Annex

Benjanun Sriduangkaew

On the eve of Samutthewi’s entry into the Costeya Hegemony, Esithu was sloughing off the shell of their birth-body. There would be speculation afterward what Esithu was born as—someone’s son, someone’s daughter? To that Esithu would always say, “I was born as I am now,” which became a stretch after Esithu obtained a second then a third body. A hardware upgrade, they liked to say. You can never have too many.

That was much later.

Esithu was a creature of solitude but, afflicted with being so new in a world so old, they found themselves craving company.

This close to the heels of conquest, sedition was a rife, busy game, and it drew Esithu as war drew soldiers. They came to it—or it came to them—in a little club on the outskirts of Vithansuthi, the city in which everything happened.

On the walls, flowers fought and devoured each other, mouth-tipped stamens tessellating in choral fury. Onstage a dancer moved in simpatico, mercury limbs shimmering silver, a body of animated liquid.

“It is said,” Esithu’s table companion began, a non-sequitur to follow a conversation they never started, “that the universe was sung into being by a divine androgyne.”

At that point Esithu was not yet acquainted with quantum theories, though even further along in life they would find said theories little more than superstition. Blunt, they asked, “Are you some sort of evangelist?”

The woman’s eyes glittered. Her sclera and irises were hidden behind compound lenses, all ruby facets. “Truth is always in need of evangelizing. Now more than ever, and I’m not talking about creation myths.”

“This is a bad climate for demagogues.”

“Indeed no; it’s never been better.”

“We lost, you realize.” Their government bent so quickly to surrender there’d hardly been casualties. Esithu had bet on that, and reaped a tidy profit against friends more patriotic.

“Our defeat is opportune. It is now that we can subvert them from within.”

Esithu snorted. Newly assimilated border planets subverted nothing except their own sense of self. Samutthewi would lap and swallow until it was as Hegemonic as the rest.

“But now is the time,” the woman insisted. “Not five years from now when we’ve grown comfortable; not ten years from now when we think back and say, ah, it used to be untidy and now that we’ve the Hegemony breathing on our neck everything is better—faster—more beautiful. Then it will be nearly impossible.”

They laughed in her face. “It is impossible now.”

A second dancer vaulted over the first, feet and fingers full of fire.

Esithu’s  alterations were more comprehensive than most. A recasting of face to obtain a youthful blankness that allowed for no surety—at a glance or several—male or female. A removal of signatures that gave them identity and history. Their body grew a map of scars, each puckered indentation marking where a regulation implant used to be. Their subsequent bodies, though made fresh, bore much the same.

Cellular editing was as yet unrefined. Hormonal inhibitors were installed, excess skin sheared away, and much that was flesh was replaced by that which was not. It made them strong and incandescent. Blood that flowed faster and a heart that shouted louder. Esithu felt their pulse in their fingertips and their mouth, a new potency that informed their dreams with lightning jolts.

Perhaps this delirious power—the need for an outlet—brought them back to the club, on a night where ambient audio was generated by replicants reenacting war. The ceiling was a sky the color of rust, the floor cracked earth the hue of vertebrae, and two-dimensional combatants screamed while equally flat fighters rained down fire. No such war had been fought on Samutthewi soil for generations uncounted. It was anachronistic; it plucked at the gut. The volume was muted but the tempo could be felt marrow-deep. Patrons kept on edge, nervous energy that could be channeled.

A clever if obvious trick, and Esithu respected tricks that worked. When the woman returned they didn’t tell her to preach elsewhere, and she introduced herself as Lykesca.

“Sounds Costeya,” Esithu said.

She touched her lenses. They were animated today, amber twitching against green, flaring into tendrils that took the place of her hair. Beneath the undulating colors her skull gleamed metallic red. “Suoqua.”

“An agent provocateur then.” Of a sovereignty that’d just seceded from—and proven itself a match for—the Hegemony.

“Not a bit. I’m Samutthewi stock much like you, and would give a proof of phenotype if that meant anything, which you of all people would know it doesn’t.”

It did not. Attaining a look more Costeya had become the rage; life could be made just a little easier that way. Gendered characteristics aside, Estihu had made a point of retaining most of their original features. “Take off the lenses and the rest. I’m curious.”

“What does it matter what I look like? We aren’t going to kiss. My aesthetic appeal is beside the point. Here’s my genetic overview though, if you’re in want of authenticity.”

Esithu deleted the data packet unread. National origins did not dictate allegiance. Samutthewi tribalism went only so far in an age where it served one seldom, betrayed one often. “So?”

“You’re a theorist.”

“Anthropology. Not a real science, if you ask most.”

“You’ve an interest in particular ideologies. Very real, very significant.”

To an academic there existed no flattery more effective than the bait of relevancy, an opportunity to feel faintly important and matter. “I’ll be taking up cybernetics.”

“That is a drastic switch.”

“Cybernetics concerns the intersection and interaction of flesh and ideas. It’s a natural outgrowth.”

“And,” Lykesca said, “a literalization of your politics.”

Esithu clapped a brief, private applause. “Who talks like that? You must be either student or graduate, and fresh from school.”

Muscles in Lykesca’s face rippled beneath all the rioting lights. Her eyebrows she had shaven clean off. “It pleases you to condescend, but I won’t be put off. I’ve got boundless resources and an important project on the cusp of completion.”

“What is in it for me?”

“Monetary compensation. Vindication for your most passionate beliefs. At the very least I think you’ll find my ideas . . . intriguing.”

“Such as?”

“Upending how the Hegemony thinks.” Lykesca gestured at her head. “I’m looking to play a very long game.”

Lykesca, Esithu supposed, was a little mad. But she was good about one thing: her funds were near-limitless. Her project had begun thirty-six years ago, anticipating a spark of greed in the Hegemonic eye long before anyone thought them a threat to Samutthewi.

Esithu reevaluated her age. It was not easy; Lykesca never set aside her accoutrements. Chrome filaments webbed her skull, enclosing her forearms and wrists in the fashion favored by Costeya generals. “Are you military?” Esithu asked her, to get it out of the way.

“If I was I would be risking life and career both—and my family as well. Seven generations forward and backward executed. The Costeya army is unconditionally literal about oaths of loyalty.”

“Unless you’ve anonymized your past.”

Lykesca smiled with narrow lips that had been cosmeticized to resemble charred wood. “Why, but that is impossible. Let’s stay realistic, Professor.”

“I didn’t have tenure.”

“Isn’t it fun to be called that? Prestige, erudition, a steady income.” Lykesca strode ahead without looking over her shoulder, at a pace with the rhythm and look of a soldier’s march.

The facility wended deep, of such scope that it couldn’t have gone undetected for so long—but it had, if Lykesca was to be believed. Layers of disruptive plating canceled out signals; a second set of disruptors blanked out tectonic and heat scans. Trailblazing stealth tech: classified and beyond doubt restricted to military use. No sensor confirmed Lykesca’s identity that Esithu could see, but they doubted the gates stood open and welcome to anyone who came calling.

Behind the blast wall, the temperature plunged. Mainframes, limned in soft light, breathed like sleeping children. Glass capsules overhead shone with firefly bots wheeling in abstract patterns. There was a rhythm to them, and—on intuition—Esithu replayed the cannibal flowers’ chorus. One of the capsules matched exactly.

“Subliminal behavior modification?”

“That makes it sound more sinister than it is. I’m using the tunes as a conductive medium, that’s all; the important part is making them go viral.”

“Is this marketing gone wrong?”

Lykesca chortled. “Oh, no, though some companies have tried similar methods. Memetic dreams. Culinary transmission. You heard about that?”

“My grandparents probably did.” Esithu revised their estimate a second time. Provided she was born into fortune Lykesca might have started anti-aging therapy as early as adolescence. Some parents, especially zealous, initiated it as soon as their offspring reached toddlerhood. “What kind of scale are you talking about? For your endeavor.”

“A long game,” she said. “My objective is to safeguard Samutthewi.”

“Yes, and?”

“I want to alter the way humanity collects past, present, and in consequence the future. They’re already halfway there—all they need is a little nudge. How do you receive information, Professor? How do you know what is happening beyond Vithansuthi or across the far edges of the Hegemony?”

“From the net.”

“Just so. That’s how people perceive and learn. Data subsumes material reality. Suppose you glance at news about Thotsakan’s eel exports. Suppose it says that’s been disrupted for the foreseeable future. There’ll be feeds of what’s happening down there . . . laborer strike, a sudden infection that halved the eel harvest, and so on. But.” Lykesca snapped her fingers. “What if you can’t? What if in fact there’s nothing wrong with the eels or the harvesters, but everyone on Thotsakan and beyond believes there is?”

Esithu touched the edge of one mainframe. Icy enough to numb. “Hypothetically there are a number of solutions. You’re after a specific one.”

“First the data is altered; each farm’s cortices will report false. Easy, yes? Then the data would’ve to be proofed against doubt and fact-checking.”

They followed her reasoning. “The average individual already relies on grid updates for traffic routes, current events, disaster warnings.”

“One day you think the eels are sick and dying; the next sync you think the workers are on strike and agitating for better work conditions. Whatever the data you’re fed is taken as fact. A connection implanted at infancy. At the beginning it’ll be for instilling early behavior, better than any AI nurse. By the time they talk the babies are literate. By the time they are ten, the grid will be their sole channel with which to interact with the world. You will, I hope, turn the key.”

“This is either a tall order or a thought experiment so preposterous it’s beneath contempt.”

“Whatever you believe, I’d like your input.” Lykesca flashed her teeth. “No pressure. It’s only a universal revolution.”

It might well be that or it might not—Esithu engaged with  Lykesca’s proposal for the sheer, seductive absurdity of it. They sought out aquariums in which to listen to whale-song, zoos in which to observe the migration patterns of volcano-cranes as triggered by eruption signals. They became intimately familiar with how vibrations affected the deaf, how changes in light affected the blind. They studied sounds infused with colors and scents, and the induction of synesthesia.

Esithu’s initial subjects were, of necessity, fictive. Virtual constructs, virtual lives. They created tribes that worshiped sequences of birdcall, nations that bound themselves to musical theory and waged war over tonal disputes. They tried an evolutionary approach: how humanity might have structured its mores, languages and cultures if it was created by a god who gave commandments in biophony and prophecies in randomly generated verses.

Simulation had limits. Esithu sent for live subjects, and Lykesca provided.

Volunteers, Esithu was reassured; hard-up dregs, Esithu could see. Homeless mostly, addicts to the last, and desperate—but then, Esithu did not require them healthy and the experiments were not audited by an ethics committee. It was disturbingly liberating—and efficient—to have a patron as amoral and wealthy as Lykesca. Progress reports became Esithu’s calendar.

They wove in and out of clubs and dance floors, hearing more of Lykesca’s music. Some of it was released under composers up-and-coming, others under stars long established with reach across most demographics. Some avant-garde and others conventional.

“Suppose you succeed,” they said to Lykesca over an olfactory sculpture, “what do you expect to happen?” They always met in museums or galleries, Lykesca’s preference and pretension.

“For the first decade, not much will change.” She had set aside her accessories, and without them her face was plain, a chameleon. As though her complexion had been selected to blend in anywhere, the planes of her cheekbones and jawline likewise. Family to all and none. “The speed of normatization will depend on Hegemonic encouragement.”

“And then?”

“Then we erase Samutthewi from all memory. Rub it out of existence. The best defense you can give a nation too weak to fight back.”

A replicant connoisseur stepped around them to inhale the sculpture. Its eyes, never meant to look human, lit up. Blue fire race down its shoulders. There’d been more of these lately, replicants produced to consume, focus-groups in the wild to emulate and predict purchasing trends. Lykesca scowled after it. They must have, in ways minor or major, disrupted her.

“How much of the music is yours?”

She glanced at Esithu sidelong; laughed. “Did you think this was for vanity? I’m not an artist—never have been. Almost everything else, but not that.”

“What have you gotten involved in?”

“Manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, agriculture. I believe in having a well-rounded set of interests and expertise. Makes one so much more interesting to talk to, don’t you agree?” She rubbed at the fuzzy growth of hair that was slowly encroaching on the shaven smoothness of her pate. “I came to give you a deadline.”

Esithu pulled up data on the replicant consumers. A great many had rejected Lykesca’s artists, and their patterns would be sieved for product forecasts. “No pressure, I thought?”

“A concrete date can be reinvigorating. It’s not unreasonable. In eighteen months I expect—let’s say a working prototype, a plan that can be put to action.”

“That isn’t reasonable.”

“But,” Lykesca breathed, “you’re a genius.”

Their mouth twitched. “That I may be, but I can’t make something out of nothing. Eighteen months. What’s escalated?”

“What hasn’t? The world escalates by the minute, and tomorrow’s always more histrionic than yesterday.”

Lykesca’s underground compound was raided.

Esithu did not hear it from her. It was a middling headline, rating barely more noise and flourish than a perfectly average murder involving defenestration at a porn shoot. A hidden lab, it was reported, with a dozen dead mainframes. Lykesca’s ensuing silence made it difficult to tell whether she had been caught with her guard down, or whether she’d sacrificed the facility to protect something dearer. She did not contact Esithu to clarify or instruct.

The flow of funds cut off, abruptly.

Just as well: Esithu did not want to be convicted as her accomplice. They scaled the project back to virtualization and absconded to Vithansuthi’s old city where body-mod artists gathered and lived as far as they could off the grid. It was novel to go to sleep in such quiet, where the walls and floorboards did not pulse one awake with network noise. The derelict tenements stood on six legs each, roofed with scarab tiles, each narrow window the dull amber of carapaces.

Esithu shared a floor with Yinshi, a woman who made songs out of religious chants, the shrieking of extinct predator birds, and stringed instruments: the old-fashioned sort. She played a hammered dulcimer and a balalaika, recording and sampling scraps of melody. The final products were rough, not altogether pleasant, but compelling.

“Could I commission a piece?”

Yinshi looked up from her nest of cables and metal shells. “I don’t come cheap.”

“I can pay.” It would take all of Lykesca’s remaining largesse, secreted away for contingencies. It would be well spent.

“What do you have in mind?”

“Something,” Esithu said, “for forgetting. Call it ‘Annex’ if you call it anything.”

The rest of it was simply slotting algorithms into place. A matter of using sound to energize the effects of popular recreational drugs, and then unleashing it on an audience already well and dosed. Esithu made it small: a shift to alter perception of tempo.

They slipped into one of Yinshi’s performances. The crowd danced two beats slower than they should, not quite matching what was being played. The second time Esithu activated the script, Yinshi’s entire audience paused their network streams by mid-song and resumed them three-fourths of the way through.

When they met Lykesca again she had a head full of hair, and limbs bristling with thorns.

“I like what you’ve been doing.”

They talked over wilted vegetable and slivers of synthetic meat. In the old city few had a functioning palate and most subsisted on liquid nutrients or tablets. Easier to digest, less interruption to addictives or ongoing modification processes. Esithu had started eating real food again as soon as the physiotherapy permitted.

“I’m hoping,” Esithu said, “those are not prison marks.”

Lykesca lifted a barbed hand; Esithu switched to an augmens overlay. A playback of Yinshi’s music, spiked with Esithu’s memetic injection. “I’ve been freer than a pirate ship, but if I’m going to return to the scene of crime I might as well not be recognized on sight.”

They didn’t ask if she’d covered her tracks otherwise. It seemed an insult. “I’ve been thinking that your ideas are defeatist.”

“Coming from a cynic like you, that honestly upsets me.”

“You build them around the thought that not only can we not fight back now, we never will be able to. Not in two generations, not in twenty. Not ever.”

Lykesca shook a head of razorish brambles. “It’s true that plenty can happen over as short a time as decades. But I’ve made projections, Esithu, and my plans aren’t going to change.”

“Even if I said I could trigger mass hallucination? Mass suicide?”

It was gratifying to see Lykesca recoil. “A little extreme,” she said, “and it won’t solve anything. The Hegemony doesn’t run on people. It’s planets. It’s inertia. Revenge on individuals—this general, that lawmaker—is meaningless.”

Esithu chewed on tasteless faux-chicken. “If you’d said yes, I might have turned you in.”

“Very amusing. When will you have it ready? I’ll compile it against mass suicide models, by the way.”

“What good fortune it is our sense of humor is so compatible. It’s ready any time you want it.”

Lykesca stood. “You’ll know when the time comes.”

A public address on an override channel to all Hegemonic citizens: they were now at war with the Suoqua Sovereignty, and to harbor a Suoqua was treason. Save those who’d ripped out network receptors from their lobes, who’d blinded and deafened themselves—save those, none would fail to receive the broadcast.

Yinshi’s piece beat just out of hearing, infiltrating the interstices between a call to arms, a demand for sacrifices. Esithu would find out only belatedly how Lykesca broke through the security filters to embed the song and its memetic payload.

It went undetected for some time; Esithu’s injection left no trace, caused no immediate effect. They celebrated with turmeric-yellowed rice, tender poultry steeped in spices, and drinks that didn’t taste like lukewarm acid. Yinshi ate with them in bemusement. Neither disclosed to her, quite, what had happened.

“I’m going to prove you wrong,” Esithu said when the last yellow grain had been savored and swallowed.

A little inebriated and having flirted—disastrously—with Yinshi, Lykesca licked a dash of sauce off her thumb. “What about?”

“Costeya will give up Samutthewi.”

She vented a roar of laughter. Yinshi, dozing by the door, twitched awake. “I’d say I wish you luck, but you’ll need more than that. Immortality perhaps, and even then the universe will probably succumb to heat death first.”

“I intend to return Samutthewi to autonomy before the universe forgets it, forgets us. A couple centuries, at least. Not that it’ll moot your plan, but I just want to make a point.”

Lykesca spluttered liquor and amusement, then collected herself. “Then I can only say that I hope for the best, and may your ancestors watch over you.”

Esithu immersed themselves in cybernetics. They chased a greater consciousness, and a frame for it that could withstand time. They experimented on Yinshi, who wanted ears that could hear beyond the human range and fingers which could bifurcate to better manipulate strings. An extra arm.

A year of that and Esithu began to work on themselves, opening up veins and digestive tracts, excavating fat and epidermis.

In Hegemonic capitals it became difficult to live without a synchronized memory, and few rejected total integration into the grid. So long as the phenomenon was under control it served Costeya interests. On their part, Esithu retained their own memory in an indelible partition.

Lykesca was caught, eventually.

Like the raid, it happened in ignominious quiet. A data-terrorist and smuggler, Lykesca was called. There was a glimpse of her face, haggard and burned; she went to her execution tagged with a convict’s code, cremated without name or kin.

Twenty years after Lykesca’s execution, Samutthewi became a native and loyal constituent of the Hegemony. It always had been, just as Costeya had always been at war with Suoqua.

Twenty years after Lykesca’s execution, Esithu revised Yinshi’s music to tell a story. By then modifying data had become the exclusive province of Hegemonic agencies. But the backdoors stayed, and Esithu kept Lykesca’s access protocols.

Esithu gave Yinshi a change of name and origins out of courtesy, to sever her ties to a particular piece of music. “Annex” returned to circulation and a heroine slipped into the fabric of Costeya history.

A woman who shed and donned faces as easily as she changed names, who through tricks and transplants cheated death for a hundred lifetimes. A woman who traveled from world to world, promising unity under one name, an empire of peace whose borders knew no limits.

In the morning, flower-mouths in Vithansuthi sang a composition to honor Saint Lykesca, mother of Costeya.

Across Hegemonic planets the song was repeated, reverbing in uncounted millions of temples and churches. It preceded dawn prayers: Saint Lykesca ruled over worship of any thought or idol.

As she always would; as she always had.

About the Author

Benjanun Sriduangkaew spends her free time on words, amateur photography, and the pursuit of colorful, unusual makeup. She has a love for cities, airports, and bees. Her fiction can be found in GigaNotoSaurus, Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Clockwork Phoenix 4.

No Portraits on the Sky

Kali Wallace

The stranger fell from the sky just after dawn.

Rela heard the snap of branches and looked up. The sun was rising in a gray haze beyond the forest’s eastern edge, and the mist was retreating from the aerie. In the canopy above, a dark figure tumbled through the fog, bouncing from branches and whipping past leaves. Rela watched with her breath caught in her chest, her heart stuttering. But as the person fell closer she could see he was no skywarden. He wore no tools, no ropes, no soft sticky gloves the color of spider silk.

The stranger missed the bridge as he fell, but a line of cocoons caught him. He tangled in the ropes and set the pods swaying before twisting free again. Rela heard a thump as he landed. She couldn’t see the platform through the shivering leaves and broken cobwebs, and when she held her breath to listen, she heard no shouts of alarm, no curious cries. There was only the drip of dew and the rustle of settling branches.

Holding tight to the bridge, Rela leaned over the ropes for a better view of the sky. The canopy was thick, but she was high enough and there were breaks enough for her to see patches of bland gray through the trees, and the dark imperfections marring its smooth expanse.

Everybody in the forest knew the sky was falling. They muttered and fussed when scraps ripped free and fluttered down, draped over gardens and saplings and pods, left brown patches of crisp leaves and dead moss behind. Some days it was worse than others, a soft white rain, and spiders scurried to devour what they could before it did too much damage. Children, unconcerned, collected the tatters to poke them with sticks, burn them with embers, and laughed as the translucent threads pulled and curled and shriveled. The fallen sky made a high hissing noise as it burned, not unlike the call of the fat brown beetles that lived in knots and hollows.

Everybody knew the sky was falling, but Rela didn’t know if there were more wounds now than there had been yesterday. She rarely looked at the sky anymore.

Her spiders chattered and nipped at her bare arms. The ropes the stranger had struck were old, easily frayed, and the cocoons dangled precariously.

“Fix the line,” Rela said. The words trembled on her tongue, but her spiders calmed at the sound of her voice. One of the largest, a green and gold ropemaker with bright sparking eyes, crept down her arm and onto the rope. Rela stroked a hand over its back and let it nip at her fingers. “Fix the line, lovely. Go.”

The spider scurried away, and others followed, trailing fresh threads of silk. Rela left them to their repairs and followed the bridge to the nearest trunk, climbed down a ladder and crossed to a junction between three trees. There she stopped, and again she listened. This corner of the aerie was remote, little used and little visited, home only to the faded cocoons of sleepers whose names and faces were long forgotten. That was why she had chosen it for her morning routine, apart from her fellow weavers who spoke to her in soft voices, with pitying glances; they did not know what to say to her anymore, and she preferred to work alone. The swaying cocoons and bright blue lights of her spiders’ eyes were the only sign anything had disturbed the canopy.

Nobody else had seen the stranger fall.

Her heart still pounding, her throat tight, Rela crossed a bridge to an old platform. Its wooden planks were softened with mold, split and warped by water and time. Half a dozen cocoons hung around its perimeter: sleepers who had been wrapped and silent for longer than Rela had been alive. Silk webs draped the cocoons in delicate curtains, and through the veils their painted features were soft, indistinct, their eyes no more than dark, blank blotches, their solemn mouths washed away.

The stranger lay face-down at a corner of the platform. His shoulders were twisted, both legs bent, one arm tucked crookedly beneath his chest. Rela hesitated, uncertain, but she could not help if she could not see his injuries. She dragged him away from the edge and rolled him onto his back. An odd gray cloth, soft and slick to the touch, covered his entire body. He wore no harness and carried no tools. His arms were too short, his legs too long, and a smooth, blank mask hid his face.

Rela drew her knife. Her spiders crowded up her arms and back. She saw no blood yet, but they could smell it, and they clicked and flashed eagerly as she sliced into the gray cloth to free the man’s shoulders and arms, his neck beneath the unsettling blank mask, his hips and groin and peculiar long legs. Beneath the pliable gray fabric there was another layer, soft, white, damp with sweat and splotched with blood. Rela cut that away as well. It had been a long time since she had used her spiders to heal broken bones and battered flesh, but she remembered what to do, and with each careful step she pushed her worry about where the man had come from to the back of her mind.

“Go on,” she said, but quietly, a whisper that would not carry.

The spiders raced down her arms and picked away the white fabric to reveal the stranger’s skin. Beneath the man looked like no person Rela had ever seen. The people of the forest were the same color as the leaves, softer green for those who dwelt in the shade, deeper green for those who climbed in the canopies and worked in the sunlight, and their hair curled and tangled like vines. The stranger was as brown as wood and hairless all over.

And he was alive. Each breath was shuddering and shallow, but he was alive.

Rela pressed the tip of her knife into the man’s side and opened a cut the length of a finger. She held the skin apart to let a few of her smallest spiders pick their way through his seeping blood. They balked and blinked at the first taste, but Rela did not let them flee.

“Go in,” she said firmly. “You remember, little ones. Go in. Heal.”

Reluctant, flashing their dismay, a dozen quick red spiders burrowed into the stranger’s body and pulled the incision closed after them. Rela sent others down the man’s legs to chew away the last of the gray clothing and weave a sturdy cocoon around his feet.

She turned her attention to the man’s head. Bruises mottled his neck and shoulders, and the mask he wore was as hard as the shell of a nut. In its flat, reflective surface Rela saw only her own face and the sparking eyes of the spiders perched on her shoulders. She probed around the stranger’s jaw and neck with her fingertips, worked the mask loose and pulled it free. The stranger’s face was as brown as the rest of his body, round and young and smooth. His dark hair was shaved close to his scalp. Rela pressed a finger to one eyelid to pull it open.

The stranger gasped. Rela jerked back, but she caught herself before she lost her balance. The spiders chirped and flashed and fled before gathering again. A strangled half-word escaped the man’s throat. It drew into a long, pained groan when he tried to lift his head. Rela placed a hand on the man’s brow; his skin was hot and damp with sweat.

“Don’t move,” she said. “Don’t move. You’re hurt.”

She rubbed her thumb soothingly over his forehead and leaned close to look him in the eyes. His pupils were wide, his gaze unfocused. She did not know if he saw her at all.

“Who are you?” she asked. “Where did you come from?”

His lips moved again and for one sharp moment Rela thought he might answer, but the only sound he made was a hiss of pain. His eyes closed. He sank into himself, his breath slowing, his head lolling to the side, and he was silent.

At a gesture from Rela, the spiders closed the cocoon over his chest and shoulders and neck, and finally stitched the silk across his face and the crown of his head. Those spiders trapped within moved beneath the silk in roving lumps.

Rela cleaned her knife and tucked it into its sheath. With the stranger’s brown face hidden, his strange clothes piled to the side, the gasp of his voice and what he could not say caught now within a soft cocoon, she could almost pretend her hands weren’t shaking.

There was nothing she could do for the man but let the spiders heal him, if they could, if his body was not so broken it couldn’t be stitched together again. She waited until she was certain the spiders were settled in the cocoon, then left the platform. She paused again at the junction of three bridges and looked up. The day was growing brighter, colors shifting and deepening as the sun climbed.

The sky was falling, shedding pieces of itself like old skin, but even children knew not to ask why the wardens did nothing. Not a year had passed since six skywardens had fallen to their deaths. Most of the people of the forest had never known anybody to die; the elderly and ill wrapped themselves in cocoons to sleep and heal and one day, in a distant future, emerge as young and fit again, however long it might take. The weavers had hoped to heal the skywardens too, but the rootwardens had emerged from their hollows and taken the broken bodies from the aerie before the spiders could weave a single cocoon. They claimed, later, the unlucky skywardens had been shattered beyond what any long sleep could heal. It had been decades since the forest had held even a single funeral, and now it was holding six, all at once, for strong young men and women who had climbed too recklessly and too high. From every corner of the forest people had gathered to watch the six flat boats float the river, lined with torches and draped with flowers, from the boundary roots in the east to the western caves. Funeral spiders on delicate threads had dropped to the boats in a fine pale rain, burrowed into the shrouds and emerged, scattered again into the forest. Some onlookers had flinched away, closed their eyes and held their breath; others opened their mouths and welcomed the quick stinging bites on their tongues.

Rela had watched the funeral with Kef and their daughter Marun. She hadn’t known it then, but it was the last night they would spend together as a family, the last time she would sit beside her daughter and hold her hand, listen to her breath and know she was well. They had looped thick vines into swings above the river, and they hung, embraced by a low mist that never dissipated, their eyes hot with smoke, and they let the funeral spiders crawl over their lips and across their tongues. Rela had felt a rush of dizziness with the first bite, a spike of aching fear and the rush of sickening vertigo, the terrifying last moments of one young warden’s life, but it passed.

Marun had asked, “Does it always feel like that?”

Rela had been to only one funeral before, long before Marun was born, and that had been an eccentric old woman who had refused the comforting promise of sleep. Her memories had been as green and familiar as the forest itself, sunlight and shadows, a teasing mist of dew on skin before it was gone.

“I don’t know,” Rela had said. She did not lie to her daughter. The skywardens who had fallen had been Marun’s friends and partners, and the only thought in Rela’s mind had been cold relief that it had not been another day, another part of the sky, and Marun who had fallen.

The next morning, Marun and two other young skywardens had climbed the barren apex branches of the Dusk Man, one of the forest’s oldest and tallest trees, and disappeared through a tear in the sky. They never returned. The skywardens who remained refused to climb anymore. There was occasional talk, throughout the forest, of training new wardens, sending them up with ropes and hooks and tools to heal the sky, but more often now the gossip turned to wondering if perhaps the skywardens refused because they knew there was nothing to be done.

Laughter echoed below, and Rela startled from her memory. A spider nipped at her thumb. Rela released the rope and made for the ladders.

The forest darkened as she descended, and the canopy filled with the sounds of an ordinary morning: weavers talking and singing as they worked, spiders clicking eagerly, the coursing of collected water spilling into wooden troughs. Shouts echoed as builders hoisted a repaired bridge between two trees, ropes and wooden slats swinging, filling a blank space with a curved line; their rasping saws dusted the morning with the scent of fresh-cut wood. The aerie was more crowded below, not only with weavers and their spiders, but with sleepers in their hanging cocoons. Oblong white sacs lined every branch, swaying on every bridge, every platform, their colorful painted portraits turning in and out of sight. Rela spotted a pair of painters retouching a family of cocoons hanging in a cluster like pale berries, and she thought, for a moment, to ask them where Kef was working today, to find her, to grasp her hands and lean close, her lips to Kef’s ear, and tell her about the stranger.

The urge was a fleeting burn on her tongue, like a child’s dare to taste a scrap of fallen sky, and she could not imagine how Kef would reply. She could not remember when they had stopped carrying each other’s secrets and began instead hoarding their own. She did not even know if Kef had noticed.

The painters raised their hands in uncertain greeting. Rela turned away before they could call out, but somebody else had spotted her. Approaching from the other direction, moving briskly along a bridge, was Pira, an elder weavers with threads of spider-silk white in her hair. She wasn’t alone: following on the bridge were two rootwardens. Their faces were hidden beneath deep hoods of woven bark and muddy leaves, and the planks of the bridge groaned beneath their steps. It wasn’t unusual to see rootwardens high in the trees anymore, not as it had been when Rela was a child and they had kept themselves apart, emerging rarely, and only at night. People whispered, when rootwardens passed, that they ventured higher now because the trees were rotting on the inside and driving them out.

“Rela, there you are,” Pira said. She spoke softly, and she smiled. “I’ve been looking for you.”

Panic that almost felt like relief squeezed Rela’s chest. Somebody had seen, she thought. Somebody had seen and sent for the wardens.

But Pira went on before she could speak. “There was a great deal of fall over the Sisters last night,” she said. She tilted her chin and sunlight caught her face. The Three Sisters were a cluster of trees beneath one of the weakest patches of sky; they stood at a bend in the river, well away from where the stranger had fallen. Pira said, “They could use your help, if you can spare the time. They’re quite overwhelmed.”

Lips pressed together, Rela nodded, swallowed and looked away from the rootwardens. She could not see their faces beneath their dark hoods, if they had faces at all, but she knew they were watching her. One touched the rope with its thin hand, and Pira’s spiders, clinging beside her, recoiled and scattered. The warden’s fingers were like reeds the color of still, murky water, damp and slick but strong, and Rela half-expected to see the rope disintegrate at its touch. “Don’t let it touch you,” Rela’s mother had said, when she was a child and gawking at the first rootwarden she had ever seen, a memory long since faded like an old portrait, but vivid now, surprising in its clarity. They had been collecting pitcher flowers in a pond near the roots of the boundary trees, where caves breathed cool air into the forest and water dripped in distant echoes. Rela loved plucking the soft pink blooms from a curtain of vines and tipping the nectar into her mouth when her mother wasn’t looking. When the rootwarden had appeared, a dark shape in the shadow, tall and grim beneath the arch of a black root, Rela’s mother had grabbed her hand so hard her fingers twisted together, and she had said, “Don’t let it touch you,” though it was across the water and did not seem to notice them at all. Rela had asked, in her childish innocence, why her mother was so scared, and her mother had said, “I’m not scared,” and then she had said, “We’re done here,” but she hadn’t moved until the warden was gone.

“Rela? Are you well?”

Pira’s voice was warm, kind, and her green eyes soft with understanding. Rela felt the chance as a tug at the back of her throat, as the hesitation before flinging a net or throwing a spear, knowing the fish or frog or bird might escape if she waited too long. She could tell them, Pira and the rootwardens and anybody else who might overhear. They would think her mad, confused by grief, mourning a lost daughter, but she could take them to the stranger and ask her spiders to split the cocoon and let his blood flow.

The rootwardens would take him away. They would drag his odd brown body down from the aerie, careless as hunters dragging the marsh frogs they speared. He would vanish with them into their caverns, as the fallen skywardens had vanished before, and Rela would never have a chance to speak to him.

“Is there something wrong?” Pira asked.

Rela smiled. Her spiders nipped and clicked at the back of her neck. “No, of course not. I’ll go at once to help.”

She nodded to Pira before hurrying away. Across the bridge she looked back. The rootwardens had turned their hooded faces to follow her, dark smudges of brown in the morning light.

The weavers at work in the Three Sisters did not need Rela’s help, but one, with familiar pity in her voice, sent her to the Red Guardian to weave a cocoon for an old man who had been putting off sleep for too long. His joints were swollen, his hands unsteady, his eyes cloudy. Rela helped him across the last long bridge to a platform clinging snug to the tree’s red trunk. The old man fussed and squirmed as the spiders began to work, and he did not calm until Rela asked him which of the cocoons hanging around the platform belonged to his family. He could not remember all of their names, and the paint of their portraits had long since leached away, but sharing their stories soothed his worry.

“It will be good to see them when we wake,” he said. The spiders were creeping delicately around his shoulders and neck; he twitched his head, chased a faint itch. He exhaled, and frowned, and said, “If we wake.”

“You will,” Rela said. “We all will. Close your eyes. There’s no reason to be afraid.”

The old man huffed but did as she said. A small black spider eased itself beneath the silk at his neck to place the final sting, then he was sleeping. The spiders closed the cocoon over his face, spun a rope from the crown of his head and, with Rela’s help, lifted him to hang beside the sleepers who had been his wife and brothers and children. A painter would come to give him a face in a day or two, when the silk had stiffened and dried, and his portrait would be a splash of fresh bright color until time and age washed it away. The funeral spiders would nest in the fine threads of the cocoon, and those pale blind creatures would be the old man’s only company while he slept.

Rela stayed at the Red Guardian for the rest of the day, working alone to repair damaged ropes and cocoons, speaking to no one but her spiders. She did not let herself even look toward the nameless tree where she had left the stranger to heal. When twilight fell over the forest, she left the aerie with the other weavers, nodding at those who bid her a good evening. By the time she reached the Bearded Frog, the tree where she and Kef hung their home, the forest was filled with warm yellow light and smoke from cooking fires. Rela stepped off a spiraling ladder and onto the branch that held their pod, climbed down to the web beneath and sent the spiders to their nest. She felt naked without them crawling over her arms and shoulders, without their sharp, quick legs pricking her skin.

The scent of something rich and pungent drifted from inside. Kef was making supper.

“Rela? Are you hungry?”

Kef always sounded as though she was on the verge of laughing, even when she was serious; it was the second thing Rela had noticed about her. The first had been the light of her water-green eyes as she stared up at the sky. They had met on a fine, warm day years ago, when Rela had found Kef in a nest of tangled branches high above the aerie, lying on her back amongst white flowers and purple berries growing from the tree’s cradled patches of soil. Rela had said, “You’re not supposed to be up here,” and Kef had laughed and said, “Do you ever look at the sky? Look at the sky and tell me what you see.”

Rela checked that the spiders had food and collected buckets of water to carry inside. Kef took one from her and kissed her cheek. “I thought I might see you today, but they said you were helping at the Sisters.”

There was a moment, again, the heartbeat hesitation before a frog’s fearful leap, and Rela thought she might tell Kef about the stranger. But it had been so long since the laughter in Kef’s voice had been accompanied by a smile on her lips, since she had hummed while stirring supper in a pot and touched Rela’s hand with paint-flecked fingers, and those days grew ever rarer, stretched apart, dew drops on a silk thread.

“I was on the Red Guardian,” Rela said. “There was an old man.”

Kef withdrew her hand to return to the fire. “Supper is ready, if you’re hungry.”

They filled wooden bowls with soup made of fish and mushrooms. Kef spoke about her day, about the woman whose portrait she was preparing to paint, the stories and memories that though Kef’s brushes of silk and bristle would cover a fresh cocoon while the woman slept. Every cocoon was unique, every portrait singular. Kef had hoped, once, that Marun would follow in her footsteps, as Rela had hoped she might take a liking to the spiders. But Marun had chosen the sky.

There was still a seat for Marun at their table, and the hammock where she had slept as a child still hung high on the curved wall. She had not lived with them since she had joined the skywardens and moved to their tents in the east where the sky grew from fat gray branches, and they had long since traded away her childhood clothes and toys, but traces of her remained: the dried old vines she had braided in mimicry of Rela’s weaving, the knife she had forgotten the last time she came for dinner, a broken harness she had brought one evening to share and laugh about how close she had come to falling.

Rela’s appetite was gone. She scraped leftover soup into the pot and said, without turning, “I have to see to the spiders.”

The night air was warm and heavy with mist. All around the forest glowed with soft light, and the evening was hushed, but not silent, never silent. Insects chirped and clicked, birds called, and somewhere above there were bursts of music and laughter. A marsh frog bellowed, its deep, throaty cry carrying like a horn. The night smelled of smoke and spiced fish and boiled fruit, all of it mingled with the rich, mossy scent of the trees.

Rela climbed to the edge of the web and stretched out face-down, arms folded beneath her chin. The ropes pressed into her stomach and chest. A few spiders scurried to greet her with light pinches before settling into the hollow at the small of her back. Below, softened by smoke and mist, torches lined bridges with golden flames, and the river was a fat lazy snake curled around the roots.

The web swayed as Kef came to join her. She sat, legs dangling over the edge, and rested a hand between Rela’s shoulders.

“Sometimes I wonder if it would be easier,” Kef said, but she did not finish. She toyed with the fine hairs at the base of Rela’s neck; her touch was light, her palm warm. Rela could no longer identify the shades of unhappiness in Kef’s voice, but she knew where those words led: if Marun had fallen, if they had a body, if the shell of their daughter had drifted past shrouded on a funeral raft, if there were spiders in the forest with Marun’s blood in their bites.

Kef exhaled, and her hand on Rela’s back stilled.

“Do you remember when the Ugly Twin fell?” she asked.

Rela lifted her chin. She could see the gap the tree had left when it died. Its taller, straighter, more sturdy sibling remained, curiously alone where it towered over lesser trees. The Ugly Twin had been a gnarled, damaged thing, broken and healed so many times it was impossible to know which of its many trunks had been the original. Nobody had lived in the Ugly Twin for generations. Its sleepers had long ago been moved to safer corners of the aerie, its bridges cut away, its ladders and platforms left to rot, every link to the forest severed. The wardens had been guiding its slow, inevitable collapse for as long as Rela had been alive.

The Ugly Twin had toppled in the night ten or twelve years ago. The great tree had not died quietly. It had twisted and groaned against its own weight, against the unwilling support of its nearest neighbors, against its proud, handsome twin. Marun had climbed into their hammock, shaken them awake and said, “I can’t sleep. It’s too noisy.” Rela and Kef had taken her outside to watch and listen. Their neighbors were up too, huddled on their own webs, talking in quiet voices. It had been a clear night, unusually dry and free of fog.

When the Ugly Twin fell, it fell slowly, a tilting dark silhouette against the flat gray sky. Moments later the deafening roar reached them and a shudder passed over the forest, set bridges swaying and pods twisting. Marun held tight to Rela with one hand and Kef with the other, and for some time nobody spoke.

Then Marun had said, her little girl voice soft and high, “What happens when all the trees are too old to live?”

Kef smoothed a hand over her hair. “Young trees will take their place.”

“But what happens when those trees die too?” Marun asked. “Will we have to live somewhere outside the forest?”

“There is nowhere outside the forest,” Rela had said. It was what her own mother had said to her when she had asked where the water came from and where the river flowed, and what it was the rootwardens guarded so jealously in their damp caves beneath the boundary trees.

Marun had frowned and said, “Is it sky forever?”

Kef laughed. “Forever and ever, caterpillar.” Marun had considered this answer and found it satisfactory, and she asked if they could go see the fallen tree in the morning.

There was a gap in the forest where the Ugly Twin once stood, and lifetimes would pass before another tree would grow to take its place. There were sleepers in cocoons high in the aerie who had never even known the Ugly Twin was dying. Should they ever wake, long after their children’s children settled into their own cocoons and the forest slowly filled with hanging white shapes, after the very last weaver closed herself in and the last spiders spun a soft web to cover her face, they would find the forest less one ancient giant, and the sky pockmarked with tears as dark and unblinking as their painted eyes.

“I remember,” said Rela.

A quiet sigh, and Kef took her hand from Rela’s back. “You’ll be in soon?”

She waited for an answer, but Rela said nothing, and she went inside.

The forest relaxed into a peaceful night. The bridge-keepers extinguished torches far below; distant voices faded; birds fell silent. Only the insects still sang, accompanied by the drip of water from leaves. The fog thickened and Rela’s skin grew damp. She listened to Kef moving inside the pod, washing bowls, sorting her brushes, checking her pots and pouches of paint. A bittersweet odor surrounded her: Kef was crushing flowers and seeds for a bright red hue. She worked for a time, then extinguished the lamp. Ropes creaked as she climbed into their hammock. She would be curling into the woven mat and closing her eyes, and she would expect Rela to join her, to sink into the space beside her, press a kiss to her bare shoulder before falling asleep.

The bright startled morning and long anxious day felt unreal, a lingering dream, but evening passed into night and the knot in Rela’s gut would not ease. She waited until she was certain Kef was asleep, then she rose and called her spiders. They climbed up to her shoulders and gathered around her neck. Their blue eyes flashed with sleepy curiosity, lighting the mist. Rela made soothing noises until they calmed.

She made her way to the aerie, starting with guilty fear at every darting bat and croaking frog. But she saw no one. The forest slept.

When she reached the platform, Rela knelt beside the stranger. Healing spiders moved within the cocoon, slow wandering knots beneath the surface. She drew her knife from its sheath and cut a hole in the silk. Spiders spilled onto the wooden planks, their legs and bodies slicked with blood.

“Open,” she whispered.

Spiders swarmed over the cocoon to peel it away from the stranger’s face. The man was alive, but barely. His breath was labored and hoarse; the scent of blood was strong. Rela heard the funeral spiders wake in their nests. A single funeral spider was too tiny a creature to make a sound, but together, gathering, they were the whisper of a bird’s wind in still morning air, the rustle of a snake moving through leaves.

Rela curled her hand around the back of the stranger’s neck. Slack in unconsciousness, his face was young, round and unlined. He was no older than Marun. She wondered if he had a family somewhere outside the forest, a mother who waited for him to come home. The funeral spiders tasted his blood cautiously. They were small and clumsy, pale on her hands and the stranger’s skin, their eyes devoid of light, aggressive in their hunger. Rela held herself still, scarcely breathing, and let them crawl over her fingers and onto his face. They covered his cheeks and jaw like the mist, gray and silent, creeping into his nose and mouth, burrowing into the damp corners of his closed eyes.

The stranger gasped and opened his eyes. He began to speak, as he had before, the beginning of a single word. Rela clasped her hand over his nose and mouth. He fought, rolled his head from side to side, lips moving against her palm, but he was weak and bound in the cocoon. She held him until he stopped struggling.

Bloated and dark with his blood, the funeral spiders spilled from the dead man’s nose and mouth. Rela lifted her fingers to her lips and caught a few on her tongue. They nipped at the inside of her mouth, each bite a spark of pain.

Shadows gathered, and Rela closed her eyes. The stranger’s memories were jumbled and twisted, every moment of clarity shattered by a burst of pain. She felt the terrifying rush of falling through the canopy, the impact of every branch and snap of every bone, and she felt the panic of losing her grip as a slick strip of sky tore away high above the forest. The fear faded and a gray darkness engulfed her, soft light and sticky pale threads, and for a moment she was herself a spider, lost in a web she had not spun.

Then she was standing outside the sky. The heat was unbearable, even tempered by the suit and mask, and her balance was precarious at the edge of a tear just wide enough for a man to slip through. She stood on translucent fibers, soft and flexible, and beneath her feet the forest was dark shadows and shapes through a film of gray. The sky was brightening as the sun rose, a golden fire in the east, and fierce morning air whipped around her. She turned but the world was the same in every direction: larger than she had ever imagined, an unbounded forest so vast, so far below it looked, at first glance, like moss crowding around countless white nests, each as tall and round as the one on which she stood, smooth surfaces pockmarked by the jutting support of massive trees. Some were no more than barren remains, blackened skeleton forests from which the sky had been ripped away, leaving only wind-torn wisps caught in the highest dead branches.

There was no trail to show where the stranger had come from, no sign of where a curious explorer might go. The endless green and countless mounds rippled the land out to the horizon and the red-tinted sky.

Rela opened her eyes. The roar of the wind ceased, the heat faded, and she was alone. No fellow weavers watched aghast at what she had done; no rootwardens waited on the bridge in silent censure. Kef had not awakened and followed. The stranger was dead. Rela did not know if it was disappointment or relief that pressed like a fist against her throat.

She exhaled, and she said, “Close.”

Her mouth was swollen, and the funeral spiders, sluggish and depleted, picked their way along her lips, down the line of her jaw and neck. Her own spiders hesitated, sparking blue questions in the darkness.

Rela said again, “Close.”

The spiders stitched the cocoon closed across the dead man’s head. Rela brushed the last of the funeral spiders from her skin, blinked to clear the lingering threads of his memories. She pressed her thumbs to his blank face to leave twin smudges of blood in place of eyes.

About the Author

Kali Wallace studied geology and geophysics before she decided she enjoyed inventing imaginary worlds as much as she liked researching the real one. Her short fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed Magazine, and on Tor.com. She lives in Colorado.

Melt With You

Emily C. Skaftun

Even after being reincarnated as a plastic lawn flamingo, Irma still insisted that the scruffy panhandler on the I-95 off-ramp near our house had been Jesus. “We missed him,” she’d say, painted beak opening to reveal a mouth that did not lead to a windpipe or vocal chords or lungs. “We mistreated Jesus again and now we’re doomed.” Sometimes she got so agitated she’d gallop around on her two skinny metal legs until she fell over and it took both of us pushing and pulling with our beaks to right her.

And then I’d shake my long plastic neck and sigh. It was useless trying to explain to her that Jesus and reincarnation were from mutually exclusive religions. And anyway she was right about the second part: we were definitely doomed.

The gnomes were coming.

A little bird told me about it. His name was Jay and before the apocalypses he’d been our mailman. Now he was a blue jay. I shit you not, and not only because I am now made of plastic and incapable of shitting. But no matter how much we all giggled about it, Jay the blue jay had the last laugh, because he’d been reincarnated into a living being. Cindee, a one-time yoga instructor who was now a stone Buddha, said Jay must have been better than all of us in his last life. He was alive. Alive and able to fly.

And on a recent flight Jay had spotted an army of garden gnomes cutting a swath through what used to be an affluent Florida neighborhood, burning houses with cities’ worth of toys and action figures inside, spreading poison for the remaining rats and birds and insects, smashing anything smashable that might have a soul in it, and generally making a mess of things. Their advance was slow, but they were relentless. Some of them even had weapons, axes and other tools they’d been carrying when they were inanimate lawn decoration, or improvised slingshots and flamethrowers made of cast-off barbecue lighters and aerosol solvents.

Not only could Irma and I not fly away on our pink plastic wings—they barely peeled away from our bodies—I could hardly even hop. The body that God or Buddha or Cthulhu or whoever had seen fit to shove my soul into had only one skinny metal leg.

Jay warned us as he flew by, ducking into the broken windows of all the houses to warn the souls inside. And then he was gone, a blue dot against the always-cloudy sky, and those of us in the yard looked at each other with as much panic as our various inhuman faces could convey, which wasn’t much. But we felt it.

After a beat Chip the ceramic frog started hopping away. His legs worked better than I thought they had a right to, considering how useless my wings were, and he made decent time through the jungle of overgrown grass that had been a lawn. “He’s right!” another frog said, and most of the other amphibians and small mammals hopped and lurched after him.

“No,” twittered a weather-worn bird. “We should hide. They’ll never find us all.”

Some of the small critters paused then, a painted stone squirrel looking between factions much like a live one would have. It occurred to me, not for the first time, what a tacky neighborhood this had been. Even with some of the lawn art broken beyond repair, we were quite the menagerie.

Irma looked to me for an answer, just as she had in life. I tried to shrug, before remembering I didn’t have the shoulders for it. “You should run,” I said to her, twining my neck around hers by way of goodbye. “You have two legs, sort of; I think you’ve got a chance. As for me, I can’t outrun the gnomes, and I sure as a pink flamingo can’t hide from them. I guess I’m gonna fight.”

But Irma shook her head, which with that new neck of hers was quite the maneuver. “I’ll stay with you, Bubby. We fight.”

As it turned out, we only had about half an hour to prepare. We managed to contact some of the inhabitants of the house, about a million precious little ceramic figurines and human- and animal-shaped candles that had probably been the pride of the house’s owner. Most of them were so small it would take them all day to cross a room, but there were a few stuffed animals that were pretty mobile, and they helped us get the supplies we needed to mount a defense of the property. They also sent an envoy into the attic, where a taxidermied jackalope stood watch for us.

A great many of the fleeter of us did choose to flee, but when the jackalope cried its shrill rabbit’s wail, the rest of us took up arms.

The battle was bloodless. Many were killed.

Despite being made of concrete or whatever, gnome axes cut right through other stone beings. I watched as friends shattered, cleaved by those weapons or hit with slingshotted debris. A few pebbles hit me hard enough to dent, but they only knocked me over. I started to feel guilty about leading the menagerie into battle, when I was so much more shatterproof than most of the rest.

Our side gave as well as we got, for a while. We’d made very decent slingshots by staking fallen tree branches into the ground and stringing rubber bands between them. Irma and I even turned our own selves into a slingshot: she flipped over so her two metal legs were in the air and I used my beak to fire projectiles at the invading gnomes. We had pretty good aim, if I do say so, shattering quite a few gnomes with high-velocity nuts and bolts. The teddy bears from the house helped by shoving whatever heavy and seemingly inanimate things they could lift out the windows onto the gnomes’ pointy heads.

It was tough selecting projectiles in this new world, and we’d gone back and forth a lot about whether it was right to use bolts, or throw lamps and heavy tomes. One of the bears thought that everything had a soul now, anthropomorphic or not, and that to use anything was wrong. I tended to disagree. Once again, Cindee had settled it, saying that without a face there was no soul. She was Buddha, so we had to believe her.

So I was crouching on my one stupid leg, holding a lugnut in my plastic beak and tugging against the rubber band, sighting through Irma’s legs trying not to imagine how obscene her pose would be if she were still human, thinking the battle was going pretty well.

And then the flamethrowers came out. A big gnome with a cross painted on his red pointed cap came at us. “In Jesus’ name!” he shouted, and with the click of a big lighter unleashed hell. Flames shot from a nozzle in every direction, catching the grass and weeds on fire. The stone and ceramic animals rallied, trying to stomp out the spreading fire. A cherubic angel that had once held a birdbath had some success, being the largest. But Irma and me, we started to feel a little droopy.

“Come on!” I shouted, dropping the lugnut. I wished I had arms, hands, anything to reach out to her with. She struggled to right herself, flailing her metal legs in the air. I’d dropped the rubber band, but it was still stuck around her legs, and her neck seemed to be caught under her. I nipped at her with my plastic beak, but couldn’t get ahold of anything. And then, stomping through the flames and the high grass like an action hero, the cross-headed gnome came at me. I was staring down the nozzle of a WD-40 can, with the meanest face you ever saw glaring at me over it.

I ran. Or rather, I hopped, as fast as my one spindly leg would take me, feeling the heat at my tail.

Flames roared as the house caught, and all I could hear over it as I fled were the thousand tiny screams of melting candles, and then the jackalope’s anguished cry.

At some point, after the gnomes had moved on and the fires died down, while the remains of the house shuddered and smoked, I hopped sheepishly back toward the yard I’d lived in since the apocalypses.

It was a wasteland. What had been overgrown grass was now blackened. The trees were singed, and the house was rubble. All around were shards of friends and foes, chips of cement and ceramic that had broken apart. The cherub’s huge water dish lay upside-down atop a pair of cracked red gnome feet that stuck out from the thing like ruby slippers beneath a fallen house.

“Irma!” I shouted, knowing it was hopeless. No one was going back to Kansas.

Cindee hobbled out from behind a singed tree. Because she was a seated Buddha she had no feet. “She’s gone,” she said. Cindee led me in her limping gait to the last place I’d seen Irma. Amid the char and ash was a dirty pink puddle with two metal spires sticking up out of it like an old-fashioned TV antenna.

If I’d had knees, I’d have fallen onto them. Cindee put one stone hand on my flank. “You mustn’t weep for her; she’s in a new form now.”

“If the gnomes are right she’s dead.”

“The gnomes are not right. Her soul is free now.”

I looked up at her and the serenity on her ever-smiling face bugged the hell out of me. “You know you’re not really Buddha, right?” I snapped. “You’re not even Buddhist, are you? Not anymore than off-ramp guy was Jesus or I’m the pope.”

“Aren’t you Jewish?” Cindee asked mildly.

And then I was laughing. “I haven’t been to temple since my Bar Mitzvah. Irma and I went to Unitarian church a few times.”

A pair of singed teddy bears sidled up behind me. “Would you like to bury her?”

I nodded my long neck, almost laying it on the ground. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the cherub searching dead gnomes, and before long he came up with a shovel. He was kind enough to dig the hole for me, and when it was done Cindee said a few words about the soul’s eternal nature. After that the survivors milled around for a bit, unsure what to do. There were only a handful of us: the two teddy bears, Rocky and Rowan; a few of the tiny figurines from the house; a tailless stone squirrel; and about half of a plastic barn owl that had been wired to the roof. The fire had freed her, but also melted her legs. She hobbled around using her wings like a pair of too-short crutches. Most of the dead were in so many pieces that burial seemed a futile task. But I was glad everyone had helped me with Irma’s remains.

For the first time since the apocalypses, I felt really adrift. Part of me hoped the gnomes, in their insane religious crusade, were right. If our souls could be killed, then maybe we could all finally go to heaven.

I said one more prayer over Irma’s grave: “Jesus, Shiva, Allah, Flying Spaghetti Monster, Yahweh, whoever’s out there. Give Irma’s spirit peace, and let us one day meet again.”

We found Rowan the next morning, cut to shreds.

We’d been adrift that night, each seeking a reason to go on and a place to go on in. Being inanimate, we didn’t need food or water or shelter. We didn’t sleep, so the nights were long. That one, without Irma, was the longest of my life or my afterlife. I’d hopped to the very edge of the lawn, where the cracked pavement began, and stood there looking into the scorched neighborhood for a long time. Standing on pavement was really hard for me, but I thought about trying to leave, crawling if I had to, to find a new home.

In the end I didn’t. I hopped back toward the house but stopped dead when I saw Rowan. It was an explosion of stuffing that dotted our charred lawn like snow. Strips of his brown faux fur were mixed in, and I stood there wondering what sort of animal could have done this—most of them had died along with the humans—when I found his head. Half of it anyway, the left side of his face from nose to ear. The stuffing was still attached, but the eyeball wasn’t. In its place, stabbed all the way through the head, was a long, sharp shard of ceramic. I leaned my long neck toward it and when I saw what it was I screamed like the jackalope.

The shard was a broken gnome leg.

My screams drew the attention of the others, who scrambled over as fast as their various locomotion would carry them. Rocky wailed when he saw, beating the blackened ground with furry fists. It struck me once again how the reincarnation machine had grouped us together, me and Irma, Rocky and Rowan. We hadn’t known them well before the apocalypses, but they’d lived in the neighborhood. We all had. So where had the gnomes come from? They were united by their psychotic belief in the true Christian apocalypse, the crusade they’d undertaken to kill everyone on earth to bring it about. I’m not sure what made them think the souls whose unusual bodies they eliminated didn’t just come back as someone else.

We burned the rest of Rowan’s body on a pyre made of broken house. While smoke still curled into the air I saw a blue speck that grew and resolved into Jay the blue jay. He circled the house and yard slowly before alighting on top of the overturned birdbath with the crushed gnome underneath. Still looking around in his new, flighty way, Jay whistled. But it wasn’t birdsong, it was one of those long “look how messed up this shit is” whistles.

I glared at him. I couldn’t help it. The little bastard could’ve helped us, but he’d flown.

“You broke a lot of gnomes,” he said.

It was true. Pieces of gnomes were scattered all around us, from shards barely visible to whole hands or feet. “Yes,” I said, feeling a little defensive. “We fought them.” After I said it I remembered that my fighting had been less than courageous, and if I hadn’t been bright pink already I swear even my plastic self would have blushed.

No one seemed to notice. Jay continued: “They seem mad about it.”

“What are you talking about?” Cindee asked, squinting her serene face.

In response, Jay flew up in the air a few feet. When he dropped back down he landed on the cherub’s head and immediately pooped on it. He gestured all around us with one wing. “They left you a message.”

The cherub stopped swatting at his head and looked around. He was by far the tallest of us, and I could tell from the look on his face he’d seen what Jay was talking about. He was made of bleached concrete, but the way his fat cheeks slackened made him look even paler. “It’s a cross,” he said.

“The pieces moved?” asked Rocky, perking up from his mourning. His black eyes looked wider than usual.

“They can’t move,” Cindee said. “They’re dead. Their souls have moved on into new hosts.”

I was standing as high as I could on my one leg—actually, everyone was trying to stretch upward—to try to see the effect Jay and the cherub had. I couldn’t really make it out, so I hopped to the nearest piece of gnome and peered at it with one eye at a time. “Actually it’s worse than that,” I said. “Obviously the gnomes have come back. The survivors, I mean.”

“Oh god,” Rocky said. “We’re all gonna die.”

I thought he was probably right. But we’d all died before, and it hadn’t been so bad.

I hopped down the length of the cross, following a trail of gnome bits. There was no pattern to it that I could see. A foot here, a chunk of torso there, a scrap of pointed hat. It was creepy as hell, looking at all those body parts. The eyes seemed to follow me.

Then I got to one fragment of gnome head that contained the thing’s whole mouth. It wasn’t much more than that—a half-inch-thick slab of face and chin with a pair of lips painted on. I wouldn’t have even noticed it, really.

Until it started talking. “Your end is at hand,” it said, lips moving. Another fragment a few inches away blinked its eye, pupil swiveling toward me. The eyes really were following me.

I jerked my head away from it as quickly as I could. The other survivors reacted predictably, with panic and frantic movement. They ran and hopped and scooted, but not knowing which way the danger was coming from they largely went in circles. I scanned the horizon for colorful pointy hats, but I didn’t see anything.

“In the name of the father!” the mouth shouted, and I backed away so fast I fell right on my tail. I was scrambling away using my stupid metal leg and my stumpy wings, and not getting very far at all, when the gnome pieces began to rise. I don’t know how they did it, since even if they were still imbued with spirit, most of the chunks had no physical way of moving, but they came together into a sort of Frankenstein’s monster of pottery. Maybe it really was god’s will.

Before I knew it there were many of them, surrounding me. I had nothing to use as a weapon, nowhere to run. I couldn’t even get up on my foot, as it were.

I wish I could say the last thing I remember was the gnome’s club coming toward my head, the beast’s self-righteous, seamed grimace. But I remember the whole thing. I had no brain to concuss, no lights to go out. And whatever was creating my consciousness, it wasn’t going to let me off that easily.

On the other hand, it didn’t really hurt either, with no nerves. The first blow squished my head, and I guess it must have wiped the paint off my right eye, because after that I couldn’t see out of it. The gnome pounded me until I felt as flat as roadkill. And all the while, out of my left eye, I watched friends shatter.

Some time after the gnomes left I picked myself up and looked around. It wasn’t easy. The gnomes had pulled out my metal leg and used it to skewer Rocky. They’d also dented me all over, and part of my neck was so thin that the weight of my plastic head made it droop.

But I saw right away that I was the only one left. The others had been brittle; they had broken. Rocky the teddy bear had gone the way of Rowan. I couldn’t see the plastic half barn owl at all.

The worst part was the secret the gnomes had taught me: the fact of eternal life. It horrified me to think that the shards of my friends might still have consciousness, trapped in whatever powerless form they had left. The thought of Irma tormented me. She’d been melted into a shapeless blob of plastic with no eyes, no ears, no limbs, no mouth to scream. And then I’d buried her.

The gnomes’ behavior didn’t make any sense, in light of their ability to re-form and keep on going. If they knew that these forms we now inhabited were deathless, then why had they tried to kill us? I could only hope that they really had been divinely animated, and that my friends and family wouldn’t be. But in order to believe in that I had to believe in god, and those days were long, long behind me.

It took me a damn long time, broken as I was. First I had to gather the things I’d need, and they were hard to find in the wasteland the property had become. Then I needed to dig up my Irma. The gnome’s shovel was still where we’d dropped it, but it was hell to wield it without any hands. In the end I gave up and dug with my pathetic wings, one scraping millimeter at a time. But what did I have but time? I didn’t need to stop for food or sleep; I didn’t have muscles to fatigue. So I didn’t rest until I’d uncovered my love.

She was at the bottom of a shallow hole, a dingy pink puddle of plastic with two metal legs still sticking out at odd angles. God, I hoped she wasn’t in there. But if she was, it was where I wanted to be. I dropped my own mangled body on top of hers, then doused us both with the little bottle of lighter fluid I’d found.

“I’m coming, Irma,” I said.

And then I lit a match.

About the Author

Emily C. Skaftun lives in Seattle with her husband and their child, a cat who thinks he&rsquo;s a tiger. When she&rsquo;s not teaching or writing, she dabbles in roller derby, flying trapeze, and any other absurd opportunities that come along. Emily has an MFA in Creative Writing and is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. Her stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Ideomancer, FLURB, and Every Day Fiction, with upcoming works in Daily Science Fiction and After Death, an anthology.

Spar
 (Making Bacon Version) 

Kij Johnson

[Editor’s note: In 2009, we published Kij Johnson's Nebula Award-winning story, “Spar.” In 2013, she contributed this alternate version of the story to John Ordover’s BACONTHOLOGY, a bacon-themed charity anthology aimed at raising money for children with autism. We present this story for your April amusement and hope that you will consider supporting John’s cause. —Neil]

In the tiny lifeboat, she and the alien eat bacon endlessly, relentlessly.

They each have their own preference. Hers is the usual, crispy but not too crispy, the creamy fat just firm enough to bite through, the salt making grainy little bumps that she licks off her fingers.

The alien is not humanoid. It is not bipedal. It has cilia. It has no bones, or perhaps it does and she cannot feel them. Its muscles, or what might be muscles, are rings and not strands. It seems to like its bacon softer than she does, almost raw even, though sometimes it eats pieces that were left to fry a little too long.

It eats the bacon a thousand ways. She eats it, too.

The lifeboat is not for humans. The air is too warm, the light too dim. It is too small. There are no screens, no books, no bed or comfy chair or dishwasher or Facebook. The ships hum is steady. Nothing changes.

There is nothing to do. They cannot help but eat bacon. There is always bacon being eaten, bacon inside, outside. She is always greasy. She cannot tell whether this is the slime from its skin or the bacon, but suspects it’s probably about fifty/fifty.

She’s having the worst acne of her life right now. When she can, she pulls her mind away. Eating bacon with the alien is less horrible.

She does not remember the first time. It is safer to think the bacon was properly cooked.

The wreck was random: a mid-space collision between their ship and the alien’s, simultaneously a statistical impossibility and a fact. She and Gary just had time to start the emergency beacon and claw into their suits before their ship was cut in half. Their lifeboat spun out of reach. A piece of debris slashed through the leg of Gary’s suit. Blood and fat and muscle that looked quite a lot like bacon swelled from his suit into vacuum. It was pretty bad.

The alien’s vessel also broke into pieces, its lifeboat kicking free and the waldos reaching out, pulling her through the airlock. In.

Why did it save her? The mariner’s code? She does not think it knows she is alive. If it did it would be a little nicer about sharing. It would try to establish communications.

She eats bacon from a Tupperware container in the otherwise featureless lifeboat. She uses the stovetop whenever they are running low. They run low a lot. It has no sense of the bacon resources available to them.

There is a time when she eats bacon so fast that her nose bleeds.

She tries to teach it words. “Pork,” she says. “Trotters. Ham hocks.” Her vocabulary options are limited here.

“Listen to me,” she says. “Listen. To. Me.” Can it hear over its chewing?

The bacon never gets better or worse, always adequate Safeway-type bacon smacking slightly of nitrites. It tastes fine. She does not learn anything that will make it better: would not if she could. And why? Even merely adequate bacon is pretty outstanding. She suddenly remembers, the greasy salty smell of it and its perfect mottled brown, its squeaky texture against her teeth.

She finds herself hungry at the thought of bacon between her teeth, because it is the only thing that combines salt, fat, meat and grease in such perfect proportions. But perhaps she’s still full. Her appetite for bacon makes it a little hard to be sure sometimes.

For a while, she measures time by number of strips she fries. She estimates she can fry five strips in the nine-inch pan, seven in the larger one. She stops after a time since she keeps losing count because the alien keeps snatching them from the pan.

Sometimes she watches it eat bacon, the strange coiling of its weirdo body like watching earthworms in a baggie, and this kind of appalls her, but at least it is not eating eggplant.

She cannot communicate, but she tries to make sense of its actions.

She likes her bacon crispier, because she at least knows it’s less likely to kill her.

Doesn’t it know that bacon needs to be heated to at least 165 degrees? The threat of trichinosis is much less than in former days, but it’s still better to be safe than sorry. Or maybe it’s not worried about getting food poisoning, it’s an alien, who knows.

What is she to it? If she weren’t around would it just eat it raw? Ugh.

It is covered with slime, or maybe that’s bacon fat, too. There’s one time when they’re almost out of bacon, so she gives it a quick lick, just to check. It does taste like bacon, but there’s another flavor, too. She can’t figure out whether that’s maybe the taste of chicken or something. But more bacon turns up, so she doesn’t have to explore further, thank God.

She dreams of pancakes, but doesn’t remember what they taste like.

Her appetite for bacon is endless, relentless.

Gary, her current husband, the one who just died, was pretty solid on the whole bacon thing, but she had an ex-husband a while back who was not at all partial to bacon, and they used to have quite the arguments about this, him explaining how unhealthy it was, not to mention that most of it was raised inhumanely and in any case pigs were pretty damn smart and deserve better.

“If pigs don’t want to get turned into bacon, they shouldn’t be so delicious,” she said.

“Maybe they would feel the same way about you, if they got the chance,” he said tartly. She threw half a pound of apple-smoked thick-cut slices in his face and moved out that day, though it took another six months to get all the details hammered out. In the interim, she found that it is quite possible to subsist on bacon and vitamin pills, knowledge that has served her well in this contingency. At least the alien isnt always trying to tell her what to eat.

“I think I love you,” she says to it. “But if you eat the last piece without setting more out to thaw one more time, I swear to God that I will fucking kill you dead.”

The lifeboat decelerates. Metal clashes on metal. Gaskets seal.

The airlock opens overhead. There is light. Her eyes water helplessly and everything becomes glare and indistinct dark shapes. The air is dry and cold and smells of artichokes or something foul like that. She recoils.

“Hey,” one of the shapes says, “Anyone in there?”

The alien does not react to the light, the hard air. They still have a pile of bacon. Nothing changes.

No. She pulls the hatch shut. Making bacon.

About the Author

Kij Johnson is the author of three novels and a number of short stories, a three-time winner of the Nebula Award (including in 2010, for her Clarkesworld story, “Spar”), and a winner of the World Fantasy, Sturgeon, Crawford, and Asimov’s Reader Awards.

Guest of Honor

Robert Reed

One of the robots offered to carry Pico for the last hundred meters, on its back or cradled in its padded arms; but she shook her head emphatically, telling it, “Thank you, no. I can make it myself.” The ground was grassy and soft, lit by glowglobes and the grass-colored moon. It wasn’t a difficult walk, even with her bad hip, and she wasn’t an invalid. She could manage, she thought with an instinctive independence. And as if to show them, she struck out ahead of the half-dozen robots as they unloaded the big skimmer, stacking Pico’s gifts in their long arms. She was halfway across the paddock before they caught her. By then she could hear the muddled voices and laughter coming from the hill-like tent straight ahead. By then she was breathing fast for reasons other than her pain. For fear, mostly. But it was a different flavor of fear than the kinds she knew. What was happening now was beyond her control, and inevitable . . . and it was that kind of certainty that made her stop after a few more steps, one hand rubbing at her hip for no reason except to delay her arrival. If only for a moment or two . . .

“Are you all right?” asked one robot.

She was gazing up at the tent, dark and smooth and gently rounded. “I don’t want to be here,” she admitted. “That’s all.” Her life on board the Kyber had been spent with robots—they had outnumbered the human crew ten to one, then more—and she could always be ruthlessly honest with them. “This is madness. I want to leave again.”

“Only, you can’t,” responded the ceramic creature. The voice was mild, unnervingly patient. “You have nothing to worry about.”

“I know.”

“The technology has been perfected since—”

“I know.”

It stopped speaking, adjusting its hold on the colorful packages.

“That’s not what I meant,” she admitted. Then she breathed deeply, holding the breath for a moment and exhaling, saying, “All right. Let’s go. Go.”

The robot pivoted and strode toward the giant tent. The leading robots triggered the doorway, causing it to fold upward with a sudden rush of golden light flooding across the grass, Pico squinting and then blinking, walking faster now and allowing herself the occasional low moan.

“Ever wonder how it’ll feel?” Tyson had asked her.

The tent had been pitched over a small pond, probably that very day, and in places the soft, thick grasses had been matted flat by people and their robots. So many people, she thought. Pico tried not to look at any faces. For a moment, she gazed at the pond, shallow and richly green, noticing the tamed waterfowl sprinkled over it and along its shoreline. Ducks and geese, she realized. And some small, crimson-headed cranes. Lifting her eyes, she noticed the large, omega-shaped table near the far wall. She couldn’t count the place settings, but it seemed a fair assumption there were sixty-three of them. Plus a single round table and chair in the middle of the omega—my table—and she took another deep breath, looking higher, noticing floating glowglobes and several indigo swallows flying around them, presumably snatching up the insects that were drawn to the yellow-white light.

People were approaching. Since she had entered, in one patient rush, all sixty-three people had been climbing the slope while shouting, “Pico! Hello!” Their voices mixed together, forming a noisy, senseless paste. “Greetings!” they seemed to say. “Hello, hello!” They were brightly dressed, flowing robes swishing and everyone wearing big-rimmed hats made to resemble titanic flowers. The people sharply contrasted with the gray-white shells of the robot servants. Those hats were a new fashion, Pico realized. One of the little changes made during these past decades

. . . and finally she made herself look at the faces themselves, offering a forced smile and taking a step backward, her belly aching, but her hip healed. The burst of adrenaline hid the deep ache in her bones. Wrestling one of her hands into a wave, she told her audience, “Hello,” with a near-whisper. Then she swallowed and said, “Greetings to you!” Was that her voice? She very nearly didn’t recognize it. A woman broke away from the others, almost running toward her. Her big, flowery hat began to work free, and she grabbed the fat, petalish brim and began to fan herself with one hand, the other hand touching Pico on the shoulder. The palm was damp and quite warm; the air suddenly stank of overly sweet perfumes. It was all Pico could manage not to cough. The woman—what was her name?—was asking, “Do you need to sit? We heard . . . about your accident. You poor girl.All the way fine, and then on the last world.Of all the luck!”

Her hip. The woman was jabbering about her sick hip.

Pico nodded and confessed, “Sitting would be nice, yes.”

A dozen voices shouted commands. Robots broke into runs, racing one another around the pond to grab the chair beside the little table. The drama seemed to make people laugh. A nervous, self-conscious laugh. When the lead robot reached the chair and started back, there was applause. Another woman shouted, “Mine won! Mine won!” She threw her hat into the air and tried to follow it, leaping as high as possible.

Some man cursed her sharply, then giggled.

Another man forced his way ahead, emerging from the packed bodies in front of Pico. He was smiling in a strange fashion. Drunk or drugged . . . what was permissible these days? With a sloppy, earnest voice, he asked, “How’d it happen? The hip thing . . . how’d you do it?” He should know. She had dutifully filed her reports throughout the mission, squirting them home. Hadn’t he seen them? But then she noticed the watchful, excited faces—no exceptions—and someone seemed to read her thoughts, explaining, “We’d love to hear it firsthand. Tell, tell, tell!” As if they needed to hear a word, she thought, suddenly feeling quite cold. Her audience grew silent. The robot arrived with the promised chair, and she sat and stretched her bad leg out in front of her, working to focus her mind. It was touching, their silence . . . reverent and almost childlike . . . and she began by telling them how she had tried climbing Miriam Prime with two other crew members. Miriam Prime was the tallest volcano on a super-Venusian world; it was brutal work because of the terrain and their massive lifesuits, cumbersome refrigeration units strapped to their backs, and the atmosphere thick as water. Scalding and acidic. Carbon dioxide and water made for a double greenhouse effect. . . . And she shuddered, partly for dramatics and partly from the memory. Then she said, “Brutal,” once again, shaking her head thoughtfully. They had used hyperthreads to climb the steepest slopes and the cliffs. Normally hyperthreads were virtually unbreakable; but Miriam was not a normal world. She described the basalt cliff and the awful instant of the tragedy; the clarity of the scene startled her. She could feel the heat seeping into her suit, see the dense, dark air, and her arms and legs shook with exhaustion. She told sixty-three people how it felt to be suspended on an invisible thread, two friends and a winch somewhere above in the acidic fog. The winch had jammed without warning, she told; the worst bad luck made it jam where the thread was its weakest. This was near the mission’s end, and all the equipment was tired. Several dozen alien worlds had been visited, many mapped for the first time, and every one of them examined up close. As planned.

“Everything has its limits,” she told them, her voice having an ominous quality that she hadn’t intended. Even hyperthreads had limits. Pico was dangling, talking to her companions by radio; and just as the jam was cleared, a voice saying, “There . . . got it!”, the thread parted. He didn’t have any way to know it had parted. Pico was falling, gaining velocity, and the poor man was ignorantly telling her, “It’s running strong. You’ll be up in no time, no problem. . . . ”

People muttered to themselves.

“Oh my,” they said.

“Gosh.”

“Shit.”

Their excitement was obvious, perhaps even overdone. Pico almost laughed, thinking they were making fun of her storytelling . . . thinking, What do they know about such things? . . . Only, they were sincere, she realized a moment later. They were enraptured with the image of Pico’s long fall, her spinning and lashing out with both hands, fighting to grab anything and slow her fall any way possible—

—and she struck a narrow shelf of eroded stone, the one leg shattered and telescoping down to a gruesome stump. Pico remembered the painless shock of the impact and that glorious instant free of all sensation. She was alive, and the realization had made her giddy. Joyous. Then the pain found her head—a great nauseating wave of pain—and she heard her distant friends shouting, “Pico? Are you there? Can you hear us? Oh, Pico . . . Pico? Answer us!”

She had to remain absolutely motionless, sensing that any move would send her tumbling again. She answered in a whisper, telling her friends that she was alive, yes, and please, please hurry. But they had only a partial thread left, and it would take them more than half an hour to descend . . . and she spoke of her agony and the horror, her hip and leg screaming, and not just from the impact. It was worse than mere broken bone, the lifesuit’s insulation damaged and the heat bleeding inward, slowly and thoroughly cooking her living flesh.

Pico paused, gazing out at the round-mouthed faces.

So many people and not a breath of sound; and she was having fun. She realized her pleasure almost too late, nearly missing it. Then she told them, “I nearly died,” and shrugged her shoulders. “All the distances traveled, every imaginable adventure . . . and I nearly died on one of our last worlds, doing an ordinary climb. . . . ”

Let them appreciate her luck, she decided. Their luck.

Then another woman lifted her purple flowery hat with both hands, pressing it flush against her own chest.

“Of course you survived!” she proclaimed. “You wanted to come home, Pico! You couldn’t stand the thought of dying.”

Pico nodded without comment, then said, “I was rescued. Obviously.” She flexed the damaged leg, saying, “I never really healed,” and she touched her hip with reverence, admitting, “We didn’t have the resources on board the Kyber. This was the best our medical units could do.” Her mood shifted again, without warning. Suddenly she felt sad to tears, eyes dropping and her mouth clamped shut.

“We worried about you, Pico!”

“All the time, dear!”

“. . . in our prayers . . . !”

Voices pulled upon each other, competing to be heard. The faces were smiling and thoroughly sincere. Handsome people, she was thinking. Clean and civilized and older than her by centuries. Some of them were more than a thousand years old.

Look at them! she told herself.

And now she felt fear. Pulling both legs toward her chest, she hugged herself, weeping hard enough to dampen her trouser legs; and her audience said, “But you made it, Pico! You came home! The wonders you’ve seen, the places you’ve actually touched . . . with those hands. . . . And we’re so proud of you! So proud! You’ve proven your worth a thousand times, Pico! You’re made of the very best stuff—!”

—which brought laughter, a great clattering roar of laughter, the joke obviously and apparently tireless. Even after so long.

They were Pico; Pico was they.

Centuries ago, during the Blossoming, technologies had raced forward at an unprecedented rate. Starships like the Kyber and a functional immortality had allowed the first missions to the distant worlds, and there were some grand adventures. Yet adventure requires some element of danger; exploration has never been a safe enterprise. Despite precautions, there were casualties. People who had lived for centuries died suddenly, oftentimes in stupid accidents; and it was no wonder that after the first wave of missions came a long moratorium. No new starships were built, and no sensible person would have ridden inside even the safest vessel. Why risk yourself? Whatever the benefits, why taunt extinction when you have a choice.

Only recently had a solution been invented. Maybe it was prompted by the call of deep space, though Tyson used to claim, “It’s the boredom on Earth that inspired them. That’s why they came up with their elaborate scheme.”

The near-immortals devised ways of making highly gifted, highly trained crews from themselves. With computers and genetic engineering, groups of people could pool their qualities and create compilation humans. Sixty-three individuals had each donated moneys and their own natures, and Pico was the result. She was a grand and sophisticated average of the group. Her face was a blending of every face; her body was a feminine approximation of their own varied bodies. In a few instances, the engineers had planted synthetic genes—for speed and strength, for example—and her brain had a subtly different architecture. Yet basically Pico was their offspring, a stewlike clone. The second of two clones, she knew. The first clone created had had subtle flaws, and he was painlessly destroyed just before birth. Pico and Tyson and every other compilation person had been born at adult size. Because she was the second attempt, and behind schedule, Pico was thrown straight into her training. Unlike the other crew members, she had spent only a minimal time with her parents. Her sponsors.Whatever they were calling themselves. That and the long intervening years made it difficult to recognize faces and names. She found herself gazing out at them, believing they were strangers, their tireless smiles hinting at something predatory. The neat white teeth gleamed at her, and she wanted to shiver again, holding the knees closer to her mouth.

Someone suggested opening the lovely gifts.

A good idea. She agreed, and the robots brought down the stacks of boxes, placing them beside and behind her. The presents were a young tradition; when she was leaving Earth, the first compilation people were returning with little souvenirs of their travels. Pico had liked the gesture and had done the same. One after another, she started reading the names inscribed in her own flowing handwriting. Then each person stepped forward, thanking her for the treasure, then greedily unwrapping it, the papers flaring into bright colors as they were bent and twisted and torn, then tossed aside for the robots to collect. She knew none of these people, and that was wrong. What she should have done, she realized, was go into the Kyber’s records and memorize names and faces. It would have been easy enough, and proper, and she felt guilty for never having made the effort.

It wasn’t merely genetics that she shared with these people; she also embodied slivers of their personalities and basic tendencies. Inside Pico’s sophisticated womb, the computers had blended together their shrugs and tongue clicks and the distinctive patterns of their speech. She had emerged as an approximation of every one of them; yet why didn’t she feel a greater closeness? Why wasn’t there a strong, tangible bond here?

Or was there something—only, she wasn’t noticing it?

One early gift was a slab of mirrored rock. “From Tween V,” she explained. “What it doesn’t reflect, it absorbs and reemits later. I kept that particular piece in my own cabin, fixed to the outer wall—”

“Thank you, thank you,”gushed the woman.

For an instant, Pico saw herself reflected on the rock. She looked much older than these people. Tired, she thought. Badly weathered. In the cramped starship, they hadn’t the tools to revitalize aged flesh, nor had there been the need. Most of the voyage had been spent in cold-sleep. Their waking times, added together, barely exceeded forty years of biological activity.

“Look at this!” the woman shouted, turning and waving her prize at the others. “Isn’t it lovely?”

“A shiny rock,” teased one voice. “Perfect!”

Yet the woman refused to be anything but impressed. She clasped her prize to her chest and giggled, merging with the crowd and then vanishing.

They look like children, Pico told herself.

At least how she imagined children to appear . . . unworldly and spoiled, needing care and infinite patience. . . .

She read the next name, and a new woman emerged to collect her gift. “My, what a large box!” She tore at the paper, then the box’s lid, then eased her hands into the dunnage of white foam. Pico remembered wrapping this gift—one of the only ones where she was positive of its contents—and she happily watched the smooth, elegant hands pulling free a greasy and knob-faced nut. Then Pico explained:

“It’s from the Yult Tree on Proxima Centauri 2.”The only member of the species on that strange little world.“If you wish, you can break its dormancy with liquid nitrogen. Then plant it in pure quartz sand, never anything else. Sand, and use red sunlight—”

“I know how to cultivate them,” the woman snapped.

There was a sudden silence, uneasy and prolonged.

Finally Pico said, “Well . . . good . . .”

“Everyone knows about Yult nuts,” the woman explained. “They’re practically giving them away at the greeneries now.”

Someone spoke sharply, warning her to stop and think.

“I’m sorry,” she responded. “If I sound ungrateful, I mean. I was just thinking, hoping . . . I don’t know. Never mind.”

A weak, almost inconsequential apology, and the woman paused to feel the grease between her fingertips.

The thing was, Pico thought, that she had relied on guesswork in selecting these gifts. She had decided to represent every alien world, and she felt proud of herself on the job accomplished. Yult Trees were common on Earth? But how could she know such a thing? And besides, why should it matter? She had brought the nut and everything else because she’d taken risks, and these people were obviously too ignorant and silly to appreciate what they were receiving.

Rage had replaced her fear.

Sometimes she heard people talking among themselves, trying to trade gifts. Gemstones and pieces of alien driftwood were being passed about like orphans. Yet nobody would release the specimens of odd life-forms from living worlds, transparent canisters holding bugs and birds and whatnot inside preserving fluids or hard vacuums. If only she had known what she couldn’t have known, these silly brats . . . And she found herself swallowing, holding her breath, and wanting to scream at all of them. Pico was a compilation, yet she wasn’t.

She hadn’t lived one day as these people had lived their entire lives. She didn’t know about comfort or changelessness, and with an attempt at empathy, she tried to imagine such an incredible existence. Tyson used to tell her, “Shallowness is a luxury. Maybe the ultimate luxury.” She hadn’t understood him. Not really. “Only the rich can master true frivolity.” Now those words echoed back at her, making her think of Tyson. That intense and angry man . . . the opposite of frivolity, the truth told. And with that, her mood shifted again. Her skin tingled. She felt nothing for or against her audience. How could they help being what they were? How could anyone help their nature? And with that, she found herself reading another name on another unopened box. A little box, she saw. Probably another one of the unpopular gemstones, born deep inside an alien crust and thrown out by forces unimaginable . . . There was a silence, an odd stillness, and she repeated the name.

“Opera?Opera Ting?”

Was it her imagination, or was there a nervousness running through the audience? Just what was happening—?

“Excuse me?” said a voice from the back. “Pardon?” People began moving aside, making room, and a figure emerged. A male, something about him noticeably different. He moved with a telltale lightness, with a spring to his gait. Smiling, he took the tiny package while saying, “Thank you,” with great feeling. “For my father, thank you. I’m sure he would have enjoyed this moment. I only wish he could have been here, if only . . .” Father? Wasn’t this Opera Ting?

Pico managed to nod, then she asked, “Where is he? I mean, is he busy somewhere?”

“Oh no. He died, I’m afraid.” The man moved differently because he was different. He was young—even younger than I, Pico realized—and he shook his head, smiling in a serene way. Was he a clone? A biological child? What? “But on his behalf,” said the man, “I wish to thank you. Whatever this gift is, I will treasure it. I promise you. I know you must have gone through hell to find it and bring it to me, and thank you so very much, Pico. Thank you, thank you. Thank you!”

Death.

An appropriate intruder in the evening’s festivities, thought Pico. Some accident, some kind of tragedy . . . something had killed one of her sixty-three parents, and that thought pleased her. There was a pang of guilt woven into her pleasure, but not very much. It was comforting to know that even these people weren’t perfectly insulated from death; it was a force that would grasp everyone, given time. Like it had taken Midge, she thought. And Uoo, she thought. And Tyson.

Seventeen compilated people had embarked on Kyber, representing almost a thousand near-immortals. Only nine had returned, including Pico. Eight friends were lost. . . . Lost was a better word than death, she decided. . . . And usually it happened in places worse than any Hell conceived by human beings. After Opera—his name, she learned, was the same as his father’s—the giving of the gifts settled into a routine. Maybe it was because of the young man’s attitude. People seemed more polite, more self-contained. Someone had the presence to ask for another story. Anything she wished to tell. And Pico found herself thinking of a watery planet circling a distant red-dwarf sun, her voice saying,

“Coldtear,” and watching faces nod in unison. They recognized the name, and it was too late. It wasn’t the story she would have preferred to tell, yet she couldn’t seem to stop herself. Coldtear was on her mind.

Just tell parts, she warned herself.

What you can stand!

The world was terran-class and covered with a single ocean frozen on its surface and heated from below. By tides, in part.And by Coldtear’s own nuclear decay. It had been Tyson’s idea to build a submersible and dive to the ocean’s remote floor. He used spare parts in Kyber’s machine shop—the largest room on board—then he’d taken his machine to the surface, setting it on the red-stained ice and using lasers and robot help to bore a wide hole and keep it clear.

Pico described the submersible, in brief, then mentioned that Tyson had asked her to accompany him. She didn’t add that they’d been lovers now and again, nor that sometimes they had feuded. She’d keep those parts of the story to herself for as long as possible.

The submersible’s interior was cramped and ascetic, and she tried to impress her audience with the pressures that would build on the hyperfiber hull. Many times the pressure found in Earth’s oceans, she warned; and Tyson’s goal was to set down on the floor, then don a lifesuit protected with a human-shaped force field, actually stepping outside and taking a brief walk.

“Because we need to leave behind footprints,” he had argued. “Isn’t that why we’ve come here? We can’t just leave prints up on the ice. It moves and melts, wiping itself clean every thousand years or so.”

“But isn’t that the same below?” Pico had responded. “New muds rain down—slowly, granted—and quakes cause slides and avalanches.”

“So we pick right. We find someplace where our marks will be quietly covered. Enshrouded.Made everlasting.”

She had blinked, surprised that Tyson cared about such things.

“I’ve studied the currents,” he explained, “and the terrain—”

“Are you serious?” Yet you couldn’t feel certain about Tyson. He was a creature full of surprises. “All this trouble, and for what—?”

“Trust me, Pico. Trust me!”

Tyson had had an enormous laugh. His parents, sponsors, whatever—an entirely different group of people—had purposefully made him larger than the norm. They had selected genes for physical size, perhaps wanting Tyson to dominate the Kyber’s crew in at least that one fashion. If his own noise was to be believed, that was the only tinkering done to him. Otherwise, he was a pure compilation of his parents’

traits, fiery and passionate to a fault. It was a little unclear to Pico what group of people could be so uniformly aggressive; yet Tyson had had his place in their tight-woven crew, and he had had his charms in addition to his size and the biting intelligence.

“Oh Pico,” he cried out. “What’s this about, coming here? If it’s not about leaving traces of our passage . . . then what?”

“It’s about going home again,” she had answered.

“Then why do we leave the Kyber? Why not just orbit Coldtear and send down our robots to explore?”

“Because . . .”

“Indeed! Because!” The giant head nodded, and he put a big hand on her shoulder. “I knew you’d see my point. I just needed to give you time, my friend.”

She agreed to the deep dive, but not without misgivings.

And during their descent, listening to the ominous creaks and groans of the hull while lying flat on their backs, the misgivings began to reassert themselves.

It was Tyson’s fault, and maybe his aim.

No, she thought. It was most definitely his aim.

At first, she thought it was some game, him asking, “Do you ever wonder how it will feel? We come home and are welcomed, and then our dear parents disassemble our brains and implant them—”

“Quiet,” she interrupted. “We agreed. Everyone agreed. We aren’t going to talk about it, all right?” A pause, then he said, “Except, I know. How it feels, I mean.” She heard him, then she listened to him take a deep breath from the close, damp air; and finally she had strength enough to ask, “How can you know?”

When Tyson didn’t answer, she rolled onto her side and saw the outline of his face. A handsome face, she thought. Strong and incapable of any doubts. This was the only taboo subject among the compilations—”How will it feel?”—and it was left to each of them to decide what they believed. Was it a fate or a reward? To be subdivided and implanted into the minds of dozens and dozens of near-immortals . . .

It wasn’t a difficult trick, medically speaking.

After all, each of their minds had been designed for this one specific goal. Memories and talent; passion and training. All of the qualities would be saved—diluted, but, in the same instant, gaining their own near-immortality. Death of a sort, but a kind of everlasting life, too. That was the creed by which Pico had been born and raised.

The return home brings a great reward, and peace.

Pico’s first memory was of her birth, spilling slippery-wet from the womb and coughing hard, a pair of doctoring robots bent over her, whispering to her, “Welcome, child. Welcome. You’ve been born from them to be joined with them when it is time. . . . We promise you . . . !” Comforting noise, and mostly Pico had believed it.

But Tyson had to say, “I know how it feels, Pico,” and she could make out his grin, his amusement patronizing. Endless.

“How?” she muttered. “How do you know—?”

“Because some of my parents . . . well, let’s just say that I’m not their first time. Understand me?”

“They made another compilation?”

“One of the very first, yes.Which was incorporated into them before I was begun, and which was incorporated into me because there was a spare piece. A leftover chunk of the mind—”

“You’re making this up, Tyson!”

Except, he wasn’t, she sensed. Knew. Several times, on several early worlds, Tyson had seemed too knowledgeable about too much. Nobody could have prepared himself that well, she realized. She and the others had assumed that Tyson was intuitive in some useful way. Part of him was from another compilation? From someone like them? A fragment of the man had walked twice beside the gray dust sea of Plicker, and it had twice climbed the giant ant mounds on Proxima Centauri 2. It was a revelation, unnerving and hard to accept; and just the memory of that instant made her tremble secretly, facing her audience, her tired blood turning to ice.

Pico told none of this to her audience.

Instead, they heard about the long descent and the glow of rare life-forms outside—a thin plankton consuming chemical energies as they found them—and, too, the growing creaks of the spherical hull. They didn’t hear how she asked, “So how does it feel? You’ve got a piece of compilation inside you . . . all right! Are you going to tell me what it’s like?”

They didn’t hear about her partner’s long, deep laugh.

Nor could they imagine him saying, “Pico, my dear. You’re such a passive, foolish creature. That’s why I love you. So docile, so damned innocent—”

“Does it live inside you, Tyson?”

“It depends on what you consider life.”

“Can you feel its presence? I mean, does it have a personality? An existence? Or have you swallowed it all up?”

“I don’t think I’ll tell.” Then the laugh enlarged, and the man lifted his legs and kicked at the hyperfiber with his powerful muscles. She could hear, and feel, the solid impacts of his bootheels. She knew that Tyson’s strength was nothing compared to the ocean’s mass bearing down on them, their hull scarcely feeling the blows . . . yet some irrational part of her was terrified. She had to reach out, grasping one of his trouser legs and tugging hard, telling him:

“Don’t! Stop that! Will you please . . . quit!?”

The tension shifted direction in an instant.

Tyson said, “I was lying,” and then added, “About knowing. About having a compilation inside me.” And he gave her a huge hug, laughing in a different way now. He nearly crushed her ribs and lungs. Then he spoke into one of her ears, offering more, whispering with the old charm, and she accepting his offer. They did it as well as possible, considering their circumstances and the endless groaning of their tiny vessel; and she remembered all of it while her voice, detached but thorough, described how they had landed on top of something rare. There was a distinct crunch of stone. They had made their touchdown on the slope of a recent volcano—an island on an endless plain of mud—and afterward they dressed in their lifesuits, triple-checked their force fields, then flooded the compartment and crawled into the frigid, pressurized water.

It was an eerie, almost indescribable experience to walk on that ocean floor. When language failed Pico, she tried to use silence and oblique gestures to capture the sense of endless time and the cold and darkness. Even when Tyson ignited the submersible’s outer lights, making the nearby terrain bright as late afternoon, there was the palpable taste of endless dark just beyond. She told of feeling the pressure despite the force field shrouding her; she told of climbing after Tyson, scrambling up a rough slope of youngish rock to a summit where they discovered a hot-water spring that pumped heated, mineral-rich water up at them.

That might have been the garden spot of Coldtear. Surrounding the spring was a thick, almost gelatinous mass of gray-green bacteria, pulsating and fat by its own standards. She paused, seeing the scene all over again. Then she assured her parents, “It had a beauty. I mean it. An elegant, minimalist beauty.” Nobody spoke.

Then someone muttered, “I can hardly wait to remember it,” and gave a weak laugh. The audience became uncomfortable, tense and too quiet. People shot accusing looks at the offender, and Pico worked not to notice any of it. A bitterness was building in her guts, and she sat up straighter, rubbing at both hips.

Then a woman coughed for attention, waited, and then asked, “What happened next?” Pico searched for her face.

“There was an accident, wasn’t there? On Coldtear . . . ?”

I won’t tell them, thought Pico. Not now. Not this way.

She said, “No, not then. Later.” And maybe some of them knew better. Judging by the expressions, a few must have remembered the records. Tyson died on the first dive. It was recorded as being an equipment failure—Pico’s lie—and she’d hold on to the lie as long as possible. It was a promise she’d made to herself and kept all these years.

Shutting her eyes, she saw Tyson’s face smiling at her. Even through the thick faceplate and the shimmering glow of the force field, she could make out the mischievous expression, eyes glinting, the large mouth saying, “Go on back, Pico. In and up and a safe trip to you, pretty lady.” She had been too stunned to respond, gawking at him.

“Remember? I’ve still got to leave my footprints somewhere—”

“What are you planning?” she interrupted.

He laughed and asked, “Isn’t it obvious? I’m going to make my mark on this world. It’s dull and nearly dead, and I don’t think anyone is ever going to return here. Certainly not to here.Which means I’ll be pretty well left alone—”

“Your force field will drain your batteries,” she argued stupidly. Of course he knew that salient fact. “If you stay here—!”

“I know, Pico. I know.”

“But why—?”

“I lied before. About lying.” The big face gave a disappointed look, then the old smile reemerged. “Poor, docile Pico. I knew you wouldn’t take this well. You’d take it too much to heart . . . which I suppose is why I asked you along in the first place. . . . ” and he turned away, starting to walk through the bacterial mat with threads and chunks kicked loose, sailing into the warm current and obscuring him. It was a strange gray snow moving against gravity. Her last image of Tyson was of a hulking figure amid the living goo; and to this day, she had wondered if she could have wrestled him back to the submersible—an impossibility, of course—and how far could he have walked before his force field failed. Down the opposite slope and onto the mud, no doubt.

She could imagine him walking fast, using his strength . . . fighting the deep, cold muds . . . Tyson plus that fragment of an earlier compilation—and who was driving whom? she asked herself. Again and again and again.

Sometimes she heard herself asking Tyson, “How does it feel having a sliver of another soul inside you?” His ghost never answered, merely laughing with his booming voice.

She hated him for his suicide, and admired him; and sometimes she cursed him for taking her along with him and for the way he kept cropping up in her thoughts. . . . “Damn you, Tyson. Goddamn you, goddamn you . . . !”

No more presents remained.

One near-immortal asked, “Are we hungry?”, and others replied, “Famished,” in one voice, then breaking into laughter. The party moved toward the distant tables, a noisy mass of bodies surrounding Pico. Her hip had stiffened while sitting, but she worked hard to move normally, managing the downslope toward the pond and then the little wooden bridge spanning a rocky brook. The waterfowl made grumbling sounds, angered by the disturbances; Pico stopped and watched them, finally asking, “What kinds are those?” She meant the ducks.

“Just mallards,” she heard. “Nothing fancy.”

Yet, to her, they seemed like miraculous creatures, vivid plumage and the moving eyes, wings spreading as a reflex and their nervous motions lending them a sense of muscular power. A vibrancy. Someone said, “You’ve seen many birds, I’m sure.”

Of a sort, yes . . .

“What were your favorites, Pico?”

They were starting uphill, quieter now, feet making a swishing sound in the grass; and Pico told them about the pterosaurs of Wilder, the man-sized bats on Little Quark, and the giant insects—a multitude of species—thriving in the thick, warm air of Tau Ceti I.

“Bugs,” grumbled someone. “Uggh!”

“Now, now,” another person responded.

Then a third joked, “I’m not looking forward to that. Who wants to trade memories?” A joke, thought Pico, because memories weren’t tradable properties. Minds were holographic—every piece held the basic picture of the whole—and these people each would receive a sliver of Pico’s whole self. Somehow that made her smile, thinking how none of them would be spared. Every terror and every agony would be set inside each of them. In a diluted form, of course. The Pico-ness minimized. Made manageable. Yet it was something, wasn’t it? It pleased her to think that a few of them might awaken in the night, bathed in sweat after dreaming of Tyson’s death . . . just as she had dreamed of it time after time

. . . her audience given more than they had anticipated, a dark little joke of her own. . . . They reached the tables, Pico taking hers and sitting, feeling rather self-conscious as the others quietly assembled around her, each of them knowing where they belonged. She watched their faces. The excitement she had sensed from the beginning remained; only, it seemed magnified now. More colorful, more intense. Facing toward the inside of the omega, her hosts couldn’t quit staring, forever smiling, scarcely able to eat once the robots brought them plates filled with steaming foods. Fancy meals, Pico learned.

The robot setting her dinner before her explained, “The vegetables are from Triton, miss. A very special and much-prized strain. And the meat is from a wild hound killed just yesterday—”

“Really?”

“As part of the festivities, yes.” The ceramic face, white and expressionless, stared down at her. “There have been hunting parties and games, among other diversions. Quite an assortment of activities, yes.”

“For how long?” she asked. “These festivities . . . have they been going on for days?”

“A little longer than three months, miss.”

She had no appetite; nonetheless, she lifted her utensils and made the proper motions, reminding herself that three months of continuous parties would be nothing to these people. Three months was a day to them, and what did they do with their time? So much of it, and such a constricted existence. What had Tyson once told her? The average citizen of earth averages less than one off-world trip in eighty years, and the trends were toward less traveling. Spaceflight was safe only to a degree, and these people couldn’t stand the idea of being meters away from a cold, raw vacuum.

“Cowards,” Tyson had called them. “Gutted, deblooded cowards!” Looking about, she saw the delicate twists of green leaves vanishing into grinning mouths, the chewing prolonged and indifferent. Except for Opera, that is. Opera saw her and smiled back in turn, his eyes different, something mocking about the tilt of his head and the curl of his mouth. She found her eyes returning to Opera every little while, and she wasn’t sure why. She felt no physical attraction for the man. His youth and attitudes made him different from the others, but how much different? Then she noticed his dinner—cultured potatoes with meaty hearts—and that made an impression on Pico. It was a standard food on board the Kyber. Opera was making a gesture, perhaps. Nobody else was eating that bland food, and she decided this was a show of solidarity. At least the man was trying, wasn’t he? More than the others, he was. He was.

Dessert was cold and sweet and shot full of some odd liquor.

Pico watched the others drinking and talking among themselves. For the first time, she noticed how they seemed subdivided—discrete groups formed, and boundaries between each one. A dozen people here, seven back there, and sometimes individuals sitting alone—like Opera—chatting politely or appearing entirely friendless.

One lonesome woman rose to her feet and approached Pico, not smiling, and with a sharp voice, she declared, “Tomorrow, come morning . . . you’ll live forever . . . !” Conversations diminished, then quit entirely.

“Plugged in.Here.” She was under the influence of some drug, the tip of her finger shaking and missing her own temple. “You fine lucky girl . . . Yes, you are . . . !” Some people laughed at the woman, suddenly and without shame.

The harsh sound made her turn and squint, and Pico watched her straightening her back. The woman was pretending to be above them and uninjured, her thin mouth squeezed shut and her nose tilting with mock pride. With a clear, soft voice, she said, “Fuck every one of you,” and then laughed, turning toward Pico, acting as if they had just shared some glorious joke of their own.

“I would apologize for our behavior,” said Opera, “but I can’t. Not in good faith, I’m afraid.” Pico eyed the man. Dessert was finished; people stood about drinking, keeping the three-month-old party in motion. A few of them stripped naked and swam in the green pond. It was a raucous scene, tireless and full of happy scenes that never seemed convincingly joyous. Happy sounds by practice, rather. Centuries of practice, and the result was to make Pico feel sad and quite lonely.

“A silly, vain lot,” Opera told her.

She said, “Perhaps,” with a diplomatic tone, then saw several others approaching. At least they looked polite, she thought. Respectful. It was odd how a dose of respect glossed over so much. Particularly when the respect wasn’t reciprocated, Pico feeling none toward them. . . . A man asked to hear more stories. Please?

Pico shrugged her shoulders, then asked, “Of what?” Every request brought her a momentary sense of claustrophobia, her memories threatening to crush her. “Maybe you’re interested in a specific world?”Opera responded, saying, “Blueblue!”

Blueblue was a giant gaseous world circling a bluish sun. Her first thought was of Midge vanishing into the dark storm on its southern hemisphere, searching for the source of the carbon monoxide upflow that effectively gave breath to half the world. Most of Blueblue was calm in comparison. Thick winds; strong sunlight. Its largest organisms would dwarf most cities, their bodies balloonlike and their lives spent feeding on sunlight and hydrocarbons, utilizing carbon monoxide and other radicals in their patient metabolisms. Pico and the others had spent several months living on the living clouds, walking across them, taking samples and studying the assortment of parasites and symbionts that grew in their flesh. She told about sunrise on Blueblue, remembering its colors and its astounding speed. Suddenly she found herself talking about a particular morning when the landing party was jostled out of sleep by an apparent quake. Their little huts had been strapped down and secured, but they found themselves tilting fast. Their cloud was colliding with a neighboring cloud—something they had never seen—and of course there was a rush to load their shuttle and leave. If it came to that.

“Normally, you see, the clouds avoid each other,” Pico told her little audience. “At first, we thought the creatures were fighting, judging by their roaring and the hard shoving. They make sounds by forcing air through pores and throats and anuses. It was a strange show. Deafening. The collision point was maybe a third of a kilometer from camp, our whole world rolling over while the sun kept rising, its bright, hot light cutting through the organic haze—”

“Gorgeous,” someone said.

A companion said, “Quiet!”

Then Opera touched Pico on the arm, saying, “Go on. Don’t pay any attention to them.” The others glanced at Opera, hearing something in his voice, and their backs stiffening reflexively. And then Pico was speaking again, finishing her story. Tyson was the first one of them to understand, who somehow made the right guess and began laughing, not saying a word. By then everyone was on board the shuttle, ready to fly; the tilting stopped suddenly, the air filling with countless little blue balloons. Each was the size of a toy balloon, she told. Their cloud was bleeding them from new pores, and the other cloud responded with a thick gray fog of butterflylikesomethings. The somethings flew after the balloons, and Tyson laughed harder, his face contorted and the laugh finally shattering into a string of gasping coughs.

“Don’t you see?” he asked the others. “Look! The clouds are enjoying a morning screw!” Pico imitated Tyson’s voice, regurgitating the words and enthusiasm. Then she was laughing for herself, scarcely noticing how the others giggled politely. No more. Only Opera was enjoying her story, again touching her arm and saying, “That’s lovely. Perfect. God, precious . . . !” The rest began to drift away, not quite excusing themselves.

What was wrong?

“Don’t mind them,” Opera cautioned. “They’re members of some new chastity faith. Clarity through horniness, and all that.” He laughed at them now. “They probably went to too many orgies, and this is how they’re coping with their guilt. That’s all.”

Pico shut her eyes, remembering the scene on Blueblue for herself. She didn’t want to relinquish it.

“Screwing clouds,” Opera was saying. “That is lovely.” And she thought.

He sounds a little like Tyson. In places.In ways.

After a while, Pico admitted. “I can’t remember your father’s face. I’m sure I must have met him, but I don’t—”

“You did meet him,” Opera replied. “He left a recording of it in his journal—a brief meeting—and I made a point of studying everything about the mission and you. His journal entries; your reports. Actually, I’m the best-prepared person here today. Other than you, of course.” She said nothing, considering those words.

They were walking now, making their way down to the pond, and sometimes Pico noticed the hard glances of the others. Did they approve of Opera? Did it anger them, watching him monopolizing her time? Yet she didn’t want to be with them, the truth told. Fuck them, she thought; and she smiled at her private profanity.

The pond was empty of swimmers now. There were just a few sleepless ducks and the roiled water. A lot of the celebrants had vanished, Pico realized. To where? She asked Opera, and he said:

“It’s late. But then again, most people sleep ten or twelve hours every night.”

“That much?”

He nodded. “Enhanced dreams are popular lately. And the oldest people sometimes exceed fifteen hours—”

“Always?”

He shrugged and offered a smile.

“What a waste!”

“Of time?” he countered.

Immortals can waste many things, she realized. But never time. And with that thought, she looked straight at her companion, asking him, “What happened to your father?”

“How did he die, you mean?”

A little nod. A respectful expression, she hoped. But curious.

Opera said, “He used an extremely toxic poison, self-induced.” He gave a vague disapproving look directed at nobody. “A suicide at the end of a prolonged depression. He made certain that his mind was ruined before autodocs and his own robots could save him.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yet I can’t afford to feel sorry,” he responded. “You see, I was born according to the terms of his will. I’m 99 percent his clone, the rest of my genes tailored according to his desires. If he hadn’t murdered himself, I wouldn’t exist. Nor would I have inherited his money.” He shrugged, saying, “Parents,” with a measured scorn. “They have such power over you, like it or not.” She didn’t know how to respond.

“Listen to us. All of this death talk, and doesn’t it seem out of place?” Opera said, “After all, we’re here to celebrate your return home. Your successes.Your gifts. And you . . . you on the brink of being magnified many times over.” He paused before saying, “By this time tomorrow, you’ll reside inside all of us, making everyone richer as a consequence.”

The young man had an odd way of phrasing his statements, the entire speech either earnest or satirical. She couldn’t tell which. Or if there was a which. Maybe it was her ignorance with the audible clues, the unknown trappings of this culture. . . . Then something else occurred to her.

“What do you mean? ‘Death talk . . .’“

“Your friend Tyson died on Coldtear,” he replied. “And didn’t you lose another on Blueblue?”

“Midge. Yes.”

He nodded gravely, glancing down at Pico’s legs. “We can sit. I’m sorry; I should have noticed you were getting tired.”

They sat side by side on the grass, watching the mallard ducks. Males and females had the same vivid green heads. Beautiful, she mentioned. Opera explained how females were once brown and quite drab, but people thought that was a shame, and voted to have the species altered, both sexes made equally resplendent. Pico nodded, only halfway listening. She couldn’t get Tyson and her other dead friends out of her mind. Particularly Tyson. She had been angry with him for a long time, and even now her anger wasn’t finished. Her confusion and general tiredness made it worse. Why had he done it? In life the man had had a way of dominating every meeting, every little gathering. He had been optimistic and fearless, the last sort of person to do such an awful thing. Suicide. The others had heard it was an accident—Pico had held to her lie—but she and they were in agreement about one fact. When Tyson died, at that precise instant, some essential heart of their mission had been lost. Why? she wondered. Why?

Midge had flown into the storm on Blueblue, seeking adventure and important scientific answers; and her death was sad, yes, and everyone had missed her. But it wasn’t like Tyson’s death. It felt honorable, maybe even perfect. They had a duty to fulfill in the wilderness, and that duty was in their blood and their training. People spoke about Midge for years, acting as if she were still alive. As if she were still flying the shuttle into the storm’s vortex.

But Tyson was different.

Maybe everyone knew the truth about his death. Sometimes it seemed that, in Pico’s eyes, the crew could see what had really happened, and they’d hear it between her practiced lines. They weren’t fooled. Meanwhile, others died in the throes of life.

Uoo—a slender wisp of a compilation—was incinerated by a giant bolt of lightning on Miriam II, little left but ashes, and the rest of the party continuing its descent into the superheated Bottoms and the quiet Lead Sea.

Opaltu died in the mouth of a nameless predator. He had been another of Pico’s lovers, a proud man and the best example of vanity that she had known—until today, she thought—and she and the others had laughed at the justice that befell Opaltu’s killer. Unable to digest alien meats, the predator had sickened and died in a slow, agonizing fashion, vomiting up its insides as it staggered through the yellow jungle. Boo was killed while working outside the Kyber, struck by a mote of interstellar debris. Xon’slifesuit failed, suffocating her.

As did Kyties’s suit, and that wasn’t long ago. Just a year now, ship time, and she remembered a cascade of jokes and his endless good humor. The most decent person on board the Kyber. Yet it was Tyson who dominated her memories of the dead. It was the man as well as his self-induced extinction, and the anger within her swelled all at once. Suddenly even simple breathing was work. Pico found herself sweating, then blinking away the salt in her eyes. Once, then again, she coughed into a fist; then finally she had the energy to ask, “Why did he do it?”

“Who? My father?”

“Depression is . . . should be . . . a curable ailment. We had drugs and therapies on board that could erase it.”

“But it was more than depression. It was something that attacks the very old people. A kind of giant boredom, if you will.”

She wasn’t surprised. Nodding as if she’d expected that reply, she told him, “I can understand that, considering your lives.” Then she thought how Tyson hadn’t been depressed or bored. How could he have been either?

Opera touched her bad leg, for just a moment. “You must wonder how it will be,” he mentioned.

“Tomorrow, I mean.”

She shivered, aware of the fear returning. Closing her burning eyes, she saw Tyson’s walk through the bacterial mat, the loose gray chunks spinning as the currents carried them, lending them a greater sort of life with the motion. . . . And she opened her eyes, Opera watching, saying something to her with his expression, and her unable to decipher any meanings.

“Maybe I should go to bed, too,” she allowed.

The park under the tent was nearly empty now. Where had the others gone?

Opera said, “Of course,” as if expecting it. He rose and offered his hand, and she surprised herself by taking the hand with both of hers. Then he said, “If you like, I can show you your quarters.” She nodded, saying nothing.

It was a long, painful walk, and Pico honestly considered asking for a robot’s help. For anyone’s. Even a cane would have been a blessing, her hip never having felt so bad. Earth’s gravity and the general stress were making it worse, most likely. She told herself that at least it was a pleasant night, warm and calm and perfectly clear, and the soft ground beneath the grass seemed to be calling to her, inviting her to lie down and sleep in the open.

People were staying in a chain of old houses subdivided into apartments, luxurious yet small. Pico’s apartment was on the ground floor, Opera happy to show her through the rooms. For an instant, she considered asking him to stay the night. Indeed, she sensed that he was delaying, hoping for some sort of invitation. But she heard herself saying, “Rest well, and thank you,” and her companion smiled and left without comment, vanishing through the crystal front door and leaving her completely alone. For a little while, she sat on her bed, doing nothing. Not even thinking, at least in any conscious fashion. Then she realized something, no warning given; and aloud, in a voice almost too soft for even her to hear, she said, “He didn’t know. Didn’t have an idea, the shit.”Tyson. She was thinking about the fiery man and his boast about being the second generation of star explorers. What if it was all true? His parents had injected a portion of a former Tyson into him, and he had already known the early worlds they had visited. He already knew the look of double sunrises on the desert world orbiting Alpha Centauri A; he knew the smell of constant rot before they cracked their airlocks on Barnard’s 2. But try as he might—

“—he couldn’t remember how it feels to be disassembled.” She spoke without sound. To herself.“That titanic and fearless creature, and he couldn’t remember. Everything else, yes, but not that. And not knowing had to scare him. Nothing else did, but that terrified him. The only time in his life he was truly scared, and it took all his bluster to keep that secret—!”

Killing himself rather than face his fear.

Of course, she thought. Why not?

And he took Pico as his audience, knowing she’d be a good audience. Because they were lovers. Because he must have decided that he could convince her of his fearlessness one last time, leaving his legend secure. Immortal, in a sense.

That’s what you were thinking . . .

. . . wasn’t it?

And she shivered, holding both legs close to her mouth, and feeling the warm misery of her doomed hip.

She sat for a couple more hours, neither sleeping nor feeling the slightest need for sleep. Finally she rose and used the bathroom, and after a long, careful look through the windows, she ordered the door to open, and stepped outside, picking a reasonable direction and walking stiffly and quickly on the weakened leg.

Opera emerged from the shadows, startling her.

“If you want to escape,” he whispered, “I can help. Let me help you, please.” The face was handsome in the moonlight, young in every fashion. He must have guessed her mood, she realized, and she didn’t allow herself to become upset. Help was important, she reasoned. Even essential. She had to find her way across a vast and very strange alien world. “I want to get back into orbit,” she told him, “and find another starship. We saw several. They looked almost ready to embark.”Bigger than the Kyber, and obviously faster. No doubt designed to move even deeper into the endless wilderness.

“I’m not surprised,” Opera told her. “And I understand.” She paused, staring at him before asking, “How did you guess?”

“Living forever inside our heads . . . That’s just a mess of metaphysical nonsense, isn’t it? You know you’ll die tomorrow. Bits of your brain will vanish inside us, made part of us, and not vice versa. I think it sounds like an awful way to die, certainly for someone like you—”

“Can you really help me?”

“This way,” he told her. “Come on.”

They walked for an age, crossing the paddock and finally reaching the wide tube where the skimmers shot past with a rush of air. Opera touched a simple control, then said, “It won’t be long,” and smiled at her. Just for a moment. “You know, I almost gave up on you. I thought I must have read you wrong. You didn’t strike me as someone who’d go quietly to her death. . . . ”

She had a vague, fleeting memory of the senior Opera. Gazing at the young face, she could recall a big, warm hand shaking her hand, and a similar voice saying, “It’s very good to meet you, Pico. At last!”

“I bet one of the new starships will want you.” The young Opera was telling her, “You’re right. They’re bigger ships, and they’ve got better facilities. Since they’ll be gone even longer, they’ve been given the best possible medical equipment. That hip and your general body should respond to treatments—”

“I have experience,” she whispered.

“Pardon me?”

“Experience.” She nodded with conviction. “I can offer a crew plenty of valuable experience.”

“They’d be idiots not to take you.”

A skimmer slowed and stopped before them. Opera made the windows opaque—”So nobody can see you”—and punched in their destination, Pico making herself comfortable.

“Here we go,” he chuckled, and they accelerated away.

There was an excitement to all of this, an adventure like every other. Pico realized that she was scared, but in a good, familiar way. Life and death. Both possibilities seemed balanced on a very narrow fulcrum, and she found herself smiling, rubbing her hip with a slow hand.

They were moving fast, following Opera’s instructions.

“A circuitous route,” he explained. “We want to make our whereabouts less obvious. All right?”

“Fine.”

“Are you comfortable?”

“Yes,” she allowed. “Basically.”

Then she was thinking about the others—the other survivors from the Kyber—wondering how many of them were having second or third thoughts. The long journey home had been spent in cold-sleep, but there had been intervals when two or three of them were awakened to do normal maintenance. Not once did anyone even joke about taking the ship elsewhere. Nobody had asked, “Why do we have to go to Earth?” The obvious question had eluded them, and at the time, she had assumed it was because there were no doubters. Besides herself, that is. The rest believed this would be the natural conclusion to full and satisfied lives; they were returning home to a new life and an appreciative audience. How could any sane compilation think otherwise?

Yet she found herself wondering.

Why no jokes?

If they hadn’t had doubts, wouldn’t they have made jokes?

Eight others had survived the mission. Yet none were as close to Pico as she had been to Tyson. They had saved each other’s proverbial skin many times, and she did feel a sudden deep empathy for them, remembering how they had boarded nine separate shuttles after kisses and hugs and a few careful tears, each of them struggling with the proper things to say. But what could anyone say at such a moment?

Particularly when you believed that your companions were of one mind, and, in some fashion, happy. . . . Pico said, “I wonder about the others,” and intended to leave it at that. To say nothing more.

“The others?”

“From the Kyber.My friends.” She paused and swallowed, then said softly, “Maybe I could contact them.”

“No,” he responded.

She jerked her head, watching Opera’s profile.

“That would make it easy to catch you.” His voice was quite sensible and measured. “Besides,” he added, “can’t they make up their own minds? Like you have?” She nodded, thinking that was reasonable. Sure.

He waited a long moment, then said, “Perhaps you’d like to talk about something else?”

“Like what?”

He eyed Pico, then broke into a wide smile. “If I’m not going to inherit a slice of your mind, leave me another story. Tell . . . I don’t know. Tell me about your favorite single place. Not a world, but some favorite patch of ground on any world. If you could be anywhere now, where would it be? And with whom?”

Pico felt the skimmer turning, following the tube. She didn’t have to consider the question—her answer seemed obvious to her—but the pause was to collect herself, weighing how to begin and what to tell.

“In the mountains on Erindi 3,” she said, “the air thins enough to be breathed safely, and it’s really quite pretty. The scenery, I mean.”

“I’ve seen holos of the place. It is lovely.”

“Not just lovely.” She was surprised by her authority, her self-assured voice telling him, “There’s a strange sense of peace there. You don’t get that from holos. Supposedly it’s produced by the weather and the vegetation. . . . They make showers of negative ions, some say. . . . And it’s the colors, too. A subtle interplay of shades and shadows.All very one-of-a-kind.”

“Of course,” he said carefully.

She shut her eyes, seeing the place with almost perfect clarity. A summer storm had swept overhead, charging the glorious atmosphere even further, leaving everyone in the party invigorated. She and Tyson, Midge, and several others had decided to swim in a deep-blue pool near their campsite. The terrain itself was rugged, black rocks erupting from the blue-green vegetation. The valley’s little river poured into a gorge and the pool, and the people did the same. Tyson was first, naturally. He laughed and bounced in the icy water, screaming loud enough to make a flock of razor-bats take flight. This was only the third solar system they had visited, and they were still young in every sense. It seemed to them that every world would be this much fun.

She recalled—and described—diving feet first. She was last into the pool, having inherited a lot of caution from her parents. Tyson had teased her, calling her a coward and then worse, then showing where to aim. “Right here! It’s deep here! Come on, coward! Take a chance!” The water was startlingly cold, and there wasn’t much of it beneath the shiny flowing surface. She struck and hit the packed sand below, and the impact made her groan, then shout. Tyson had lied, and she chased the bastard around the pool, screaming and finally clawing at his broad back until she’d driven him up the gorge walls, him laughing and once, losing strength with all the laughing, almost tumbling down on top of her.

She told Opera everything.

At first, it seemed like an accident. All her filters were off; she admitted everything without hesitation. Then she told herself that the man was saving her life and deserved the whole story. That’s when she was describing the lovemaking between her and Tyson. That night. It was their first time, and maybe the best time. They did it on a bed of mosses, perched on the rim of the gorge, and she tried to paint a vivid word picture for her audience, including smells and the textures and the sight of the double moons overhead, colored a strange living pink and moving fast.

Their skimmer ride seemed to be taking a long time, she thought once she was finished. She mentioned this to Opera, and he nodded soberly. Otherwise, he made no comment. I won’t be disembodied tomorrow, she told herself.

Then she added, Today, I mean today.

She felt certain now. Secure. She was glad for this chance and for this dear new friend, and it was too bad she’d have to leave so quickly, escaping into the relative safety of space. Perhaps there were more people like Opera . . . people who would be kind to her, appreciating her circumstances and desires . . . supportive and interesting companions in their own right. . . .

And suddenly the skimmer was slowing, preparing to stop.

When Opera said, “Almost there,” she felt completely at ease. Entirely calm. She shut her eyes and saw the raw, wild mountains on Erindi 3, storm clouds gathering and flashes of lightning piercing the howling winds. She summoned a different day, and saw Tyson standing against the storms, smiling, beckoning for her to climb up to him just as the first cold, fat raindrops smacked against her face. The skimmer’s hatch opened with a hiss.

Sunlight streamed inside, and she thought: Dawn. By now, sure . . .

Opera rose and stepped outside, then held a hand out to Pico. She took it with both of hers and said,

“Thank you,” while rising, looking past him and seeing the paddock and the familiar faces, the green ground and the giant tent with its doorways opened now, various birds flying inside and out again . . . and Pico most surprised by how little she was surprised, Opera still holding her hands, and his flesh dry, the hand perfectly calm.

The autodocs stood waiting for orders.

This time, Pico had been carried from the skimmer, riding cradled in a robot’s arms. She had taken just a few faltering steps before half-crumbling. Exhaustion was to blame. Not fear. At least it didn’t feel like fear, she told herself. Everyone told her to take it easy, to enjoy her comfort; and now, finding herself flanked by autodocs, her exhaustion worsened. She thought she might die before the cutting began, too tired now to pump her own blood or fire her neurons or even breathe. Opera was standing nearby, almost smiling, his pleasure serene and chilly and without regrets. He hadn’t said a word since they left the skimmer.

Several others told her to sit, offering her a padded seat with built-in channels to catch any flowing blood. Pico took an uneasy step toward the seat, then paused and straightened her back, saying, “I’m thirsty,” softly, her words sounding thoroughly parched.

“Pardon?” they asked.

“I want to drink . . . some water, please . . . ?”

Faces turned, hunting for a cup and water.

It was Opera who said, “Will the pond do?” Then he came forward, extending an arm and telling everyone else, “It won’t take long. Give us a moment, will you?” Pico and Opera walked alone.

Last night’s ducks were sleeping and lazily feeding. Pico looked at their metallic green heads, so lovely that she ached at seeing them, and she tried to miss nothing. She tried to concentrate so hard that time itself would compress, seconds turning to hours, and her life in that way prolonged. Opera was speaking, asking her, “Do you want to hear why?” She shook her head, not caring in the slightest.

“But you must be wondering why. I fool you into believing that I’m your ally, and I manipulate you—”

“Why?” she sputtered. “So tell me.”

“Because,” he allowed, “it helps the process. It helps your integration into us. I gave you a chance for doubts and helped you think you were fleeing, convinced you that you’d be free . . . and now you’re angry and scared and intensely alive. It’s that intensity that we want. It makes the neurological grafts take hold. It’s a trick that we learned since the Kyber left Earth. Some compilations tried to escape, and when they were caught and finally incorporated along with their anger—”

“Except, I’m not angry,” she lied, gazing at his self-satisfied grin.

“A nervous system in flux,” he said. “I volunteered, by the way.” She thought of hitting him. Could she kill him somehow?

But instead, she turned and asked, “Why this way? Why not just let me slip away, then catch me at the spaceport?”

“You were going to drink,” he reminded her. “Drink.” She knelt despite her hip’s pain, knees sinking into the muddy bank and her lips pursing, taking in a long, warmish thread of muddy water, and then her face lifting, the water spilling across her chin and chest, and her mouth unable to close tight.

“Nothing angers,” he said, “like the betrayal of someone you trust.” True enough, she thought. Suddenly she could see Tyson leaving her alone on the ocean floor, his private fears too much, and his answer being to kill himself while dressed up in apparent bravery. A kind of betrayal, wasn’t that? To both of them, and it still hurt. . . .

“Are you still thirsty?” asked Opera.

“Yes,” she whispered.

“Then drink. Go on.”

She knelt again, taking a bulging mouthful and swirling it with her tongue. Yet she couldn’t make herself swallow, and after a moment, it began leaking out from her lips and down her front again. Making a mess, she realized. Muddy, warm, ugly water, and she couldn’t remember how it felt to be thirsty. Such a little thing, and ordinary, and she couldn’t remember it.

“Come on, then,” said Opera.

She looked at him.

He took her arm and began lifting her, a small, smiling voice saying, “You’ve done very well, Pico. You have. The truth is that everyone is very proud of you.”

She was on her feet again and walking, not sure when she had begun moving her legs. She wanted to poison her thoughts with her hatred of these awful people, and for a little while, she could think of nothing else. She would make her mind bilious and cancerous, poisoning all of these bastards and finally destroying them. That’s what she would do, she promised herself. Except, suddenly she was sitting on the padded chair, autodocs coming close with their bright, humming limbs; and there was so much stored in her mind—worlds and people, emotions heaped on emotions—and she didn’t have the time she would need to poison herself.

Which proved something, she realized.

Sitting still now.

Sitting still and silent. At ease. Her front drenched and stained brown, but her open eyes calm and dry.

First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, June 1993.

About the Author

Robert Reed has had eleven novels published, starting with The Leeshore in 1987 and most recently with The Well of Stars in 2004. Since winning the first annual L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future contest in 1986 (under the pen name Robert Touzalin) and being a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer in 1987, he has had over 200 shorter works published in a variety of magazines and anthologies. Eleven of those stories were published in his critically-acclaimed first collection, The Dragons of Springplace, in 1999. Twelve more stories appear in his second collection, The Cuckoo’s Boys [2005]. In addition to his success in the U.S., Reed has also been published in the U.K., Russia, Japan, Spain and in France, where a second (French-language) collection of nine of his shorter works, Chrysalide, was released in 2002. Bob has had stories appear in at least one of the annual “Year’s Best” anthologies in every year since 1992. Bob has received nominations for both the Nebula Award (nominated and voted upon by genre authors) and the Hugo Award (nominated and voted upon by fans), as well as numerous other literary awards (see Awards). He won his first Hugo Award for the 2006 novella “A Billion Eves“. He is currently working on a Great Ship trilogy for Prime Books, and of course, more short pieces.

Finisterra

David Moles

1. Encantada

Bianca Nazario stands at the end of the world.

The firmament above is as blue as the summer skies of her childhood, mirrored in the waters of la caldera; but where the skies she remembers were bounded by mountains, here on Sky there is no real horizon, only a line of white cloud. The white line shades into a diffuse grayish fog that, as Bianca looks down, grows progressively murkier, until the sky directly below is thoroughly dark and opaque.

She remembers what Dinh told her about the ways Sky could kill her. With a large enough parachute, Bianca imagines, she could fall for hours, drifting through the layered clouds, before finding her end in heat or pressure or the jaws of some monstrous denizen of the deep air.

If this should go wrong, Bianca cannot imagine a better way to die.

Bianca works her way out a few hundred meters along the base of one of Encantada’s ventral fins, stopping when the dry red dirt beneath her feet begins to give way to scarred gray flesh. She takes a last look around: at the pall of smoke obscuring the zaratán’s tree-lined dorsal ridge, at the fin she stands on, curving out and down to its delicate-looking tip, kilometers away. Then she knots her scarf around her skirted ankles and shrugs into the paraballoon harness, still warm from the bungalow’s fabricators. As the harness tightens itself around her, she takes a deep breath, filling her lungs. The wind from the burning camp smells of wood smoke and pine resin, enough to overwhelm the taint of blood from the killing ground.

Blessed Virgin, she prays, be my witness: this is no suicide.

This is a prayer for a miracle.

She leans forward.

She falls.

2. The Flying Archipelago

The boat-like anemopter that Valadez had sent for them had a cruising speed of just less than the speed of sound, which in this part of Sky’s atmosphere meant about nine hundred kilometers per hour. The speed, Bianca thought, might have been calculated to bring home the true size of Sky, the impossible immensity of it. It had taken the better part of their first day’s travel for the anemopter’s point of departure, the ten-kilometer, billion-ton vacuum balloon Transient Meridian, to drop from sight—the dwindling golden droplet disappearing, not over the horizon, but into the haze. From that Bianca estimated that the bowl of clouds visible through the subtle blurring of the anemopter’s static fields covered an area about the size of North America.

She heard a plastic clattering on the deck behind her, and turned to see one of the anemopter’s crew, a globular, brown-furred alien with a collection of arms like furry snakes, each arm tipped with a mouth or a round and curious eye. The firija were low-gravity creatures; the ones Bianca had seen on her passage from Earth had tumbled joyously through the Caliph of Baghdad’s inner ring spaces like so many radially symmetrical monkeys. The three aboard the anemopter, in Sky’s heavier gravity, had to make do with spindly-legged walking machines, and there was a droop in their arms that was both comical and melancholy.

“Come forward,” this one told Bianca in fractured Arabic, its voice like a Peruvian pipe ensemble. She thought it was the one that called itself Ismaíl. “Make see archipelago.”

She followed it forward to the anemopter’s rounded prow. The naturalist, Erasmus Fry, was already there, resting his elbows on the rail, looking down.

“Pictures don’t do them justice, do they?” he said.

Bianca went to the rail and follows the naturalist’s gaze. She did her best to maintain a certain stiff formality around Fry; from their first meeting aboard Transient Meridian she’d had the idea that it might not be good to let him get too familiar. But when she saw what Fry was looking at, the mask slipped for a moment, and she couldn’t help a sharp, quick intake of breath.

Fry chuckled. “To stand on the back of one,” he said, “to stand in a valley and look up at the hills and know that the ground under your feet is supported by the bones of a living creature—there’s nothing else like it.” He shook his head.

At this altitude they were above all but the highest-flying of the thousands of beasts that made up Septentrionalis Archipelago. Bianca’s eyes tried to make the herd (or flock, or school) of zaratanes into other things: a chain of islands, yes, if she concentrated on the colors, the greens and browns of forests and plains, the grays and whites of the snowy highlands; a fleet of ships, perhaps, if she instead focused on the individual shapes, the keel ridges, the long, translucent fins, ribbed like Chinese sails.

The zaratanes of the archipelago were more different from one another than the members of a flock of birds or a pod of whales, but still there was a symmetry, a regularity of form, the basic anatomical plan— equal parts fish and mountain—repeated throughout, in fractal detail from the great old shape of Zaratán Finisterra, a hundred kilometers along the dorsal ridge, down to the merely hill-sized bodies of the nameless younger beasts. When she took in the archipelago as a whole, it was impossible for Bianca not to see the zaratanes as living things.

“Nothing else like it,” Fry repeated.

Bianca turned reluctantly from the view, and looked at Fry. The naturalist spoke Spanish with a flawless Miami accent, courtesy, he’d said, of a Consilium language module. Bianca was finding it hard to judge the ages of extrañados, particularly the men, but in Fry’s case she thought he might be ten years older than Bianca’s own forty, and unwilling to admit it—or ten years younger, and in the habit of treating himself very badly. On her journey here she’d met cyborgs and foreigners and artificial intelligences and several sorts of alien—some familiar, at least from media coverage of the hajj, and some strange—but it was the extrañados that bothered her the most. It was hard to come to terms with the idea of humans born off Earth, humans who had never been to Earth or even seen it; humans who, many of them, had no interest in it.

“Why did you leave here, Mr. Fry?” she asked.

Fry laughed. “Because I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life out here.” With a hand, he swept the horizon. “Stuck on some Godforsaken floating island for years on end, with no one but researchers and feral refugees to talk to, nowhere to go for fun but some slum of a balloon station, nothing but a thousand kilometers of air between you and Hell?” He laughed again. “You’d leave, too, Nazario, believe me.”

“Maybe I would,” Bianca said. “But you’re back.”

“I’m here for the money,” Fry said. “Just like you.”

Bianca smiled, and said nothing.

“You know,” Fry said after a little while, “they have to kill the zaratanes to take them out of here.” He looked at  Bianca and smiled, in a way that was probably meant to be ghoulish. “There’s no atmosphere ship big enough to lift a zaratán in one piece—even a small one. The poachers deflate them—gut them— flatten them out and roll them up. And even then, they throw out almost everything but the skin and bones.”

“Strange,” Bianca mused. Her mask was back in place. “There was a packet of material on the zaratanes with my contract; I watched most of it on the voyage. According to the packet, the Consilium considers the zaratanes a protected species.”

Fry looked uneasy, and now it was Bianca’s turn to chuckle.

“Don’t worry, Mr. Fry,” she said. “I may not know exactly what it is Mr. Valadez is paying me to do, but I’ve never had any illusion that it was legal.”

Behind her, the firija made a fluting noise that might have been laughter.

3. The Steel Bird

When Bianca was a girl, the mosque of Punta Aguila was the most prominent feature in the view from her fourth-floor window, a sixteenth-century structure of tensegrity cables and soaring catenary curves, its spreading white wings vaguely—but only vaguely—recalling the bird that gave the city its name. The automation that controlled the tension of the cables and adjusted the mosque’s wings to match the shifting winds was hidden within the cables themselves, and was very old. Once, after the hurricane in the time of Bianca’s grandfather, it had needed adjusting, and the old men of the ayuntamiento had been forced to send for extrañado technicians, at an expense so great that the jizyah of Bianca’s time was still paying for it.

But Bianca rarely thought of that. Instead she would spend long hours surreptitiously sketching those white wings, calculating the weight of the structure and the tension of the cables, wondering what it would take to make the steel bird fly.

Bianca’s father could probably have told her, but she never dared to ask. Raúl Nazario de Arenas was an aeronautical engineer, like the seven generations before him, and flight was the Nazarios’ fortune; fully a third of the aircraft that plied the skies over the Rio Pícaro were types designed by Raúl or his father or his wife’s father, on contract to the great moro trading and manufacturing families that were Punta Aguila’s truly wealthy.

Because he worked for other men, and because he was a Christian, Raúl Nazario would never be as wealthy as the men who employed him, but his profession was an ancient and honorable one, providing his family with a more than comfortable living. If Raúl Nazario de Arenas thought of the mosque at all, it was only to mutter about the jizyah from time to time—but never loudly, because the Nazarios, like the other Christians of Punta Aguila, however valued, however ancient their roots, knew that they lived there only on sufferance.

But Bianca would sketch the aircraft, too, the swift gliders and lumbering flying boats and stately dirigibles, and these drawings she did not have to hide; in fact for many years her father would encourage her, explaining this and that aspect of their construction, gently correcting errors of proportion and balance in Bianca’s drawings; would let her listen in while he taught the family profession to her brothers, Jesús the older, Pablo the younger.

This lasted until shortly before Bianca’s quinceañera, when Jesús changed his name to Walíd and married a moro’s daughter, and Bianca’s mother delivered a lecture concerning the difference between what was proper for a child and what was proper for a young Christian woman with hopes of one day making a good marriage.

It was only a handful of years later that Bianca’s father died, leaving a teenaged Pablo at the helm of his engineering business; and only Bianca’s invisible assistance and the pity of a few old clients had kept contracts and money coming into the Nazario household.

By the time Pablo was old enough to think he could run the business himself, old enough to marry the daughter of a musical instrument maker from Tierra Ceniza, their mother was dead, Bianca was thirty, and even if her dowry had been half her father’s business, there was not a Christian man in Rio Pícaro who wanted it, or her.

And then one day Pablo told her about the extrañado contract that had been brought to the ayuntamiento, a contract that the ayuntamiento and the Guild had together forbidden the Christian engineers of Punta Aguila to bid on—a contract for a Spanish-speaking aeronautical engineer to travel a very long way from Rio Pícaro and be paid a very large sum of money indeed.

Three months later Bianca was in Quito, boarding an elevator car. In her valise was a bootleg copy of her father’s engineering system, and a contract with the factor of a starship called the Caliph of Baghdad, for passage to Sky.

4. The Killing Ground

The anemopter’s destination was a zaratán called Encantada, smaller than the giant Finisterra but still nearly forty kilometers from nose to tail, and eight thousand meters from gray-white keel to forested crest. From a distance of a hundred kilometers, Encantada was like a forested mountain rising from a desert plain, the clear air under its keel as dreamlike as a mirage. On her pocket system, Bianca called up pictures from Sky’s network of the alpine ecology that covered the hills and valleys of Encantada’s flanks: hardy grasses and small warm-blooded creatures and tall evergreens with spreading branches, reminding her of the pines and redwoods in the mountains west of Rio Pícaro.

For the last century or so Encantada had been keeping company with Zaratán Finisterra, holding its position above the larger beast’s eastern flank. No one, apparently, knew the reason, and Fry—who, he being the expert, Bianca had expected to at least have a theory—didn’t even seem to be interested in the question.

“They’re beasts, Nazario,” he said. “They don’t do things for reasons. We only call them animals and not plants because they bleed when we cut them.”

They were passing over Finisterra’s southern slopes. Looking down, Bianca saw brighter, warmer greens, more shades than she could count, more than she had known existed, the green threaded through with bright ribbons of silver water. She saw the anemopter’s shadow, a dark oblong that rode the slopes and ridges, ringed by brightness—the faint reflection of Sky’s sun behind them.

And just before the shadow entered the larger darkness that was the shadow of Encantada, Bianca watched it ride over something else: a flat green space carved out of the jungle, a suspiciously geometric collection of shapes that could only be buildings, the smudge of chimney smoke.

“Fry—” she started to say.

Then the village, if that’s what it was, was gone, hidden behind the next ridge.

“What?” said Fry.

“I saw—I thought I saw—”

“People?” asked Fry. “You probably did.”

“But I thought Sky didn’t have any native sentients. Who are they?”

“Humans, mostly,” Fry said. “Savages. Refugees. Drug farmers. Five generations of escaped criminals, and their kids, and their kids.” The naturalist shrugged. “Once in a while, if the Consilium’s looking for somebody in particular, the wardens might stage a raid, just for show. The rest of the time, the wardens fly their dope, screw their women . . . and otherwise leave them alone.”

“But where do they come from?” Bianca asked.

“Everywhere,” Fry said with another shrug. “Humans have been in this part of space for a long, long time. This is one of those places people end up, you know? People with nowhere else to go. People who can’t fall any farther.”

Bianca shook her head, and said nothing.

The poachers’ camp, on Encantada’s eastern slope, was invisible until they were almost upon it, hidden from the wardens’ satellite eyes by layers of projected camouflage. Close up, the illusion seemed flat, its artificiality obvious, but it was still not until the anemopter passed through the projection that the camp itself could be seen: a clear-cut swath a kilometer wide and three times as long, stretching from the lower slopes of Encantada’s dorsal ridge down to the edge of the zaratán’s cliff-like flank. Near the edge, at one corner, there was a small cluster of prefabricated bungalows; but at first it seemed to Bianca that most of the space was wasted.

Then she saw the red churned into the brown mud of the cleared strip, saw the way the shape of the terrain suggested the imprint of a gigantic, elongated body.

The open space was for killing.

“Sky is very poor, Miss Nazario,” said Valadez, over his shoulder.

The poacher boss looked to be about fifty, stocky, his hair still black and his olive skin well-tanned but pocked with tiny scars. His Spanish was a dialect Bianca had never heard before, strange and lush, its vowels rich, its hs breathy as Bianca’s js, its js warm and liquid as the ys of an Argentine. When he said fuck your mother—and already, in the hour or so Bianca had been in the camp, she had heard him say it several times, though never yet to her—the madre came out madri.

About half of the poachers were human, but Valadez seemed to be the only one who spoke Spanish natively; the rest used Sky’s dialect of bazaar Arabic. Valadez spoke that as well, better than Bianca did, but she had the sense that he’d learned it late in life. If he had a first name, he was keeping it to himself.

“There are things on Sky that people want,” Valadez went on. “But the people of Sky have nothing of interest to anybody. The companies that mine the deep air pay some royalties. But mostly what people live on here is Consilium handouts.”

The four of them—Bianca, Fry, and the firija, Ismaíl, who as well as being an anemopter pilot seemed to be Valadez’ servant or business partner or bodyguard, or perhaps all three—were climbing the ridge above the poachers’ camp. Below them workers, some human, some firija, a handful of other species, were setting up equipment: mobile machines that looked like they belonged on a construction site, pipes and cylindrical tanks reminiscent of a brewery or a refinery.

“I’m changing that, Miss Nazario.” Valadez glanced over his shoulder at Bianca. “Off-world, there are people—like Ismaíl’s people here”— he waved at the firija—“who like the idea of living on a floating island, and have the money to pay for one.” He swept an arm, taking in the camp, the busy teams of workers. “With that money, I take boys out of the shantytowns of Sky’s balloon stations and elevator gondolas. I give them tools, and teach them to kill beasts.

“To stop me—since they can’t be bothered to do it themselves —the Consilium takes the same boys, gives them guns, and teaches them to kill men.”

The poacher stopped and turned to face Bianca, jamming his hands into the pockets of his coat.

“Tell me, Miss Nazario—is one worse than the other?”

“I’m not here to judge you, Mr. Valadez,” said Bianca. “I’m here to do a job.”

Valadez smiled. “So you are.”

He turned and continued up the slope. Bianca and the firija followed, Fry trailing behind. The path switchbacked through unfamiliar trees, dark, stunted, waxy-needled; these gave way to taller varieties, including some that Bianca would have sworn were ordinary pines and firs. She breathed deeply, enjoying the alpine breeze after the crowds-and-machines reek of Transient Meridian’s teeming slums, the canned air of ships and anemopters.

“It smells just like home,” she remarked. “Why is that?”

No once answered.

The ridge leveled off, and they came out into a cleared space, overlooking the camp. Spread out below them Bianca could see the airfield, the globular tanks and pipes of the poachers’ little industrial plant, the bungalows in the distance—and, in between, the red-brown earth of the killing ground, stretching out to the cliff-edge and the bases of the nearest translucent fins.

“This is a good spot,” Valadez declared. “Should be a good view from up here.”

“A view of what?” said Fry.

The poacher didn’t answer. He waved to Ismaíl, and the firija took a small folding stool out of a pocket, snapping it into shape with a flick of sinuous arms and setting it down behind him. Valadez sat.

And after a moment, the answer to Fry’s question came up over the edge.

Bianca had not thought hardly at all about the killing of a zaratán, and when she had thought of it she had imagined something like the harpooning of a whale in ancient times, the great beast fleeing, pursued by the tiny harassing shapes of boats, gored by harpoons, sounding again and again, all the strength bleeding out of the beast until there was nothing left for it to do but wallow gasping on the surface and expire, noble and tragic. Now Bianca realized that for all their great size, the zaratanes were far weaker than any whale, far less able to fight or to escape or even—she sincerely hoped—to understand what was happening to them.

There was nothing noble about the way the nameless zaratán died. Anemopters landed men and aliens with drilling tools at the base of each hundred-meter fin, to bore through soil and scale and living flesh and cut the connecting nerves that controlled them. This took about fifteen minutes, and to Bianca there seemed to be something obscene in the way the paralyzed fins hung there afterwards, lifeless and limp. Thus crippled, the beast was pushed and pulled by aerial tugs—awkward machines, stubby and cylindrical, converted from the stationkeeping engines of vacuum balloons like Transient Meridian—into position over Encantada’s killing ground. Then the drilling teams moved in again, to the places marked for them ahead of time by seismic sensors and ultrasound, cutting this time through bone as well as flesh, to find the zaratán’s brain.

When the charges the drilling teams had planted went off, a ripple went through the zaratán’s body, a slow-motion convulsion that took nearly a minute to travel down the body’s long axis, as the news of death passed from synapse to synapse; and Bianca saw flocks of birds started from the trees along the zaratán’s back as if by an earthquake, which in a way she supposed this was. The carcass immediately began to pitch downward, the nose dropping—the result, Bianca realized, of sphincters relaxing one by one, all along the zaratán’s length, venting hydrogen from the ballonets.

Then the forward edge of the keel fin hit the ground and crumpled, and the whole length of the dead beast, a hundred thousand tons of it, crashed down into the field; and even at that distance Bianca could hear the cracking of gargantuan bones.

She shivered, and glanced at her pocket system. The whole process, she was amazed to see, had taken less than half an hour.

“That’s this trip paid for, whatever else happens,” said Valadez. He turned to Bianca. “Mostly, though, I thought you should see this. Have you guessed yet what it is I’m paying you to do, Miss Nazario?”

Bianca shook her head. “Clearly you don’t need an aeronautical engineer to do what you’ve just done.” She looked down at the killing ground, where men and aliens and machines were already climbing over the zaratán’s carcass, uprooting trees, peeling back skin and soil in great strips like bleeding boulevards. A wind had come up, blowing from the killing ground across the camp, bringing with it a smell that Bianca associated with butcher shops.

An engineering problem, she reminded herself, as she turned her back on the scene and faced Valadez. That’s all this is.

“How are you going to get it out of here?” she asked.

“Cargo-lifter,” said Valadez. “The Lupita Jeréz. A supply ship, diverted from one of the balloon stations.”

The alien, Ismaíl, said: “Like fly anemopter make transatmospheric.” The same fluting voice and broken Arabic. “Lifter plenty payload mass limit, but fly got make have packaging. Packaging for got make platform have stable.” On the word packaging the firija’s arms made an expressive gesture, like rolling something up into a bundle and tying it.

Bianca nodded hesitantly, hoping she understood. “And so you can only take the small ones,” she said. “Right? Because there’s only one place on Sky you’ll find a stable platform that size: on the back of another zaratán.”

“You have the problem in a nutshell, Miss Nazario,” said Valadez. “Now, how would you solve it? How would you bag, say, Encantada here? How would you bag Finisterra?”

Fry said: “You want to take one alive?” His face was even more pale than usual, and Bianca noticed that he, too, had turned is back to the killing ground.

Valadez was still looking at Bianca, expectantly.

“He doesn’t want it alive, Mr. Fry,” she said, watching the poacher expectantly. “He wants it dead—but intact. You could take even Finisterra apart, and lift it piece by piece, but you’d need a thousand cargo-lifters to do it.”

Valadez smiled.

“I’ve got another ship,” he said. “Built for deep mining, outfitted as a mobile elevator station. Counterweighted. The ship itself isn’t rated for atmosphere, but if you can get one of the big ones to the edge of space, we’ll lower the skyhook, catch the beast, and catapult it into orbit. The buyer’s arranged an FTL tug to take it from there.”

Bianca made herself look back at the killing ground. The workers were freeing the bones, lifting them with aerial cranes and feeding them into the plant; for cleaning and preservation, she supposed. She turned back to Valadez.

“We should be able to do that, if the zaratán’s body will stand up to the low pressure,” she said. “But why go to all this trouble? I’ve seen the balloon stations. I’ve seen what you people can do with materials. How hard can it be to make an imitation zaratán?”

Valadez glanced at Ismaíl. The walker was facing the killing ground, but two of the alien’s many eyes were watching the sky—and two more were watching Valadez. The poacher looked back at Bianca.

“An imitation’s one thing, Miss Nazario; the real thing is something else. And worth a lot more, to the right buyer.” He looked away again; not at Ismaíl this time, but up the slope, through the trees. “Besides,” he added, “in this case I’ve got my own reasons.”

“Ship come,” Ismaíl announced.

Bianca looked and saw more of the firija’s eyes turning upward. She followed their gaze, and at first saw only empty sky. Then the air around the descending Lupita Jeréz boiled into contrails, outlining the invisible ovoid shape of the ship’s lifting fields.

“Time to get to work,” said Valadez.

Bianca glanced toward the killing ground. A pink fog was rising to cover the work of the flensing crews.

The air was full of blood.

5. The aeronauts

Valadez’s workers cleaned the nameless zaratán’s bones one by one; they tanned the hide, and rolled it into bundles for loading aboard the Lupita Jeréz. That job, grotesque though it was, was the cleanest part of the work. What occupied most of the workers was the disposal of the unwanted parts, a much dirtier and more arduous job. Exotic internal organs the size of houses; tendons like braided, knotted bridge cables; ballonets large enough, each of them, to lift an ordinary dirigible; and hectares and hectares of pale, dead flesh. The poachers piled up the mess with earth-moving machines and shoveled it off the edge of the killing ground, a rain of offal falling into the clouds in a mist of blood, manna for the ecology of the deep air. They sprayed the killing ground with antiseptics, and the cool air helped to slow decay a little, but by the fourth day the butcher-shop smell had nonetheless given way to something worse.

Bianca’s bungalow was one of the farthest out, only a few dozen meters from Encantada’s edge, where the wind blew in from the open eastern sky, and she could turn her back on the slaughter to look out into clear air, dotted with the small, distant shapes of younger zaratanes. Even here, though, a kilometer and more upwind of the killing ground, the air carried a taint of spoiled meat. The sky was full of insects and scavenger birds, and there were always vermin underfoot.

Bianca spent most of her time indoors, where the air was filtered and the wet industrial sounds of the work muted. The bungalow was outfitted with all the mechanisms the extrañados used to make themselves comfortable, but while in the course of her journey Bianca had learned to operate these, she made little use of them. Besides her traveling chest—a gift from her older brother’s wife, which served as armoire, desk, dresser and drafting table—the only furnishings were a woven carpet in the Lagos Grandes style, a hard little bed, and a single wooden chair, not very different from the ones in her room in Punta Aguila. Though those had been handmade, and these were simulations provided by the bungalow’s machines.

The rest of the room was given over to the projected spaces of Bianca’s engineering work. The tools Valadez had given her were slick and fast and factory-fresh, the state of somebody’s art, somewhere; but what Bianca mostly found herself using was her pocket system’s crippled copy of the Nazario family automation.

The system Bianca’s father used to use, to calculate stresses in fabric and metal and wood, to model the flow of air over wings and the variation of pressure and temperature through gasbags, was six centuries old, a slow, patient, reliable thing that dated from before the founding of the London Caliphate. It had aged along with the family, grown used to their quirks and to the strange demands of aviation in Rio Pícaro. Bianca’s version of it, limited though it was, at least didn’t balk at control surfaces supported by muscle and bone, at curves not aerodynamically smooth but fractally complex with grasses and trees and hanging vines. If the zaratanes had been machines, they would have been marvels of engineering, with their internal networks of gasbags and ballonets, their reservoir-sized ballast bladders full of collected rainwater, their great delicate fins. The zaratanes were beyond the poachers’ systems’ stubborn, narrow-minded comprehension; for all their speed and flash, the systems sulked like spoiled children whenever Bianca tried to use them to do something their designers had not expected her to do.

Which she was doing, all the time. She was working out how to draw up Leviathan with a hook.

“Miss Nazario.”

Bianca started. She had yet to grow used to these extrañado telephones that never rang, but only spoke to her out of the air, or perhaps out of her own head.

“Mr. Valadez,” she said, after a moment.

“Whatever you’re doing, drop it,” said Valadez’s voice. “You and Fry. I’m sending a ‘mopter for you.”

“I’m working,” said Bianca. “I don’t know what Fry’s doing.”

“This is work,” said Valadez. “Five minutes.”

A change in the quality of the silence told Bianca that Valadez had hung up. She sighed; then stood, stretched, and started to braid her hair.

The anemopter brought them up over the dorsal ridge, passing between two of the great translucent fins. At this altitude, Encantada’s body was clear of vegetation; Bianca looked down on hectares of wind-blasted gray hide, dusted lightly with snow. They passed within a few hundred meters of one of the huge spars that anchored the after fin’s leading edge: a kilometers-high pillar of flesh, teardrop in cross-section and at least a hundred meters thick. The trailing edge of the next fin, by contrast, flashed by in an instant, and Bianca had only a brief impression of a silk-supple membrane, veined with red, clear as dirty glass.

“What do you think he wants?” Fry asked.

“I don’t know.” She nodded her head toward the firija behind them at the steering console. “Did you ask the pilot?”

“I tried,” Fry said. “Doesn’t speak Arabic.”

Bianca shrugged. “I suppose we’ll find out soon enough.”

Then they were coming down again, down the western slope. In front of Bianca was the dorsal ridge of Zaratán Finisterra. Twenty kilometers away and blue with haze, it nonetheless rose until it seemed to cover a third of the sky.

Bianca looked out at it, wondering again what kept Encantada and Finisterra so close; but then the view was taken away, and they were coming down between the trees, into a shady, ivy-filled creekbed somewhere not far from Encantada’s western edge. There was another anemopter already there, and a pair of aerial tugs—and a whitish mass that dwarfed all of these, sheets and ribbons of pale material hanging from the branches and draped over the ivy, folds of it damming the little stream.

With an audible splash, the anemopter set down, the ramps lowered, and Bianca stepped off, into cold, ankle-deep water that made her glad of her knee-high boots. Fry followed, gingerly.

“You!” called Valadez, pointing at Fry from the deck of the other anemopter. “Come here. Miss Nazario—I’d like you to have a look at that balloon.”

“Balloon?”

Valadez gestured impatiently downstream, and suddenly Bianca saw the white material for the shredded, deflated gasbag it was; and saw, too, that there was a basket attached to it, lying on its side, partially submerged in the middle of the stream. Ismaíl was standing over it, waving.

Bianca splashed over to the basket. It actually was a basket, two meters across and a meter and a half high, woven from strips of something like bamboo or rattan. The gasbag—this was obvious, once Bianca saw it up close—had been made from one of the ballonets of a zaratán, a zaratán younger and smaller even than the one Bianca had seen killed; it had been tanned, but inexpertly, and by someone without access to the sort of industrial equipment the poachers used.

Bianca wondered about the way the gasbag was torn up. The tissues of the zaratánes, she knew, were very strong. A hydrogen explosion?

“Make want fly got very bad,” Ismaíl commented, as Bianca came around to the open side of the basket.

“They certainly did,” she said.

In the basket there were only some wool blankets and some empty leather waterbags, probably used both for drinking water and for ballast. The lines used to control the vent flaps were all tangled together, and tangled, too, with the lines that secured the gasbag to the basket, but Bianca could guess how they had worked. No stove. It seemed to have been a pure hydrogen balloon; and why not, she thought, with all the hydrogen anyone could want free from the nearest zaratán’s vent valves?

“Where did it come from?” she asked.

Ismaíl rippled his arms in a way that Bianca guessed was meant to be an imitation of a human shrug. One of his eyes glanced downstream.

Bianca fingered the material of the basket: tough, woody fiber. Tropical, from a climate warmer than Encantada’s. She followed Ismaíl’s glance. The trees hid the western horizon, but she knew, if she could see beyond them, what would be there.

Aloud, she said: “Finisterra.”

She splashed back to the anemopters. Valadez’s hatch was open.

“I’m telling you,” Fry was saying, “I don’t know her!”

“Fuck off, Fry,” Valadez said as Bianca stepped into the cabin. “Look at her ID.”

The her in question was a young woman with short black hair and sallow skin, wearing tan off-world cottons like Fry’s under a colorful homespun serape; and at first Bianca was not sure the woman was alive, because the man next to her on Valadez’s floor, also in homespun, was clearly dead, his eyes half-lidded, his olive skin gone muddy gray.

The contents of their pockets were spread out on a low table. As Bianca was taking in the scene, Fry bent down and picked up a Consilium-style ID tag.

“‘Edith Dinh,’“ he read. He tossed the tag back and looked at Valadez. “So?”

“‘Edith Dinh, Consilium Ethnological Service,’“ Valadez growled. “Issued Shawwal ‘43. You were here with the Ecological Service from Rajab ‘42 to Muharram ‘46. Look again!”

Fry turned away.

“All right!” he said. “Maybe—maybe I met her once or twice.”

“So,” said Valadez. “Now we’re getting somewhere. Who the hell is she? And what’s she doing here?”

“She’s . . . ” Fry glanced at the woman and then quickly looked away. “I don’t know. I think she was a population biologist or something. There was a group working with the, you know, the natives—”

“There aren’t any natives on Sky,” said Valadez. He prodded the dead man with the toe of his boot. “You mean these cabrones?”

Fry nodded. “They had this ‘sustainable development’ program going—farming, forestry. Teaching them how to live on Finisterra without killing it.”

Valadez looked skeptical. “If the Consilium wanted to stop them from killing Finisterra, why didn’t they just send in the wardens?”

“Interdepartmental politics. The zaratanes were EcoServ’s responsibility; the n-—I mean, the inhabitants were EthServ’s.” Fry shrugged. “You know the wardens. They’d have taken bribes from anyone who could afford it, and shot the rest.”

“Damn right I know the wardens.” Valadez scowled. “So instead EthServ sent in these do-gooders to teach them to make balloons?”

Fry shook his head. “I don’t know anything about that.”

“Miss Nazario? Tell me about that balloon.”

“It’s a hydrogen balloon, I think. Probably filled from some zaratán’s external vents.” She shrugged. “It looks like the sort of thing I’d expect someone living out here to build, if that’s what you mean.”

Valadez nodded.

“But,” Bianca added, “I can’t tell you why it crashed.”

Valadez snorted. “I don’t need you to tell me that,” he said. “It crashed because we shot it down.” Pitching his voice for the anemopter’s communication system, he called out: “Ismaíl!”

Bianca tried to keep the shock from showing on her face, and after a moment, she had regained her composure. You knew they were criminals when you took their money, she told herself.

The firija’s eyes came around the edge of the doorway.

“Yes?”

“Tell the tug crews to pack that thing up,” said Valadez. “Every piece, every scrap. Pack it up and drop it into clear air.”

The alien’s walking machine clambered into the cabin. Its legs bent briefly, making a little bob like a curtsey.

“Yes.” Ismaíl gestured at the bodies of the dead man and the unconscious woman. Several of the firija’s eyes met Valadez’s. “These two what do?” he asked.

“Them, too,” said Valadez. “Lash them into the basket.”

The firija made another bob, and started to bend down to pick them up.

Bianca looked down at the two bodies, both of them, the dead man and the unconscious woman, looking small and thin and vulnerable. She glanced at Fry, whose eyes were fixed on the floor, his lips pressed together in a thin line.

Then she looked over at Valadez, who was methodically sweeping the balloonists’ effects into a pile, as if neither Bianca nor Fry was present.

“No,” she said; and Ismaíl stopped, and straightened up.

“What?” said Valadez.

“No,” Bianca repeated.

“You want her bringing the wardens down on us?” Valadez demanded.

“That’s murder, Mr. Valadez,” Bianca said. “I won’t be a party to it.”

The poacher’s eyes narrowed. He gestured at the dead man.

“You’re already an accessory,” he said.

“After the fact,” Bianca replied evenly. She kept her eyes on Valadez.

The poacher looked at the ceiling. “Fuck your mother,” he muttered. He looked down at the two bodies, and at Ismaíl, and then over at Bianca. He sighed, heavily.

“All right,” he said to the firija. “Take the live one back to the camp. Secure a bungalow, one of the ones out by the edge”—he glanced at Bianca—“and lock her in it. Okay?”

“Okay,” said Ismaíl. “Dead one what do?”

Valadez looked at Bianca again. “The dead one,” he said, “goes in the basket.”

Bianca looked at the dead man again, wondering what bravery or madness had brought him aboard that fragile balloon, and wondering what he would have thought if he had known that the voyage would end this way, with his body tumbling down into the deep air. She supposed he must have known there was a chance of it.

After a moment, she nodded, once.

“Right,” said Valadez. “Now get back to work, damn it.”

6. The city of the dead

The anemopter that brought Bianca and Fry over the ridge took them back. Fry was silent, hunched, his elbows on his knees, staring at nothing. What fear or guilt was going through his mind, Bianca couldn’t guess.

After a little while she stopped watching him. She thought about the Finisterran balloon, so simple, so fragile, making her father’s wood-and-silk craft look as sophisticated as the Lupita Jeréz. She took out her pocket system, sketched a simple globe and basket, then erased them.

Make want fly very bad, Ismaíl the firija had said. Why?

Bianca undid the erasure, bringing her sketch back. She drew the spherical balloon out into a blunt torpedo, round at the nose, tapering to a point behind. Added fins. An arrangement of pulleys and levers, allowing them to be controlled from the basket. A propeller, powered by—she had to think for a little while—by an alcohol-fueled engine, carved from zaratán bones . . .

The anemopter was landing. Bianca sighed and again erased the design.

Why?

The firija guard outside Edith Dinh’s bungalow didn’t seem to speak Arabic or Spanish, or in fact any human language at all. Bianca wondered if the choice was deliberate, the guard chosen by Valadez as a way of keeping a kind of solitary confinement.

Or was the guard Valadez’s choice at all? she wondered suddenly, and shivered, looking at the meter-long weapon cradled in the alien’s furred arms.

Then she squared her shoulders and approached the bungalow. Wordlessly, she waved the valise she was carrying, as if by it her reason for being there were made customary and obvious.

The alien said something in its own fluting language— whether a reply to her, or a request for instructions from some unseen listener, Bianca couldn’t tell. Either those instructions were to let her pass, though, or by being seen in Valadez’s company she had acquired some sort of reflected authority; because the firija lifted its weapon and, as the bungalow’s outer door slid open, motioned for her to enter. The inner door was already open.

“¿Hóla?” Bianca called out, tentatively, and immediately felt like an idiot.

But the answer came:

“Aqui.”

The interior layout of the bungalow was the same as Bianca’s. The voice came from the sitting room, and Bianca found Dinh there, still wearing the clothes she’d had on when they found her, sitting with her knees drawn up, staring out the east window into the sky. The east was dark with rain clouds, and far below, Bianca could see flashes of lightning.

“Salaam aleikum,” said Bianca, taking refuge in the formality of the Arabic.

“Aleikum as-salaam,” Dinh replied. She glanced briefly at Bianca and looked away; then looked back again. In a Spanish that was somewhere between Valadez’s strange accent and the mechanical fluency of Fry’s language module, she said: “You’re not from Finisterra.”

“No,” said Bianca, giving up on the Arabic. “I’m from Rio Pícaro—from Earth. My name is Nazario, Bianca Nazario y Arenas.”

“Edith Dinh.”

Dinh stood up. There was an awkward moment, where Bianca was not sure whether to bow or curtsey or give Dinh her hand. She settled for proffering the valise.

“I brought you some things,” she said. “Clothes, toiletries.”

Dinh looked surprised. “Thanks,” she said, taking the valise and looking inside.

“Are they feeding you? I could bring you some food.”

“The kitchen still works,” said Dinh. She held up a white packet. “And these?”

“Sanitary napkins,” said Bianca.

“Sanitary . . .?” Color rose to Dinh’s face. “Oh. That’s all right. I’ve got implants.” She dropped the packet back in the valise and closed it.

Bianca looked away, feeling her own cheeks blush in turn. Damned extrañados, she thought. “I’d better—” be going, she started to say.

“Please—” said Dinh.

The older woman and the younger stood there for a moment, looking at each other, and Bianca suddenly wondered what impulse had brought her here, whether curiosity or Christian charity or simply a moment of loneliness, weakness. Of course she’d had to stop Valadez from killing the girl, but this was clearly a mistake.

“Sit,” Dinh said. “Let me get you something. Tea. Coffee.”

“I—All right.” Bianca sat, slowly, perching on the edge of one of the too-soft extrañado couches. “Coffee,” she said.

The coffee was very dark, and sweeter than Bianca liked it, flavored with something like condensed milk. She was glad to have it, regardless, glad to have something to look at and something to occupy her hands.

“You don’t look like a poacher,” Dinh said.

“I’m an aeronautical engineer,” Bianca said. “I’m doing some work for them.” She looked down at her coffee, took a sip, and looked up. “What about you? Fry said you’re a biologist of some kind. What were you doing in that balloon?”

She couldn’t tell whether the mention of Fry’s name had registered, but Dinh’s mouth went thin. She glanced out the west window.

Bianca followed her glance and saw the guard, slumped in its walker, watching the two women with one eye each. She wondered again whether Valadez was really running things, and then whether the firija’s ignorance of human language was real or feigned—and whether, even if it was real, someone less ignorant might be watching and listening, unseen.

Then she shook her head and looked back at Dinh, waiting.

“Finisterra’s falling,” Dinh said eventually. “Dying, maybe. It’s too big; it’s losing lift. It’s fallen more than fifty meters in the last year alone.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Bianca said. “The lift-to-weight ratio of an aerostat depends on the ratio of volume to surface area. A larger zaratán should be more efficient, not less. And even if it does lose lift, it should only fall until it reaches a new equilibrium.”

“It’s not a machine,” Dinh said. “It’s a living creature.”

Bianca shrugged. “Maybe it’s old age, then,” she said. “Everything has to die sometime.”

“Not like this,” Dinh said. She set down her coffee and turned to face Bianca fully. “Look. We don’t know who built Sky, or how long ago, but it’s obviously artificial. A gas giant with a nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere? That doesn’t happen. And the Earthlike biology—the zaratánes are DNA-based, did you know that? The whole place is astronomically unlikely; if the Phenomenological Service had its way, they’d just quarantine the entire system, and damn Sky and everybody on it.

“The archipelago ecology is as artificial as everything else. Whoever designed it must have been very good; post-human, probably, maybe even post-singularity. It’s a robust equilibrium, full of feedback mechanisms, ways to correct itself. But we, us ordinary humans and human-equivalents, we’ve” —she made a helpless gesture—“fucked it up. You know why Encantada’s stayed here so long? Breeding, that’s why . . . or maybe ‘pollination’ would be a better way to put it . . . ”

She looked over at Bianca.

“The death of an old zaratán like Finisterra should be balanced by the birth of dozens, hundreds. But you, those bastards you work for, you’ve killed them all.”

Bianca let the implication of complicity slide. “All right, then,” she said. “Let’s hear your plan.”

“What?”

“Your plan,” Bianca repeated. “For Finisterra. How are you going to save it?”

Dinh stared at her for a moment, then shook her head. “I can’t,” she said. She stood up, and went to the east window. Beyond the sheet of rain that now poured down the window the sky was deep mauve shading to indigo, relieved only by the lightning that sparked in the deep and played across the fins of the distant zaratanes of the archipelago’s outer reaches. Dinh put her palm flat against the diamond pane.

“I can’t save Finisterra,” she said quietly. “I just want to stop you hijos de puta from doing this again.”

Now Bianca was stung. “Hija de puta, yourself,” she said. “You’re killing them, too. Killing them and making balloons out of them, how is that better?”

Dinh turned back. “One zaratán the size of the one they’re slaughtering out there right now would keep the Finisterrans in balloons for a hundred years,” she said. “The only way to save the archipelago is to make the zaratanes more valuable alive than dead—and the only value a live zaratán has, on Sky, is as living space.”

“You’re trying to get the Finisterrans to colonize the other zaratanes?” Bianca asked. “But why should they? What’s in it for them?”

“I told you,” Dinh said. “Finisterra’s dying.” She looked out the window, down into the depths of the storm, both hands pressed against the glass. “Do you know how falling into Sky kills you, Bianca? First, there’s the pressure. On the slopes of Finisterra, where the people live, it’s a little more than a thousand millibars. Five kilometers down, under Finisterra’s keel, it’s double that. At two thousand millibars you can still breathe the air. At three thousand nitrogen narcosis sets in—‘rapture of the deep,’ they used to call it. At four thousand, the partial pressure of oxygen alone is enough to make your lungs bleed.”

She stepped away from the window and looked at Bianca.

“But you’ll never live to suffer that,” she said, “because of the heat. Every thousand meters the average temperature rises six or seven degrees. Here it’s about fifteen. Under Finisterra’s keel it’s closer to fifty. Twenty kilometers down, the air is hot enough to boil water.”

Bianca met her gaze steadily. “I can think of worse ways to die,” she said.

“There are seventeen thousand people on Finisterra,” said Dinh. “Men, women, children, old people. There’s a town—they call it the Lost City, la ciudad perdida. Some of the families on Finisterra can trace their roots back six generations.” She gave a little laugh, with no humor in it. “They should call it la ciudad muerta. They’re the walking dead, all seventeen thousand of them. Even though no one’s alive on Finisterra today will live to see it die. Already the crops are starting to fail. Already more old men and old women die every summer, as the summers get hotter and drier. The children of the children who are born today will have to move up into the hills as it starts to get too hot to grow crops on the lower slopes; but the soil isn’t as rich up there, so many of those crops will fail, too. And their children’s children . . . won’t live to be old enough to have children of their own.”

“Surely someone will rescue them before then,” Bianca said.

“Who?” Dinh asked. “The Consilium? Where would they put them? The vacuum balloons and the elevator stations are already overcrowded. As far as the rest of Sky is concerned, the Finisterrans are ‘malcontents’ and ‘criminal elements.’ Who’s going to take them in?”

“Then Valadez is doing them a favor,” Bianca said.

Dinh started. “Emmanuel Valadez is running your operation?”

“It’s not my operation,” Bianca said, trying to keep her voice level. “And I didn’t ask his first name.”

Dinh fell into the window seat. “Of course it would be,” she said. “Who else would they . . . ” She trailed off, looking out the west window, toward the killing ground.

Then, suddenly, she turned back to Bianca.

“What do you mean, doing them a favor?” she said.

“Finisterra,” Bianca said. “He’s poaching Finisterra.”

Dinh stared at her. “My God, Bianca! What about the people?”

“What about them?” asked Bianca. “They’d be better off somewhere else—you said that yourself.”

“And what makes you think Valadez will evacuate them?”

“He’s a thief, not a mass murderer.”

Dinh gave her a withering look. “He is a murderer, Bianca. His father was a warden, his mother was the wife of the alcalde of Ciudad Perdida. He killed his own stepfather, two uncles, and three brothers. They were going to execute him—throw him over the edge—but a warden airboat picked him up. He spent two years with them, then killed his sergeant and three other wardens, stole their ship and sold it for a ticket off-world. He’s probably the most wanted man on Sky.”

She shook her head and, unexpectedly, gave Bianca a small smile.

“You didn’t know any of that when you took the job, did you?”

Her voice was full of pity. It showed on her face as well, and suddenly Bianca couldn’t stand to look at it. She got up and went to the east window. The rain was lighter now, the lightning less frequent.

She thought back to her simulations, her plans for lifting Finisterra up into the waiting embrace of the skyhook: the gasbags swelling, the zaratán lifting, first slowly and then with increasing speed, toward the upper reaches of Sky’s atmosphere. But now her inner vision was not the ghost-shape of a projection but a living image—trees cracking in the cold, water freezing, blood boiling from the ground in a million, million tiny hemorrhages.

She saw her mother’s house in Punta Aguila—her sister-in-law’s house, now: saw its windows rimed with frost, the trees in the courtyard gone brown and sere. She saw the Mercado de los Maculados beneath a blackening sky, the awnings whipped away by a thin wind, ice-cold, bone-dry.

He killed that Finisterran balloonist, she thought. He was ready to kill Dinh. He’s capable of murder.

Then she shook her head.

Killing one person, or two, to cover up a crime, was murder, she thought. Killing seventeen thousand people by deliberate asphyxiation— men, women, and children—wasn’t murder, it was genocide.

She took her cup of coffee from the table, took a sip and put it down again.

“Thank you for the coffee,” she said, and turned to go.

“How can you just let him do this?” Dinh demanded. “How can you help him do this?”

Bianca turned on her. Dinh was on her feet; her fists were clenched, and she was shaking. Bianca stared her down, her face as cold and blank as she could make it. She waited until Dinh turned away, throwing herself into a chair, staring out the window.

“I saved your life,” Bianca told her. “That was more than I needed to do. Even if I did believe that Valadez meant to kill every person on Finisterra, which I don’t, that wouldn’t make it my problem.”

Dinh turned farther away.

“Listen to me,” Bianca said, “because I’m only going to explain this once.”

She waited until Dinh, involuntarily, turned back to face her.

“This job is my one chance,” Bianca said. “This job is what I’m here to do. I’m not here to save the world. Saving the world is a luxury for spoiled extrañado children like you and Fry. It’s a luxury I don’t have.”

She went to the door, and knocked on the window to signal the firija guard.

“I’ll get you out of here if I can,” she added, over her shoulder. “But that’s all I can do. I’m sorry.”

Dinh hadn’t moved.

As the firija opened the door, Bianca heard Dinh stir.

“Erasmus Fry?” she asked. “The naturalist?”

“That’s right.” Bianca glanced back, and saw Dinh looking out the window again.

“I’d like to see him,” Dinh said.

“I’ll let him know,” said Bianca.

The guard closed the door behind her.

7. The face in the mirror

There was still lightning playing along Encantada’s dorsal ridge, but here on the eastern edge the storm had passed. A clean, electric smell was in the air, relief from the stink of the killing ground. Bianca returned to her own bungalow through a rain that had died to sprinkles.

She called Fry.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Miss Dinh,” Bianca said. “She wants to see you.”

There was silence on the other end. Then:

“You told her I was here?”

“Sorry,” Bianca said, insincerely. “It just slipped out.”

More silence.

“You knew her better than you told Valadez, didn’t you,” she said.

She heard Fry sigh. “Yes.”

“She seemed upset,” Bianca said. “You should go see her.”

Fry sighed again, but said nothing.

“I’ve got work to do,” Bianca said. “I’ll talk to you later.”

She ended the call.

She was supposed to make a presentation tomorrow, to Valadez and some of the poachers’ crew bosses, talking about what they would be doing to Finisterra. It was mostly done; the outline was straightforward, and the visuals could be auto-generated from the design files. She opened the projection file, and poked at it for a little while, but found it hard to concentrate.

Suddenly to Bianca her clothes smelled of death, of Dinh’s dead companion and the slaughtered zaratán and the death she’d spared Dinh from and the eventual deaths of all the marooned Finisterrans. She stripped them off and threw them in the recycler; bathed, washed her hair, changed into a nightgown.

They should call it la ciudad muerta.

Even though no one who’s alive on Finisterra today will live to see it die.

She turned off the light, Dinh’s words echoing in her head, and tried to sleep. But she couldn’t; she couldn’t stop thinking. Thinking about what it felt like to be forced to live on, when all you had to look forward to was death.

She knew that feeling very well.

What Bianca had on Pablo’s wife Mélia, the instrument-maker’s daughter, was ten years of age, and a surreptitious technical education. What Mélia had on Bianca was a keen sense of territory, and the experience of growing up in a house full of sisters. Bianca continued to live in the house after Mélia moved in, even though it was Mélia’s house now, and continued, without credit, to help her brother with the work that came in. But she retreated over the years, step by step, until the line was drawn at the door of the fourth-floor room that had been hers ever since she was a girl, and buried herself in her blueprints and her calculations, and tried to pretend she didn’t know what was happening.

And then there was the day she met her other sister-in-law. Her moro sister-in-law. In the Mercado de los Maculados, where the aliens and the extrañados came to sell their trinkets and their medicines; a dispensation from the ayuntamiento had recently opened it to Christians.

Zahra al-Halim, a successful architect, took Bianca to her home, where Bianca ate caramels and drank blackberry tea and saw her older brother for the first time in more than twenty years, and tried very hard to call him Walíd and not Jesús. Here was a world—Bianca sensed; her brother and his wife were very discreet—that could be hers, too, if she wanted it. But like Jesús/Walíd, she would have to give up her old world to have it. Even if she remained a Christian she would never see the inside of a church again. And she would still never be accepted by the engineers’ guild.

She went back to the Nazario house that evening, ignoring the barbed questions from Mélia about how she had spent her day; she went back to her room, with its blueprints and its models, and the furnishings she’d had all her life. She tried for a little while to work, but was unable to muster the concentration she needed to interface with the system.

Instead she found herself looking into the mirror.

And looking into the mirror Bianca focused not on the fragile trapped shapes of the flying machines tacked to the wall behind her, spread out and pinned down like so many chloroformed butterflies, but on her own tired face, the stray wisps of dry, brittle hair, the lines that years of captivity had made across her forehead and around her eyes. And, meeting those eyes, it seemed to Bianca that she was looking not into the mirror but down through the years of her future, a long, straight, narrow corridor without doors or branches, and that the eyes she was meeting at the end of it were the eyes of Death, Bianca’s own, su propria Muerte, personal, personified.

Bianca got out of bed, turning on the lights. She picked up her pocket system. She wondered if she should call the wardens.

Instead she un-erased, yet again, the sketch she’d made earlier of the simple alcohol-powered dirigible. She used the Nazario family automation to fill it out with diagrams and renderings, lists of materials, building instructions, maintenance and pre-flight checklists.

It wasn’t much, but it was better than Dinh’s balloon.

Now she needed a way for Dinh to get it to the Finisterrans.

For that—thinking as she did so that there was some justice in it—she turned back to the system Valadez had given her. This was the sort of work the extrañado automation had been made for, no constraints other than those imposed by function, every trick of exotic technology available to be used. It was a matter of minutes for Bianca to sketch out her design; an hour or so to refine it, to trim away the unnecessary pieces until what remained was small enough to fit in the valise she’d left with Dinh. The only difficult part was getting the design automation to talk to the bungalow’s fabricator, which was meant for clothes and furniture and domestic utensils. Eventually she had to use her pocket system to go out on Sky’s local net—hoping as she did so that Valadez didn’t have anyone monitoring her—and spend her own funds to contract the conversion out to a consulting service, somewhere out on one of the elevator gondolas.

Eventually she got it done, though. The fabricator spit out a neat package, which Bianca stuffed under the bed. Tomorrow she could get the valise back and smuggle the package to Dinh, along with the dirigible designs.

But first she had a presentation to make to Valadez. She wondered what motivated him. Nothing so simple as money—she was sure of that, even if she had trouble believing he was the monster Dinh had painted him to be. Was it revenge he was after? Revenge on his family, revenge on his homeland?

That struck Bianca a little too close to home.

She sighed, and turned out the lights.

8. The professionals

By morning the storm had passed and the sky was blue again, but the inside of Valadez’ bungalow was dark, to display the presenters’ projections to better advantage. Chairs for Valadez and the human crew bosses were arranged in a rough semicircle; with them were the aliens whose anatomy permitted them to sit down. Ismaíl and the other firija stood in the back, their curled arms and the spindly legs of their machines making their silhouettes look, to Bianca, incongruously like those of potted plants.

Then the fronds stirred, suddenly menacing, and Bianca shivered. Who was really in charge?

No time to worry about that now. She straightened up and took out her pocket system.

“In a moment,” she began, pitching her voice to carry to the back of the room, “Mr. Fry will be going over the zaratán’s metabolic processes, and our plans to stimulate the internal production of hydrogen. What I’m going to be talking about is the engineering work required to make that extra hydrogen do what we need it to do.”

Bianca’s pocket system projected the shape of a hundred-kilometer zaratán, not Finisterra or any other particular individual but rather an archetype, a sort of Platonic ideal. Points of pink light brightened all across the projected zaratán’s back, each indicating the position of a sphincter that would have to be cut out and replaced with a mechanical valve.

“Our primary concern during the preparation phase has to be these external vents. However, we also need to consider the internal trim and ballast valves . . . ”

As she went on, outlining the implants and grafts, surgeries and mutilations needed to turn a living zaratán into an animatronic corpse, a part of her was amazed at her own presumption, amazed at the strong, confident, professional tone she was taking.

It was almost as if she were a real engineer.

The presentation came to a close. Bianca drew in a deep breath, trying to maintain her veneer of professionalism. This part wasn’t in her outline.

“And then, finally, there is the matter of evacuation,” she said.

In the back of the room, Ismaíl stirred. “Evacuation?” he asked—the first word anyone had uttered through the whole presentation.

Bianca cleared her throat. Red stars appeared along the imaginary zaratán’s southeastern edge, approximating the locations of Ciudad Perdida and the smaller Finisterran villages.

“Finisterra has a population of between fifteen and twenty thousand, most of them concentrated in these settlements here,” she began. “Using a ship the size of the Lupita Jeréz, it should take roughly—”

“Not your problem, Miss Nazario.” Valadez waved a hand. “In any case, there won’t be any evacuations.”

Bianca looked at him, appalled, and it must have shown on her face, because Valadez laughed.

“Don’t look at me like that, Miss Nazario. We’ll set up field domes over Ciudad Perdida and the central pueblos, to tide them over till we get them where they’re going. If they keep their heads they should be fine.” He laughed again. “Fucking hell,” he said, shaking his head. “What did you think this was about? You didn’t think we were going to kill twenty thousand people, did you?”

Bianca didn’t answer. She shut the projection off and sat down, putting her pocket system away. Her heart was racing.

“Right,” said Valadez. “Nice presentation, miss Nazario. Mr. Fry?”

Fry stood up. “Okay,” he said. “Let me—” He patted his pockets. “I, ah, I think I must have left my system in my bungalow.”

Valadez sighed.

“We’ll wait,” he said.

The dark room was silent. Bianca tried to take slow, deep breaths. Mother of God, she thought, thank you for not letting me do anything stupid.

In the next moment she doubted herself. Dinh had been so sure. How could Bianca know whether Valadez was telling the truth?

There was no way to know, she decided. She’d just have to wait and see.

Fry came back in, breathless.

“Ah, it wasn’t—”

The voice that interrupted him was loud enough that at first it was hardly recognizable as a voice; it was only a wall of sound, seeming to come from the air itself, echoing and reechoing endlessly across the camp.

“THIS IS AN ILLEGAL ENCAMPMENT,” it said, in bazaar Arabic. “ALL PERSONNEL IN THE ENCAMPMENT WILL ASSEMBLE ON OPEN GROUND AND SURRENDER TO THE PARK WARDENS IN AN ORDERLY FASHION. ANY PERSONS CARRYING WEAPONS WILL BE PRESUMED TO BE RESISTING ARREST AND WILL BE DEALT WITH ACCORDINGLY. ANY VEHICLE ATTEMPTING TO LEAVE THE ENCAMPMENT WILL BE DESTROYED. YOU HAVE FIVE MINUTES TO COMPLY.”

The announcement repeated itself: first in the fluting language of the firija, then in Miami Spanish, then as a series of projected alien glyphs, logograms and semagrams. Then the Arabic started again.

“Fuck your mother,” said Valadez grimly.

All around Bianca, poachers were gathering weapons. In the back of the room, the firija were having what looked like an argument, arms waving, voices raised in a hooting, atonal cacophony.

“What do we do?” Fry shouted, over the wardens’ announcement.

“Get out of here,” said Valadez.

“Make fight!” said Ismaíl, turning several eyes from the firija discussion.

“Isn’t that resisting arrest?” asked Bianca.

Valadez laughed harshly. “Not shooting back isn’t going to save you,” he said. “The wardens aren’t the Phenomenological Service. They’re not civilized Caliphate cops. Killed while resisting arrest is what they’re all about. Believe me—I used to be one.”

Taking a surprisingly small gun from inside his jacket, he kicked open the door and was gone.

Around the Lupita Jeréz was a milling knot of people, human and otherwise, some hurrying to finish the loading, others simply fighting to get aboard.

Something large and dark, and fast, passed over the camp, and there was a white flash from the cargo-lifter, and screams.

In the wake of the dark thing came a sudden sensation of heaviness, as if the flank of Encantada were the deck of a ship riding a rogue wave, leaping up beneath Bianca’s feet. Her knees buckled and she was thrown to the ground, pressed into the grass by twice, three times her normal weight.

The feeling passed as quickly as the wardens’ dark vehicle, and Ismaíl, whose walker had kept its footing, helped Bianca up.

“What was that?” Bianca demanded, bruises making her wince as she tried to brush the dirt and grass from her skirts.

“Antigravity ship,” Ismaíl said. “Same principle like starship wave propagation drive.”

“Antigravity?” Bianca stared after the ship, but it was already gone, over Encantada’s dorsal ridge. “If you coños have antigravity, then why in God’s name have we been sitting here playing with catapults and balloons?”

“Make very expensive,” said Ismaíl. “Minus two suns exotic mass, same like starship.” The firija waved two of its free eyes. “Why do? Plenty got cheap way to fly.”

Bianca realized that despite the remarks Valadez had made on the poverty of Sky, she had been thinking of all extrañados and aliens— with their ships and machines, their familiar way with sciences that in Rio Pícaro were barely more than a whisper of forbidden things hidden behind the walls of the rich moros’ palaces—as wealthy, and powerful, and free. Now, feeling like a fool for not having understood sooner, she realized that between the power of the Consilium and people like Valadez there was a gap as wide as, if not wider than, the gap between those rich moros and the most petty Ali Baba in the back streets of Punta Aguila.

She glanced toward the airfield. Aerial tugs were lifting off; anemopters were blurring into motion. But as she watched, one of the tugs opened up into a ball of green fire. An anemopter made it as far as the killing ground before being hit by something that made its static fields crawl briefly with purple lightnings and then collapse, as the craft’s material body crashed down in an explosion of earth.

And all the while the wardens’ recorded voice was everywhere and nowhere, repeating its list of instructions and demands.

“Not any more, we don’t,” Bianca said to Ismaíl. “We’d better run.”

The firija raised its gun. “First got kill prisoner.”

“What?”

But Ismaíl was already moving, the mechanical legs of the walker sure-footed on the broken ground, taking long, swift strides, no longer comical but frighteningly full of purpose.

Bianca struggled after the firija, but quickly fell behind. The surface of the killing ground was rutted and scarred, torn by the earth-moving equipment used to push the offal of the gutted zaratanes over the edge. Bianca supposed grasses had covered it once, but now there was only mud and old blood. Only the certainty that going back would be as bad as going forward kept Bianca moving, slipping and stumbling in reeking muck that was sometimes ankle-deep.

By the time she got to Dinh’s bungalow, Ismaíl was already gone. The door was ajar.

Maybe the wardens rescued her, Bianca thought; but she couldn’t make herself believe it.

She went inside, moving slowly.

“Edith?”

No answer; not that Bianca had really expected any.

She found her in the kitchen, face down, feet toward the door as if she had been shot while trying to run, or hide. From three meters away Bianca could see the neat, black, fist-sized hole in the small of Dinh’s back. She felt no need to get closer.

Fry’s pocket system was on the floor in the living room, as Bianca had known it would be.

“You should have waited,” Bianca said to the empty room. “You should have trusted me.”

She found her valise in Dinh’s bedroom, and emptied the contents onto the bed. Dinh did not seem to have touched any of them.

Bianca’s eyes stung with tears. She glanced again at Fry’s system. He’d left it on purpose, Bianca realized; she’d underestimated him. Perhaps he had been a better person than she herself, all along.

She looked one more time at the body lying on the kitchen floor.

“No, you shouldn’t,” she said then. “You shouldn’t have trusted me at all.”

Then she went back to her own bungalow and took the package out from under the bed.

9. Finisterra

A hundred meters, two hundred, five hundred—Bianca falls, the wind whipping at her clothes, and the hanging vegetation that covers Encantada’s flanks is a green-brown blur, going gray as it thins, as the zaratán’s body curves away from her. She blinks away the tears brought on by the rushing wind, and tries to focus on the monitor panel of the harness. The wind speed indicator is the only one that makes sense; the others—altitude, attitude, rate of descent—are cycling through nonsense in three languages, baffled by the instruments’ inability to find solid ground anywhere below.

Then Bianca falls out of Encantada’s shadow into the sun, and before she can consciously form the thought her hand has grasped the emergency handle of the harness and pulled, convulsively; and the glassy fabric of the paraballoon is billowing out above her, rippling like water, and the harness is tugging at her, gently but firmly, smart threads reeling themselves quickly out and then slowly in again on their tiny spinnerets.

After a moment, she catches her breath. She is no longer falling, but flying.

She wipes the tears from her eyes. To the west, the slopes of Finisterra are bright and impossibly detailed in the low-angle sunlight, a million trees casting a million tiny shadows through the morning’s rapidly dissipating mist.

She looks up, out through the nearly invisible curve of the paraballoon, and sees that Encantada is burning. She watches it for a long time.

The air grows warmer, and more damp, too. With a start, Bianca realizes she is falling below Finisterra’s edge. When she designed the paraballoon, Bianca intended for Dinh to fall as far as she safely could, dropping deep into Sky’s atmosphere before firing up the reverse Maxwell pumps, to heat the air in the balloon and lift her back to Finisterra; but it does not look as if there is any danger of pursuit now, from either the poachers or the wardens. Bianca starts the pumps, and the paraballoon slows, then begins to ascend.

As the prevailing wind carries her inland, over a riot of tropical green, and in the distance Bianca sees the smoke rising from the chimneys of Ciudad Perdida, Bianca glances up again at the burning shape of Encantada, and wonders whether she’ll ever know if Valadez was telling the truth.

Abruptly the jungle below her opens up, and Bianca is flying over cultivated fields, and people are looking up at her in wonder. Without thinking, she has cut the power to the pumps and opened the parachute valve at the top of the balloon.

She lands hard, hobbled by the scarf still tied around her ankles, and rolls, the paraballoon harness freeing itself automatically, in obedience to its original programming. She pulls the scarf loose and stands up, shaking out her torn, stained skirt. Children are already running toward her across the field.

Savages, Fry said. Refugees. Bianca wonders if all of them speak Valadez’ odd Spanish. She tries to gather her scraps of Arabic, but is suddenly unable to remember anything beyond Salaam alaikum.

The children—six, eight, ten of them—falter as they approach, stopping five or ten meters away.

Salaam alaikum, Bianca rehearses silently. Alaikum as-salaam. She takes a deep breath.

The boldest of the children, a stick-legged boy of eight or ten, takes a few steps closer. He has curly black hair and sun-browned skin, and the brightly colored shirt and shorts he is wearing were probably made by an autofactory on one of the elevator gondolas or vacuum balloon stations, six or seven owners ago. He looks like her brother Pablo, in the old days, before Jesús left.

Trying not to look too threatening, Bianca meets his dark eyes.

“Hóla,” she says.

“Hóla,” the boy answers. “¿Cómo te llamas? ¿Es este su globo?”

Bianca straightens her back.

“Yes, it’s my balloon,” she says. “And you may call me Señora Nazario.”

“If the balloon’s yours,” the boy asks, undaunted, “will you let me fly in it?”

Bianca looks out into the eastern sky, dotted with distant zaratanes. There is a vision in her mind, a vision that she thinks maybe Edith Dinh saw: the skies of Sky more crowded than the skies over Rio Pícaro, Septentrionalis Archipelago alive with the bright shapes of dirigibles and gliders, those nameless zaratanes out there no longer uncharted shoals but comforting and familiar landmarks.

She turns to look at the rapidly collapsing paraballoon, and wonders how much work it would take to inflate it again. She takes out her pocket system and checks it: the design for the hand-built dirigible is still there, and the family automation too.

This isn’t what she wanted, when she set out from home; but she is still a Nazario, and still an engineer.

She puts the system away and turns back to the boy.

“I have a better idea,” she says. “How would you like a balloon of your very own?”

The boy breaks into a smile.

First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, December 2007.

About the Author

David Moles shares a birthday with Robert Goddard, Václav Havel, Kate Winslet, and the R.101 disaster. He has lived in seven time zones on three continents, and hopes some day to collect the whole set.

David was a finalist for the 2005 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, which he lost to Elizabeth Bear. His novelette “Finisterra” won the 2008 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award and was a finalist for the 2008 Hugo Award. His fiction and poetry have been published in Polyphony, Say..., Rabid Transit, Flytrap, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Asimov’s, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, as well as on Strange Horizons. He co-edited All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories with Jay Lake and the World Fantasy Awardnominated Twenty Epics with Susan Marie Groppi.

Gathered in Translation

Ken Liu

Since speculative fiction is about imagined worlds, one might theorize that it poses fewer problems for translators than genres of literature more tethered to the specific cultures and languages of the real world.

In a sense, the theory is right. When the global language of science is English, it is indeed easy to translate to “traveling-wave maser” because the Chinese term is simply a word-for-word borrowing from English. When high-fantasy films and games are popular the world over, it is likely that a Japanese reader would be perfectly conversant with the hackneyed stereotypes of Orcs and Goblins and Dwarves and Elves.

But these happen to be the least interesting aspects of speculative fiction in translation. Richly imagined worlds draw upon the real experiences of authors and readers. Based on my own experience as a translator of Chinese stories into English, and having had my own English stories translated into Chinese, I’ve come to appreciate the unique challenges and rewards in translating speculative fiction.

We’ll begin with translation philosophy. Yan Fu, one of the earliest Chinese-English translators, wrote the following in the introduction to his 1898 Classical Chinese translation of Thomas Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics:

There are three difficult goals in translation: fidelity to the source, aptness of expression, and beauty of language. To render the meaning of the original faithfully is difficult enough, but if one focuses only on fidelity and ignores the need to craft the words for the benefit of readers, then such a translation might as well not exist.

Most translators probably work under some version of this mantra of “fidelity, expressiveness, and elegance,” but the simplicity of the phrase belies many complexities.

Let’s start with “fidelity,” the very definition of which is slippery. The following passage appears in Xia Jia’s fantasy/scifi story, :

When I translated this story for Clarkesworld — (“A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight”), I rendered it as:

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

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

Note that this list of fantastical beings from folk Chinese mythology contains three——imported from Buddhism (or Hinduism by way of Buddhism). Some Chinese readers will recognize their non-Chinese origins, but for others, they’re as Chinese as anything else on that list because, in the long history of Buddhism in China, they have been sinicized and gradually acquired a set of legends and characteristics divergent from their non-Chinese origins.

When translating into English, is it more faithful to use the common, accepted anglicizations by way of Sanskrit (“Asura, Yaksha, Rakshasa”) or more accurate to use pinyin to represent their phonetic readings in Chinese (“Xiuluo, Yecha, Luosha”)? The former has the advantage of respecting their non-Chinese origins, but the latter has the advantage of subtly suggesting how they’re perceived by Chinese readers. Without a footnote, is it even possible to make the diverse, multi-origin nature of Chinese folk mythology known to the non-Chinese reader?

At the same time, note that the world conjured up by this story is as far from the everyday experiences of the Chinese reader (that is the point of fantastical literature, after all) as it is from the everyday experiences of the English reader. But the precise sense of the exotic and the fantastic evoked by this passage is different for the former (calling up images of dynastic China and traditional myths) and the latter (calling up images of “the mysterious Orient,” perhaps with a dash of manga). “Fidelity” is contextual and elusive.

In terms of expressiveness and elegance, there are even more difficulties. What constitutes the right expression? By what scale should we measure the beauty of the language?1

I often hear the advice that idioms, fixed expressions, and culture-specific terms that are not analyzable ought not be translated literally. Many who advocate a translation that reads as though it were written in English in the first place subscribe to this philosophy. I disagree. For me, much of the joy of reading a translation is in hearing an echo of the original, in seeing English used in a way that suggests the rhythms and worldviews of another language. Judicious translation of such terms, when done in the service of a particular literary effect, can enhance the reader’s enjoyment without sliding into exoticism.

For example, in Xia Jia’s story, I chose to translate the names of specific dates on the Chinese lunar calendar rather than giving their approximate equivalents on the common Western calendar. I could have converted these dates——to “March 5th,” “July 23rd,” “October 8th,” and “December 21st.” For most Chinese readers, the meanings behind the names of the dates are only a faint echo, like how we might remember that “Thursday” is really “Thor’s Day.” But I decided to translate them literally as “Awakening of Insects,” “Major Heat,” “Cold Dew,” and “Winter Solstice.” This choice meant that the English reader must work harder to figure out the time of year by contextual clues, but the names also give the reader a better sense of how the Chinese calendar is tied to the cycles and movements of the natural world, to the demands and rhythms of the agricultural life. I believe the decision enhances the story’s portrayal of a (seemingly) pastoral, idealized life constructed from elements of pre-modern Chinese village traditions.2

As another example, consider the following sentence from Xia’s story:

Which I rendered as:

She says that to hide from the [Thunder] Calamity, a ghost must find a real person with a good heart to stay beside her. That way, just like how one wouldn’t throw a shoe at a mouse sitting beside an expensive vase, the Duke of Thunder will not strike the ghost.

is an idiom meaning something like “refrain from action to avoid harming the innocent” or “those who live in glass houses should not throw stones” but I felt that it was more vivid to translate it literally into a simile. Instead of using a cliché to translate another cliché, the phrase tells the English reader something about the source culture and language. A literal translation, when properly used, can defamiliarize and reinvigorate both the source image and the target language to give the reader a sense of fruitful strangeness that adds to the experience of reading.3

We accept that a translator has to make many creative choices, but is the degree of freedom unlimited? At what point do the translator’s acts become ultra vires and the translation ceases to be a translation? Yan Fu himself chose to give short shift to fidelity in his translation of Huxley, often expanding upon the original with his own observations and ideas and omitting passages that he felt did not suit his purpose of introducing (his understanding of) new Western ideas to a Chinese readership. The resulting translation was influential but was also subject to charges of being unfaithful.

This conflict between the author and the translator is present in every act of translation, but it’s especially acute in contemporary passages between English and Chinese. The political divide between China and the West, exacerbated by the Scylla of Chinese censorship on the one hand and the Charybdis of the Western gaze on China as the Other on the other hand, turns every attempt to navigate across the gulf between the two languages into a dangerous journey with no easy answers.

A few examples will illustrate the range of issues. My story, “The Paper Menagerie,” has a mother who was once a Chinese mail-order bride as a main character. In my original, she was born in China right before the Great Famines of 1958-61 and lost her family to persecutions during the Cultural Revolution. When the story was commissioned for translation by a Chinese speculative fiction magazine, the translator excised these biographical details because the famines and the Cultural Revolution remain sensitive topics in China and subject to censorship. I had to accept the alterations as a condition to publication.

My initial reaction was one of outrage, but further consideration of the matter revealed complexities that were not apparent at first. I understood, of course, that the magazine’s staff would be subject to political repercussions if they defied the censorship rules (and these rules are complex, opaque, and constantly shifting). But the translator was also dealing with deeper, more nuanced issues related to the representation of China in fiction. As an American author, I wrote my story for an American audience and adopted a certain simplified, Western view of recent Chinese history. The Great Famines resulted from a combination of natural disasters and Communist agricultural policy mismanagement, and to this day the relative contribution of the various factors and the precise death figure are subject to debate. The Cultural Revolution, similarly, was far more complex than the relatively straightforward narrative of “planned brutality” most in the West are familiar with. I understood these complexities but chose to simplify them to suit the mother’s character and to serve the narrative about her I wished to construct, but in the eyes of Chinese readers these choices can appear as evidence of an American-centric view about China that overwhelmed the individual, human story that I wished to tell.

Putting aside the odious official practice of censorship, another way to look at the issue is that I chose to frame history a certain way for my American readers; why couldn’t the translator choose to frame history another way for his Chinese readers? Both of us were using historical details to serve the needs of fiction, to tell a story about specific characters designed to achieve a certain emotional effect. If a translator’s job is to preserve that overall emotional arc of the story, then faithfully translating those details in the way I used them may actually get in the way.4 If the translator’s choice hadn’t been (at least in part) motivated by the official policy of censorship, would it have been justified? And, more important, would I have been as outraged?5

Ideally, I would have preferred these details in the story to be translated faithfully, but with an open conversation with Chinese readers about the way I used Chinese history to serve my narrative. But this was the real world, and I concluded that it was best to allow publication of the altered translation while explaining the changes myself through other avenues. Luckily, a fan translation of the story soon appeared that did preserve these details, giving Chinese readers an opportunity to compare the two and decide for themselves which was more “faithful” in the broader sense.

Once you’re sensitized to these issues, they show up in all kinds of unexpected ways in translation. For example, I chose to render the title of a short story by Liu Cixin (China’s most famous scifi novelist), , as “Taking Care of God.” I did so in part because is the standard Chinese term for “God.” In addition, I read Liu’s story, concerning a race of aliens who manifest themselves to humans as old men in white robes with long white beards, as clearly intending to reference the Judeo-Christian concept.6

But the fact that the dictionary defines as “God” does not end the debate.7 There’s much more to fidelity than literal accuracy. A word does not exist alone, but as one term in a web of references embedded in culture and language. Each word brings with it countless semantic ghosts. And the ghosts in Chinese are very different from the ghosts in English.

The word is of ancient origin, not a neologism imported by Christianity. It has existed since the oracle bone script of the Shang Dynasty of the second millennium B.C., and represented the formless Supreme Being of ancient Chinese religious worship. With the advent of Confucianism, it became incorporated into the system of rites and justifications for Chinese imperial rule. It was Matteo Ricci, the great Jesuit missionary to Ming China in the 16th and 17th centuries, who first translated God (Deus) as (causing great controversy in both China and Rome). And in modern times, this Western, imported sense has become dominant. For the Chinese reader, the word will thus forever evoke a complex, layered history involving China’s classical past as well as its more recent experiences of colonialism and foreign domination, of ideological challenges from Christian missionaries and Chinese revolutionaries (Hong Xiuquan, Sun Yat-sen, etc.) who embraced Christianity as a force for positive change.

A Western reader faced with the word “God” will have a completely separate set of emotional reactions and historical references. Indeed, it’s hardly accurate to say that and God are the same word at all. On the one hand, as Liu Cixin’s story is about humanity’s responses to alien beings who claim to have created us and were “God,” translating the title the way I did was “faithful.” But it is also undeniable that an English reader faced with the phrase “Taking Care of God” would have a completely different set of semantic associations from a Chinese reader faced with . Would it have been more accurate for me to translate the title as “Caring for the Creators”? The latter is far less evocative and elegant, but perhaps in a sense more accurate. By making the choice I did, I inevitably rewrote Liu Cixin’s story.8

The other word in the title, , poses even more challenges. It is a specific Chinese concept for the duty of children to care for their parents in old age that has no exact equivalent in English. The word, shaped by thousands of years of cultural emphasis on filial piety, has an emotional resonance for Chinese readers that cannot be translated.9 One alternative, “The Dotage of the Deities,” suggested by my friend Anatoly Belilovsky, probably comes closest, and it would strike the English reader in ways distinct both from my choice and the original.

Finally, I want to note that a good translation can enhance the original in ways both big and small. For example, Tao Ruohua, who translated my “Algorithms for Love,” decided to use Classical Chinese to translate an embedded fictional account supposedly written by Western missionaries to China during the Qing Dynasty. This choice evoked for the Chinese reader the mood and historical context far more effectively than my original. As another example, Xia Jia, who translated “The Man Who Ended History” into Chinese, effectively used numerous colloquialisms and slang to give my Chinese characters a sense of authenticity that is lacking in my English original.

By far the most impressive example in this vein I’ve experienced involves the fan translation of “The Paper Menagerie.” The English original rendered some of the mother’s dialog in Chinese (pinyin) to give the English reader a sense of her foreignness. When translated into Chinese, it was not obvious how this sense could be preserved as the Chinese sentences would obviously be perfectly comprehensible to Chinese readers.

The translator, Zhang Xinyuan, came up with the novel solution of rendering those sections with the “wrong” Chinese characters whose phonetic values approximated the intended phrases. In other words, she employed a technique often used to transliterate foreign words into Chinese: using characters chosen for their phonetic value without regard to their meaning (recall /“Asura, Yaksha, Rakshasa” from earlier).10 This way of “writing Chinese in Chinese as though it were a foreign language” perfectly captured the effect of the original for Chinese readers, and defamiliarized the Chinese writing system by highlighting its phonetic nature, a fact often forgotten by those fluent with it.

Translation can never perfectly capture the original. The translator must make choices that re-create the story in a new language for a new set of readers. But it isn’t a simple matter of “lost in translation”; often, the result offers something new as instructive to the target readers as it is to the original author.

Note: Thanks to Anatoly Belilovsky, Helena Bell, Aliette de Bodard, and Alex Shvartsman for their comments on drafts of this essay.

Footnotes:

1 The choice of the right tense to use in translating Chinese fiction into English—a side effect of the differences between the two languages—is another complex topic that I do not delve into here.

2 The key is to use such literal translation techniques only judiciously. The translated names of the dates in this case may also cause an English reader to latch onto the poetic phrasings and exoticize the Chinese calendar. Readers of fantasy and science fiction may be somewhat more sensitized to these issues as the genres are full of attempts to rephrase the quotidian to appear strange and unfamiliar, a potentially problematic dynamic when applied to translations from another culture. Ultimately, I felt that the use of literal translations here was justified, but it isn’t without problems.

3 Again, this technique must be used selectively. When the metaphrase (a word-for-word-translation) is relatively transparent in meaning, this approach can delight and enlighten, but for more obscure idioms, paraphrasing would be appropriate.

4 For comparison, consider whether an American reader’s reaction to a story translated from Chinese that contained a simplified, Chinese-centric view of the Kent State shootings may detract from and overwhelm the rest of the story.

5 American authors who find that their stories have been altered in translation often react with outrage and anger, but I invite them to re-consider the reaction in the context of my own experience.

6 This understanding was confirmed with Liu Cixin.

7 Neither does authorial intent, for that matter.

8 When my translation was re-printed, the new publisher altered the title to “Taking Care of Gods” (note the plural). The new publisher, whose staff are mostly Chinese, explained to me that they thought the change was necessary because they did not wish to offend Western readers by making too explicit a reference to the Christian God. Instead, they wanted to make the aliens seem like generic “gods.” I was reminded of the controversies surrounding Matteo Ricci’s original translation of God to .

9 The tradition of children caring for aged parents at home is increasingly coming into conflict with an urbanizing, mobile society without a developed welfare state. A hot-button issue in China, this social background also forms part of the story’s meaning to Chinese readers.

10 Sometimes the characters used in transliteration are chosen to give a semantic hint of the meaning of the foreign word (e.g., —pronounced lili, literally “Beautiful Jasmine”—for “Lily” to approximate the sound as well as suggesting the name’s floral, feminine origin). The nuances in the practice of transliterating foreign words into Chinese deserve a whole book.

About the Author

Ken Liu is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. His fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov&rsquo;s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. He has won a Nebula, a Hugo, a World Fantasy Award, and a Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award, and been nominated for the Sturgeon and the Locus Awards. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.

The Military, Magic, and the Misery Ethic:
A Conversation with Myke Cole

Jeremy L. C. Jones

In Shadow Ops: Control Point by Myke Cole, Oscar Britton is an officer attached to the Supernatural Operations Corps. He might doubt the system now and then, but he puts his life and the life of his men on the line to uphold it.

And then he begins to manifest magical abilities. According to the post-Great Reawakening law, Britton should turn himself in. Instead he runs.

In Shadow Ops: Fortress Frontier, Alan Bookbinder works in the Pentagon. He’s a family man. An administrator. A paper-pushing patriot. He believes in the system. In fact, he makes the system work. When Bookbinder wakes from a nightmare, the strange current that runs through him is certainly not doubt in the system. Bookbinder thinks the “drowning” feeling might be a heart condition, but the doctor diagnosis it as a panic attack.

When Bookbinder discovers that the “current” is magic and that he is, indeed, Latent, he follows the rules. He turns himself in, even though it may mean losing everything and everyone he loves.

The Shadow Ops universe crackles with wind, fire, and stone magic (to name but a few types). There are villains like the aeromancer, Harlequin. There are monsters and elementals. Cole dips generously from the genre well to produce novels that could be labeled grimdark, urban fantasy, military fantasy, or simply speculative fiction.

Readers easily sense Cole’s love of comic books, adventure fiction, and late night games of Dungeons and Dragons.

Equally obvious, is Cole’s experience in the military and as a civilian and government security contractor.

And there are a lot of pretty cool places—the magic, the military jargon, the many forms of magic—in Coles novels where he could’ve lost sight of his mission or gotten bogged down. But he doesn’t. He stays focused on the characters—what’s going on inside them and what happens when they have to make hard decisions.

“The only interesting thing in life, really, is people interacting with other people,” said Cole, “and that’s really what all stories are. If you boil down any story, no matter what it is . . . it’s always people interacting with people at its heart.”

The most interesting thing about Cole’s Shadow Ops novels is, indeed, “people interacting with people,” and that’s saying a whole lot.

Below, Cole and I talk about writing, PTSD, and the military. We talk about his characters, his books, and his Misery Ethic. And we have a whole lot of fun doing it. 

When I read a book I love, my first instinct is to not apply any critical thinking, but at the same time I’m trying to figure out, “Why do I love this so much?” You’re recent post about post-traumatic stress disorder answered some of that question for me.

I think books work on a couple of levels. There’s a visceral, gut-punch reaction to how characters resonate with you. Sort of your own lens. I did another blog post on China Miéville and why I wanted to meet him, and one of the things I said in it is that every time I read a book I feel like it’s a book written just for me, that my experience with it is so unique that it’s almost like I’m reading a different version of the book than everyone else.

But I also think critical thinking can be applied, and there is a rational lens that can be looked at, and people can make arguments for why a story works or why it doesn’t and that those arguments are common, I think, to most readers.

The Shadow Ops books definitely aim for the gut. I nearly had a panic attack reading the early sequences of both books, when Britton and Bookbinder realize that they are magical [Latent].

I’m so pleased to hear that you have that visceral reaction. That is the goal. I get different reactions from people. There are plenty of people that absolutely loathe my writing and plenty of people that love it, but the reaction I fear the most is people who go, “Eh,” and are somewhere in the middle. That’s death to a writer.

Do you encounter many readers who have a “somewhere in the middle” feeling about these books?

Not the first one [Shadow Ops: Control Point]. Most people seem to either really like it or really don’t like it. The second book [Shadow Ops: Fortress Frontier] . . . I don’t want to flatter myself, but it’s almost universally praised. I haven’t read a lot of bad reviews about it, but there have been a couple of people who have said that the book just didn’t rouse them in the way they had hoped it would. Luckily, those voices have been few enough.

I think it was Charlie Stross who wrote that a polarized fan base is actually a really positive sign because it means that your writing is really affecting people, and a person that really hates you or hates your work is actually more likely to read it than someone who had a bland and banal experience with it.

The idea of forcing us—the readers—to change viewpoint characters with each novel in a series seems to be the very thing that you force your characters to go through: the world is the same, but now I’m having to see it differently.

That’s a great way to explain it. I never even thought of it that way. For me it was a much more bald approach.

Ace mass market originals, in particular, have been very successful with a long run of novels that deal with a single protagonist. [Jim Butcher’s] Harry Dresden is a great example of that. [Charlaine Harris’] Sookie Stackhouse is another great example. People love them, and it’s a really great way to run a series.

The thing for me is that all of the stories that have been most dear to me have had ensemble casts. I think that’s one of the reasons that Game of Thrones is so unspeakably resonant, so incredibly successful.

My intention was always to do an ensemble cast, and part of it was because those are the kinds of stories I like, but part of it was also that the world is interesting and the people in it are interesting, and maybe I’m ADD or easily distracted, but I want to see it through different lenses.

I also think, frankly, it’s the best way to grow as a writer because it forces you to really, really immerse yourself in different character types with different goals and different experiences, and that’s really the only way to improve in my mind.

In Shadow Ops: Control Point, we get an image from the cover art that suggests one type of character, and then you show us that the person that we think of as powerful, the muscles, the tight t-shirt, the big gun, often feels powerless.

That’s exactly right.

You pull a cultural rug out from under us, and that’s a huge risk . . . with, of course, huge rewards, too.

The thing is: who knows if I’m reaping those rewards or not. Again, I was successful, but I just wish . . . it’s breaking the fourth wall, I guess, because the reality of it is that I’m an officer and I command about 50 people right now, and I have to make a lot of decisions, and a lot of decisions that there is no right answer to and I’m going to be in a lot of trouble if I get it wrong. I try very hard to come across as Alan Bookbinder does. He turns into Patton by the end of the book, right? But the truth is I agonize, and it’s hard. Sometimes I do waffle all over the place, and sometimes I make bad calls. That has been my experience as a military officer, and it’s been the experience, I guess, of the people I’ve seen around me as well.

John Ringo writes those books with the big gun and all that stuff and has a huge audience of people that love it; but he’s doing that. I don’t want to do that. I want to do something else.

Somewhere in the first few chapters of Fortress, Bookbinder is talks to a doctor about anxiety. I am told by doctors that this is one of the hardest things for men in this country to do, to acknowledge an anxiety disorder even with a doctor.

I think two things hold back members of the United States military from seeking help for anxiety disorders, and the first is security clearances. Despite the Department of Defense and the intelligence community’s insistence that self-referring for mental health issues will not result in a loss of security clearance, most people don’t believe it, and there are always horror stories about it.

I mentioned in my essay on PTSD that it kept me from getting help for a long time, and sure enough, it was fine; but I do think that it holds a lot of people back because the security clearance process is very opaque, it’s very protean, and you have no control over it. Clearance is a privilege, not a right, and they can take it away for any reason or no reason at any time. The loss of your clearance isn’t the loss of your job; it’s the loss of your career. You will never work in that field again, and that really scares the crap out of people who depend on this work for their livelihoods.

The other issue is the perception of leadership. In the military whether you’re a noncommissioned officer or a commissioned officer, you’re a leader, and people are looking at you all the time. You are the face of whatever your mission on and the face of your organization, and if you appear frightened or uncertain or weak, while that’s okay, that trickles into the morale of your people.

No one ever specifically says to you that you can’t do that, but when we admit to ourselves that we have challenges, anxiety or what have you, seeking that help, because we’ve been trained never to show it, it’s really, really tough.

I think that the climate of leadership will eventually change and the action of seeking help will be seen someday as a position of strength and something that your people will admire you for, and also an example to them that, when they have these issues, there’s no problem with getting help, just like there’s no problem when you have high blood pressure going to get help.

But that climate doesn’t exist yet, and I think we have a long way to go to get there.

Are you seeing improvements?

Sure, every day. I’m so proud of the military, how progressive we are.

It’s so funny. It’s almost an analog for . . . people think that Oscar Britton should be a badass, and I’m portraying him as I think he really is. I think people think the military is an incredibly conservative organization when the truth is we’re the most progressive organization in the country.

We integrated people before desegregation. The conversation about ending segregation started was because Eisenhower integrated military units. We abolished “don’t ask, don’t tell” long before the civilian legislature has permitted marriage equality, and that’s an argument we’re seeing before the Supreme Court right now.

So yes, I do think that we’re seeing a change, and I’m enormously proud of the fact that the United States military tends to be out front on these really important issues.

Where do you suppose that progressive vein comes from?

I think it comes from two things. I think that the military is the most mission-driven organization in the United States. I mean, a lot of companies have different kinds of corporate cultures, and the military certainly has a culture, but the bottom line in the military is you get the job done, and whatever gets the job done and is good for the job is the thing that leads the way.

Things like the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” were better for good order and discipline, were better for efficiencies. We were losing thousands upon thousands of fantastic intelligence officers and linguists and technology specialists, and people in critical, critical positions, and so the brass realized that this wasn’t going to work, wasn’t going to help them accomplish the mission.

The second reason is that the military is such an incredibly diverse organization in that so many people from all walks of life. The military is an incredible incredibly diverse organization, and when you have that degree of diversity mixing, you have to be progressive on social issues because you have to create an environment that’s safe for everybody to do their jobs.

I think the big hurdle . . . and we’re coming to it now with the admission of women into combat roles . . . we have a long way to go on sexual violence. That culture needs to changes, and it’s not changing as fast as command would like it to. But I am hopeful, because of all these other strides we’ve made, that we’ll lick that, too.

The public perception is that command covers up sexual violence.

Yes, and I think there’s some truth to that. Here. I’ll make an analogy. When Pearl Harbor was attacked, people said it was the Japanese, and it was, but it was a much more complex issue than that. There was a schism in the Japanese army between the Tosei-Ha and the Kodo-Ha, with the Kodo-Ha being young junior officers that were firebrands that wanted war with the United States, and the Tosei-Ha who were older senior officers who didn’t. The Kodo-Ha being more numerous and having access to an operational command and a few key senior officers in their sphere, were able to make that attack happen, knowing that the emperor and the Japanese army wouldn’t want to appear divided and would get behind it.

I think the same thing is true in the United States military. You have a cadre of senior officers that are much, much older, that have a different perspective on what the culture of the military should be; but they’re retiring, and the people who are O3s right now are people like me, and we have a different perception of what the culture should be.

I think, as that generational shift moves over, you’re going to see the change accelerate.

It seems like when there’s trauma involved and your world view has switched to, “It is an unsafe world,” you’re going to be less likely to request help. It perpetuates itself.

I couldn’t agree more. I couldn’t agree more. I think that’s a very, very insightful look at it. I also think that . . . and this is one of the best things about the military, actually, but it’s also one of the worst things . . . is that we are a culture that celebrates misery. We love being miserable. We love this idea that we taken on the jobs that no one else will take on. We take on the risks that no one else will take on. We go down in the mud and work twenty times as hard as anyone else, and then when that misery produces results, it’s a sublime, sublime feeling.

I’ll give you an example of what I mean. There was a night when we were doing man-overboard drills, and it was a night op, so we’re on one of these 25-foot defender-class patrol boats that I work on in the Guard, and we’re off Manhattan. We have a dummy we call Oscar, and we’re chucking him into the water as part of this man-overboard exercise.

The water is below a certain temperature so I have to wear my dry suit, and in order to create a watertight seal these dry suits have neck gaskets that basically choke you to death, and we’re underway for eight hours . . . your face is purple and it’s awful, it’s really uncomfortable, and here we are chucking Oscar in the water and pulling him out; and we’re also on standby for a search and rescue case.

We got to a point in the river where there was some kind of party going on the shore, and I could hear this pulsing dance beat and hear people laughing and enjoying the celebration; and here I am freezing because those dry suits don’t keep you as warm as you need to be, I’m choking to death. I’m exhausted. It’s like midnight. And I’m doing these drills out on the water. But I just had this moment of celebrating that misery where I thought of all those people partying and I just thought, “Go on and party, don’t worry about it. I’ve got this. Nothing’s going to happen to you on my watch. You enjoy your party and don’t worry about the things that go bump in the night. I won’t let anything hurt you.”

That’s one of the few moments of peace. By somehow sheltering others you make it a fraction more all right for yourself.

I was thinking about all the stories my dad tells about his time in the Air Force. Every one’s a combination of misery and dark humor. We don’t talk about how much fun it was to travel around the country or anything like that. It’s all mud and misery.

I’m telling you, we celebrate misery, but that is also translated into my life as a writer.

Look, if I didn’t have that Misery Ethic, I don’t think I’d be as good a writer as I am, or at least a disciplined a writer as I am, and I don’t think I’d be in as good shape as I am. I think that so much of what I value in myself has come out of learning to love being miserable.

I wonder how much writing is like therapy. How much does the writing keep you between the ditches, as Dave Drake would say?

For me it’s critical. The reality of it was that is that my commitment to the military is part time. I’m reserves. But I used to be full time in the security community, and when I realized that I didn’t want to do that, I began to look at writing as a way out.

The problem for me, and I think a lot of other vets and security personnel may say the same thing, is that for a lot of us security work, that’s what defines us. When you look in the mirror in the morning and ask, “Why am I alive and what am I doing to earn the air that I’m pushing past my teeth?” that’s the answer: “I’m protecting people. I’m saving lives. I’m taking on the rough tasks that no one else wants to do,” and that’s our way of putting love out into the world.

You can’t just slough that off, and that’s a big part of PTSD, I think, that isn’t addressed, is that that experience of fighting in a war or rescuing someone from a burning building—and this is not, by the way, to downplay other forms of PTSD like a death in the family or abusive relationships—when you have that incredible sense of resonance and significance in your life, and all of a sudden it goes away and now you’re working at a bank or a car dealership or whatever, life seems like it has no meaning. “Why the hell am I doing this?” You get bored and you get listless.

I had that problem in spades when I came back from each tour, and it only got worse. The only thing I could ever find that made me feel like my life had meaning and that there was something that was worth being was writing. That’s why I say that it literally saved me. I think without it I would have gone right down the drain and eventually I would have died, but writing filled up that space.

Now I have this wonderful experience where I can look in that mirror, and I have two things that make me worthwhile. Art can be a really, really great way to cope.

Which novel are you currently working on, three or four?

I’m in the middle of number four. The story arc of the Shadow Ops series that you’re in now ends with book three [Shadow Ops: Breach Zone]. Book four is still in the same universe, but it’s a prequel going back to the very, very early days of the Great Reawakening with a complete new cast of characters, so I hope that it’s similar enough to the experience that people are having in [the current] story arc to draw those readers in but different enough to be a new entry point to the series for people who either weren’t into this story arc or who want to come to it fresh for the first time.

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:
Literatures of Despair

Daniel Abraham

When I grew up, I knew what a fantasy novel was. I had my examples right there close to hand: Terry Brooks, David Eddings, Barbara Hambly, Louise Cooper, Lloyd Alexander. They were the stories deep within other worlds, where there were elves and dwarfs, or something like them. There was magic. There was a dark power rising, and the heroes stood against it and after several books, the safe money said they’d win. They were the legacy born of The Lord of the Rings and the Chronicles of Narnia.

I hadn’t heard of George Macdonald at that point, and Thomas Mallory was basically unreadable for me, so as far as I knew the Inklings had laid the path and everyone after that was just walking down it.

Now that I’m two (or three) decades older, the water’s a little muddier. Jo Walton’s, Tooth and Claw is a tale of dragons, romance and social etiquette where the great evils are the class system of dragons and a suitor who is entirely too forward. Guy Gavriel Kay’s fantasies owe immensely more to history than to Tolkien. Miéville’s Perdido Street Station takes place in a fantasy world with magic and fantastic beings without appearing to have a single literary chromosome in common with The Belgariad.

The genre I knew as a kid is broader now, with projects that are exploring the implications of epic fantasy’s toolbox in ways I hadn’t begun to imagine when I started reading the stuff.

And among these new, strange monsters, far and away the most commercially successful is known best by its epithet: Grimdark.

The term actually comes from Warhammer 40,000, a tabletop battle simulation game whose tagline is “In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.” It can be applied to books where the traditional fantasy arc is retold in a way that is darker, more violent, and less cathartic. For instance, consider culturally iconic fantasy series in which the noble hero is slaughtered at the end of the first season. Grimdark projects can also replace traditional genre pieces with stories that focus on unredeemed and unredeemable characters in similar traditional fantasy or science fiction settings.

Infusing fantasy with a sense of unredeemable despair isn’t exactly a new thing. Stephen R. Donaldson was on the bestseller lists with The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant back when I was in my David Eddings days. The most recent surge in popularity for these projects includes Joe Abercrombie, Richard Morgan, and the defining name in contemporary fantasy, George R.R. Martin.

The adjective “gritty” comes into it a lot too. These authors have fantasy worlds that include crude language, sexual violence, profound moral ambiguity, and in which there is very little chance—if any—that the hero is actually a good person, much less that they will overcome the forces of darkness as a champion of light. Sometimes it’s described and defended as being more realistic than the standard, the argument being that the real world is made up of moral ambiguities and justice is something we have to create, not a natural order that we can discover. I don’t really want to go into that here, apart from saying that:

I disagree with that analysis.

Any serious-minded critic would disagree with that too because I am so clearly right. Right?

I do want to say that grimdark fantasy does speak to something the more joyful, uplifting, not-as-grim-as-a-hospice-nurse’s-bad-day, that regularly-defined fantasy doesn’t. And I think you can get a hint of what that difference is by looking at grimdark’s closest analog: noir.

I thought of noir as being a variety of hardboiled detective stories until about eight months ago when I read the fairly brilliant Otto Penzler’s foreword to The Best American Noir of the Century. He made the argument that hardboiled mystery and noir look similar because of the setting, but are engaged in very different projects. They share a world that is grimy, violent and corrupt. The difference comes in the relationship of the protagonist to that world. The hardboiled detective is, to borrow a phrase with certain religious connotations, in the world, but not of it. In The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade appears to be as lacking in moral boundaries as any of the other characters until the end, but when the time comes to look away from the murder of his partner or turn the woman he loves in to the authorities, he takes an explicitly moral path. “The chances are you’ll get off with life. That means if you’re a good girl, you’ll be out in 20 years. I’ll be waiting for you. If they hang you, I’ll always remember you.”

 Noir protagonists, on the other hand, are very much a piece of the fallen world they live in. The corrupt nature of the world is also the corrupt nature of the character. They are either unable to overcome their greed, lust, and violence, or are unwilling to even try. They usually end badly, but even when they appear to succeed—as in Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley—they end unredeemed. Redemption is, in fact, impossible. Noir is, as Penztler points out, essentially pessimistic. It assumes and asserts that human nature is mean, petty, cruel, and incapable of any meaningful transcendence.

Walter Jon Williams once gave me his breakdown of speculative fiction genres. It went something like this:

In fantasy, the world is essentially benign; in science fiction, the world is essentially amoral; in horror, the world is malefic. Put in terms of illness, fantasy evil is an illness from which the world must recover. In science fiction, evil is a social construct put on a universe that simply is the way it is. In horror, evil is the natural deformity of the world from which there is no way to recover. Noir—and I suspect grimdark fantasy—get its power from the same source as horror. They are expressions of pessimism about the nature of the world. Noir, I think, goes farther than horror. To misquote Walter Sobchak, say what you will about the morality that informs Freddy Krueger’s and Jason Voorhees’ selective slaughter of sexually active teenagers, at least it’s an ethos. “Forget it Jake. It’s Chinatown.” actively turns away from the hope of any moral compass.

So where does grimdark fall in that spectrum? Is it Tolkienesque horror? Is it existential despair with a cloak and a magic sword? Or is it something more its own?

It varies according to the individual project, of course, but at the risk of over-generalizing; I’ll put my flag on an opinion. I think grimdark is now and has—at least since the time of Thomas Covenant—been a rejection of heroism’s ability to save the world. The modern template of fantasy ends with the decent, gentle, bourgeois Frodo Baggins being saved in the end by an act of mercy he’d made when there was no reason to think it would do him any good. The book that—for me—embodies the purest grimdark response is Abercrombie’s thoroughly brilliant The Heroes, in which the final moments (and spoilers here, so turn away if you don’t want to know) affirm that the violence will not only continue, but that the heroic men and women who are dedicated to it will never escape it except through death.

Honestly, until I read The Heroes, I didn’t have much use for the grimdark projects, and now that I have, I feel like I’ve seen this expressed as clearly, powerfully, and beautifully as anyone ever will, and I don’t have to read another one pretty much ever. I can respect it, understand it, appreciate it, but I have a hard time enjoying it. Not long ago, Thea of Booksmugglers summed up the recent noir bestseller Gone Girl with this: “It is a brilliantly written book, but I hated reading it.” Like that.

Except.

There is a small voice in the back of my head. It doesn’t come from the happier places, and it doesn’t speak loud. And it points out that grimdark, like noir, is a literature of despair. And maybe the one thing worse than indulging in other people’s despair is despairing alone and in isolation.

So there is that.

About the Author

Daniel Abraham is a writer of genre fiction with a dozen books in print and over thirty published short stories. His work has been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Hugo Awards and has been awarded the International Horror Guild Award. He also writes as MLN Hanover and (with Ty Franck) as James S. A. Corey. He lives in the American Southwest.

Editor’s Desk:
How Did This Happen?

Neil Clarke

As last month came to a close, the World Science Fiction Association announced the nominees for the 2013 Hugo Awards. If you’ve missed the news, you can find the complete list of nominees at thehugoawards.org, but I’d like to take a moment to spotlight the Clarkesworld nominees:

Best Novelette: “Fade to White” by Catherynne M. Valente

Best Short Story: “Immersion” by Aliette de Bodard

Best Short Story: “Mantis Wives” by Kij Johnson

Best Editor (Short Form): Neil Clarke

Best Semiprozine: Clarkesworld Magazine—Edited by Neil Clarke, Sean Wallace, Jason Heller, Podcast directed by Kate Baker

A special congratulations goes out to four-time Clarkesworld cover artist, Julie Dillon, for her nomination in the Best Professional Artist category.

Thank you for your vote of confidence—and, as always, we’re extremely grateful for your support. In light of the challenges I’ve faced in the last year, this news is particularly heart-warming.

If you’ve ever wondered what it is like behind the curtain, the Hugo Administrators contact you in advance of the public announcement to confirm your eligiblity and willingness to be a nominee. This year, that was about a week before the official announcement and during that time you are expected to keep everything confidential. It’s brutal.

I have to admit that I didn’t completely contain myself. I told my parents. Apparently, my announcement got my father thinking. “So how did you end up doing this?” he asked. “Probably all those episodes of Lost in Space you watched as a kid, right?”

The question surprised me, but he was right to ask. I graduated with a computer science degree. I never worked for a school newspaper, journal, or publication. I’ve spent the last twenty-plus years working in educational technology. This was never a course that I expected my life to take.

Lost in Space had its influence. What young boy wouldn’t want to have Will Robinson’s adventures, complete with a faithful Robot and the antics of Dr. Smith? As I grew up, that sense of wonder stayed with me. When I could, I bought the show on DVD and I’ve since rewatched it straight through with my own children. Seeing that wonder through their eyes has added more fond memories to the pile.

But there is more. Lost in Space may have played a role, but it was ultimately my family that set me on this course. My father likes to tell the tale of how he held toddler-me up to the TV so I could see Armstrong walk on the Moon. They read to me—The Lorax comes to mind—and encouraged me to read on my own. I never had to worry about the availability of books. They were always there.

In my tween years, my cousin introduced me to the works of Heinlein and Clarke and gave me a copy of the classic anthology Adventures in Space and Time. Well-read copies of these books still sit on my shelf. I remember our family outing to see Star Wars shortly after its release and looking to the stars as we walked back to our car that night. They set the stage.

As I made my way through college, I met people who shared the same interests. They introduced me to science fiction conventions, but I didn’t feel comfortable with most of them until I was introduced to Readercon by a friend. Ironically enough, the very same place where Clarkesworld Magazine was born and the site of my heart attack years later.

So, Dad, this is how I came to be where I am today. Thanks for making me think about it and thanks for everything you’ve done to get me here. Now, following your lead, off I go to nudge my own children. Can’t wait to see where they go.

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.