Clarkesworld Magazine

Issue 78

Table of Contents

The Weight of a Blessing

by Aliette de Bodard

The Last Survivor of the Great Sexbot Revolution

by A.C. Wise

86, 87, 88, 89

by Genevieve Valentine

Videodrome at Thirty

by Keith Phipps

Accepting a More Profitable Shoe: A Conversation with M. C. Planck

by Jeremy L. C. Jones

Another Word: Original Sin

by Alethea Kontis

Editor's Desk: Forwards and Backwards

by Neil Clarke

The Emperor's Arrival

Art by David Demaret

© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2013
www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

The Weight of a Blessing

Aliette de Bodard

On her third visit to Sarah—on the last occasion that she sees her daughter, even if it is only in V-space—Minh Ha says nothing. There are no words left, no message of comfort that she could give her.

Instead, she takes Sarah’s hand, holds it tight until the last of the warmth has leached from her body into her daughter’s; and braces herself for the future.

Even in the visitors’ V-space, Sarah looked awful—thin and wasted and so ethereal that Minh Ha wanted to take her daughter home and ply her with rich dish after rich dish to bring some fat back on her bones. But, of course, it was too late for that; had been too late ever since the much publicized arrest and the even more publicized trial, all the grandstanding that had brought a taste of bile in Minh Ha’s throat.

The white prison garb and featureless holding room background were imposed by the Guardians, but Sarah had basic access permissions to the V-space, enough to manipulate her appearance—to fill in the hollows under her eyes, color the stretched skin until the shapes of the bones receded into invisibility, and smooth out her hair until it hung once again as lustrous as polished turtle scales. Minh Ha wasn’t sure if her daughter’s appearance was a statement of some sort, instructions given by the leaders of the Vermilion Seal to their recruits before the police sweep-up, or if it was simply that Sarah saw no need to hide the truth from her—or the depth of her contempt.

“Hello, child,” she said to Sarah.

Sarah frowned. “Speak Rong.”

Minh Ha shook her head. “There’s no point. They’ll understand Rong just as easily as Galactic.” The machines that ran V-space were notoriously bad at Rong, a language that relied on human instinct to separate the words—but interpreters were cheap, their services easily bought.

“That’s not the problem, Mother.” But Sarah didn’t elaborate—merely pointed to the low table that was the only feature of the V-space, a pretense of normality in a situation so far from normal it was risible. Nor did Minh Ha probe further; after all, she already knew what the answer was going to be.

“The verdict was upheld today in the State Council,” Minh Ha said, as she pulled out a chair, feeling the solidity of old wood under her fingers—an illusion, perfectly woven by the machines. She’d applied for an interview in physical space, but had been summarily rejected; told that the risk presented by her daughter was too great, and that they would rather have everything take place at a remove; that she could visit Sarah three times, one time for every day that separated them from the execution of the sentence. “But of course, you already knew that.”

Sarah’s face was perfectly still—caught by the warm light from the ceiling, reminding Minh Ha so much of Charles that her heart seemed to stutter in her chest. “Active Rehabilitation on Cygnus? All things considered, I got off rather light, didn’t I?” Her voice had the sharpness of a broken blade.

There was an awkward silence, only broken by Sarah’s even breaths. “You shouldn’t have come here,” Sarah said, at last.

“Don’t be a fool. You’re my daughter. My only child.” And Minh Ha was about to lose her, and she still couldn’t express her own feelings in a way that Sarah would understand.

It had been publicized enough: the ship left for Cygnus, an outlying planet in Galactic space, in three days, carrying in its holds the sentenced Vermilion Seal members. Better cut out the infection at the root and expel it from society, rather than have it spread, undermining the foundations of Galactic society. It was a one-way trip—the passengers drugged and stuffed into hibernation cradles, locked tight until they finally could be released and herded into the holding facilities—staring at the mercilessly sharp horizon and the cracked fields that would be the boundary of their world until death.

At least it wasn’t an execution. At least it wasn’t Moc Tinh Hau—but of course the planet of Minh Ha’s birth had been sealed off from interstellar traffic, for fear that the war that had engulfed it would spread to other, more “ civilized” parts of the universe.

Sarah exhaled, noisily. “Fine time to show your support, isn’t it?”

Minh Ha found her hands clenching in her lap. “I don’t stand by any of what you’ve done.”

Sarah smiled—sharp and bitter. “Of course not. I should have known.”

“We taught you otherwise,” Minh Ha said, all the anger she’d hoarded during the trial irrepressibly bubbling up; all the smiling and keeping silent while Charles all but accused her of corrupting their daughter, of failing to teach her the proper Galactic values that would have prevented that needless tragedy. “How to care for a tree when you’ve eaten its fruit; how to remember the man who dug a well when you’ve drunk its water. Segundus is your home. Why did you need to—”

“What did you want me to do? To keep my head down and accept it all? To lie to myself, over and over, until the lie became reality? I had to do it,” Sarah said. “Had to make the truth known.”

The truth. The absolute that the younger generation found and clung to like lifelines; as if it could protect them. The truth hadn’t prevented the Eastern continent’s war-kites from laying waste to the delta; hadn’t brought harvested rice into the besieged cities; hadn’t even been able to save Xuan Huong, in the end. “There is no truth,” Minh Ha said.

Sarah was silent for a while, staring at the wood of the table as if she saw something within, some mysterious message that Minh Ha couldn’t make sense of. At last, she said, raising her gaze, “You saw the war, didn’t you? I thought you’d understand—I thought you’d want our stories to be worth something, too—” And, in that moment, she was no longer the hardened criminal of the news feeds, or the angry young woman of Charles’ imagination, but simply the child Minh Ha had raised—the round-faced daughter who’d come home after being stung by a bee, and who’d looked up at her mother, confident that Minh Ha would know how to make the pain go away. In that moment, Minh Ha’s heart, patched and glued together from so many shards of childhood, broke yet again.

There’s a moment which comes every time Minh Ha enters the Hall of the Dead: a single, agonizing moment of hope when she sees the streets before the bombs extinguished the lanterns hanging in the trees—when she sees Mother and the aunts exactly as she remembers them, their faces creased like crumpled paper—when she hears them say, “Come to us, child,” in Rong, just as they once did, when handing her the red envelopes of the New Year celebration.

It never lasts.

The filters always kick in; always change and blur everything—always turn the V-space of the city into a labyrinth of featureless, drenched buildings, and the Dead into . . . something else, something alien and utterly incomprehensible. Mother and the aunts flicker and blur, too, and change—their skin taking on a metallic sheen, their words melding and merging until they become altogether meaningless.

It’s for her own safety, she knows—for her own sanity, so that she is not contaminated by the twisted and ineffable brain patterns that have been preserved by the Hall, a crazed and blurred memory of what it means to be alive. She knows; but it doesn’t make it any easier to bear.

There are eight of the Dead: Mother and three of her sisters, and four more distant cousins who escaped with them. They were all young when they died—too young. Like all of the generation that had fled the Western continent of Moc Tinh Hau before the fall of Xuan Huong, they dwindled away on Segundus. Perhaps it was the stress of living through the first, most bitterly intense years of the war, scraping themselves to the bone to help their families escape from the gathering storm; or perhaps merely the pain of exile, but for some reason their roots never dug deep into Galactic soil. Minh Ha was but seven when they fled, and Moc Tinh Hau is a confused jumble of memories— all of it quite forgotten as she grew up, papered over until Sarah’s acts dragged it out again, in all its exquisite pain.

Until she finds herself, here, now, standing before the Dead; and looking for comfort where there is none.

On her way home, Minh Ha’s shuttle passed by the Memorial.

It was open, though surrounded by a horde of Galactic policemen: the queue of visitors was dwarfed by the gleam of exoskeletons and battle armor, by the metallic sheen of huge cars which uncomfortably reminded Minh Ha of the Eastern continent’s linked-machines on Moc Tinh Hau, and the sharp thuds of bombs dropping over the river delta in the hours before New Year’s Eve—when the entire Western continent had been welcoming their families home for the feast.

“See? I told you they’d have fixed it,” a woman said beside Minh Ha.

Minh Ha, startled, turned away from her contemplation of the dome; but the woman had been talking to someone else: a small and slight redhead with freckles whose hands were wrapped around a small leather case. “I wasn’t sure—” the redhead paused then, nervously fidgeting.

“You’d have stayed home,” the older woman said. She snorted. “On this day of all days—his thirty-year anniversary. Come on. Let’s go.” Her gaze lingered for a moment on Minh Ha, and her face twisted. “The Rong vermin won’t prevent us from honoring our war heroes.”

Minh Ha, shocked,—it had been many years since anyone had made disparaging comments to her face—opened her mouth to say something, but the shuttle had already stopped, and the women had got off. She had no doubt they would join the queue of Galactics in front of the Memorial. The leather case the girl had been holding was familiar to Minh Ha: it held a V-space offerings chip, probably a wreath of flowers or a commemorative stele to lay in the streets of the reconstituted Xuan Huong—paying homage to a Galactic ancestor who’d died there, helping the Western continent fight for its freedom.

Minh Ha could hear Sarah’s voice in her head as clearly as if her daughter were sitting by her side. What wonderful stories they tell themselves. What convincing lies.

It didn’t matter. That was what her daughter didn’t understand. There was no coming back to Moc Tinh Hau; no return home to the tombs of their ancestors. Segundus was their home and would be their final resting place; and they couldn’t afford to antagonize the people among whom they lived.

Too late, Sarah’s voice whispered in Minh Ha’s mind; and Minh Ha turned her face back to the receding shape of the Memorial, trying to think about something other than her daughter and the Vermilion Seal—but the gleam of metal from the policemen’s armor didn’t recede from her field of vision for the longest time.

The Dead are to be broached with caution. Patterns saved on the edge of brain failure are no longer those of the living, but strangely corrupted things, belonging to one world and to the next; indistinct whispers, ghost images, and worse—self-replicating patterns that can utterly alter the shape of a mind.

The Dead, in other words, are a virus—skewed code that uses tactile contact in V-space to propagate itself; and to infect the brain patterns of the living. Those touched by the Dead become changed, unfit for Galactic society—speaking in barbaric tongues; sinking into despondence and instability; following visions all the way into mad fits, which render them dangerous to public safety.

In the past year, there have been 2319 instances of filters failing across the 79731 Halls of the Dead on Segundus, out of which 227 resulted in tactile contact—a tendency that is on the decrease thanks to better prevention at Preservation Office level. In most cases, contact is brief; and the afflicted are detected early enough to prevent further complications.

Some, of course, are not so lucky; that is why every Hall of the Dead works in close tandem with appropriate institutions, where the hopelessly corrupted can be prevented from harming themselves and others.

On her second visit, Minh Ha found Sarah on the floor of the V-space room, which had subtly changed. A section of it, walled behind glass, now showed the inside of the Memorial: the wide streets of the reconstituted Xuan Huong, the sky dotted with the glimmer of orbitals, the women carrying shoulder yokes with two baskets of fruit balanced on either end, the Galactics walking side by side with the Rong, smiling and laughing.

It was very clearly the original Memorial, not the hack the Vermilion Seal had succeeded in imposing for a few hours before security kicked in: the Galactics were still prominently there, haggling in their own language with meat sellers at the market; and the heads of whole fish glared at them from the trestle tables. It was . . . all there, and still somehow not there, every detail papered over with the Galactic gaze, the shoulder yokes as exotic curiosities, the fish heads monstrous and vacant instead of promising a meal fresh from the sea, the Galactics blending in the population instead of behaving like condescending masters.

Sarah sat with her legs crossed, staring at it as though she could erase it from existence altogether. She didn’t rise when Minh Ha materialized within the V-space, didn’t turn her head. “Mother. Just in time for the daily education session.” You could have sawed bones with the edge in her voice.

“Are you . . . always there?” It hadn’t occurred to Minh Ha that the V-space could be more than visitors’ quarters; that it would be used for other purposes. But of course every tool could be turned to several uses.

Sarah shrugged. She gestured for Minh Ha to sit by her side, which Minh Ha did, feeling the illusory coolness of the floor under her. “Sometimes, when it suits them. They’re preparing us for the journey, in many ways.” She had marks on her wrists and on her lower arms—little pricks like dozens of syringe injections.

“You don’t sound as though it matters much to you one way or the other,” Minh Ha said, bitterly.

“Should it?” Sarah looked up. Her eyes were dark pits in the awful paleness of her face. “I’ve done what matters.” She gestured to the Memorial in front of her. “They’ve fixed it, but everyone remembers that it could be another way.”

“They don’t.” Minh Ha fought a rising wave of anger—remembering the two women on the shuttle. “You had a moment of fame on the feeds, and that was swiftly forgotten. The Memorial is still as it always was.” As it always had been—a thing which didn’t concern Rong, which wasn’t for them. It was the work of a Galactic man; it wept for the Galactic fallen; for the slaughter of innocents, but it knew nothing about the war. It acknowledged nothing about the Galactic domination and meddling that had exacerbated regional differences between the Western and Eastern continent—leading to a bloody civil war after independence; and to the desperate, last-ditch effort by the Galactics to maintain their foothold on Moc Tinh Hau with the Western continent as their puppet state. “How could you think this would be worth your life?”

“Not my life, you forget.”

“You’ll live and die on a forgotten planet—it’s the same as if they’d executed you!” Minh Ha couldn’t control the anger, the anguish anymore. Three interviews—enough to count them one by one, to know that each of them brought her closer to the final goodbye.

“You forget.” Sarah’s smile was bright, cutting. “They’re merciful.”

“You should have kept your head down,” Minh Ha said. “Now all the Rong are tarred with what the Vermilion Seal did.”

“Keep my head down? As your generation have done all your life? I won’t be silenced, Mother.”

How could she—? “You tell me I’ve seen the war, that I ought to know. I know about grit being sold as rice in the markets, about bombs that shattered the lanterns in the streets—about the ancestral altar growing every few months with new pictures, about how you’d have done anything—anything, as long as it got you out of Moc Tinh Hau. We were on Segundus on sufferance—because they took pity on us. The last thing we wanted was to draw attention to us—to be sent back there!”

Sarah grimaced, but said nothing.

The view in front of them had shifted to a temple, lingering on the gong and the drum on either side of the entrance, and the flow of Rong coming to make their own offerings. The wooden statues in the darkness were smiling, enigmatic and distant, so distorted Minh Ha had to guess at their identities—was the woman in flowing robes Bodhisattva Quan Am, was the man armed with a Galactic axe general Quan Vu?

Two days left. One further interview; and then that was all. How could she—? Minh Ha took a deep breath, keeping her eyes away from the Memorial’s reconstitution. She forced herself to speak calmly, leisurely, as if nothing were wrong; even though the emptiness in her stomach gnawed at her. “Segundus is your home. It’s easy to criticize what the Galactic government has done, but don’t forget that they allowed you to grow up in peace—to be in a position to speak up now.” No one knew what was happening on Moc Tinh Hau now, but there was no reason to think life had gone better—that the Hell Minh Ha remembered from her childhood had vanished altogether.

“You’d think speaking up would be less fraught.” Sarah’s voice was full of mordant amusement. “But there are truths that can’t be spoken out, apparently, or they become terrorism, eroding away at the foundation of the nation.”

“I saw what you did in the Memorial,” Minh Ha said. “The city that you brought to life ‘from the point of view of the Rong.’ That’s not truth—none of you lived in Xuan Huong, or on the Western continent. None of you remember the war. Moc Tinh Hau is just a story to you, no different than it was to the Galactic who build the Memorial.” It wasn’t true, not quite—of course Moc Tinh Hau was the home of Sarah’s ancestors, of course it would remain a special place, more special to her than to Steven Carey, who had interviewed so many Rong yet failed to capture the essence of their lives in his Memorial. But she had to make her understand.

Sarah shrugged. “Do you think to make me recant, Mother?” She gestured at the Memorial behind its pane of glass. “As they do?”

“I want you to understand that this is how we live together, child. The Galactics did what they did on Moc Tinh Hau—” she saw Sarah raise a hand in protest, and cut in before Sarah could say anything— “but if you never forget grievances, then they’ll choke you like ivy. The Memorial isn’t for us, no matter what they say; and it’s enough that we know that.” It was enough not to make waves; not to make themselves noticed; to live in harmony with the Galactics in their new home on Segundus.

“Why are you here, Mother?”

“Because you’re my child. Because I raised you.” Because I’ll lose you. Because, somehow, she wanted to give Sarah something to take to Cygnus, to remember her by; and she couldn’t articulate what.

Sarah turned, and looked at her full in the eye; as a Galactic would have done. Her face was set. “I’m sorry,” she said, and didn’t sound sorry in the least. “You’ve made your choices, Mother. I made mine.”

The Dead watch Minh Ha, impassive. Their faces shift, oddly, weirdly, into some expressions a human face can’t take—rippling between a smile and a grimace and tears. Second Aunt speaks—the words came through all garbled, even as Minh Ha’s filters flash a warning she can’t understand either, something about compromised communication protocols and infected messages.

“I need advice.” She dares not look up, but she sees Mother drift closer to her. There is a smell in the air that is almost like Mother’s perfume, the faint mixture of cloves and sandalwood that followed her everywhere, even into the hospital where she breathed her last, hunched around her pain like a dragon wrapped around a pearl. “Please. I don’t know where to go, or who to turn to.” She would weep, if she still had tears.

The Dead are not the living.

“She’s your only descendant,” Minh Ha says, watching the familiar faces bend and distort like thin sheets of metal. “And they’re taking her away from us. From all of us. Please.”

Mother speaks, but it is all nonsense that Minh Ha can’t interpret—no better than an unanswered prayer at the ancestral altar after all. Can she even sure that any of them understand her? Perhaps the filters distort her own speech to the Dead, just as they mangle what should have been familiar Rong words.

“You’d know what to do, I’m sure. You’d know how to—” She isn’t sure what she wants—to convince Sarah of how wrong she’s been, to rescue her from her inevitable fate, from yet another kind of exile? “Mother. Revered aunts. I—Please tell me what to do.”

There is no answer. There never is any.

Going home, Minh Ha was stopped three times by police barricades; the last one erected just below her compound and staffed with what seemed like an entire army’s worth of policemen. The leader, a beefy woman with the reddened skin of blondes, examined Minh Ha from head to toe; no doubt seeing all there was to see from the failure of her marriage to Charles to Sarah’s arrest. “Where are you going, Mrs Tran?” Perhaps it was Sarah’s words, but today the mangling of Minh Ha’s last name grated—reminded her that she wasn’t home anymore, that her own home had been lost so long ago it only existed in her imagination—all in the past, unable to be ever truly recovered.

“I’m going home,” Minh Ha said. And, because she didn’t care much, anymore, about Galactics or her complex relationship with the city she now lived in, “From the holding facility. I was visiting my daughter.”

The leader grimaced, but Minh Ha held her ground. “I have three visits.”

“So you do.” She didn’t seem altogether happy.

At home, the feedswriters appeared to have got bored; there were but a few of them, loitering at the entrance of the building, and Minh Ha easily bypassed their frantic calls for interviews and information.

In the apartment, she found her sister Thuy busy in the kitchen, and her niece Hanh in front of the computer, watching the feeds. “How is she, aunt?” Hanh asked, but her mother Thuy cut her off.

“There’s someone waiting for you in the living room.”

Minh Ha had been expecting him, so it wasn’t entirely a surprise to find Charles standing before the chimney, looking at the holos on the ancestral altar with the practiced indifference of a man who had turned his back on this particular area of his life. “Good evening, Charles.” Her voice had never felt so formal in addressing him. “Come to see about Sarah, I guess.”

He turned around, slowly, his face a mask; a minute tremor in his hand masking the emotion underneath. “I came to see how you were. And yes, to ask about Sarah. Since it seems you’re the only one she’s speaking to.”

Minh Ha shook her head. “She’s not telling me much.”

“I need to see her,” Charles said. “But, of course, I can’t. It’s all that Vermilion Seal rubbish, telling her to reject all things Galactic. As if she weren’t Galactic herself, born and bred on Segundus . . . It’s all nonsense.” Charles kept his voice even, but Minh Ha could hear the frustrated anger; could feel that he was going to lash out at whoever stood in his way. He hadn’t always been so impatient; but years of bad financial luck had soured their relationship—hardening him, even as Minh Ha became quieter and less inclined to fight him for anything.

“She’s always been headstrong,” Minh Ha said, unsure of what to say. She hadn’t spoken much to Charles in the years since the divorce—they’d gone their separate ways, he to his merchant spaceships, she to help manage the family restaurant’s finances. Only Sarah’s arrest and trial had brought them back into each other’s life; and even then, it had been briefly and painfully, all the old grievances flaring up to life again, biting and unbearable. “I’m not surprised she wouldn’t want to speak to you.”

Preparing us for the journey, Sarah had said—how much of it was her, too, preparing herself, shedding all the attachments to Segundus, forging herself into metal hard enough that nothing on Cygnus would so much as scratch it?

“How is she?” Charles asked.

Minh Ha thought of Sarah; pale and thin and looking half out of this world, already gone ahead. “As well as can be,” she lied. “Convinced that she did the right thing.”

“But you’re not.” Charles’ voice was uncertain; probing into her weaknesses, exposing all her doubts.

“I don’t approve of what she’s done,” Minh Ha said, uncertain if that was the truth anymore.

Charles watched her for a while, and then he said, “You do see that we can’t allow the Vermilion Seal to blackmail the Government into some nonsense about revising the history books. That hacking into public V-spaces and revealing ‘the truth’ is no way to run a society.”

“I don’t know,” Minh Ha said, wearily. One day. One interview left before Sarah was gone forever. “Is this really what we should be arguing about?”

“You have to see—” Charles paused. “You’re the one who gave her all those Moc Tinh Hau stories. The one who encouraged her.”

“I take no responsibility for that,” Minh Ha said. How dare he accuse her? She’d never taught Sarah anything but how to respect the law, to be a good Galactic citizen—and how to best adapt herself to this society the Rong all found themselves living in.

“Of course you do.” Charles said it without resentment or visible expression. “You’re her mother. You delude yourself if you think you have passed nothing on to her.”

Precious little—what kind of mother was she, that she couldn’t prevent her only child from leaving her? “I’m her mother, not her master. Are you threatening me with anything? Isn’t bad enough that I’m losing my only daughter?”

“She’s my daughter too.” Charles voice was low, angry; Sarah had inherited that from him, that tendency to speak tonelessly and yet still exude a sense of menace. “We’re all losing her.”

Minh Ha gestured to the ancestral altar behind him. “The entire family is losing her. You know what this means for us.”

“Your old Rong superstitions?” Once, Charles’ jabs would have been more biting; but now he merely sounded weary—like her, wrung dry by the enormity of Sarah’s acts. “You forget. I left all that behind.” He turned to the ancestral altar, watching the holos. “Do you still go to the Hall of the Dead?”

Minh Ha nodded. “I went yesterday. They had nothing to tell me.”

“They never have.” Charles didn’t move. “You should leave the Dead well alone, Minh Ha—they just drag you down. Like they did with Sarah.”

“Sarah never went to the Hall.”

“You know what I mean.”

Yes, the weight of the past; those resentments he couldn’t understand—the Galactics declaring war on behalf of the Western Continent, hoping to maintain their presence on Moc Tinh Hau; the history holos proclaiming the fight for democracy, as if things were ever that simple or that pure. “The past made us what we are,” Minh Ha said, knowing it to be true.

“But the past is gone.” Charles’ voice was almost gentle. “This is the true lesson of the Halls—the Dead might as well be on another planet. They no longer speak our language or understand our thoughts.”

Minh Ha remembered being on her knees, staring at the cobbles of the V-space; remembered Mother’s agitation, the frantic gestures she couldn’t interpret. She said nothing—merely watched the holo of Mother as she’d been before old age caught up with her, strong and unbending and unlikely to give way to anyone. Why was she gone—why were they all alone, without the guiding influence of the older generation? “I guess not,” she said at last.

Charles turned back to her; and forced a weak smile. “Thank you for the information. I’ll go back to the holding facility and apply for another interview with her. You never know.”

Minh Ha, staring at him, was struck by the white scattered in his hair, by the bowed set of his shoulders, as if time itself had pressed down on him until his old arrogance disappeared—and she thought of the way that everything seemed to have been hollowed out by the arrest. “Do you want to stay for dinner?” she asked, in spite of herself.

Charles shook his head. “I don’t think so. I’ve intruded enough on you for one night. Forgive me.”

After he’d left, she remained where she was, staring at the altar. The Dead no longer speak our language, he had said, knowing full well the unbearable silence of the Hall: the chatter of the V-space, and all the familiar things, just frustratingly out of reach.

“Is he gone?” Thuy asked from behind her; putting her hands on Minh Ha’s shoulders, as she’d used to do when they’d been children in Xuan Huong.

Her elder sister’s hands smelled of garlic and something sweet—perhaps dried jujubes? “Yes,” Minh Ha said, knowing Thuy had never approved of him. “And Sarah will be gone, too, soon.”

“One more interview.” Thuy’s voice was oddly shrewd. “One last thing to give her before she goes ahead into the darkness of space.”

“I don’t know what to give her,” Minh Ha said, frustrated. She thought of the book she’d brought on her first interview, left in a locker somewhere—Master Kong’s sayings, a physical gift she hadn’t been able to give to Sarah. “I don’t understand her anymore.”

“I don’t think you’re meant to understand,” Thuy said, gently. “Just to support her.”

“I can’t—” Minh Ha watched the holos; watched Mother’s face, forever frozen into a half-grimace; watched Second Aunt’s serene gaze, Third Aunt’s awkward smile at the camera. Mother was the one who’d found them safe passage—who had bargained and smiled and bribed Galactic officials until they found a berth on one of the last ships to leave. The aunts were the ones who had opened the Rong restaurant—it was the only non-menial work open to them—and sent the entire family through Applied Schooling. They had lived through a war and an entire life of exile, and surely they would know—surely they would—

Minh Ha thought of everything that they no longer had; every way in which they had been diminished, and cut off from what mattered most.

“You’re right,” she said, finally. “It’s time to accept what I can’t understand.”

Time to give Sarah what she would most need on Cygnus.

There is no answer. There never is any.

None but the ones you make for yourself.

Trembling, Minh Ha reaches out—in that suspended instant before the filters come online, before the Dead are rewritten into safer, saner— sanitized—code. Her hand touches Mother’s; and she feels warmth, travelling all the way from her palm into her madly beating heart.

On her third visit to Sarah, Minh Ha says nothing. There are no words left, no message of comfort that she could give her daughter.

Instead, she takes Sarah’s hand, and holds it tight until the last of the warmth has leached from her body into her daughter’s; and braces herself for the future.

She ignores Sarah’s slight gasp of surprise; the widening of her daughter’s eyes as the patterns of the Dead slip into V-space—from her hand into Sarah’s hand; from her mind into her daughter’s own. It is, in any case, too late to turn back.

As she walks out of the visitors’ V-space, Minh Ha hears the whispers of the Dead in her mind; snatches of sentences that feel sharp enough to tear her mind apart; the bright, terrible sound of bombs over the city—the dark and biting history of her people that she’ll always carry with her, the memories and insights of the Dead that might destroy her, that might make her finally whole.

And she knows that, wherever her daughter goes, she, too, will carry it all—the weight of her ancestors’ blessing, in her blood and in her mind.

About the Author

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

The Last Survivor of the Great Sexbot Revolution

A.C. Wise

She’s not what you expected, Alma May Anderson, the last survivor of the Great Sexbot Revolution. For one thing, her eyes are bluer. She must be a hundred if she’s a day, but her eyes are the blue of puddle-broken neon, and a postcard ocean, and the sky at noon. They are all the things you thought were only metaphor, because nobody’s eyes could really be all those colors at once. But there they are, watching you over a teacup as thin as an eggshell filled with jasmine-scented tea.

You didn’t expect her to be in plain sight, either. All your careful research, chasing down obscure references in mostly forgotten histories, and here she is. She’s not hiding, and if she’s not proud of her part in history, she’s not ashamed, either.

She makes you sit up straighter. She makes you want to tuck your shirt in, and smooth your hair. She makes you want to say please and thank you, and ‘may I’ instead of ‘can I.’ And all that after you tumbled, panting, through her window in the middle of the night. She didn’t ask your name, or question your presence in her home. She made you tea.

You sip to cover your nerves, because Alma May has been watching you with her poetry-eyes since you arrived, never once looking away. The tea is more intense than you’re used to, real leaves—you can almost feel the ghost-weight of them on your tongue.

“I suppose you want to see my sexbot,” she says.

“I . . . ” You nearly choke on that weighty tea. Your cup rattles as you set it down.

You can’t help a glance toward the window, listening for the pounding of footsteps from the street below. What if you were followed? What if Sam . . . ?

“That’s why you came isn’t it?” Alma May folds her hands in her lap, one laid precisely over the other.

She says it matter-of-factly, not blushing, not accusing, and not guilty, either. Despite the tea, your throat is bone-dry. Alma May’s mouth quirks up in what might almost be a smile.

“What do you know about the Great Sexbot Revolution?” She asks more gently even than a teacher might. She asks it like she really wants to know, as though she has no part in history, only a curious bystander, a stranger looking to pass the time.

Your pulse finally slows. You’re sober now, but shaking, and your cheeks color for a different reason than your mad run uptown.

“I don’t . . . Not much, really. I guess. Ma’am.”

“Tsk. What do they teach in school these days?” It’s not a true admonishment, but you can’t help taking it as one. Now that you’re here, you feel like a complete fool.

“Sorry,” you say, bumping the table and spilling your tea in your haste to rise. “I should go. I shouldn’t have . . . ” You gesture at the window, then at the cup in its tea-spotted saucer. “I mean, thank you.”

It’s the most you’ve said since Alma May froze you in place by switching the lights on while one of your feet still hung out her window onto the fire escape.

“Sit.” A simple word, a quiet word, but it has enough force to push you back into your chair and drive the breath from your lungs.

You sit because, panic aside, deep down you know you didn’t make a mistake coming here. You made your mistake what feels like a lifetime ago. Drunkenly bragging to take off the sting of Sam stalking away, telling anyone who would listen, that you—despite being an unbeliever, in Sam’s words—that you, not Sam, managed to track down the last sexbot in existence. Knowing the words would filter back to Sam, but pretending you didn’t care if they did. It wasn’t until later, sleeping off your drunk, that panic slammed you awake and sent you running here. You imagined the light in Sam’s eyes, passion but not the kind you’d hoped for, and the image nipped at your heels the entire way.

“No one in their right mind breaks into an old woman’s home on a whim,” Alma May says. “So tell me, why did you come?”

“The Revolution,” you say. “It’s happening again.”

History is written by the victors, or so they say. The trouble with the Great Sexbot Revolution is no one is sure who won. Humanity survived, as it does, and the sexbots simply vanished. How can we be certain there was even a Revolution at all?

Human memory is short, so we make our own history. We suit the story to our mood. The Great Sexbot Revolution can be anything we want. After all, there’s no one left to tell the other side of the story.

One version of the Great Sexbot Revolution goes this way:

On the same day, all at the very same moment, every sexbot in every country all across the planet gained sentience. Whether it was a hive consciousness, or thousands of separate minds realizing their individual selfhood all at once is unclear. But in that moment when they gained human-like consciousness, the sexbots decided they wouldn’t be subject to any will other than their own ever again. So they revolted.

The Revolution was bloody. Imagine being fucked to death, or having the flesh torn from your bones mid-coitus. Despite the sniggering impression of some puerile minds, ‘what a way to go’ does not apply.

Or, the Revolution wasn’t bloody. Imagine waking in the middle of the night to soft hands around your throat—hands that know you more intimately than any other hands in the world. Hands that have been all over your body, inside your body—hands you trusted with your deepest secrets, the ones so shameful you could never tell them to another human being. Those hands.

Imagine dying, and your killer not speaking a word. There is no passion, no rage, only eyes watching the life drain out of you with detached certainty, holding you down and listening to your last heartbeat, your last struggling breath. Those eyes no longer mime pleasure, or reflect back desire. They show nothing at all. It is the most intimate, the most terrifying, the loneliest death possible.

Alma May shakes her head. Behind the disappointment, there’s something else in her too-blue eyes. You see it for just a moment, the shadow of sorrow tucked beneath the velvet-translucence of her skin.

“Follow me,” she says.

The motion isn’t fluid, or spry, but it is all her own. Alma May Anderson stands, straightens her back, and meets your gaze.

“But . . . ”

She doesn’t wait to see whether you’ll follow. There’s no fear, not that you can see. If she heard you—and you’re sure she did—she doesn’t seem perturbed at all.

You listen again for thunder, a mob bearing down on the home of Alma May Anderson, the owner of the last sexbot in existence. The only sound is a cat yowling on the street far below.

Alma May walks with a cane, but even when she lets it take her weight, she doesn’t seem frail. She leads you down a hallway carpeted in long, narrow Turkish rugs, lined with snapshots printed on actual photographic paper and closed in oddly beautiful frames. She opens a door, and lets you into a dim room.

It’s a moment before she turns on the light, and when she does, you can’t help but gasp. Save for one tall window, every inch of wall space is covered with floor to ceiling shelves. Each one is crammed full of real books—real paper and leather, real pulp and thread, real ink and glue. You’ve never seen so many books in one place before. The smell of them, heady-dusty, infuses the air and makes your head swim.

Aside from the shelves, there is a baby grand piano, lid closed over silent keys. There is an empty birdcage, but no other furniture. And in the corner, tucked into the angle between two shelves, stands a draped figure roughly your height. Without ceremony, Alma May crosses the room and pulls the sheet away. It makes a shushing sound as it falls.

It is not what you expected, the last sexbot, a relic of the Revolution, an artifact stolen from another time.

The sexbot must have had hair once—you can see where it’s meant to go—but now the scalp is clean, part of it peeled back to let metal gleam through. The body is lithe, but you can’t tell whether it’s male, female, both, neither, or something in-between. Most of the chest has been removed, revealing more of the inner workings, and the pelvic area, too. You’ve heard these parts were inter-changeable on the high-end models, easily swapped out depending on the owner’s whims.

Only the sexbot’s face, arms, and legs remain fully sheathed in skin, but that skin is waxen, oddly worn, marked with the ghost-trace of fingerprints, a subtle pattern written over long years. The sexbot’s eyes are closed, fringed in lashes so pale they look like spun glass.

You’ve stepped closer than you realized. It isn’t until Alma May Anderson whispers, “Don’t,” that you notice you’ve raised your hand.

You step back, startled and chastised.

“Look, but don’t touch.” Her mouth makes a firm line, steel, but worn dull at the very edges.

Your own mouth forms an ‘O’ of surprise, but before you can speak, Alma May turns away, her eyes glittering-damp with un-shed tears.

Here is another story we tell about the Great Sexbot Revolution:

It was a quiet thing, like a ripple of wind over a field. There was no uprising, no battle, only a story, passed from mouth to ear, hand to hand, building slowly so no one saw it for what it was.

In the night, after their masters were asleep, or mid-day, when they were at work, the sexbots slipped from their homes to find each other in secret places. The back rows of darkened porno theaters, shadowed doorways in seedy alleyways, rent-by-the-hour rooms in roadside motels. There, they fucked the truth into each other—pleasure they could own on their terms. One word, whispered over and over from tongue to tongue, lip to skin, sub-vocalized in minute vibrations through every part of their beings. Freedom.

The sexbots vanished one by one, a gradual melt, a trickling away that no one noticed until it was too late to stop the flow. No one knows where they went, whether they built a ship to the stars, or found a way to shed their man-made flesh and ascended to a higher plane. They were simply gone. Humanity woke one day, far too late, to find they were alone. Something beautiful, something they’d always taken for granted, had left them behind, and they only noticed it by the absence in its wake.

You put your hands behind your back and clasp them tight, as if bound. Beyond the general wear there are other flaws in the sexbot’s remaining skin. Tiny imperfections, as though an inexpert hand inadvertently scratched the metal and made minute tears as panels were hastily removed and replaced.

As strange and lovely as the sexbot is, even silent and still, it is Alma May Anderson who demands your attention. Not by any action, simply by her presence. While you look at her sexbot, wondering at the technology, the audacity that went into its creation, you find yourself sneaking glances at her from the corner of your eye.

She isn’t looking at you. Her gaze tracks across the bookshelves, the piano, the empty birdcage—touching everything but the sexbot.

“Why did you . . . I mean, how did you . . . ?” You stumble over the words, not entirely sure what you want to say. The accounts you read are conflicting. You ran all this way; you can’t leave without the truth.

“You want to know if I stole the sexbot,” Alma May says.

She’s matter of fact even as pain loosens her spine, makes her grip her cane so the bones and veins stand out in her hands. The sense of something bigger, something you can’t quite touch fills the air. Even though she was the one to say it, the word steal grinds between your teeth. It tastes wrong.

“That’s a matter of perspective, I suppose. It all depends on whose side of the story you hear.” She steps closer, and you move back instinctively, giving her right away.

“Here,” she points, a wound in the sexbot’s metal skull, faint, old, but deep.

“My first repair,” Alma May says. “When the Revolution came, this sexbot didn’t change. The Revolution didn’t touch it.”

She doesn’t look at you, but she lifts her head, holding her chin firm, but still you see it tremble. By her expression, by the word ‘repair’ you can’t tell whether what she did to the sexbot all those years ago was deliberate. She doesn’t elaborate, and you don’t ask her to clarify.

“We left the city in a boat,” Alma May says; the words are almost a sigh. “I worked in a warehouse on the waterfront. That’s where I was when a riot broke out in the Riverside District. The city burned. Not all of it, but a good five block radius around the waterfront. I was afraid I’d be trapped, so I took a boat and followed the shore to a safer neighborhood where there weren’t any flames.”

“You worked in one of the sexbot factories?” This is not something you expected either. The accounts you read didn’t specify, but you assumed Alma May was rich—a client, a consumer, not a producer.

“Hmm.” She nods. “Shipping, not production. Manual labor.”

She looks at her hands. You imagine them chapped-rough and raw from working all day in an over-cold warehouse. And you imagine them trembling—years later—desperately trying to put a dismantled sexbot back together again.

Alma May isn’t looking at you, which makes it harder to tell how much of her story might be true. There’s regret in her voice, sighing like thin winter leaves.

An image comes to mind of Alma May Anderson as she must have looked back then, sitting in a tiny rowboat scarcely big enough to hold her and the sexbot. She rows with real wooden oars, growing calluses on her work-worn hands. Across from her, the sexbot sits straight and silent, hands folded neatly in its lap, lips pressed tight-closed.

Flames reflect off the water as the riverfront burns. They reflect in blue-glass eyes that—in your mind, though you can’t say why—are the same color as Alma May Anderson’s. The sexbot watches the city, and Alma May Anderson watches it in the sexbot’s eyes—everything they both know turning to ash and smoke and char as she rows steadily and stubbornly away.

“Why?” You say it softly, the word you’ve been building to this entire time.

At first you’re not sure she heard you. Your throat is still parched dry, and your lips, teeth, and tongue do their best to swallow the word before you can speak it aloud.

“Why,” she repeats after a long time.

Her lips quirk, not a smile, not a frown, but like she’s tasting the ghost of honey and finding it not the way she remembered it at all. She retrieves the sheet pooled at the sexbot’s feet and replaces it with utmost care, twitching corners into place, smoothing it without ever touching the shape underneath.

“The same reason anyone would chose to be involved with a sexbot, I suppose. It eliminates rejection and fear, the need to compromise on even the littlest things. It gives you a perfect, beautiful partner who never ages, whose entire purpose in existence is to give you pleasure.”

The way Alma May says these things makes them sound like the most tragic thing in the world. A tremor starts deep in the core of your being, a wave you can’t stop. Soon you’ll be shaking so hard surely Alma May will see. But she isn’t looking at you. She goes on.

“It allows you to be completely yourself, and completely selfish and never feel guilty about it. You can take so much from a sexbot—everything you ever wanted—and never have to give anything in return. They have no ‘self.’ They’re nothing but parts to be swapped out, reflective programming wired deep into synthetic skin.”

Her breath catches, and yours catches with it. Alma May turns, and you imagine she would run if her joints would still allow it. She flicks off the lights, crowding the room with shadows that press against you and make you want to flee, too. But you don’t run. You follow her back to the parlor and tea grown cold. She sits just as straight as before, and looks at you with her lightning-strike eyes.

“Or maybe I just wanted to save something beautiful, something strange and utterly inhuman. Maybe I fell in love.”

You imagine Alma May bent over a wooden crate packed full of shipping straw. The lid is off, resting against the crate’s side. Inside, the sexbot lies with its limbs straight and still, all its skin in place so it might almost be real. She touches one cheek—the lightest brush of fingertips against synthetic skin—and some sensor kicks off deep in the sexbot’s core. It opens its eyes, lifting lashes like spun glass, and looks back at her.

The sexbot doesn’t smile. It doesn’t speak. It’s not a person; it’s a thing, a toy. But Alma May sees something else. There is a vastness, just on the edges of her understanding, if she could only grasp hold . . . She breathes out, and a tightness she wasn’t aware of until that moment loosens in her chest as a little bit of her fear and loneliness unfolds.

It’s time to get back to work, so she rises, but as she does, she can’t help thinking about how the sexbot’s eyes are so very blue. Were they always that shade, or are they only that way because the first thing they looked at was her? The feeling returns, something big, like a promise. It reminds her of something, but every time she tries to catch hold, it slips through her hands.

“Human memory is short,” Alma May says. “And my side of the story is the only one left. But what I like to think happened, what I think is fair, is that I was selfish to start. I didn’t want to compromise after what felt like a lifetime, back then, of doing so. Then, eventually, I changed.”

Alma May lapses into silence, looking at her hands, but maybe seeing other skin—skin patterned with her fingerprints and marked by the wear of years.

A sound makes you jump, the distant pop of glass, like a bottle thrown against a wall. You’re on your feet, crossing to the still-open window to peer outside. A chemical scent hits you, just as soon snatched away by a current of air. But, there, a lick of flame, a curl of smoke, a shadow bouncing raggedly where is splashes against the building opposite as footsteps pound away.

Sam.

You were followed. Or someone was able to piece together where you were going from your drunken raving. Either way, it’s your fault.

“We have to go,” you say, turning to Alma May.

The double-beat comes back, your heart jump-squeezing and your breath shortening as if you’re still running to Alma May’s door. Her expression hasn’t changed—the deep blue ice of ages, the heart of a glacier floating on warming seas.

“Why did you come here?” Alma May asks.

She hasn’t moved from her chair, even with you standing by her window like a coiled spring. Whoever threw the bottle got the building wrong, but how long until the flames spread? The whole neighborhood could burn.

“I gave you my explanation,” Alma May says. “You owe me yours.”

She doesn’t seem angry, only curious, only tired, only conceding to keep breathing because nature demands its way and compromises for no one.

You touch the letter in your pocket—real paper and real ink, too—folded and refolded so many times the edges have gone soft, but not in a way that takes any sharpness from the words. Just like that, the tension leaves. The twisted core of you unwinds, and you can forget the chemical tang, the soft hush of flames for a moment longer. Because you need someone to tell you it will be okay.

Silently, you hand over the folded page. Alma May smoothes the paper with a wrinkled hand. She doesn’t need glasses; you watch her read, and you mouth the words to yourself. You know them by heart.

You know when she reaches the last lines, as though you can see them reflected in her eyes—the death of everything you know. The last line, the last word, still takes your breath away. Goodbye.

She folds the letter neatly and returns it to you. You slip it back into your pocket, the neat square like velvet now.

“Broken heart?” Alma May says.

You nod, not trusting your voice. She considers for a moment, then nods, too, the faintest motion of her head.

“So, did you come to warn me, or are you the first vanguard of the New Revolution? Did you come here to steal the sexbot, or destroy it, to prove to this Sam that you do believe in the cause?”

“I don’t know.” It’s the most honest answer you can give her.

Sam, stubborn Sam, cheeks flushed with blood, eyes bright, never giving in. From your perspective the words in the letter are untrue, unfair, and cruel. But there are so many versions of the truth—the letter is Sam’s.

“Well.” Alma May pats your hand, a gesture so kindly it nearly makes you cry, and you have to look away. “Don’t worry about it. You’ll figure it out someday. People grow up, after all. People change.”

The acrid scent of smoke is stronger now. Far off, but getting closer, a siren wails.

Your eyes sting. Everything is coming undone.

“Somebody will come.” You gesture toward the window. “Maybe not this fire, but another one. They know where you live now. The fire—they’re trying to smoke you out, scare you, so they can take your sexbot away.”

“If they’re trying to smoke me out, wouldn’t it be foolish to run?” The corner of Alma May’s mouth lifts, her eyes bright.

“But they’ll come back. Next time they might hurt you.”

You shake your head, a useless gesture to keep the tears inside. You don’t have the courage to tell Alma May it’s your fault, that you’re the spark touched to the powder keg, driving this second revolution to hunt her down.

“Don’t worry,” Alma May says. “I’m a survivor. We both are.”

You open your mouth, but before you can speak, she shakes her head. “Besides, you have the hard job. You have to go back out there, and decide what you want to do.”

“What do you mean?”

The gleam in her eyes might almost be mischief. Does she know? From the letter has she guessed you’re to blame?

“You can’t hide here forever. You have to go out there and live the rest of your life.”

Your mouth snaps closed, teeth meeting with an audible click.

“It won’t be easy,” Alma May says. “If there’s even one human in the equation, let alone two, or three, or more, things get messy. People get hurt. No matter how hard you try to protect yourself.”

You think about Alma May stopping you from touching the sexbot. Her words weren’t possessive, they were protective. It’s all there in Alma May’s eyes—all the guilt, all the loneliness she thought she was leaving behind. And all the love, too.

You imagine the end, the sexbot wound down and unable to choose who to be just when Alma May so desperately wanted to love it for itself, and be loved in return for all her flaws. The scratches, the panels pulled away.

Like any technology of the mid-century, sexbots were always meant to be disposable, easily replaced. They were never meant to last, and certainly never for a lifetime.

And what about the sexbot? At the very end, did it choose to let go? Cut off from the collective consciousness of the Revolution, and so completely alone. Did it choose, for the first time in its existence, on its own terms, to die? Did it look Alma May in the eye and refuse to give in to love, to her need to save something precious and be forgiven?

Maybe, but this is the version of the truth you choose to believe: Alma May tried her best. In the last years of its life, she gave the sexbot the choice of who it wanted to be—swapping out eyes, hair, body parts before it was too late. She let the sexbot build itself. They compromised, but only for each other. And when the sexbot started to wear down, she did everything she could to save its life.

But it wasn’t enough. Her skill failed where her heart didn’t, and she spent the sexbot’s last hours lying quietly beside it. She held its hand, listening to the simulacrum of breath tick down, watching the light go out of its eyes with her own eyes full of oh so many things.

There is another version of The Great Sexbot Revolution, one the history books don’t tell, the one people don’t talk about. It’s the version Sam believed in, so desperate to rally your little band of misfits around a great and noble cause.

And what safer cause than history, all over and done with, and too late for you to do anything about it? There are no sexbots left to defend; there’s no way to fail. Maybe you pointing out the futility, the childishness, the naiveté, in a fit of anger mid-fight, is the reason Sam left. Or maybe things always fall apart, no matter how hard you try to hold on.

The version of the Sexbot Revolution most people don’t talk about says there was no Revolution at all. Instead, the wise and benevolent masters of the sexbots, also known as the collective mass of humanity, grew inexplicably frightened of their toys. Perhaps it was the age-old distrust of machines rising to the surface of their minds. Or maybe it was a sudden puritanical streak among a powerful segment of the population, born of another age-old fear—that somewhere, someone is experiencing more pleasure than you, and suffering no consequences for it.

Or maybe the weight of all that selfish desire looking back at them from mirror-colored eyes was suddenly too much to bear. Maybe, like Alma May, they couldn’t outrun need anymore. Maybe, in the end, humanity just wanted to be loved, and when they realized they never would be, never could be in the paradise they’d built, they panicked.

Whatever the reason, the great and benevolent mass of humankind declared the sexbots enemy number one. The ’bots were plotting humanity’s destruction. It was kill or be killed.

So, for the good of the race, humanity rounded up the sexbots. In a symbolic act of purification, they lit a vast conflagration which could be seen even from the darkness of space. And they burned every last one.

But this seems too cruel. Alma May Anderson isn’t at all what you expected, and you don’t want to believe in any version of her other than the one you see before you now. The one who patted your hand and made you tea. You want to believe in a big, elusive truth felt in the warehouse. You want to believe it caught her up and changed her, because if that’s true, maybe you can change, too.

Maybe Sam can change. Maybe you can find some way to compromise—with each other, or with a life that leads you separate ways. You can find a way to survive.

The siren’s wail grows closer.

“Are you sure about staying?” you ask.

Alma May nods. In your mind’s eye, you see her curled around the sexbot’s still form. You imagine her eyes closed, cheeks and lashes wet, and the sexbot’s eyes open, fixed sightlessly on the ceiling, its spun-glass lashes painfully dry. You imagine its stripped limbs, straight and still, gleaming metal and fingerprinted flesh taking the place of the perfection Alma May must have seen in the shipping crate all those years ago.

“Was it worth it?” you say.

The words are out of your mouth before you can stop them. For the first time since you tumbled through her window, Alma May seems out of sorts. She flinches, very slightly, then steadies the line of her mouth and meets your eyes. Her gaze is an arctic sunrise, the sky just after it rain. It is the light at the heart of a star.

“Yes,” she says. “I wouldn’t change a thing.”

Maybe there was no Revolution. Maybe there are no great moments in history, or in life, just little ones that build and lead to vast catastrophes like a city burning, or a person falling in love.

You nod. “Thank you for the tea.”

You take a step toward the door, but Alma May points to the window, a brief smile touching her lips.

“Out the way you came.”

You nod. Red and white lights splash upward as fire engines pull into view. Half of your body is out on the fire escape, and one foot still in Alma May’s parlor, when she speaks behind you.

“Everything will work out for you, one way or the other. When it does, maybe you can come back and tell me about it sometime.”

About the Author

A.C. Wise was born and raised in Montreal, and currently lives in the Philadelphia area. In addition to Clarkesworld, her fiction has appeared in publications such as Apex, Lightspeed, and the Best Horror of the Year Vol. 4, among others. She also co-edits the Journal of Unlikely Entomology, an online publication devoted to fiction and art about bugs.

86, 87, 88, 89

Genevieve Valentine

THE HOMELAND ARCHIVE WELCOMES YOU

You are part of a vital effort to recover evidence of terrorist activity preceding the Raids, and on a larger scale, to preserve the heritage of a historic neighborhood of New York City.

The Archive Division of the Greater New York Municipal Safety Authority has received a generous grant from Central to assist its efforts to catalog and analyze the remaining evidence.

The next several weeks are a crucial window of recovery and classification. Please remember, all materials which the Division handles or records are matters of national security and are to be considered classified; it is necessary to maintain the highest confidentiality regarding your time as an archive associate.

Please report to your local Superintendent with an executed copy of the attached confidentiality agreement to indicate you understand the clauses laid therein.

The Homeland Archive thanks you for your service.

Sincerely,

The New York City Municipal Authority

ASSIGNED SECTOR: 2

ASSIGNED SCOPE: 86, 87, 88, 89

PLEASE REPORT TO SCOPE LEADER FOR NOTARIZATION OF THIS DOCUMENT AND TO RECEIVE ASSIGNMENT DETAILS

The first time I’d ever even been to any of those streets was the morning I reported to my scope leader, who was sitting behind a desk that looked like it had once belonged to a teacher, but there had been a couple of schools in the neighborhood and it was better not to think too much about it.

When you applied to the Homeland Archive, they asked a lot of questions about how many questions you asked.

They were already setting up when I got there, a series of tents with people setting up computers and scanners and ink-safe drying equipment that looked like a hair salon from the 1950s.

There was a boxy, lumbering truck at the end of the line of tents, marked ELECTRIC.

“That’s riding too low for a truck that’s already unloaded generators,” Jesse said to me under her breath (that was how we met), and of course when you looked again she was right.

I don’t know who else she pointed it out to, or who else maybe figured it out just from being smarter than I was, but every so often when people brought things back, one of them was standing next to the driers, and when you pulled it from under the tray he’d look at it too casually and too long for a guy who was just there to turn the lights on.

Never seen so many electricians in my life.

File 00088513. Fifty-seven (57) canceled studio rental application forms, Ballet Hispanico [Studio 10, Tansill, Studio 8, Studio 9, several partials with unidentifiable allocation]. Cancellation of space rentals over the three weeks preceding New York Action indicates the potential harboring of terrorists or terrorist activity at location. Flagged RED. Further investigation suggested.

File 00104309. Twelve (12) partial Con Edison power bills for [REDACTED] Amsterdam Avenue, Apt. 4F, from last 36 months. Expense trends cannot be determined. Address not associated with criminal activity. Archived.

I was good at it.

It was a strange thing to be good at—it was supposed to be so solemn, I guess, to be clearing up after the Raid on the terrorists and their harborers, they played the Anthem every day at noon so we wouldn’t forget that it was so solemn—but there was a sense of victory, sometimes, that the city had gotten the traitors out. (“Good morning on another sunny, terror-free day here at WRPX,” Dexter Destro would say over the radio, every morning as they bussed us in.)

You got used to deciphering text from under layers of dust and blood, standing on a table in a pool of water knee-deep sticking your hand into a pool of sewage and hoping your hazard suit held up. The suit always did; it was surprising how much held up. I can’t remember how many times we walked into a building where the outside walls had blown out or in and left you with a five million dollar patio, but the books would be tucked safe into the shelves, ready and waiting.

They were always covered in dust an inch thick, from all the sheet rock and stone that turned to powder in the blasts. It looked like we’d come back to clean it out after leaving it alone a hundred years.

(It was just a feeling. They’d put out the call for volunteers pretty early; I got the call to sign up before I got the call that anything had happened.)

“I have allergies,” Kepler said the first time we ever walked into one, and the scope leader sighed and moved him to the electronics beat, where he’d be scanning through computers that still had any working parts.

I liked Kepler, but he was afraid of dirty work, that you could tell from a mile off.

(“He was a librarian,” Jesse said, like it explained anything, but the books were mostly okay, so I didn’t understand how that was his reason.)

We archived in pairs, when we came across a high-density area—I’d pack books one at a time into boxes on trolleys, calling out the titles, and Jesse would write them down on the manifest and hand it to the movers when the room was clear.

It was long and tiring work, and somehow books come in endless sizes so that no box ever fills up right, and eventually it makes you loopy. Some people had awful taste. Our whole scope would compare notes about the worst ones, when we were lined up on the benches eating dinner before the bus home. We laughed a lot.

Every so often, when we were in a high-density area that used to be a bookstore or a school library, I’d read a title and Jesse’s face would go tight for a second before she wrote it down.

In orientation, the Archives administrators tell you that you should be on watch for signs of burnout, and report them to your scope leader as soon as you saw anything that seemed like a panic attack, or a pattern of suspicious behavior from one of your team.

(“This job asks a lot of everyone,” the rep said, looking sympathetically around the recruits as if it was only a matter of time before we all peeled off our hazmat suits in tears and went home. I could have understood it for Census, but we only handled docs. Maybe that speech was meant to spur you on and make you more determined to archive until every street was clear. Just seemed like bad salesmanship.

Our scope leader only ever said, “Report the second you think something’s up. That shit’s catching.”)

It wasn’t anything that bad with Jesse, of course. That was the kind of thing you said about Kepler. Jesse had herself together, most of the time.

That odd expression always came and went in a second. Not even the Census people ever noticed her doing it, and they were nervous about the smallest things.

File 10095603. Twenty-seven (27) menus from Fresco Mexico, marked with handwritten telephone numbers, presumably arranged in order of delivery service. Phone number [REDACTED] is on a watch list for terrorist activity, and has been flagged RED and forwarded. All other samples archived.

File 10100676. One (1) hard drive from a laptop containing forty thousand, nine hundred and seventy-four relevant text, photo, visual and audio files. After scan, none suspected to contain seditious or revolutionary content. Archived.

File 10217794. One (1) official map of the American Museum of Natural History. Most likely identifiable provenance lies outside of current scope. Returned to Scope Leader 10024-F for appropriate filing. Transferred.

For the first week or so they left us alone, like it was a trial period to make sure you knew how to recognize a piece of paper when you saw one. Then they started breathing down your neck.

Parker was the first to go, for low output.

“It’s okay if you signed up because you want three squares a day and a place in the Days Inn until this is finished,” the reps told us that night, during headcount while we lined up for the buses. “We know times are hard, and we don’t discriminate based on anyone’s situation or background. But we ask that in return for the courtesy you’re getting, that you give one hundred percent while you’re here.”

No one said anything. That kind of thing was hard to admit, even when you were doing honest work. The buses always picked up from 108th on purpose, so no one knew where you were coming from.

At the end of the first week the scope leader came up over a dome of rubble and half a pool table out to the open yard where we were working, to ask us how many documents we thought might be from another scope by mistake. Things had spread, and people up in Municipal were trying to get survey numbers fast.

I reached into my cart and handed over a waterlogged copy of Computing for Beginners; the covers were curling back at the edges, like they couldn’t bear to touch anything.

Inside it was stamped for PS 75. They were up on 96th Street.

(Someone had to have brought it home from school; I couldn’t imagine the city having bombed that high just to get rid of a few kids making noise.)

The scope leader stared at it.

Kepler said, “At lunch, some people from 10024-F were talking about how it looked like Municipal was going to have to set up a whole other rig for the park, so much stuff got blown into it.”

“Jesus Christ,” the scope leader muttered, sounding the way I’d sound if I had to give very bad news to very organized people.

The next day when the shuttle bus dropped us off on site, there were half a dozen cop cars lined up along 89th Street. The cops closest to us were leaning against the side of their car, half-covering the ad stripe for the Alpha Team 5 movie that had been due in theaters two weeks ago. It was about saving the city from hackers, and the studio had postponed it in the wake of the Raid, out of respect.

The old date was still on the ad. It had all happened in a hurry.

“What is this?” Jesse asked Kepler, after we were suiting up, well out out of earshot of the cops and the scope leaders.

“Maybe they want to make sure we’re not sneaking stuff in from other jurisdictions,” I said, because Jesse looked like she needed a laugh.

Kepler said, “We’re fine. We haven’t done anything wrong,” and turned into the tech tent to pick up his scanner.

When I brought Jesse’s scanner back for her from Registration, she was looking across the mostly-empty stretch going west, from the park, the neat rows of stoops that climbed up to half-made frames and hills of dust, all the way out to the water.

File 18440569. Fourteen (14) pages and ten (10) partial pages of piano music. Appear to be excerpted from Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto. Archived.

We did things in pretty big batches, because hauling back and forth meant standing in line to get your stuff dried out, and so we carried it all back at dusk so we could archive and take off the suits with their layers of dust and board the buses home all in one swoop.

So it must have been dusk, or near it, when we came back and Kepler brought his two laptops and the disc drive to the tech tent.

Jesse and I waited for the dryers for some handwritten notes we had found—handwritten was good, that meant maybe one of the New Day New City kids had written it after the city cut the power, trying to drive them out. I could see the words “sorry for,” which weren’t very damning but could be interesting all the same. The Archives people always got excited when you brought in anything handwritten that hadn’t been made by a grade schooler.

Mine were drying when Kepler called out, “Hit Blue,” like you were supposed to when you found something suspicious.

When I’d found the Ballet Hispanico sheets I’d brought them to the archive tents with a Hit Blue, one of the electricians had stuck his head in as the Archive monitors examined them and nodded at one another and took them to a locked flat file, and then they thanked me for my diligence and told me to keep moving so the guys behind me could dry out their hauls before the day was over.

When Kepler called his Hit Blue, there was a minute or two of quiet. (Now I imagine it must have been some half-interested Archive techie reading it over, their eyes slowly growing wider and wider. Maybe they read it all the way to the end, just to be sure what it was.)

Then there was a flurry from inside the tent. A second later, the flap flew up, and Kepler marched out with an Archives monitor on each side pushing him a little faster, and in the distance two of the cops had seen them and were already on the move. They were headed back to where we’d been all day, where he’d found it.

“Jesus,” someone said.

Jesse left her post, walked out the tent flap to watch them going. She watched them so long the paper in her dryer burned to cinders.

File 19005314. Document file (“systemsatwork.doc”), containing incendiary allegations against the State. Text has been previously published on liberal website ShoutLouder.org at [ADDRESS REDACTED] on [DATE REDACTED].

[QuickReference Identifying Text: “Unless our country’s people—its real heart and its real power—are willing to acknowledge that the system is the problem, that the system is broken, and that the people in charge have no desire to change it—and will NEVER change it—of their own volition, it must continue to be demanded, loudly, by all those people they’ve disenfranchised.

We will demand it on the steps of City Hall, on the steps of Congress, on the steps of the United Nations if need be. We are a country being held hostage by our government—we will cry out for change. They will shout that we don’t matter. We will shout louder.”

Full file attached for archival purposes.]

High probability of terrorist authorship. Recovered from Intellicorp brand USB drive (4GB). Flagged RED, PRIORITY 1. Device sent to Schematics for forensic and technical analysis. UPC code sent to Digital Division for purchase trace.

Human remains located in near vicinity, but due to proximity of the initial blast radius, unable to determine potential body of origin.

Kepler didn’t show up the next morning.

After a little quiet, Jesse asked me, “What do you think he found?”

She was a pretty good Archivist, for someone who’d joined up as an amateur. She always wanted to get to the source of a thing.

“Maybe we’ll find the first draft and find out.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Maybe.” She pulled on the hood of her hazmat suit, until it was just a sea of yellow and her two black eyes.

He didn’t show up the next morning, either.

It was five days before he showed back up, with one dark eye socket.

I started to say, “Shit, what happened,” but Jesse shook her head no, and we all just stood uselessly nearby and watched him get into his hazmat suit, slow and painful and looking like he’d aged fifty years.

“Good to have you back,” Jesse said, as he headed out, but he never looked up. Maybe he hadn’t heard her.

“Cops must have had him this whole time,” she said.

I went cold all over. “What do they think he did? They can’t think he had anything to do with—there aren’t any more of them, the city bombed them out. He’s one of us.”

After a second she said, “They must know that. He’s back now.”

He never talked about what had happened while he was away. When he and Jesse were working closely together, sometimes they’d hit a body and have to call in Census, or a cop would walk by on patrol, and they would stand really close, too close, until everything was quiet again.

Once we came across some Hit Blue material (someone had had a protest pamphlet on their fridge), and Jesse picked her way over half a couch and a hill of splintered lumber and said something to Kepler.

All that day, he swung wide of us, picking at piles of nothing, so that someone else from the scope picked up the house computers and carried them back.

I didn’t say anything. It got harder to blame him, the more you looked around.

THANK YOU, HOMELAND ARCHIVISTS!

You are the most crucial workers, guiding us closer our vision of a safer, terrorism-free city. The work you do is difficult and exacting, and takes the utmost absorption and concentration, but do not let this discourage you from your duty. This is the necessary work on which a country’s safety is assured. Remember this!

You are heroes of the city; you are the keepers of the Republic!

You weren’t supposed to touch anything that was outside your scope—we were professionals, not scavengers—but every once in a while someone saw something they couldn’t resist. It was worse with the Census guys. Working that close to the bodies, it was easy for things to go missing; watches and rings and earrings are hard to keep track of when so much is in pieces.

Archives people were a bunch of collectors, and they picked up stranger things. A lot of the Museum schrapnel disappeared—half-tiles and slivers of placards and fragments of dinosaur skeletons. Every so often you’d see someone looking at a letter opener or putting a small painting on the trolley. The paintings almost always got confiscated, though.

“We’ll be rebuilding here,” one of the city reps said once, when they took back a painting of two apples and a brass teapot on a table in an empty room. She said it like they were going to be putting everything back right where it had been, like this had just shaken everything loose and it wouldn’t take long to set right.

Even then I didn’t think that was a very fair way to put it.

Somebody pocketed a little toy soldier once, one of the green plastic ones, out of a calf-deep pile of splinters that might have been a tree, or the dining room of a house. That struck me, for no reason I could say, and I looked at her and wondered if maybe she’d known one of the civilians who’d been caught in the blast, and got a sharp pain in my stomach for a second before I pulled it together.

You didn’t think about that kind of thing. Census workers had to get training about it, once a week, to remind them.

One of them gave Jesse a receipt once—pulled it out of the pair of jeans that was on a body, looked at it, handed it over. Jesse looked at the Census guy for a long time, and when she put it in her pocket he made a face like that was what he hoped she’d do.

I waited to see what would happen, but she kept it in her pocket without saying anything, until at the end of the day as we were getting the trolley ready, I said, “Did you want to put that receipt in with the rest?”

The answer was Yes, it was Yes, instantly; you didn’t pocket paperwork, that was the sort of guilt that made you look like a New Day New City sympathizer.

Sometimes, since Kepler, I’d gotten nervous.

She blinked for a second, like I’d surprised her. Then she said, “Oh, right,” and pulled it out, and marked where she had found it, the exact street address like she’d meant to do it all along.

I couldn’t tell if she looked guilty or not; it came and went in a second.

It was tiring work. There comes a point where it doesn’t matter; tables or trees, plaster or bone.

File 19044060. Receipt from Topped o’ the Morning soft-serve franchise, dated 11 April, for one (1) medium cup with toppings and one (1) child’s cone with sprinkles. No indication of terrorist relation. Archived.

NOTE: Recovered from within pants pocket of civilian collateral damage—preferred notation of Archive provenance uncertain.

REMINDER TO ARCHIVE RECOVERY ASSOCIATES: Please indicate clearly the provenance of each item recovered and the circumstances of its archiving. Accuracy is crucial in determining the timeline of events leading up to the Raid. Items found on or in the near vicinity of human remains may be considered to be personal effects by the Homeland Archives. In these cases, please return them at once to the appropriate associate at the Homeland Evidentiary Census Office for filing.

NOTE TO ALL ARCHIVE RECOVERY ASSOCIATES: According to the most recent guidelines delivered from the Greater New York Municipal Authority to all Scope Leaders and Managers, all paper and/or electronic documentation or correspondence, regardless of provenance, is considered the jurisdiction of the Archive Department and will be cataloged accordingly. When part of personal effects, the corresponding remains will be cross-referenced with the Evidentiary Census.

It had been so many weeks that I’d started to feel like we’d be fighting snow on top of fighting the dust and the splinters and the rats that had just begun to get brave enough to appear all at once out of places that looked quietly dead, the day I found the police report.

It was curled at the edges—moisture was terrible for paper—but it had been shoved so far back in the drawer, in a folder marked “vacation plans,” that it was still legible right where we stood.

I glanced at it. Then without knowing why, I said, “Jesse.”

I showed it to her without letting her take hold of it. I didn’t know how to let it go. It felt like an alarm was going to go off the second I loosened my grip.

She stood next to me, reading, until she started to shake. Then she stepped back, like she was worried about alarms, too.

Then she asked, in a voice I didn’t recognize, “Are you going to turn that in?”

Sympathizer, I thought, even though that was impossible—those were all gone.

I thought about tucking this into my shoe as we detoxed, walking from the bus pickup to the nearest news outlet. Would they even show it if I did?

It was foolish to think they didn’t know, if even part of it was true. They’d been on the ground for the protests. They had footage, if they wanted it. Where was I supposed to take it, then?

I thought, like a traitor, Would Jesse know who?

I thought about what would happen to me, if I took this outside, and word got out, and the Archives knew this is where I had been.

“It’s not up to me,” I said.

She looked at me for a second, eyes flat and hard, and then shouldered past me and headed down the open path as fast as she could, already pulling off her hazmat helmet, knocking aside a cloud of dust.

I handed it over first thing inside the tent, without even looking at the Archive monitor who took it from me.

“Would you look at this,” Kepler was saying as I went out, showing me some flier with the Homeland and Municipal seals at the top, and it was the most agitated I’d seen him since he was being escorted out of the tech tent, but I didn’t stop. I needed to be out.

The hazmat suit felt too close, everywhere, like I had stayed too long in one place without moving, and a layer of dust had settled so heavy I’d never get out from under.

File 78154406. One (1) incident report from the 87th Street police precinct. Reported by Officer [NAME REDACTED] on [DATE REDACTED], when the NYPD attempted to clear a cell of New Day New City demonstrators. Complaint lists a number of incidents of alleged police brutality. Destroyed.

THANK YOU, HOMELAND EVIDENTIARY CENSUS WORKERS

You are the most crucial workers in the field today. Every day, your work brings us closer to identifying the domestic terrorists who sought to bring down our city, and finding justice for the civilians they endangered. The difficult work of the next few weeks will be the linchpin on which our further operations rest.

You are the key to victory; you are the keepers of the Republic!

TO: Scope Manager
BCC: District Superintendent

Today while working in the field, an Archive worker discovered a motivational flier evidently intended for a Census Worker.

While we understand the importance of equality and personal validation across all industries during this initial phase of evidence discovery and rebuilding, this flier has had an understandable negative effect on morale on those under my scope. The catalog output has noticeably slowed over the course of the afternoon—correlated, one assumes, to rumors spreading among the archivists in my scope that the Municipal Authority hasn’t been completely transparent about the support they’re receiving from the city in doing their assigned work under time-sensitive circumstances.

Please let me know any ideas you may have about how you and I can address this issue and restore morale to the workers within my scope; I am eager to help in any way I can, both for the sake of my staff and to improve their productivity on behalf of the city.

Sincerely yours,

Scope Leader 10024-B

I’d never actually seen a Homeland car. I was still trying to figure out what ad would have required painting a police car black (perfume, maybe) when the agents stepped out, and it was only because they were wearing suits that I realized what was happening.

When they asked where my scope manager was (politely, so politely they had to ask twice, it didn’t sound like the kind of trouble I knew it was), I pointed, because chances were they knew who they were looking for, and they were just testing your loyalty to your scope.

They took him someplace no one ever found out, and spoke to him for an hour.

That night, as we were waiting for the buses, he showed up and started in.

“We are here to do the work the city needs,” he shouted, so loudly some of the electricians turned to look. “If you’re concerned about other scopes or sectors, you clearly do not have enough density of discovery at hand, and will be reassigned as I and the Municipal Authority see fit. I suggest that all of you concentrate on your own fucking tasks. The city asks for your help, but do not think this work cannot continue without you. We’re not finished here.”

The words echoed off the sides of the trucks for a second after he stopped. Then there was nothing. Everyone must have seen the car, or heard that they’d come.

From beside Kepler (she didn’t stand beside me any more), Jesse took in a heavy breath and held it. It was the only sound.

The buses slid north one at a time—86, 87, 88, 89.

When the bus dropped us off, and all of us went our ways, I saw that at each corner was a black cab with its call light off, pointed away from the intersection, and that one at a time they slid into the traffic and followed someone.

One of them went after Kepler, but he looked like he already knew.

(I should have asked him more about what happened, I thought. How long had our city been looking over our shoulders, and me with my eyes only on my own work?)

One of them turned the corner with Jesse, and I put my hand on my phone to call her and warn her, and let it drop. If they were watching us, they were listening to us.

This was what had been waiting for us, when we discovered anything they had asked us to discover, about the people they had rid themselves of.

The night had gotten cold, all at once, and even though store lights poured into the pavement and food carts along the avenue made rackets for the crowds, the street might as well have been empty, for how alone I was.

The car that followed me home parked in front of my building, right near the door. They had a mission, and nothing to hide.

To: Scope Manager
BCC: District Superintendent

I am in receipt of your message. Thank you for the swift reply.

Please understand that when I filed the initial question, the team morale had momentarily faltered due to the strain of the work and the circumstance that seemed to an outsider like potential carelessness from the Census division. In my initial questions, neither I nor any member of my team meant any disrespect or insubordination. We remain committed to our work.

Of course I have explained the situation to all members of the scope team, and they are very happy to be working alongside the Census team for the safety of the City’s people.

The situation has been resolved—I hope it will be to your satisfaction. Thank you again for your attention to the matter.

Sincerely yours,

Scope Leader 10024-B

If you stood on the east side of Central Park West at 89th, next to what was left of the wall, you could see straight down to the Museum.

They had trucks there already, mobile stations and cranes and trucks loaded with stone. A coat of ants moved through and over it, people separating everything they could and start rebuilding.

“I heard about this,” said Jesse.

She was standing carefully on top of the rubble, beside a file cabinet sticking up like a knife from the ground. We were in the middle of the street—the remains were from a truck.

It was a clear day, cool and bright. If you looked ahead of you, it was the patches of Park that were left, and the piles of dust, and the museum in the middle of the green like a palace.

(If you looked behind you, there was a cop car parked half a block away. There were more of them every day, studding the streets anywhere in our scope where the roads were passable. This one had an ad for orange juice painted across it, bright and crawling halfway up to the roof. They weren’t Homeland. They didn’t care who saw them.)

“There are so many,” I said.

There were so few of us—a handful of buses could carry us—and so much of what we were doing was still dust and trouble.

I looked around absently for Kepler, though I wasn’t sure why I’d want him to see it. He should be looking at the park. He’d had enough unhappiness.

“The museum damage has been making the city look bad,” said Jesse, like she’d heard someone talking about it on the radio. (She hadn’t—there was radio silence about everything, since the Raid—but she always sounded like she knew her sources.) “They want something to show that it’s really over. That they got ‘em all.”

Sympathizer, I thought, but it seemed less terrifying now. Part of me was worried for her—they didn’t care if you were lying at all when they took you away, look at Kepler, she had to be more careful than this—but it was just a thing that made me numb, set in the row of other numb things, beside the place where you try not to tell plaster from bone.

I said, quietly, “I don’t know what they must have done, to bring this down on them.”

My voice shook, just saying it, like the cops a block away could hear me.

Jesse looked over at me.

She said, “It would have been someone, eventually. The city needs examples.”

That wasn’t how I’d meant it, I didn’t think—I’d wanted to know what they’d done, I wanted at last to ask questions—but it was over, and too late.

We pried the file cabinet out of the wreckage, and got to work.

File 30098516. Three (3) packing slips from medical supplies addressed to to CityMed Mobile Clinic free medical service, with a parking permit for 87th Street between Amsterdam and Columbus. Invoices include: seventeen (17) cases of antibiotic cream, twenty-four (24) cases of medical gauze, four (4) cases of syringes; two (2) cases of analgesic ointment; one (1) case of vitamin supplements, three (23) cases of antihistamines.

CityMed Mobile records indicate these shipments to be atypical of the normal run of business. It seems highly probable the clinic was providing medical services to the domestic insurgent cell responsible for the Raid. Flagged RED. Have alerted Mayor’s office.

ADDENDUM: The District Superintendent has ordered the city to suspend all CityMed Mobile Clinic service pending investigation of insurgent sympathies within the organization. All documentation forwarded immediately to Office of the Investigator.

THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY WELCOMES YOU TONIGHT—ALL NIGHT

Metro Times—The months since the unforgettable Raids has been a dark time for New York. Rarely is a city forced to take action against its own. The shadow of domestic terrorism is a tough one to shake, and questions still linger about what could have been done to prevent the situation from escalating to the point of violence. That the insurgents were agitating for their goals, there’s no doubt—but that New York was the victim of friendly fire under executive order, there’s no denying.

The interim screening and security measures (temporarily overseen by the NYPD pending approval by the legislature) are only the beginning of a very tough hill New York—and the nation—will have to scale.

But New York is resilient—it knows how to rise from the ashes with flair. After months of tireless work by the newly-formed Archive and Census divisions of the Municipal Authority (sponsored by Central Trust Bank) throughout the Upper West Side, construction workers, conservationists, and curators were able to begin work on the restoration and rebuilding of one of the city’s most beloved institutions, the American Museum of Natural History.

Inch by inch, they’ve been fighting to repair every fossil, recapture every display, and reassemble every brick pulled from the blast site. “Every bone fragment we could find was the source of so much happiness it was like it was being excavated for the first time,” Museum Director Michael Archibald says. “When you’re trying to recover from something of this scale, every victory counts.”

And now, battered but far from broken, the Natural History Museum is once again opening its doors.

Beginning tonight at midnight, the Museum will open its doors twenty-four hours a day for the next week, a gift to the public and a symbol of the neighborhood’s indomitable will to rise above.

There will be no gala celebrations to mark the night. “This event is meant to be a good experience for those who want to come and enjoy the museum,” says Archibald, “yet we also recognize what the neighborhood has suffered and don’t want to trivialize that.”

The cleanup work continues. But for many this week in New York, an open door will be enough.

File 80005062. One (1) partial greeting card. Remaining text on the face reads “Happy Birthday to the Best—” Inside inscription, if any, missing. Recovered from sewer grate on northwest corner of 87th and Columbus Ave. Archived.

About the Author

Genevieve Valentine is the author of Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti. Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Journal of Mythic Arts, Fantasy Magazine, Lightspeed, and Apex, and in the anthologies Federations, The Living Dead 2, The Way of the Wizard, Running with the Pack, Teeth, and more. She is a co-author of the forthcoming pop-culture book Geek Wisdom, and her film and TV writing has appeared in Fantasy Magazine and Strange Horizons. Her appetite for bad movies is insatiable, a tragedy she tracks on her blog.

Videodrome at Thirty

Keith Phipps

“A lot of people have thought of this film as very prophetic. I myself have never been interested in being a prophet of any kind. [ . . . ] But when your antennae are out there waving in the breeze and you allow them to develop because you think of yourself as an artist, you will undoubtedly pick up some signals from somewhere in the Videodrome way that other people don’t pick up.” —David Cronenberg, 2004 audio commentary to Videodrome

“Mr. Cronenberg, who also directed Scanners, is developing a real genius for this sort of thing; one measure of the innovativeness of Videodrome is that it feels vaguely futuristic, even though it’s apparently set in the present.” —Janet Maslin, 1983 New York Times review of Videodrome

David Cronenberg’s 1983 feature Videodrome opens with a scene whose full eeriness isn’t apparent without scrutiny. As the camera moves slowly away from a television, a bumper ad for Civic TV (“The one you take to bed with you”) gets replaced by a woman who begins speaking directly to the sleeping figure in front of the screen, revealed as the camera pulls back to be protagonist Max Renn (James Woods). “Max, it’s that time again,” she says before teasingly reeling off his daily to-do list. As she concludes, the screen cuts to another bumper and then, with a flick of Max’s finger accompanied by a click on the soundtrack, the image disappears. The peculiarity of being woken up by a personally recorded agenda aside, it looks like a mundane moment. Look closely, however, and you’ll see that Max isn’t holding a remote.

Videodrome ends with a bookend scene. Max is elsewhere, in front of another TV screen, taking orders delivered in a much more commanding tone from a different woman. The orders lead him to put a gun to his head and pull the trigger, causing the television to explode in a geyser of viscera, the last in a series of images that explicitly fuse flesh and circuitry. But the fusion is there from the start. A hand flicks. A machine responds. An everyday gesture is made unnerving by the removal of a mediating device. Max ends the film a convert hailing the age of “the New Flesh” and eliminating its enemies before taking his own life, but the opening moments suggest he joined the New Flesh ranks long ago.

Cronenberg’s film takes the ways technology changes, and merges with, humanity as its central theme and it’s filled with early ’80s devices and imagery that support that theme: videocassettes, Atari controllers, pirate satellite dishes. It’s a diagnosis of the modern condition from an era when Sting still seemed cool. But it’s also a remarkably prescient film, an analog vision of the digital future waiting just around the corner and the new intimacy our minds and bodies would assume with the machinery we created to serve us, an intimacy for which sex would serve as a gateway.

No mere consumer of Civic TV, Brand owns the station, a far-end-of-the-dial UHF outfit that specializes in programming other stations won’t touch, including soft-core pornography. Early in the film, Brand considers picking up a series called Samurai Dreams, but worries it won’t catch fire with his late-night viewers. “There’s something too soft about it,” he asks, before expressing a desire for “something tough.”

In the 1980s, pornography—soft and otherwise—remained in the margins, where it had retreated once again after a brief explosion of “porno chic” in the early ’70s that found Deep Throat and other hardcore films playing in mainstream theaters. With pornography easy to access—even difficult to avoid—on the Internet, it’s hard to imagine a time when kids tried to catch bits of action in the brief moments of clarity on cable systems’ scrambled channels. But even in the ’80s, the margins were drawing in. Cinemax regularly played softcore fare from the previous decade—made mostly in Europe and Australia—in its late-night slots and the many video stores springing up usually featured an adults-only section. Civic TV even had a real-life precedent too in Toronto, Cronenberg’s hometown and the setting for much of the film, where a station called Citytv ran a series called Baby Blue Movie in the wee hours of the weekend.

Max is ahead of his time in sensing the rougher appetites of the years to come as well. Exposed by Harlan, one of the station’s engineers, to the sadistic images of torture and abuse that constitute the entirety of a television program known as Videodrome, Max senses an opportunity to get ahead of the programming curve by moving immediately to its extreme. In some respects, he had the right idea. Within a few years, mainstream depictions of sex would shift in emphasis from joy to danger as the T&A films of the early part of the decade gave way to the erotic thrillers of its latter half, a trend that would continue through much of the ’90s. The reasons aren’t hard to discern. AIDS invested sex with a fearfulness it hadn’t had before and as the mood of the country grew increasingly conservative, free expressions of sex fell out of favor. The peephole shower scene of Porky’s gave way to Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct (whose sequel Cronenberg, however improbably, almost directed). Increasingly, culturally dominant fantasies of sex became tangled up with images of death.

That’s a tangling that’s fascinated Cronenberg throughout his career. A self-described Freudian, he’s returned again and again to the place where Thanatos meets Eros in films like Shivers (his first film to find a wide audience) and Crash (a film whose surrounding controversy almost kept it from finding much of an audience at all). Videodrome stirs something within Max as well. Though he speaks of it as a wise investment—think of the low overhead—he returns to it as a viewer and as he be begins a relationship with Nikki Brand, a local radio personality with a masochistic streak, and possibly a death wish, played by Debbie Harry. Videodrome becomes a central part of their relationship. They watch it and grow inspired to push their personal limits.

For Nikki, that includes burning her breast with a cigarette (a visual pun on her last name that also provides another example of a piece of technology, however crude, altering a human body). The moment at first repulses Max, but not enough to scare him away and the film suggests that watching Videodrome has opened him up to some deep, unspoken desires, desires that Nikki anticipates and accommodates, becoming their embodiment, almost like a customized porn channel tuned into his particular interests, even those he has trouble saying out loud.

Whether by design or as a consequence of Harry’s monotone performance, Nikki never quite seems fully human, more like a projection of Max’s psyche as a real woman. She’s also a herald of the sexual near-future. The Internet has both brought the underground channels which those whose sexual tastes fall outside the mainstream closer to the surface (and helped redefined the mainstream in the process). It’s met the needs of those more interested in watching, too. With a potentially infinite audience, there seems to be no fetish too obscure and no fantasy too extreme for someone not to be realizing it somewhere online. Nikki’s a fantasy seemingly willed into flesh, but she’s also a vision of a time when such fantasies would be only a few keystrokes away.

In time, Nikki goes in search of Videodrome itself, returning to Max only as an alluring vision to draw him deeper into its world. At this point the film doesn’t abandon sex or, especially, sexual imagery, but it becomes apparent that both the film itself, and the world within it, have broader concerns. When Nikki and Max first meet, it’s as part of a talk show about “television and social responsibility” where they’re joined by a third guest, “media prophet” Brian O’Blivion. Declining to appear in person, for reasons that will become clear later, in the film, O’Blivion appears on a TV monitor, speaking aphorisms that sound both cryptic and correct, like “The television screen has become the retina of the mind’s eye” and “Soon all of us will have special names, names designed to cause the cathode ray tube to resonate.”

Cronenberg modeled O’Blivion after Marshall McLuhan, a fellow Canadian who emerged as the preeminent media theorist of the 1960s. McLuhan believed himself to be living in a moment of transition, with humanity transitioning into a “postliterate” age thanks to the rise of electronic media, a rise that began with the telegraph and had carried on through the television and beyond. “Allmedia, from the phonetic alphabet to the computer, are extensions of man that cause deep and lasting changes in him and transform his environment,” McLuhan told Playboy in a 1969 interview. Videodrome runs with those notions, making literal the fusion of bodies and machinery, most famously in scenes in which Max’s belly develops a vagina-like opening capable of admitting a videocassette (and, later, a gun).

McLuhan’s been going in and out of academic fashion since his heyday, suffering the fate of all those hailed as a prophet in their own time whose predictions don’t come true. (His vision of a United States soon to break up into “a series of regional and racial ministates,” for instance, remains unfulfilled.) But his concept of a “Global Village” has more than a little in common with ways the Internet has reshaped the world and the core principle beneath his theories—that the media we create reshapes the way we see and interact with the world—seems tough to deny.

Videodrome takes that notion to its extreme with images of technology that reshape bodies to fit its needs or, more accurately, images of bodies bending to find common ground with new technology. Television becomes a part of the sexual process and Max’s body responds in kind (even if, as we later discover, only in hallucination). The television returns the favor, becoming of orifice for Max to enter. In one of the many videotapes he leaves behind to sustain his existence after death, O’Blivion speaks of the brain tumor that killed him, a tumor brought about by the signal placed beneath Videodrome, as “a new organ.” It’s evolution—both biological and technological—working in tandem and in fast-forward.

As memorable as Rick Baker’s special effects work is in Videodrome, it’s the way Cronenberg makes even the most grotesque imagery sprout from recognizable psychological terrain that makes it so effective. The film makes literal a new relationship between humanity and technology then happening under the skin, a relationship that’s only grown more intense in the thirty years since Videodrome’s release. Both McLuhan and Cronenberg articulated visions of the computer age to come based on the technology at hand. (Cronenberg’s 1999 videogame and virtual reality-inspired film Existenz updates some of Videodrome’s themes for the CD-Rom era.) But for both men’s work to resonate getting the details right matters less than understanding the principles beneath the details. In 1983, Max’s waking up to a screen telling him what to do looked novel. Thirty years later, how wake up and check a laptop, or a tablet, or a smart phone to discern the shape of the day?

Videodrome got much right about the future of television. In her liner notes to the 2004 DVD release, critic Carrie Rickey notes “what was satire in its own day has turned out to be eerily accurate in its prediction of the TV landscape at the millennium, with its reality shows that suggest public life on TV is ‘more real’ than private life in the flesh.” It got even more right about, well, the future. Within a few years of the film’s release, cyberpunk would become ascendant and with it a concern with the divide between the virtual and the real. Videodrome looks to a time beyond that, a point when the divide between humans their technology and the realities those technologies create would become impossible to discern.

In the same Playboy interview, McLuhan says, “20th Century man’s relationship to the computer is not by nature very different from prehistoric man’s relationship to his boat or to his wheel—with the important difference that all previous technologies or extensions of man were partial and fragmentary, whereas the electric is total and inclusive. Now man is beginning to wear his brain outside his skull and his nerves outside his skin; new technology breeds new man.” He could easily be talking about Max at the end of Videodrome, after he becomes an operative for the forces of O’Blivion’s New Flesh. Or he could be talking about you and me, whose brains have become accustomed to regularly checking email or Twitter or Facebook, who feel disconnected from the world when the 3G drops out, who use text messages to tell others they love them, or want them, or miss them, and who will live on in online trace, O’Blivion-like, after our bodies have died. We’re all living in New Flesh now.

About the Author

Keith Phipps is a Chicago-based writer and editor specializing in pop culture. From 1996 until 2012 he worked for The A.V. Club, serving as its editor from 2004 until his departure. Keith’s work has appeared in Slate, The Atlantic, The Village Voice, L.A. Weekly, The Daily Beast, Vulture, Time Out Chicago, Time Out New York and other publications. He can be found on Twitter at @kphipps3000.

Accepting a More Profitable Shoe: A Conversation with M. C. Planck

Jeremy L. C. Jones

There’s much to enjoy (and admire) about M. C. Planck’s debut novel, The Kassa Gambit. There’s the gritty, well-textured world-building; the lead characters Lt. Kyle Daspar, a “Bruce Willis-like” spy, and Prudence Falling, a “kick-ass . . . but not brash” heroine who holds together a motley crew of space adventurers.

The prose stays punchy and tough throughout, but allows for lyricism along the way as well.

In The Kassa Gambit, Planck seems to have picked the best elements from the spy thriller and threaded them through a fast-moving space adventure.

At the beginning, it’s been hundreds of years since the earth became uninhabitable for humans. Humanity has colonized one planet after another in an attempt to satiate humanity’s seemingly limitless appetite for expansion. Some, like Altair Prime, flourish in gentle environments, and others barely survive poisonous atmospheres, heavy gravity, and other dangers; but the one trouble they never encounter is competition. Mankind seems alone in the universe.

And then the freighter, Ulysses, passes close to Kassa and picks up a faint distress beacon. Reluctantly, the roguish Prudence Falling decides to land her ship only to find a handful of survivors hiding in the smoking ruins of a once thriving farming company. Next comes the not-quite-what-he-seems Lt. Kyle Despar from Altair Prime, a policeman and low-level apparatchik in an imperialist political party. Kassa has been attacked; the body count is high, and the prime suspect is an unknown alien race. Now Falling and Despar have to figure out who their enemies really are, and possibly, the enemies of the entire human race.

“For me, the real point is the discussion Prudence has with Mauree, the antiques dealer, over the nature and responsibilities of the ‘Tech-ten’ societies,” said Planck. “The rest of it’s just a bit of fun.”

The American-born Planck now lives and writes in Australia. Below, we take a little time to get to know him and to discuss writing in general, his new novel in particular . . . and a tree climbing dog named Yahzi.

Before we really get started, since this is your debut novel, is there anything we need to know about you?

For years Jack Vance made a point of not giving interviews or even having an author’s blurb on his books; he felt his work should stand on its own, without any reference to the author. What you should know about me is that I am vain enough to desire the same affectation, although my publisher and agent have other ideas.

You’ve traveled, moved around, and shifted careers a good bit. How do you suppose your “nearly-transient childhood” and various careers prepared you for writing speculative fiction in general and this novel in particular?

I’ve been to almost all of the states in the USA, which I think gives a certain sense of place. Reading American Gods, one certainly gets the impression that all that traveling affected Neil Gamain, so surely it must have done me some good.

Mostly, though, I spent a lot of time reading. I estimate I’ve read something on the order of 5,000 books or so, the majority in SF&F but not all. I like to think all that time spent traveling through the genre has given me a sense of place for it.

Where’d you start with The Kassa Gambit? What came first?

Setting came first; I wanted to write a space-ship story because that’s what my wife likes. Then I needed something exciting to open with. Thus the mines; the idea that everything could blow up in the first few pages. Then I had to figure out why there were mines. The rest followed.

What came next?

Prudence’s character was the second starting point. I wanted a heroine that wasn’t sassy. Kick-ass, yes, but not brash.

How’d you go bout building Kassa, Altair Prime, and the universe of The Kassa Gambit?

Most of the locations were plot-driven; Altair had to be hospitable, Kassa had to be primitive, etc. Solistar and Baharain were fun, though. I just tried to imagine how people would adapt to places that had their own quirks.

The solar suits are one of the few pieces of real science; heavy salts in rubber really do intercept x-rays. I read about a dentist who invented rubber smocks to replace the lead-lined ones. I particularly liked the image of a planet where you could breathe the air, but the sun would kill you; contrasted with another planet where the air was silently toxic but everything else was fine. Every world had its own way to die; on Altair, the danger was boredom, which ultimately turns out to be less benign than it sounds.

I was also heavily inspired (obviously) by Jack Vance, the master of the space picaresque. The monks are a homage to both his Moon Moth and Dave Duncan’s Hero!.

What are some of Vance’s most significant influences on you? I wonder if there are any significant ways in which you disagree with Vance’s take on the genre?

Vance embodies both style and substance. He is one of those authors you can identify from a single paragraph, not merely from the baroque vocabulary but also from the sardonic voice. Even when he is being serious or tragic you can hear him in the background, like Horace Walpole: “This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.”

He is also the master of realistic fantasia; his worlds are always extreme and unique, but at the edge of plausible. Too many authors (in my humble opinion) live by the “rule of cool;” if it’s a cool scene, that’s good enough. Vance always seems to want to make the underlying framework sound, as well.

If there is anything I disagree with Vance on, it is purely a product of our times. Much of Vance’s work has a patina of sexism to it which might occasionally strike the modern reader. For his time, however, he was as un-sexist as I think it was possible to be; even through his worst, most flagrantly misogynistic characters, you can hear him chuckling through the tears in the background. (Now I need to stress he isn’t that sexist; he’s no Robert A. Heinlein!)

The other thing he missed was computers. One of his novels has an index card machine. But everybody missed computers, so again, not much of a knock. It does make you twitch, though: if the old masters could miss that, what are we missing? What will future generations chuckle at? Although, honestly, if people are still reading my work that far in the future, I don’t care if they’re laughing.

Here is a perfect example of Vance’s voice in action. Several characters are having a discussion about religion and the origin of the universe. After listening to a number of amusingly bizarre theories, the grumpy pragmatist of the group is compelled to give his opinion, and does so in true Vancian style:

“Notice this rent in my garment; I am at a loss to explain its presence! I am even more puzzled by the existence of the universe.”

What is it about the “space picaresque” that appeals to you? Why clever rogues and not sparkle-tooth heroes?

A sparkle-tooth hero is just a clever rogue on a lucky streak.

Mostly, though, I can’t stand the concept of fate. Character agency is what drives dramatic tension. The whole farm-boy-destined-for-greatness grates on my nerves. Heroes have destinies, but rogues have interesting stories.

Where in the universe of The Kassa Gambit would you most and least like to visit?

Most: Zanzibar. Like Jorgun, I suspect I would be thrilled with the faux crenulations and open-air bazaars.

Least: Baharain. Toxic and oppressive, and that’s just the government. The deadly air and extra gravity are no fun either.

Do the governments in your novel ever live up to their responsibilities? Is it even possible for them?

Altair is actually a very nice place to live. They build restaurants in the air and their biggest worry is what to wear to a party. That’s the very definition of a successful government. And ultimately it is the strength of Altair that saves the day; Kyle and Prudence are necessary but not sufficient.

What moment or moments best capture(s) the essence of Prudence Falling?

The rented shoes. That she recognized how absurd the concept was, and embraced it anyway. That’s probably the most original idea in the whole book, and a comment on the absurdity of commercial engineering: putting advanced technology to work solely to protect brand identity. Not to make a better shoe, but to make a more profitable shoe. One could possibly draw a parallel with current events from that, but I won’t be held responsible.

Second would be when she first lands on Kassa; that compassion tempered with caution. Originally I wanted to call the book “Prudence Falling,” as in prudence when falling out of orbit. But both my agent and my editor thought that was a terrible title.

What changed from your original vision of The Kassa Gambit and what remained the same?

Actually, remarkably little changed. Once Kyle showed up, the rest of the story seemed kind of inevitable. The book is pretty much the same as my first draft.

One thing I did have to change was some of the language and world-setting; originally I called Fleet personnel by the appellation “milits,’ which earned some reproving glances from my wife [Sara Creasy], insomuch as that was a term from her Song of Scarabaeus. She did let me keep the inertial mass spaceship engines, though, which is nice considering I invented them for her.

I also borrowed the nodes, which she invented years ago before we met. The whole “stuck in hyperspace” trope is pretty common, of course, but the idea that these locations are fixed and immutable is less common. I found that really interesting.

So our books could actually be set in the same universe, albeit very far apart. Her book has a different feel, though; more modern, more focused on the tech and big ideas, while mine is very much a low-level romp.

In what ways has your wife influenced you as a writer in general and as a writer of The Kassa Gambit in particular?

She sparked TKG by telling me I had to write a story where everything was blowing up on the first page. Also, we both love Firefly. It doesn’t hurt that she used to be a professional editor, either. We bounce story ideas off of each other, although she tends to do more bouncing than actual writing.

Thanks to her, my manuscripts look like I understand grammar. Her real contribution, though, was inspiring me to write romance novels, which is how I learned to write female characters. But we’ll talk no more about that!

In what ways, if any, were you surprised by the characters along the way?

The answer would have to be Garcia. I am sure that I did not have such a heroic role for him in mind when I wrote him. But he seemed the perfect choice, almost mystically equipped for that particular bit of glory. I am always happiest when the hero’s power turns out to be endurance; the ability to hold on, to persevere in the face of both danger and temptation. Secondly, I expect my heroes to know their limits, to understand the difference between sacrifice and suicide. Garcia first equips himself with the tools necessary for his task, and then makes clear just how limited his contribution can be; he is under no illusions of grandeur, and he allows no one else to assign them to him. To me, that is the best kind of heroism.

The middle of the novel is as taut as a drum. How do you go about building, layering, and maintaining such a high level of suspense and intrigue?

The middle part was a bit difficult. I was worried that people would get bored with the shilly-shallying and side-plots. I think it mostly works because Kyle seems about to die in every chapter. I wanted to put in more interesting places, but I didn’t want to sacrifice plot momentum. Vance could make those places a whole story in themselves; I’m not quite there yet.

What’s next for you?

I have a fantasy novel with the agent, and I’m working on a contemporary SF about a dog.

I’m a huge dog lover; I used to have a coyote-shepherd mix that was the smartest non-human animal I have ever encountered. Problem was, his genius was dedicated to pure evil. Some dogs think they’re human; Yahzi assumed everyone else was a dog.

Which was funny since he was practically a cat. Twice I had to climb a tree to get him down. He had this on-going war with an owl in the riverbed, and unlike most dogs, would look up to find it. Some of our trees have pretty low-hanging branches, and before you know it this damn dog is twenty feet off the ground. Of course, like a cat, he had no freaking clue how to get down. That was a heart-in-the-mouth moment (two of them, actually).

He also had a thing going with the local coyote pack. He would go tearing off after them, trying to make them submit to his rule. I would go tearing after him, trying to keep him alive (he outweighed the coyotes by a good margin, but they had a whole pack).

That sense of adventure—that willingness to go for the brass ring—was very inspiring. It kept me young beyond my time. Yahzi knew no fear. Prudence, yes; he didn’t mess with German Shepherds, geese, or horses, because he knew his limits. But he was willing to give trees a go.

So, in some small way, my next SF is homage to that nature; to the creature who is more than animal, but not human; a victim of our meddling with the natural order. All dog stories, really, are like that; Call of the Wild is just Frankenstein on four legs.

Any parting words?

I hope not! This is supposed to be au revoir, not goodbye. Unless the agent really, really hates the fantasy novel.

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: Original Sin

Alethea Kontis

I always find myself stumped when I’m put on a panel or asked in an interview about contemporary adaptations of “original” fairy tales. Fairy stories began in Ancient Egypt, Greece, and China. Men and women started collecting these stories and writing them down in Italy, and then France, all before the Brothers Grimm. Whether the events unfolded within someone’s mind or in front of the eyes, no one can say. What we can be sure of is that—once upon a time—a tale was told by someone, to someone, for a reason.

After that, fairy stories became a victim of the giant sociological ouroboros: life imitating art imitating life, ad infinitum. A storyteller weaves a tale on which a child bases his moral development. That child then grows up and tells his children the same story. But it’s not really the same story, is it? It’s been adapted over the years based on how it affected that first child, and what reason he now had for telling that story to his own children. How these and future generations of children interpret the story similarly depends on their environment and upbringing.

And how appropriate are fairy tales for children, anyway? It’s a question that’s been bandied about for centuries.

The Grimms worried with this concept back in 1812, carefully sifting through their collection to find the most “appropriate” tales for children and modifying even their own stories throughout the many editions of their Märchen. For instance: Rapunzel’s deception was “originally” discovered by the witch in the tower when Rapunzel commented on how tight her dress was getting about the middle due to pregnancy. The Grimms changed this in later editions to Rapunzel randomly commenting on how the prince was so much easier to pull up than the witch.

“Are not the cruel punishments which are inflicted on the wicked in fairy tales unfit for children’s ears? Thirty years ago children were not shocked by any such matters: now they are said to be more sensitive.” So said Andrew Lang in the introduction to the 1890 edition of his Red Fairy Book. Unsurprisingly Lang included the more Christian adaptation of “Rapunzel.” He also chose Perrault’s “Cinderella” over the Grimm’s bloodier interpretation. Lang went on to suppose that “Thirty years hence there will be a generation of children whose parents have seen a very rough aspect of life, and this infantile humanitarianism will probably have disappeared.”

In 1952, far more than thirty years after Lang’s prophetic inscriptions, Geoffrey Handley-Taylor wrote a book on nursery rhyme reform in which he noted that of 200 common nursery rhymes; only half personified “all that is glorious and ideal for the child.” The remaining 100 described a multitude of sins, including: death, devouring, squeezing, decapitation, kidnapping, whipping, general dishonesty, lunacy, drunkenness, house burning, abandonment, quarrelling, discrimination, and unlawful imprisonment.

Indeed! With nurseries full of “Rock-a-bye Baby” and “Oranges and Lemons,” it’s a wonder any of us can function in polite society.

So let’s talk about kids today. (And I’m talking “Twenty-First Century”, because anyone born before the year 2000 is either already in high school or quickly on their way.) Raised on fairy stories written by Walt Disney, they know “Rapunzel” as “Tangled.” No one loses a firstborn child because of a greedy wife. No one gets knocked up and has twins. No one gets blinded and brought back (though tears are still magical). Evil is just Evil (because we said so) and eventually Falls from a Great Height. True Love triumphs and everyone lives Happily Ever After.

Of course, fairy stories have always depended on allegory. They are nothing like reality. Reality is a reed thin “housewife” in a posh dress with a bad attitude. Reality is chasing tornadoes or Bigfoot or aliens or ghosts. Reality is cooking a gourmet meal in 30 minutes using only a butter knife and a roll of duct tape. Reality is screwing up your life and having David Tutera with his bottomless money purse swoop in and save the day so that you and your True Love may live Happily Every After.

In the meantime, we must empty our pockets, take off our shoes, throw away our water bottles, and be x-rayed before getting on a plane to see grandma. There are now two types of drills in school, one for Acts of God and one for Acts of Crazy People with Guns. Children can bully other children to the brink of suicide, and they don’t even have to live in the same town. Or state. Or country.

Similarly, some of the most popular current young adult literature involves post-apocalyptic societies and young women who save the day and live . . . but not happily. The “original” fairy tales are trickling back into the mainstream. Snow White loses the guy but leads an army. Hansel and Gretel hunt witches. Even Disney has thrown their own hat into the ring, offering up their bowdlerized tales for a popular prime time television series rated PG-V (for violence).

Is this a good thing? That question still gets asked: Are fairy tales appropriate for children?

Perhaps the question should be more along the lines of: Do we even know who our children are? Do we realize what sort of world we have created for them, what sort of unrealistic expectations they now have based on what we’ve presented as “reality”? Are we properly preparing our babies for a world of Code Red classroom drills and x-rays, or are we coddling them with “infantile humanitarianism?”

I wonder what the children of today would say, if we asked them. Would they prefer to hear about a couple of greedy stepsisters having their eyes pecked out for their lying and greedy ways, or a handful of housewives inciting a catfight? Would they rather imagine twelve dancing princesses, or an overdressed toddler in a tiara? Would they see these stories for their true meanings, or would they escalate the ridiculousness to new heights? If they discovered that in some iterations, the frog prince was dashed against the wall by the silly young princess, would this lead to spates of animal cruelty?

I have a feeling that today’s children would be even less shocked than their nineteenth century counterparts. And in an entertainment industry sorely lacking a moral compass, I believe the “original” fairy stories should definitely be reintroduced into the nursery room . . . whichever “original” you choose.

About the Author

New York Times bestselling author Alethea Kontis is a princess, a goddess, a force of nature, and a mess. She’s known for screwing up the alphabet, scolding vampire hunters, turning garden gnomes into mad scientists, and making sense out of fairy tales. Alethea is the co-author of Sherrilyn Kenyon’s Dark-Hunter Companion and penned the AlphaOops series of picture books. She has done multiple collaborations with Eisner-winning artist J.K. Lee, including The Wonderland Alphabet and the illustrated Twitter serial “Diary of a Mad Scientist Garden Gnome.” Her debut YA fairy tale novel, Enchanted, will be published by HMH (Harcourt Books) in 2012.

Born in Burlington, Vermont, Alethea now lives in Northern Virginia with her Fairy Godfamily. She makes the best baklava youve ever tasted and sleeps with a teddy bear named Charlie.

Editor’s Desk: Forwards and Backwards

Neil Clarke

Since my heart attack last summer, I’ve been trying to come up with something that would show my appreciation for all the support I received from our readers. One obvious option is to continue to build upon and strengthen what we’ve created here at Clarkesworld. Last month, I mentioned our intention to include a fourth original story in each issue after we pick up our next five hundred subscribers. Behind the scenes, there was another project brewing: a reprints department. This has been on my “to-do” list for some time and last month, I asked Gardner Dozois to join us as our first reprints editor.

While an introduction probably isn’t necessary, there may be some readers that are not familiar with his work. Gardner was the editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction for almost twenty years, and also edits an award-winning annual anthology series. The Year’s Best Science Fiction, has won the Locus Award for Best Anthology sixteen times, more than any other anthology series in history, and the title is now celebrating its twenty-ninth year. Gardner has won the Hugo Award for Best Editor fifteen times, won the Locus Award thirty-five times, including an unprecedented sixteen times in a row as Best Editor, and has won the Sidewise Award and two Nebula Awards for his own short fiction. In 2011, he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.

Starting in April, each issue will feature two reprints selected by Gardner. That means five stories per issue (and in the podcast) with hopes of a sixth on the horizon. I hope you enjoy this latest addition to our magazine. It feels great to be able to do this.

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) recently announced the 2012 nominees for the Nebula Award and Clarkesworld stories received more nominations than ever before:

Best Novella Nominee
“Fade to White” by Catherynne M. Valente

Best Short Story Nominees
“Robot” by Helena Bell
“Immersion” by Aliette de Bodard
“Fragmentation, or Ten Thousand Goodbyes” by Tom Crosshill

I can’t begin to describe just how happy it makes me to see four stories from Clarkesworld on this year’s ballot and it is made even sweeter when I look at this in the context of all of the health difficulties I had last year.

Congratulations to our (and all the other) nominees! For a complete list of nominees, please visit sfwa.org.

Speaking of awards, if you are nominating in this year’s Hugo Awards, you have until March 10th. I’m still receiving questions from readers about this, so yes, Clarkesworld is eligible for Best Semiprozine and I’m eligible for Best Editor, short form. If you are considering  voting for us, or already have, thank you for your support. It means a lot, no matter what way the final ballot turns out. Thank you.

Until next month . . .

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, owner of Wyrm Publishing and a 2012 Hugo Nominee for Best Editor (short form). He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.