellow, seen while he was—is it appropriate to say a famous neuroscientist was high? Say rather that he was conducting experiential research in a varied state of neurochemical condition! But however you slice it, he says it was the most yellow yellow he had ever seen or expects to see again, a yellow beyond description, a yellow of interstellar radiance and the breath of ancient gods.

It isn’t the first time that Dr. Sacks has discussed color and altered states: in “The Dog Beneath the Skin,” he tells the infamous story of the 22-year-old medical student who, under the influence of PCP and amphetamines, enters a week-long heightened state of awareness. Among other things, this student—decades later revealed to have been Sacks himself, of course—perceived “dozens of browns” where previously he had seen only one shade. (Dr. Sacks does not now recommend this type of student experimentation.)

This particular super-sensory color perception is, too, reminiscent of another physical condition related to color: tetrachromacy. Most humans are trichromatic, possessing three types of color-sensing cone cells—but an undetermined percentage of women, as well as almost all birds, are tetrachromatic, possessing four receptor types. Tetrachromats perceive a kind of fourth primary color, usually a blue-green, that gives them a heightened ability to distinguish between shades of color, often to the point of distinguishing separate shades where a trichromat will perceive identicality.

“The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.”

—Vladimir Nabokov, novelist, synesthete

We need not travel far to determine whether these enhanced states of perception—which, given that we remain the same species as Homer, can be societal or psychological in their impetus—can impact our worldview, or our creative selves.

We know that people with synesthesia, a neurological anomaly in which one sensation “bleeds” into other sensations, are eight times more likely to pursue careers in the arts than non-synesthetes. Synesthesia comes in many varieties, but those with a visual variant (for instance perceiving numbers and letters in colors) are more likely to become visual artists—or novelists.

Vladimir Nabokov, novelist and synesthete, wrote his synesthesia into his characters on occasion, and some of his descriptions—such as the word “loyalty” suggesting “a golden fork lying in the sun”—indicate that this crossing of senses, infused with color, certainly influenced Nabokov’s construction of language. Words themselves could be beautiful or garish depending upon their letter-level construction.

Some scientists have postulated that this phenomenon of carrying meaning from one sense into another—which is essentially the definition of a metaphor—is universal and contains insight into the deepest workings of our minds. In the case of the common grapheme-color synesthesia, such as Nabokov’s, a likely explanation is the close proximity of portions of the fusiform gyrus that deal respectively with word and color recognition in the brain. When a synesthete reads a word, some of the electrical energy from that word-recognizing region is possibly leaping over into that color recognition region. One remarkable side effect of this is that many synesthetes tend to perceive the same colors for letters (“A” tends to be red), which underscores the structural theory—and might suggest that this same phenomenon is at work in all of us below the level of our conscious awareness.

While the causes of synesthesia remain unknown, it is generally agreed that the physical basis is a kind of excess of interconnectedness between neurons. It may be that the “pruning” we undergo as children does not complete, leaving connections behind that in the mainstream population are eradicated—but provoked synesthesia in the cases of drug use or epileptic seizures suggest that non-synesthesian brains are capable of synesthetic effects.

A 1929 experiment by Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Köhler elegantly illustrates what some call our natural synesthesia. Köhler drew two random shapes: one spiky and sharp, the other flowing and rounded. He then asked subjects to guess of these shapes which one was called “kiki” and which was called “bouba.” The results were very clear: 95-98% of subjects identified the sharp shape as “kiki” and the rounded shape as “bouba.” (Fascinatingly, autistic individuals make this match only 56% of the time.)

Köhler’s experiment wrapped science around what we would call onomatopoeia: when a word sounds like what it is. But onomatopoeia is by definition synesthesia, the transference of sound into orthogonal meaning.

The modern neuroscientist Dr. Vilayanur Ramachandran suggests that Köhler’s experiment shows that, to a certain extent, we are all synesthetes, and further that this inherent interconnection between our cognitive functions is intrinsic to the most beloved traits of humanity: compassion, creativity, ingenuity. What, after all, is an idea, but one flash of thought leaping across the mind to suggest novel possibility?

“The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.”
—Aristotle

So, if we’re all synesthetes, and our minds are extraordinarily plastic, capable of reorienting our entire perception around the addition of a single new concept (“there is a color between green and violet,” “schizophrenia is much more common than previously believed”), the implications of Homer’s wine-dark sea are rich indeed.

We are all creatures of our own time, our realities framed not by the limits of our knowledge but by what we choose to perceive. Do we yet perceive all the colors there are? What concepts are hidden from us by the convention of our language? When a noblewoman of Syracuse looked out across the Mare Siculum, did she see waves of Bacchanalian indigo beneath a sunset of hammered bronze? If a seagull flew east toward Thapsus, did she think of Venus and the fall of Troy?

The myriad details that define our everyday existence may define also the boundaries of our imagination, and with it our dreams, our ethics. We are lenses moving through time, beings of color and shadow.

About the Author

Erin Hoffman is an author and game designer from California. Her fantasy series The Chaos Knight completes with its third volume, Shield of Sea and Space, in May 2013 from Pyr Books.

Riding a Whale through an Ocean of Lard: A Conversation with Jesse Bullington

Jeremy L. C. Jones

Two men row a boat above the trees. Below them, eels swim through the branches and bream swirl in birds’ nests. Soon, the two men float over a silt and moss covered town; they hear “unquiet spirits” and remembered laughter. The opening pages of Jesse Bullington’s new novel, The Folly of the World, flow with the liquid logic of a dream.

Three years in the writing, The Folly of the World is set in the flood-ravaged Low Countries of Holland in the 1420s. Folly drips with history, oozes with folklore, but never festers. Instead, he digs relentlessly.

“If I didn’t think it was important to expose and explore the absurdity and grotesqueness of the world, then I wouldn’t write what I do,” says Bullington below.

Bullington’s first novel, The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart, followed Hegel and Manfried Grossbart across Medieval Europe and the Near East—a world of plague, poverty, and grave robbing, of greed and desperation.

Next came The Enterprise of Death, set in Renaissance Europe and somehow more harrowing than The Brothers Grossbart. Like its predecessor, Enterprise has all the guilt and gore, selfishness and self-loathing, but it also has a ticking clock, a necromancer and a Moorish slave who aligns herself with an artist, an alchemist, and a mercenary.

Each landscape and each portrait comes alive in his novels, painted with a dark yet vivid palette, a steady but restless hand. The colors are, at times, saturated and at others bleak and stark—and always striking. Jesse Bullington doesn’t merely poke and prod humankind’s open sores; he finds the brilliance and laughter in even the darkest of times.

Let’s talk about the opening of The Folly of the World . . .

Oh, I’d much rather we didn’t—it’s the only part many potential readers will actually read, so why spoil it for them?

So this is your third published novel. Has writing gotten easier or harder? Has your process changed much?

As always, the difficulty of writing depends entirely on the project—certain things just require a lot more time and effort than others. Sometimes it’s the worthier endeavors that really need to be fought onto the page, but in other instances when I’m really struggling it’s because I’m off the mark in my approach, or working on the wrong thing entirely.

In terms of process, I’d say that with each passing year I get better and better at recognizing what works best for me in terms of writing habits, and avoiding the sorts of traps I inevitably set for myself, but the process itself remains the same—brainstorm, research, write, weep, draft, research some more, ponder, beg for help, revise, etc . . .

The Folly of the World of is set against the St. Elizabeth flood of 1421. I wonder, in what ways is the creative process similar to raging storms, breaking dikes, and flooding waters?

The creative process is equivalent to erecting a miniature replica of the Taj Mahal using only matchsticks and chewing gum while riding a breaching humpback whale through an ocean of lard; also, your eyes have been pecked out by sea gulls and your hair is on fire. All other metaphors and similes fail to snare the foot of the matter.

Many reviews point to the grimness, gruesomeness, and dark humor of your novels. In what ways do reviewers tend to misinterpret or miss the point of your novels?

Oh, the grimdarkness of it all! On the one hand, everything you mention is present, but I think where some readers miss the point is by focusing on these elements and ignoring everything else, and I like to think that there is quite a bit of “everything else.” Unless you live an extremely sheltered and privileged life, reality is a sea teeming with the grim and the gruesome, and finding humor in otherwise bleak situations can be one of our best lifebuoys. I don’t think that my work is gratuitously grotesque, grim, gruesome, grisly, gritty, etc.; I just think that a lot of people would prefer not to focus on how horrible the world really is, at least not in their leisure reading—if you’re picking up books solely to escape the depressing state of affairs that is reality, then a hard engagement with sundry problematic issues may not be your cuppa.

Now, I understand not wanting to constantly saturate oneself with the ugliest aspects of humanity, and I have been known, on occasion, to favor a light-hearted diversion or two myself. I really don’t (always) take myself so seriously as I perhaps come across. Then again, if I didn’t think it was important to expose and explore the absurdity and grotesqueness of the world, then I wouldn’t write what I do.

Sex, violence, profanity, gore . . . where are the limits? What are some of the ways you pushed those limits in Folly? What lines won’t you cross?

Hmmm. I don’t think there should be limits with writing; when I detail graphic sex, violence, and language in my work it’s not just to push buttons or envelopes, it’s because I’m interested in exploring, for lack of a less pretentious-sounding descriptor, the human condition, and for me that means detailing everything, the beautiful and the ugly, the brilliant and the idiotic, the nasty and the nice.

Now, I’m also of the mind that writers who do a poor job of handling potentially problematic elements deserve to be taken to task. Loudly. I’m personally disappointed by the amount of gratuitous, clumsily-handled sexual violence one finds in genre—it’s as if writers who set their works in a quasi-medieval milieu think that rape was as commonplace as belching in pre-modern societies. It’s just stupid and creepy and awful.

Your style is lush, but not self-congratulatory. It draws on the poetic end of pulp; there’s a delightful purple tint to your prose. Does each sentence come out in all its majesty or do you have to shape and edit it over time? I guess the question is, how much editing do you do line-by-line and otherwise.

Thanks! One critic compared my writing style to Garth Marenghi’s, which I suspect was meant as a barb but I took as a compliment—my more bombastic passages are decidedly tongue-in-cheek, which, again, is something that I think some readers overlook. To me, humor can be much more effective, sublimely so, when its part of the very structure of the piece, rather than being relegated to comic relief plot twists, dialogue, or, in extremely sad cases, punning.

As for how much revising goes into the prose, it depends entirely on the project, hell, it depends entirely on the passage. I’m stronger at initially getting words down than I am at revising them, which is not something I’m particularly proud of. Editing is hard business, and I have (almost) nothing but admiration for those to whom it comes naturally (there’s a healthy dash of bitter jealousy stirred up in there, too). I’d hazard that all of my novels go through about half-a-dozen drafts, with some of the final pages being similar to their first incarnation and others being significantly touched-up, if not totally scrapped. Some of my best lines, or at least my favorite ones, came out perfectly almost without my thinking them up, and others took a ridiculous amount of revising and revisiting before I got them where I wanted them to be.

I should add that one thing which I’ve tried to do less editing on over the years is dialogue. Too much time spent on dialogue leaves you with unnaturally clever conversations where everyone, no matter their personality or character, is constantly ready with a witty riposte, rather than only thinking of a good retort hours later, when it’s much too late to employ. Whedonesque dialogue can be fun, sure, but it rarely rings authentic.

How do you go about deciding who “gets it”? What impact does the death of a central character have on the novel?

I try to have characters who make decisions that impact the plot, rather than a plot that guides the characters, and so it was never a question of “well, I need to off one of the poor saps, so who’s it going to be?” Things just took a turn, as things are wont to do, and of course the death of a close associate has a huge impact on those remaining characters, and thus a huge impact on the novel as a whole.

The Folly of the World seems neither slower nor more languorous than The Enterprise of Death, but . . . more mature in some ways. What are some of the things you did differently in terms of pacing?

In Folly, the action and plot are of a smaller scale and greater intimacy than in either Enterprise or Brothers Grossbart, but the pacing is much brisker . . . I hope! Life isn’t a series of exciting plot-points, after all, it has its own ineffable pacing that is almost impossible to predict or even keep track of—look away for a moment and you’ve lost all the time you thought you had, but pay too much attention and you’ll never get through a single difficult day. I endeavor to reflect that in my work.

So yes, pacing can be relative, and is too often conflated with plot. I’ve read novels wherein the fate of the world is being decided on nearly every page, and which are as tedious as a phonebook filibuster, and I’ve read novels wherein next to nothing of external consequence happens but which are totally gripping from cover to cover. I usually care more about characters than I do plot, and I think that my own writing reflects that—if you pick up one of my novels expecting to read ninety-nine cliff-hangers for every hundred pages, you’re going to be disappointed, because I try to make the priorities of the story the priorities of the characters, and that doesn’t always make for a thrill-every-page experience (though sometimes it does). Now, something interesting happens on every page, but that’s not always the same thing, is it? Pacing is determined by perspective, and perspective is determined by character, and as I give my characters quite a long leash (enough rope to hang themselves, as it were), so long as the reader finds the cast interesting, the pacing should feel neither rushed nor plodding.

You did a huge amount of research for Folly. How do you keep from getting buried under all that material?

I always bring a shovel and an exit strategy to the library.

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: Spoiler Alert!

E. C. Ambrose

How would you feel if someone revealed the ending of a story before you’d read it? Most of us say we’d be angry. We have even established protocols to prevent having a story “spoiled,” and the term “spoiler alert” has entered common parlance. So recent research like the study at the University of California at San Diego suggesting that many people enjoy a story more when they already know the ending seems counter-intuitive.

Aren’t people coming to fiction for plot: to follow an exciting series of events to a surprising, yet appropriate, conclusion? The UCSD experiment says otherwise—and I believe they’re right. The history of heroic fiction is full of spoilers, often employed directly by the authors themselves, and there are two key reasons why spoilers work to make a work more enjoyable.

Let me give you an example. A careful reading of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, reveals a heap of spoilers at the end of the prologue, in a section entitled “Note on the Shire Records.” The conceit of the prologue is that Tolkien is merely organizing and presenting a comprehensive version of a tale told in some older works.

During the course of this academic note, we learn who lives (almost everyone), who marries whom, who has children (and who does not), who becomes king, and who leaves Middle Earth forever. Tolkien reveals the happy endings and hints at the bittersweet ones for most of the protagonists you are about to meet. What is he up to? First of all, he wants to present the narrative as an epistolary text with a historical context. He intended his Middle Earth to be an invented history or mythology for England, and this academic and contextual approach enhances that impression. You don’t read history for plot, so the spoilers reinforce the notion that this is part of the historical record with which the reader may already be familiar.

The information that everybody lives and Aragorn/Elessar is king should reduce the tension of reading the book, shouldn’t it? However, it does not, and I’m willing to bet most readers of the work have forgotten this section even exists. I suspect, in part, that Tolkien wanted to reassure his readers—just as the grandfather in The Princess Bride tells his grandson that the princess “doesn’t get eaten by the eels at this time.”

Tolkien is letting us know that things will turn out well, in spite of all of the hardships these characters are about to endure. By relieving some of the tension of plot upfront, the author directs the reader’s attention to other, more important matters than mere life and death: he invites the reader to explore the work more fully beyond that concern.

However, the spoilers have another effect altogether. We skim over them because, at this point, we simply don’t care. We don’t care who lives or dies, who is king, who is married and who is not. The first time the reader encounters this passage, the names are meaningless and somewhat jumbled. The Aragorn/Elessar connection is not made clear, nor is “Steward of Gondor” a freighted title as it later will be. Readers of The Hobbit might be surprised and disappointed to find that Elrond will leave Rivendell, but first-timers have no connection to that name or place. Far from embedding his work in a dusty old book, Tolkien rather acknowledges that the writer’s first duty is, in fact, to make the reader care. Until and unless the reader is invested in the characters who take the journey, plot spoilers have little impact.

Which brings me to my second point: Spoilers are a declaration of authorial mastery. By telling the reader the ending in advance, Tolkien announces his ability to make you care. The spoiler proclaims to the world that Tolkien is going to do his job so well that you won’t care if you know the plot, you will be desperate to keep reading.

Tolkien is not only an author of fantasy, and an academic writer, he is a student of the early history of story-telling. In many nations, the tradition of the bard includes spoilers up-front, in the form of a brief summary of the events about to occur. “Let me tell you the tale of the great hero, who encounters a dragon, rescues a maiden, and wins her hand in marriage.” Is the audience now done with the story, because the plot is laid out in plain language? Not even begun! The spoiler signals that something exciting is going to happen, and you’ll enjoy the journey—even if know where you’re going to end up.

In the case of many popular oral tales, even before the bard presented his summary, the audience already knew the stories. Written forms of epics like Beowulf proclaim the fame of their heroes even from birth, with the expectation that the listener has already heard the story. The Arthurian legends provide a far-reaching example. Generations of tellers elaborated upon them, with new characters added and old characters changing roles through the next several hundred years, but the basic plot remains the same. The listeners of those medieval bards already knew the story, just as the readers of contemporary Arthurian novels know the plot today.

The spoiler has always been both paternalistic and self-serving on behalf of the story-teller. Spoilers allow the reader a chance to relax and give their full attention to character, theme and authorial vision, the true skills the author wishes to display. It is not what is said that matters, but how it is said, and ultimately, by whom. Many Arthurian novels never transcend their plot, due to their less skillful authors.

In critique groups, the remark is often made that keeping secrets from the reader lessens the tension of the work, because the reader is more distant from the characters, and doesn’t have a chance to worry about how the character will overcome their problems. Note: it’s not what the problem is, or the fact that it will be overcome that readers worry about. I think the spoilers that people object to are not the significant points of plot, but rather the surprises the author embeds on the way to those points. Readers in most genres expect a happy ending—even if it’s bittersweet—and will receive it from an author who wants them to buy the next book. The astute reader expects that Frodo survives and that the ring is destroyed, but the manner of its destruction is meant to be startling. Again, it isn’t the what that’s important, but rather how it happens.

Perhaps the clearest evidence that readers don’t mind spoilers is found their own reading habits. There are some readers who never re-read a book, but there are many who do, who return to their favorite narratives over and over, never losing their love for the work simply because they know the ending already.

Authors play with spoilers in different ways. One version in contemporary fiction is that of a frame narrative, often employed with a first-person narrator. Even having a first-person narrator describing events in the past is a sort of spoiler, and some authors use this device to deliberately set up tension between the parts of a narrative. In Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind, he lays out a tale you might have heard, then proceeds to allow the hero to tell you the truth—the story from the inside, which will be somewhat different from the legend.

Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow, uses a spoiler structure by introducing the end of the story—the return of a single traveler from a failed voyage—then folding the story in half, building tension between the optimistic beginning of a more traditional space-travel narrative and the aftermath of the ruined trip. By revealing parts of the story to come, she makes the reader eager to know what happened in the middle, the event that links the two halves. Titles like King Javan’s Year, by Katherine Kurtz, or The Wreck of the River of Stars, by Michael Flynn, spoil the end of the work, but also serve as teasers to draw in the reader and give him or her something to worry about.

In each case, the author deliberately reveals something the ordinary narrative view would have kept secret, displaying it as a promise to the reader that the plot is not the purpose of the work. Nicholas Christenfeld, professor of social psychology and one of the authors of the UCSD study is quoted as saying, “What the plot is is (almost) irrelevant. The pleasure is in the writing.”

The great tellers know this. They tease the audience with spoilers, information that should change the experience of the work, but which, instead, draws the reader even closer, manipulating the tension of the tale, until you are so invested in what you are reading, that you even forget you already know how it ends.

About the Author

E. C. Ambrose is the author of “The Dark Apostle” historical fantasy series about a medieval barber surgeon to start in July 2013 with Elisha Barber from DAW books. E. C. blogs about history, fantasy and writing at www.wordpress.com/ecambrose and can also be found on twitter @ecambrose. E. C. spends too much time in a tiny office in New England with a mournful black lab lurking under the desk.

2012 Reader’s Survey

Neil Clarke

Now that 2012 is over, it’s time for our annual reader’s survey. In this year’s survey, you’ll have the opportunity to select your favorite stories and cover art from our 2012 issues, provide some us with some feedback, and optionally, tell us a bit about yourself. Feel free to use the comments on this post to help promote your favorites. (No attacking other people’s choices.)

Participants that provide their email address will be placed in the running for one of three free copies of our next volume in our annual anthology series, Clarkesworld: Year Three. Contest is open to readers from all countries.

You can take the survey at
http://clarkesworld2012.questionpro.com.

This survey will close on January 28th and the results will be published in our February issue.

2012 Fiction

“Scattered Along the River of Heaven” by Aliette de Bodard

“What Everyone Remembers” by Rahul Kanakia

“All the Painted Stars” by Gwendolyn Clare

“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

“Sunlight Society” by Margaret Ronald

“The Bells of Subsidence” by Michael John Grist

“From Their Paws, We Shall Inherit” by Gary Kloster

“Fragmentation, or Ten Thousand Goodbyes” by Tom Crosshill

“Draftyhouse” by Erik Amundsen

“The Womb Factory” by Peter M. Ferenczi

“Prayer” by Robert Reed

“Synch Me, Kiss Me, Drop” by Suzanne Church

“All the Things the Moon is Not” by Alexander Lumans

“Immersion” by Aliette de Bodard

“If The Mountain Comes” by An Owomoyela

“You Were She Who Abode” by E. Catherine Tobler

“Astrophilia” by Carrie Vaughn

“The Switch” by Sarah Stanton

“Iron Ladies, Iron Tigers” by Sunny Moraine

“Mantis Wives” by Kij Johnson

“Honey Bear” by Sofia Samatar

“Fade to White” by Catherynne M. Valente

“The Found Girl” by David Klecha and Tobias S. Buckell

“Robot” by Helena Bell

“muo-ka’s Child” by Indrapramit Das

“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

“(To See the Other) Whole Against the Sky” by E. Catherine Tobler

“Aquatica” by Maggie Clark

“Everything Must Go” by Brooke Wonders

“Your Final Apocalypse” by Sandra Mcdonald

“The Wisdom of Ants” by Thoraiya Dyer

“Sweet Subtleties” by Lisa L Hannett

2012 Cover Art

Rockman by Arthur Wang

Pilot by Alexander Trufanov

Dead Space Girl by Sergio Diaz

Place to Ponder by Steve Goad

Sci-fi Farmer by Jessada Sutthi

Target Detected by Max Davenport

Launch Day by Cristi Balanescu

Space Journey by Martin Faragasso

Awe at Thistledown by Angel Nieves

Breaking Through by Julie Dillon

New World by Ken Barthelmey

The Lost City by David Demaret

Thank you and Happy New Year!

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.