Soulcatcher

James Patrick Kelly

After years of planning and scheming, of deals honest and not, of sleepless nights of rage and cool days of calculation, Klary’s moment arrives when xeni-Harvel Asher, the ambassador from the Four Worlds, enters her gallery.

As a concession to local xenophobia, the xeni is embodied as a human male. Of course, he is beautiful. Some liken the xeni to the faeries of Earth legend, their charisma so intoxicating that, at the merest nod, a groom will walk away from his new bride, a mother will abandon her infant. Is it telepathy? Pheromones? The lure of great wealth and power? No matter. Klary has steeled herself against the xeni’s insidious power. Ever since the Ambassador made planetfall, Klary has been on a regimen of emotion suppressants. Not that she really needs them. After xeni-Harvel Asher ruined her life, Klary has had just one emotion. No chemistry can defeat it.

Her hopeless assistant Elloran makes a fool of himself groveling before the xeni. Klary slips behind a display case protecting a cascading sculpture of lace and leather and spun sugar. She is content for now to study her prey. The xeni is slight, almost childlike, but he commands the room with eyes as big as Klary’s fists, a smile brimming with wide teeth. Slender hands emerge from the drooping sleeves of his midnight jacket. His fingers are delicate enough to pluck the strings of a harp—or a woman’s heart.

“Here at Hamashy’s Fine Textiles we have the best collection . . . ” Elloran is talking too fast.

“Yes, this one is sure you do.” Asher cuts him off. “This one would speak with the owner now?”

Which means it’s time. But when Klary steps from her hiding place, she sees that her plan is going hideously awry. Dear, beloved, lost Janary, clone sister of her sibling batch, has followed her abductor into her gallery.

Even though it has been fourteen years since they last saw each other, even though she has lost her name, her face, and her innocence, Janary knows her as her sister. How could she not? Her frightened stare pricks Klary’s shriveled heart. All is lost. Yes, a reunion was part of her plan, but that was for later. After this was over. Will she give Klary up? Can Janary even guess what her sister plans to do? But there is no turning back.

“Ambassador.” Klary steps forward and bows. “You honor me. I am Klary Hamashy.” Despite the suppressants, she braces herself against the xeni’s fierce regard. It’s like leaning into a headwind. “Welcome, sir.”

Xeni-Harvel Asher inclines his head. “This one has heard tell of the local rug merchant, Friend Klary.” She is not sure whether he intends this as a slight. Hamashy Gallery sells native and off-world carpets, yes, but it’s no rug shop. Klary is too busy trying not to goggle at Janary to take offense.  She has not changed since the xeni lured her away from their ancestral commune. Bitter years have aged Klary and she has taken steps to smudge her appearance, but Janary is still as striking as Klary once was. She has the rust-brown curls framing pale features of their genetic line. She wears a high-necked white gown, perhaps to satisfy some ancient bridal fetish. Her sister shows no signs of anger or sadness as she shies behind the Ambassador, as if she is afraid of Klary. Has she accepted her humiliation? Embraced it? Unthinkable. Klary tries to imagine herself in Janary’s place as her sister catches up the decorative glass chain that dangles from the choker around her neck.

“What?” Asher notices her. “She won’t hurt you.”

Without a word, Janary presses the end of her chain into his hand.

“One never knows what bothers the pet.” Xeni-Harvel Asher does not apologize. “It’s been skittish today.”

Klary wants to yank the chain away, crush it in her bare hand until shards of broken glass bite her. “Not to worry,” she says. She addresses the xeni, not her sister. “She is safe in this place.”

“A pleasant enough shop.” He gestures at the racks and display cases, the hangings and the shelves that line the walls. “Might one find a present for a good friend here? A unique present, perhaps?”

Klary’s smile is tight. She knows why the xeni is here. Klary has paid an outrageous price to bait the trap, has discreetly encouraged the rumors about her illegal acquisition. But she must not rush; there is a scene to play before the final act. “Let me show you my treasures.” She tries to gesture for Elloran to peel Janary away, but her assistant is useless. Tomorrow Klary will fire him—if there is a tomorrow.

The xeni is not impressed with the life-sized nylon nudes wrapped around moveable skeletons nor does he appreciate the remarkable properties of nylon. “It’s semi-translucent,” says Klary, “so several layers of differently colored nylon produce the subtle skin tones. See how the artist’s needle modeling suggests wrinkles about the eyes?” Nor does he care for bowls made of taut coiled snuro or the hanging of cloth beads arrayed on glow-wires. He passes Tuktuk’s mixed-media tensioned fabric sculptures without comment. Klary stubbornly describes a French tapestry from the twenty-second century. “Notice the classic border filled with floral bouquets and architectural scrollwork, around very fine floating landscape scenes from old Earth. Depictions of Oriental life with courtiers seated on motorcycles, and see here, plants, birds, zombies . . . ” But Asher has already moved on, past an area carpet in the Tabriz style by master weaver Kumanen and the chain mail business suits; Klary hurries to catch up.

He flips through Fovian rugs hanging on a telescoping display like they were pages of a book he’s deciding not to read. “One wants something special for a special friend,” he says. Then he leans close—too close—and for a second his huge black eyes erase all Klary’s worries about her ruined plans. In that instant of domination, Klary feels something for her sister that she has never felt.

Envy.

“There is more.” She twitches free of the xeni, gathers herself. “Work not yet priced. Items I had not intended to sell.”

“Keep the best for yourself. A strategy to live by.” He chuckles. “Still, one might be interested to see, if not to buy.”

“Of course, Ambassador. Although it might be best if your companion stayed with Elloran.” She raises her voice to rouse the bedazzled Elloran.  There may still be a way to salvage the plan, but Janary must not see what is to come.

“No.” Janary is trembling.

The xeni glances over his shoulder, as if he has forgotten that she is following them.  “You’ve provoked the pet to speech, Friend Klary.” He gives her chain a tug and she doubles over, eyes downcast. “It’s not often so bold in public.”

“Want . . . ” Her voice grates from disuse. “ . . . to come.” She raises her eyes just enough to meet Klary’s horrified gaze.

“One is at a loss to explain this behavior.”

Worried lest the xeni punish her, Klary babbles. “It’s fine. Not a problem, I just thought she . . . it would be more comfortable out here. I live here, you see, and my rooms are rather cluttered just now.” She gestures for them to follow and, when the xeni hesitates, she almost makes the mistake of putting a hand on the ambassador’s shoulder to steer him toward the rear of the gallery. “Please,” she says. “It would be my pleasure. Elloran, you can close up and go home.” The fewer witnesses the better. “Elloran.”

“Most accommodating, Friend Klary.” Asher lets Janary’s chain go slack and then gives it a tinkling shake to get her moving. “Be assured that the pet will be on a short leash.”

Klary has four rooms at the back of the gallery: bedroom, bath, galley kitchen and the office where she eats and connects. The office is half again as big as all the other rooms combined. Klary had planned for this visit and has removed all traces of her sister clones, their long-dead first, and the world she lost when the family chose her to retrieve Janary. She has replaced mementos of that former life with pix of men she has never met. Clothes they might have worn hang in her closet. There is an artful scatter of presents she might have given or received had she dared intimacy: a vase filled with the latest airflowers, a reproduction ship’s clock, a set of magma tiles that serve as trivets, kites and crystal and antique hubcaps. But what draws Asher’s attention is the art Klary has kept for herself. The xeni points at a chair and Janary sits. He coils the glass chain on her lap and she stares down at it glumly as if to read her fortune. Then he strides about the room inspecting the needle lace hamaca and Ringwell’s blood-stained War Quilt and Xary Merry Kari’s Wrapped Dog. He pauses in front of Kumanen’s Tabriz carpet, which hangs beside the bedroom door. “But you have this one hanging in the gallery,” he says.

“A reproduction, Ambassador,” Klary says. “This is the original. Four hundred years old. Priceless.”

Asher waves mention of money aside as if it were a bad smell. He is still not satisfied with Klary’s wares. She has taken a certain pride in the taste with which she has built her collection, even if it is only a ruse to conceal her true intentions. The contents of her gallery and this room are all she has to show for the life she has led since Janary left with her xeni, and none of it interests him. She wonders now if any of it really interests her.

“One hears,” Asher says, “of a rug.”

Klary can feel the swirl of events turning him to her purpose. “I have many rugs.”

“Time passes, Friend Klary. One does not gladly waste it.” His voice changes and abruptly they are no longer speaking. Instead he is commanding. “A living rug. A soulcatcher.”

Klary gasps as she experiences the full force of the xeni’s charisma. Can ecstasy hurt? She knows the answer. “That’s supposed to be a secret.”

“Not secret enough, Friend Klary. Show.”

Klary staggers to the edge of the carpet in the middle of the office, feigning submission. Decorated with a motif of leaves and flowers on a field of blue, it is a nineteenth-century reproduction of a seventeenth-century original that was mentioned in Pope’s Survey of Persian Art. She sinks to her knees, slips fingers underneath and rolls it up to reveal a containment sunk into the floor, three meters by five and half a meter deep. A sheet of x-glass, level with the floor, protects the contents.

The xeni purrs. “So it’s real.”

“As you see, Ambassador.”

Klary’s soulcatcher has no provenance, other than horror stories told to scare children. Created by the Moccen Collective as an instrument of punishment, it is not strictly speaking textile, although it began as a matlike colony of carnivorous plants. Genetically modified to assimilate those who refused collectivization, the rugs were the Moccan’s tool to control dissidents. Since the Collective was enlightened enough to ban capital punishment, those sentenced to incarceration in a soulcatcher were functionally immortal, as long as the colony survived. The Moccen Collective had collapsed some two hundred years ago, and Klary’s soulcatcher seems as healthy as the day it captured the first dissenter.

“A closer look, Ambassador?”

Klary points at the controller and, when the glass retracts, she presses both hands against the rug’s translucent skin. As always, the surface yields to her touch, warm and silky-smooth. Beneath, the heads seem to float in a clear yellow broth of amniotic fluid. Cheeks bump against her palms and sink away, filmy, calm eyes peer through her fingers, lips part, revealing dark, inert tongues. Tangles of veins and arteries, bruise-blue and red, squiggle as blood surges; hairy bundles of ganglia connect the minds of the colony of the damned.    

Klary has always found the pulse of soulcatcher hypnotic. She has spent hours at its side, hoping for some sign from those within, listening not with her ears but with her fingertips. There have been nights when she has walked across it barefoot and one when, in despair at her wasted life, she lay naked on it and contemplated slicing the skin and submitting to capture. She believes that the captured know what has become of them, that they are restless but not in pain. Suddenly she is startled out of her dream of communion with the heads. Asher kneels next her and caresses the soulcatcher’s skin with his perfect fingers.

“Alive?” croaks Janary. Without asking permission, she too has approached the open containment.

“Yes,” murmurs the xeni. “But are they conscious?”

“There is no way to know.” Klary sits back. “The stories say they are.”

“They are singing.”  The xeni muses dreamily. “Do you hear that?”

Seeing that the xeni is transfixed, Klary dares a glance at Janary. Klary presses a forefinger to her lips and then nods at her sister’s kneeling abductor.

“No,” Janary says.

Misunderstanding, the xeni glares at her and she wilts back into her chair. “One feels for their plight. Name your price.”

“It’s not for sale.”

It takes a moment for the xeni’s mouth to work itself into a smile. “Not?”

“I mean, you don’t understand. This is a registered historical artifact. It’s against the laws of our world to sell anything on the list.”

“Then how did it come into your possession?”

“A gift, Ambassador, from a dear friend.” A dear friend, whom Klary had blackmailed. A parting gift that poor Terez had given as she and her husbands fled their creditors.

“Then this one must hope for your friendship, Klary.”

Klary realizes too late how close she is to the xeni. She tries to scoot away.

The xeni rests his hand on Klary’s shoulder. “Perhaps an exchange of gifts?”

“Ambassador . . . ” The hand unlocks years of grief and anger, Klary’s blistering need for revenge. At the same time, she is so swollen with the xeni’s desire for the soulcatcher that her brain feels as if it’s pressing against the inside of her skull. What she wants and what xeni-Harvel Asher wants are so nearly the same—she must acknowledge their mutual desire. The xeni must have the rug, that is the plan, and Klary must have her sister. But the plan is broken, useless, there is no plan, and Asher is so powerful and she must say something or her head will crack, she must, she must.

“Would I . . . I would . . . exchange.” How can she talk while a fist of blood is punching her chest, clutching at her throat? “I feel as if . . . .” She can’t stop herself. “Need help replacing Elloran . . . useless Elloran.” She gestures wildly at the gallery. “Help.” Now it is all she can do to point at Janary. “Her.”

She hears her sister’s strangled cry of anguish and then the xeni is across the room. Xeni-Harvel Asher thrusts a hand to Janary’s face, palm over her mouth, fingers splayed. “Nothing,” he says. “You are nothing.” She shakes beneath his grip. “Say nothing.”

Klary reclaims her anger and flicks her forefinger to deploy the blade. She slices into the skin of the soulcatcher.

“You want the pet?” says the xeni, who is still attempting to subdue Janary. His back is to Klary and the soulcatcher. “But humans can’t own humans.”

“No, of course.” Klary’s nose fills with the sweet, yeasty smell of the amniotic fluid. “Why did I say that?” As if the xeni didn’t know. “But I did, didn’t I?” She doesn’t know what she’s doing, only that she must do something. She babbles again. “It’s true that Elloran is not the best. Not to own it . . . her. No, but I could train her, perhaps. As an apprentice?”

“She’s yours.” Asher finally lets Janary go. He stoops until their faces are at the same level. “Nothing,” he whispers to her. Klary realizes this is his name for her. “As you worship and serve this one, Asher of Harvel, you will now serve that one, Klary Hamashy.” He breathes into her gaping, agonized mouth. “Your new friend.” Then he laughs.

Klary shakes her head to clear it. Janary is free. Wasn’t that the most important part of the plan? She can stop now. But the price of all those years of suffering must be accounted for. Not only Janary’s, but hers. Their two wasted lives. She looks past the xeni at her sister, who meets her gaze with brutal reproach. She knows Janary then, knows that she is about to warn Asher, who has taken everything from them. The plan, you stupid bitch. The plan. 

She hurls herself across the room, throws an arm around the shocked xeni’s neck and drags him back, kicking and gasping for air. Maybe he has something to say, a last plea for mercy, desperate words of command, but he is small and Klary’s anger is large.

“Klary, stop!” Janary screams, but of course, she is nothing.

She thrusts Asher’s head through the skin of the soulcatcher into its roiling interior. Just then Klary hears the captured. They are singing. To her? The song is deafening as she feels the stings of many lashes. They want her too but she releases her hold and falls backwards. Her dripping arm is covered in purple welts. The soulcatcher appears to be swallowing the xeni whole, despite churning legs and flailing arms, but then it spits the headless body out. It slumps away, blood gushing over the rolled up carpet. Ruined.

She remembers the man who sold her that carpet. His name was Lann and they were lovers for almost a week before Klary felt herself becoming attached. Lann had the oddest collection of combs: silver and bone and glass and gold. She had never met anyone before who collected combs. She wonders what became of him. Of her life.

Then she sees realizes that she is sitting in a puddle. She picks herself up. Janary stares at her.

“I did this for you,” Klary says. “Our sisters chose me to rescue you.”

“No.” Janary strangles on the word. “You don’t understand.”

“I was going to buy you afterward, bring you home. You weren’t supposed to know about this. Nobody was.”

The wound she has inflicted on the soulcatcher is already healing. Asher’s head grimaces and turns away from them.

“I had a plan, Janary. All this would have been a secret.” What is that in her sister’s eyes? Hatred? Horror? Fear?

She wonders then if anyone is coming to rescue her.

About the Author

James Patrick Kelly has written novels, short stories, essays, reviews, poetry, plays and planetarium shows. He has won the Nebula and Hugo Awards and his fiction has been translated into twenty-one languages. With John Kessel he is co-editor of seven anthologies, most recently Digital Rapture: The Singularity Anthology and SFWAs Nebula Awards Showcase, both published in 2012. He writes a column on the internet for Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and is on the faculty of the Stonecoast Creative Writing MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine. He was an early and eager adopter of podcasting; his podcasts include James Patrick Kelly’s StoryPod on Audible.com and the Free Reads Podcast (http://feeds.feedburner.com/freereads). Jim is thrilled to have his first publication in Clarkesworld and is particularly excited that Kate Baker, Audio Goddess, will be intoning his words.

Tachy Psyche

Andy Dudak

The woman who means to kill Wang Zhe is, like the rest of the universe, apparently frozen, though actually in glacial motion.

He has studied the scene for subjective years: the sculpture of her flowing cloak, the mask of her smart grease paint, the beginning of channel through that paint at the corner of her right eye. He’s gone mad theorizing on that tear. He’s gone mad counting the rain drops that hang suspended in the autumn air of this narrow Kashgar street; and mad again gauging the progress of her pistol as she levels it.

He’s gone mad wondering which will kill him first: a bullet, or the heat of his fatally overclocked brain.

There was a time, long ago, when he made a great effort of will to move his right hand on a collision course with her weapon. But of course, his body isn’t overclocked like his modified brain. He devoted volition to his hand in weird, Zen-like shifts for an apparent year before giving up. He wonders what she’ll see. Maybe a twitch before she fires, or before infected processors cook smoking holes through his skull.

He’s aware of his rising fever, but doesn’t feel it like he would in baseline time. It’s a barely perceptible global warming. The air on his skin and the weight of his utility kilt are an unchanging tactile cocoon, sound a basal drone. Sometimes the hellish monotony of his final moment is too much to bear. He retreats into memory.

He remembers his modification, deep in the bowels of a qingbaochu somewhere between Lhasa and Chongqing. All the agents endured it. After two months of psychedelic torment, they emerged with strange new powers. The one that would be their downfall was considered the greatest: acceleration or deceleration of thought, at will. The former would give them initiative in split-second decision making; the latter would speed them through isolation or torture.

The PRC’s sorcerers were optimistic. If they imagined a virus that could set thought-rate fluctuating randomly and beyond design specs, they didn’t picture it in the hands of Uyghurstan.

It hit him first in the Urumqi Han ghetto. One moment he was shuffling along with a river of his emaciated countrymen, and the next they flowed past him in a blur. He barely had time to realize he was underclocked before suspicious Uyghur troops buzzed in and whisked him away. Still he decelerated. Months of internment flashed by in minutes.

He doesn’t know if she visited during that time. She would have been another flash in the racing patterns of daily activity. Humans came in streams. They were blood, pulsing through routines with each day’s heartbeat. With each beat came the high-pitched whine of daytime clamor, the momentary break of night—with each beat, a staccato of force feedings and med-probes.

She probably had access to his little white cell. She must’ve known he wouldn’t recognize her. Was she tempted to come? Was their Tashkurgan tryst just business for her? He entered Uyghurstan via Pakistan, following the rubble of the Karakoram Highway through the Khunjerab Pass. Love was the last thing he expected to find on the Roof of the World. It managed to over- and underclock him at once. Three incredible days shot by, but there were moments that seem in retrospect to weigh centuries. A kind of gravity pulls him back to the ancient battlements of Tashkurgan Fortress, her hand in his, looking down upon the vast green plain sprinkled with white yurts.

“Uyghurstan will never again be Xinjiang province,” she murmured.

He was determined to do his part in returning Xinjiang to the fold—and he loved her anyway. Her passion was all the more endearing for its futility. Did she say it to test his reaction? Could she read micro-expressions like he could when overclocked? Had she been waiting for him at the border? If so, who betrayed him?

In his endless final moment, he guesses that she must have tracked him after Tashkurgan. He was probably watched in Urumqi. Perhaps he was chosen as a test subject for the virus. When it first yanked him from slow-thought into overclocked fever, he knew what was at work in his brain. For a baseline moment he was there with the doctors in the cell. He heard enough before they sank into slow motion. Then came three subjective weeks in a universe not much faster than the one he’s trapped in now. When Han insurgents overran the place—like a rumbling, inexorable storm front—he had ample time to wonder if they would kill him along with his captors.

The clocking malfunctions got more extreme as he returned south. He was trekking over moaning sands when days strobed by in seconds, bringing hunger and thirst like a knife in the gut. He emerged baseline on a straw pallet in a Silk Road Buddhist cave. The ancient walls danced with demons and saints as an old Han anthropologist nursed him back to health. The hermit and his heritage site had survived the Uyghur Dawn. Wang Zhe was grateful for the peeling, oxidized murals when the next overclocking hit: he lost himself in Sakyamuni’s Temptation for a subjective month.

When he emerged again, he confessed everything to the old man in a desperate rant.

An underclocking followed. Suddenly he was in the old man’s rickety ACV, hurtling south over the Taklamakan. Somehow sensing that Wang Zhe was baseline conscious, the old man explained, “We’re both Han, after all.”

Another underclocking zapped him into a flea-bitten room in an old Kashgar hostel. The place had once catered to laowai backpackers, and the walls were papered with old maps. Turn-of-the-millennium China was prominent, with its quaint autonomous regions and special economic zones.

The old man lay beside him on a dusty mattress. Breathing weakly, lips blood-flecked, he whispered, “Little brother, are you a Buddhist?”

“No,” Wang Zhe said.

“Some of us like to tailor our final moment. Optimize our eternity. I looked through the library here. A lot of old Lonely Planets, but no Bardo Thodol. Guess I’d need a lama anyway.” A coughing fit wracked him. Wang Zhe suspected the old man had spent the last of himself coming here. “Maybe you’ve read it?”

Wang Zhe knew of the text—Bardo Thodol, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, or Liberation through Hearing—but he hadn’t read it. The old man wanted guidance as he crossed over. “Sorry, uncle,” Wang Zhe answered. “Is there anything else I can do?”

“Tell me, do you really think this place can be China again?”

“It has strayed before,” Wang Zhe said, “and been brought back home.”

The old man smiled. He began to mutter snatches of the Bardo Thodol, playing lama for himself: “I have arrived at my time of death. By means of this death, I will adopt the characteristics of an enlightened mind. I will become compassionate. I will attain perfect enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings.”

He barely whispered his last words: “The present moment is a Bardo, lying between my past and future selves. This Bardo is a chance to know true reality, which is also true self.”

In the Bardo of his final moment, Wang Zhe has repeated these words thousands of times. They have become a mantra. The unmoving raindrops have become prayer beads. Past and future have melted away. He has worn his memories out. They’ve been rewritten too many times.

He can only accept the street, the girl, the gun. In the end he can only become them.

When a syringe dart finally emerges from the pistol, crawling at a snail’s pace through the rain-studded air, Wang Zhe is incapable of surprise. He cannot hope it contains a vaccine.

About the Author

Andy Dudak’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Daily Science Fiction, Flash Fiction Online, Abyss & Apex, Ray Gun Revival, and other fine venues. He is a published illustrator and aspiring translator. He lives in Beijing, and knows the Forbidden City better than most natives.

(R + D) /I = M

E. Catherine Tobler

Grapes grew differently on Mars and no one minded. This trespass was for science, ask anyone.

Perhaps they shouldn’t have grown at all, but they did, into oblong coils that turned the color of copper under the days of long, if distant, sunshine. We found they were best at night, when they froze into slush.

We would sneak into the vineyard, just the two of us, silent as we always had been. We had heard the humans wish for this ability, to be naked under the Martian sky, stretching in our low gravity, bodies coiling however they might. They pictured Martians like grapes, though never noticed any of us in those early days. They didn’t then know how close they were to the truth. Our bodies grew as slender as the grapes did, tethered to the ground by delicate webbed feet the way the grapes held to their vines, spout-like heads spread open to collect whatever moisture the air produced. The leaves and coiled vines hovered in the air, held back by only the weight of the fruit upon them. Once plucked, the vine sprang back, looking much like we did when we jumped.

It didn’t take us long to perfect our system of thievery, though we would both argue we weren’t stealing anything. A certain percentage of the crop would be lost; we reasoned we were taking grapes before they could be lost to conditions not even they could bear. The planet’s orbit would carry it farther and farther away from the sun, and the humans had not yet perfected their methods of harvest. They were still monitoring, calculating, devising. They wanted a year-round harvest; they were to be sorely disappointed.

We gorged ourselves amid the vines, unable to wait for the first taste of sweet grapey slush that befell our stigma when we crushed the grapes in our hurried hands. We ate until our bodies ached from the cold, then ate some more because we could. We sprawled on the ground, not drunk, but still intoxicated by the fruit, by the very idea that humans had come here and planted such wonders. We had never known such things. The humans found them commonplace, only an experiment.

Eventually, the outpost believed it had ghosts. One night, we overstayed our welcome and found ourselves lingering amid the vines as the humans patrolled. You—it was always you and never me—had chewed a vine and it stood out starkly against the sepia sky of mid-morning.

“Ghosts don’t chew grapevines.”

“Mars has no indigenous life—what else might have done that?”

The idea was absurd, but we learned early on that absurdity never kept humans from trying or thinking a thing. They moved past us and never noticed us amid the tangle of fruit and vines. Also absurd, considering how tall you stand and how your stomach growled (it was well past midday and stolen grapes eaten in the middle of the night cannot wholly sustain a body or the child within).

After that, we left them more clues. It was too fun not to. We also ached for contact, though our elders had forbidden us. Leave them be, we had been told. We wondered about the humans every day, because if they had something as wonderful as grapes, what else might they have? Clearly they were absurd—ghosts on Mars! they cried—but we didn’t care. One night, we left them grapes on their doorstep, spelling out a greeting in our language. They stared at the mess, unable to make anything of it. Knowing their language might help, you suggested with the curl of a lip. I scoffed.

We watched as the woman cleaned up the grapes, carefully placing them in a bin so that she might take them inside for salvage, study. But before she carted them away, she paused and looked at the vines where we hid. We held our breath, clutched our hands. I think you were holding me back rather than holding on. We did not move.

The woman smoothed the ground flat before her. She made a shape, grape by grape, then went inside. Was it a word? We watched until it froze with nightfall, then ate it piece, by piece, by piece. In our bellies, it sounded like a welcome.

They have the most amazing things, humans.

We watch from a distance, but get closer all the time, and when we find a way in, we don’t immediately leave. It’s not their walls we sink through—those are as solid as anything, and we are only flesh and sometimes bone. It’s the minds we find a way into, because humans think so loudly.

They have come a long way—from the bluish planet in the sky, or so they believe. We remain doubtful, though we have not traveled beyond our own skies, so who is to say? They have brought with them wonderful things, things we cannot explain. Perhaps the blue world is filled with such things—the better we get to know their thoughts, we realize it is so.

Within their habitat, they have rooms where they appear able to return to their home world if only for a time. These rooms mimic landscapes they know, but also those they have never visited. Virtually, they can go anywhere. The woman loves these landscapes, the man is at first hesitant. Didn’t they come to Mars to see Mars? he asks.

He holds to her hand—and as we step into their thoughts (their skins), I feel your hand in mine, an echo of theirs. They walk across a watery landscape that has both breadth and width and a strange depth that glimmers with colors we have no name for. Their bare feet press against wet lily pads which they think look painted and we watch the water ripple outward, ever expanding rings that deepen the sense of unease we feel as we go.

We don’t understand water, not this way. In our world, water is brief, transitory, often frozen. Our water does not unspool through the world the way this water does. Our water does not hold things—these lilies and fibrous green pads unfurl in the liquid, flowers spreading up and roots sprawling down. Each is reflected up and down until there is no up and down and I feel lost, lost though I know exactly where I am. I’m not in this room at all, but my mind says otherwise, hooked into the woman’s mind as I am. She takes a deep breath and leaps—

Her toes spring from one lily pad, to the next, and it’s slick, and she slides—the thrill down her-my spine is like nothing I’ve known—then she’s righted herself. They only delight in this—they cannot do this in the real world, only in this illusory place. They leap from pad to pad, hand in hand, and it’s too much for me, me who wanted to go. I pull myself out and you follow, so there we are, where we have always been, crouched outside their habitat again, familiar sepia wind washing over us. Our feet dry. Our hands unclasped, because that is also a human thing—

Until you take my hand in yours.

They keep us in a room that we can cross in three strides. The gravity within this holding space is heavier than our own, so we don’t stride. We haven’t moved at all, wrapped around each other. When I slide inside your mind, I can see the blackness, your eyes closed as you murr like a low ground tremor, the slope of your head matching the concave curve of my neck. We notch together as we ever have. I know you miss the sky.

Our long legs fold together, mine around you and yours around me, your softly swelling body fitting within the hollowed well of my own. My arms enfold you as if they could keep you from all harm, though in this false gravity I am not sure how well they would move. Were that true at all, we would not be in this room, would we? We should have run—we tell each other this over and over, but it’s no use. We were too curious. You liked those grapes too well and I cannot blame you. I liked their taste on your skin.

The humans watch us from a window that seems little more than a slit; her eyes are blue and his are hazel. They want to know what we are—not who we are. “Martians” is the word he uses over and over, muttering it as he paces in disbelief. Others are coming to see for themselves, just to be sure. As if we might be a hallucination.

“Martians!”

We suppose that’s accurate, as they call this world Mars.

Later, they slide a tray into the room and hastily close the slot. The tray is filled with their food, but no grapes. We cannot tell them that we don’t consume these things. We eat differently than they do, drinking sunlight and not water. The grapes were the first food we dared. Eventually, we will wither without the sunlight; maybe then they will understand.

I feel you slip into sleep, your round body a little more lax against my own. I bid my warmth into you, as if we can make sunlight here between us as we did the bud of a child, but keep my attention on those eyes beyond the window. Are they angry? Upset we took their grapes? They douse the lights soon after the thought—I still don’t know if they’re telepathic; it’s too easy to presume they’ve taken the light away because we took the grapes, so I won’t. It can’t be that easy. My skin puckers in the darkness, I curl around you, because I think it’s night, time to rest, even though it’s not.

When I wake my arms are empty. You are gone. The elders spoke of this before—loss, how we would come to know it if we aged. We are not aged, it’s too soon.

The humans— There is one pair of eyes at the window. Hazel. Despite the gravity in this place, despite the weakness in my sun-deprived limbs, I push myself to standing. I rush the wall, slam a shoulder into it, make that window vibrate. The hazel eyes go wide, and then I’m screaming. Words he won’t understand, about you and sunlight and how we cannot live confined. My throat strains—we are only this vocal when mating. When I quiet, the male human turns away.

We learn the room we have occupied vents to the outside; they bring you back, small and gray and how like a husk even though rounded with child. You are cold when I draw you against me. The humans seal the room and then one wall parts; I can feel their gravity flood out while the scent and heat of our own world rushes in—here come the winds, tonguing sand into every corner, over the food we have not touched.

The humans watch, study—I don’t care. I carry you out of their habitat and toward their strange vineyard. I lay you down amid the sun-drenched rows and press grapes into your skin, crushing juice over your stigma. You bloom, warmth and color starting at your edges, bleeding inward. The humans are still staring when I look up at them. The male presses his hand against the flat of their habitat window.

You are light as air in my arms as we notch into each other. The days are growing shorter, the sunlight fleeting, and soon we will be three. Carrying you both, we go. I know you miss the sky.

We trespass.

If anyone asks (and the judges will), they will say we invented it, that these landscapes do not exist for they are so completely different than the spaces within our own forms. The human body is tightly contained, and yet—

I sink into her consciousness as easily as she breathes, and she is all dark warmth. This deep, light does not pierce skin or muscle. I stretch along her bones, so unlike my bones—hard but not dense, solid and yet hollow. The marrow inside her is hot slush, suffocating, intoxicating. I move down through her arm, where it narrows at wrist and then bursts into palm, into fingers. Here, she is like the valley which nearly splits our world in two—broad and deep and fanning ever outward. Countless turns and twists, channels and ridges, rises and falls.

Her fingers are like nothing I have known, they seem clumsy when compared to my own, yet I am strangely fascinated by every tiny bone, the way the muscles move taut and then slack, the whorl of the prints which sink even to the underside of her skin. Here, there is almost-light, but it’s the dark sweet core of her I move toward.

Back up that arm, pausing in the joint that marks upper from lower. Flinging myself up and up to the shoulder, to the curl of bone which leads inward toward her heart. We have nothing so complicated as hearts, nor ribs which I step down and down. When she inhales, I cling, not yet ready to fall.

Her heart is like a sandfall—blood cascading like sand down miles of canyon, spilling careless at the bottom. I picture the forms it might take were there wind, but inside this body there is only confinement. Blood moves, a hurried river through coils of vein; the only wind is drawn down from high above, into tissue that expands, contracts, tissue that is the color of your throat. I go still at that notion, because if they share this color, what else might we have in common?

I let go and fall.

Free falling—we did this off the canyon rim yesterday and last cycle and five cycles from now. She stretches and I expand to fill all these spaces, budding nubs of flesh, gleaming edge of a rib, and I should pull back, before I lose myself entirely, but I cannot. They will say we invented it, so where’s the harm in dreaming a little longer?

Her belly is full of more coils and I am reminded of what must lurk beneath winter’s ice sheet, of what longs to explode outward as the air warms. She seems near to bursting now—out, out, we want to writhe free, but no—these bodies are contained.

Still, deeper down, deeper inside, there seems no containment—in the heart of her belly, she is as pink as sunrise, warm and wet, and she looks like us, concave from one angle and convex from another. She swells, she is hollow, she waits to be inundated even as this body can inundate itself. Small branching arms, hungry ovoid mouths. If she contains a river, she also contains the immeasurable forms which thrive in river’s flood. One body floods hers and she, she pulls that flood into herself, as if this part of her can drink the way her mouth drinks— That tongue and the curl of lips, a fathomless well I long to fall through.

I lie; this is what they tell me after they have asked (they always ask). I have created a story, so that we might spare the humans. If they are like us deep down, surely they are worth sparing.

The judges look to you for confirmation of the lie, of the story. You don’t care for fictions, knowing only facts: none will be spared, these humans threatened your child, your world, your mate. You stretch your consciousness out and pull the judges inside to do the work that must be done. No sparing, no reprieve. This body will no longer be contained; this marrow will cool.

The outpost goes silent, but the relays still run with incoming messages. Lighted panels still phosphoresce in the night, turning black to gold and blue. We listen to the voices, make shadows in the light. We play a game in the quiet corridors: how will those voices determine every human here is dead?

They will say it was a risk. Traveling to a distant world they had only dusty images and scarce data on. Traveling to a place they didn’t fully believe in. They presumed there would be no indigenous life because their data showed them none. Yes, fossils in the rock record, but that’s all they were, fossils. Evidence of past life, not present. Nothing sentient grew there. They could not believe in creatures like us no matter that their literature told them we existed. Risk is intrinsic in such endeavors. Nothing lost, nothing gained! Humans invented such phrases for these situations.

Risk plus distance divided by isolation equates madness. It crawls into one’s bones nearly the way we’re capable of. One’s brain. (Sweet, soft—don’t distract me from this game.) How much can a human stand, even if they have carted entertainment programs, books, music, and science labs across forty-eight million miles? They have come two by two, male and female, but precisely how much sex will distract one from the utter undeniable truth that they are alone in the black? Saturated walls of silk enveloping an erection is a fleeting, temporary distraction from the indisputable fact that this place is empty, that one is alone, that one will never get back home. One can pummel their blood-hard flesh into anything they like—mouth, hand, skull—try to make a home, but it will never be. Madness.

Perhaps an equipment failure, a burned relay. They can see their own messages are received, but nothing comes back. (You study those panels, noting which light brighten and which go dark as the messages come.) Concern is met with silence. Fear is met with silence. Remote sensors will tell them the outpost is intact—there was no crippling windstorm, no devastating earthquake. Ironic, that name—the scientists here were no longer on earth, remember—this world was never theirs, do not presume to name it—

Yes, names. They will come back to those, too. Mars, the god of war, red and fierce, filled with iron and anger in equal measure. Mars doesn’t give, it only consumes in its rage. They send what they like—landing rovers with optimistic names to trundle through sand, rovers to break apart our rocks and study our past. But what of our present? They never looked for that. Never named that.

What if there were sentient— That voice would be quickly silenced because the thought is irrational. There was no sentient life, they would repeat. It isn’t a possibility given the current planetary conditions. There is no liquid water, it’s not possible. But we were more than possible—they just couldn’t believe it.

They will never contemplate the truth of what took this outpost. In time, they will launch another mission with a hopeful name (Opportunity! Curiosity! Excelsior!), they will land more living beings on our world. We do not want them here. This will never be a possibility that crosses a human mind. Surely if there were sentient life, it would welcome humanity.

They trespassed, onto a world already claimed, and set their roots into dusty, cracked soil. They coaxed life from the waste—these oblong grapes we feed to each other in the quiet of the outpost amid our game. Their sweetness makes you bloom with color yet.

We mean to leave this place to the wind and the sand, but before we go, you can’t help yourself: your grape-sticky fingers slide over the communications panel. You open that channel and I imagine human faces brightening with relief, delight, when they realize there is a message after all. They were mistaken! Share the news! But the words you speak into the relay are laden with warning, with threat, with pain. No other should come here, you say. No other should dare. Do not let this be your destination.

But years later iridescent lights descend from the sky at their return. We creep to the sand-consumed outpost, you and me and our child, and watch as the humans emerge from their ships. Our child finds a grapevine amid the sand, rips it free.

They trespass.

We trespass.

About the Author

E. Catherine Tobler lives and writes in Colorado. Among others, her fiction has appeared in SciFiction, Fantasy Magazine, Realms of Fantasy, Talebones, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. She is an active member of SFWA and senior editor at Shimmer Magazine.

The Banquet of the Lords of Night

Liz Williams

Severin de Rais hurries through thistledown light, with the dangerous parcel clutched close to his heart, hoping that he won’t turn a corner and come face to face with an Unpriest. He’s already late, and the Isle de Saint Luce is forbidden territory. Yet even in the midst of his terror, de Rais still thinks it’s a pity that he can’t pause and marvel, for the Isle is, by old decree of the Lords of Night, the only place in all Paris where light is permitted at this hour. But de Rais cannot stop to admire the lamps; he’s running out of time, and if an Unpriest should find what he is carrying . . . de Rais does not even dare think about it. A death sentence, surely. He glances with swift unease up at the shattered stump of Notre Dame, imagining it as it might have looked five hundred years before, filled with candles and prayers and light, before the Lords came and brought the darkness with them, conjuring the great shell which covers the world. The shell lies above the churning stormclouds, too high even to be seen, and de Rais drags his quivering attention back to the present. The metal cover of the precious, precarious parcel is sharp against his chest; the unspells which protect it burn his skin. He wonders in a delirious moment if it will rust if the rain touches it; rust and crumble into nothing more than red ash, like old blood.

The growing rain blurs the lamps of the Isle de Saint Luce so that they look like dandelion clocks, their down blown away on the wind. The light makes de Rais squint and peer, but the parcel warms his breast, in spite of the rain. Heat seeps through him like the taste of honey. The world spins briefly to summer, leaving raindrops scattered in the void. De Rais blinks at this first taste of a season he has never seen, and clasps the parcel even more tightly to his chest. Crossing the bridge which bisects the Seine and leads into the Rue Moins Pitie, de Rais pauses reeling for a moment to catch his unsteady breath. The Seine runs fast with rainswell: a mass of branches tumbles in the current, turning the water to bramble and briar. The risk that he is about to take makes de Rais wonder for a moment if it would be wiser simply to drop the parcel in the river and let the torrent carry it back to the sea, but then he turns away. Above de Rais’ head, the curfew bell begins to chime out through the darkness, telling seven o’clock through the gloom. De Rais hurries on towards the Palais.

Behind him, the lights of the Isle are soon lost as he crosses onto the familiar territory of the right bank. De Rais makes his way through dark streets, following his path with meticulously counted steps: along the Quai, down the Tuileries, into the heart of the Lords’ Quarter. Should he deviate from that path, he runs the risk of becoming lost in the maze of the city. Occasionally, he detects the faintest gleam of light upon the wet surface of a wall; neon in a blacked-out basement, a candle flickering in a secret room. And then his fears come true. Hastening around the corner into the Rue de Louvre, de Rais runs right into a group of Unpriests. Their long leather coats rustle against the pavement; their heads swivel from side to side. They are clicking like insects in a termite mound, and de Rais shrinks back against the wall, his heart hammering. But their gaze, concealed behind their black lenses, does not turn his way and in a moment they are gone. Why should they challenge him, after all? He’s only a lowly pastry chef, and he’s not on forbidden ground any more. He’s entitled to be in this quarter, the honor signified by the ribbons on his coat. Breathing a long and tremulous sigh, de Rais continues on his way.

He reaches the kitchens of the Palais shortly afterwards, and his lateness is rewarded by a bellow of rage from the head chef. Mumbling insults and excuses beneath his breath, de Rais sidles through the outskirts of the kitchens to collect his work clothes from the store. He fastens the midnight jacket around himself and adjusts the tall smoke-colored hat in the dim reflection of the mirror. His pinched, pale face seems a picture of guilt, but the parcel remains for now in the pocket of his overcoat. De Rais plans to remove it surreptitiously when things quiet down, and hide it at the bottom of the little bread oven in his own small domain. Stepping around the corner of the table, he picks up the chopping board and begins work.

De Rais is a methodical pastry chef, who believes in preparation and planning. The ingredients for today’s desserts and pastries have been assembled the night before; the last chores performed by de Rais before he made his weary way homewards. On an ordinary day, tonight and tomorrow would follow the same pattern: home to the attic room in the old Latin Quarter; a few hours’ snatched sleep, broken by the sounds from the dingy café downstairs, then back to the Palais early in the morning, with perhaps a stolen hour towards twilight when de Rais can go to the library or snatch a pastis in one of the dreary licensed cafes. But today, things changed. Today, de Rais went to meet the girl: the terrorist, the rebel, the one who gave him the parcel, and perhaps because of that tomorrow will be different too, de Rais thinks with a sudden uplift of his spirits that must surely be noticeable clear across the kitchen. He starts guiltily, and thinks careful, neutral thoughts, but it’s not easy to see the expressions on the faces of those who inhabit the kitchens. The head chef jealously guards the ration of candles; everyone else must work in the cold glow of the ovens or simply by touch. It isn’t as though they haven’t had practice, after all.

Opening the refrigerator, de Rais takes out a container and places it on the table. He opens it carefully, not wanting the essence to escape. The container is full of ice: glassy dark ice from the seas near the southern pole, a place that de Rais knows only from legend. It seems to hold its own glow: it’s almost green, like the stories the old folk tell about dawn. With a sharp scalpel, de Rais touches the edge of the sheet of ice, so that it splits and cracks into a nest of slivers. De Rais arranges the shards of ice in the center of each of the twenty seven sorbet dishes, then reaches back inside the refrigerator for the ingredients of the sauce. He plans a complex, subtle accompaniment to the simple ice: a touch of fragrant Indonesian darkness, gathered close to midnight, redolent of cinnamon and incense and spiced smoke. Placing the darkness in a bowl, he adds a pinch of flavors: twilight from Japan, warm and clouded, with a hint of star anise. Then a touch of evening from the Sinang Delta, water-clear and cool. De Rais stirs all of these elements nine times with an ebony spoon, then pours the swirl of darkness into a silver pan and lights the chilly flame beneath it. He waits, frowning, as a drift of smoke begins to rise from the sauce and then he casts it in a spiral around the little columns of ice and claps his hands imperiously for the serving staff to take it into the dining hall, where the Lords of Night are waiting. The head chef looks up, once, as the procession passes by, and gives a single grudging nod of approval.

Having dispensed with the appetizers, the responsibility for the meal passes on to the head chef for a time, while de Rais busies himself with the desserts. He hopes to get the chance to take the parcel from his overcoat pocket and slip it into the oven, but the head chef has got the apprentices out of his fevered way by sending them over to work in de Rais’ corner, a not-uncommon occurrence. Frustrated, de Rais gets on with his own tasks. He prepares fondants of gloom, sorbets of shadows, and sherbets of dusk; each one gathered from the far and unseen corners of the Earth. Then de Rais wipes his weary hands on his apron and steps back to admire his handiwork. Behind him, the booming voice of the head chef says,

“Not bad. Perhaps there’s some promise in you after all.”

De Rais jumps like a tortured hare. Turning, he snaps, “Don’t do that! You startled me.”

“Why?” The head chef thrusts his cadaverous face close to that of de Rais. “Nervous? Been doing something you shouldn’t? Been gobbing in the fondants again?”

De Rais bridles; he’d never dream of doing such a thing and the head chef knows it.

“Get over there, boy, when you’ve finished. I want some help to scrub the floors.”

The head chef’s head jerks in the direction of the apprentices and they scramble after him as he ambles back towards the cold crimson glow of his own territory. Heart pounding, de Rais sidles into the store, retrieves the parcel at last and slides it underneath the iron floor of the little oven. The package is still warm. It seems to radiate its own heat, and de Rais is relieved when at last it’s safely out of sight. Then, he goes to where the head chef is waiting and begins to rinse the stone floor clean of blood. He keeps thinking about the package lying in the oven. Once more he rehearses the plan that has been steeping in his mind ever since the girl gave him the parcel.

Once the kitchens are quiet, and everyone has left for the night, de Rais will take the package out of the oven. And then, he will begin to cook. He’ll prepare a special dish for the next banquet of the Lords of Night, which will take place tomorrow, on a day that was once called Midsummer. De Rais thinks of the eternal, plunging rain, which he fancies he can hear beating on the pavements above the dungeons of the kitchen, and he shivers as he swabs the bloodstained floor. Mechanically, he goes over the plan once more in his mind, but in the next few minutes, he realizes it might be too late to even think about executing it. The Unpriests have arrived.

They slither down the kitchen stairs, boot-heels clicking on the expensive tiles. De Rais risks a glance, and the nape of his neck grows cold. The people in this group are no ordinary Unpriests. Their long coats bear the Lords’ own insignia, and there is a woman with them, dressed in black velvet riding breeches and a leather cuirass. A single dark pearl dangles from one ear, like a bead of jet. Her eyes are hidden behind thick dark lenses. Her head swivels from side to side. This is the closest that de Rais has ever been to one of the creatures of the Lords of Night, and she makes him feel hollow and numb. He stares grimly down at the high, polished heels of her boots. The language that she speaks is archaic, formal, and barely intelligible; she enunciates slowly, evidently for the benefit of the head chef who, as a mere servant, might not be expected to understand her.

“The Unchurch has had word that an attempt is to be made on the lives of the Lords of Night, by non-persons, by dream-sellers, by ghosts. The servants must submit to be searched.”

“An attempt on— ?” The head chef’s thin face quivers in shock. “By whom?”

“I told you. Non-persons. Those who deny darkness, who seek That which is Not.”

“By what means?”

“Unknown,” the Unpriest says, stiffly, then concedes “By myself, at least. The Lords, of course, know all, but in their black wisdom they have not divulged the answer to one as lowly as myself and were I to know that answer, I would be no more likely to divulge it to you. Now. Prepare to be searched.”

From beneath the folds of her coat, she takes a device that de Rais has never seen before. It consists of an extending tube, at the end of which is a round, glistening lens. The woman raises it to the level of the head chef’s face, and passes it down his body, from the crown of his head to his toes. Fascinated, de Rais nonetheless stares straight ahead, afraid of attracting undue attention, but he glimpses from the corner of his eye the chef’s cadaverous form, surrounded for a moment by black energy; an aura of unlight. One by one, the woman passes the device along the rows of apprentices: darkness crackles and snaps. At last she reaches de Rais. She stares at him for a moment, and, swallowing, he raises his gaze to hers but sees nothing. Her eyes are entirely concealed behind the thick obsidian lenses.

She says, caressingly, “You look alarmed, boy. Are you afraid?”

De Rais says what is no more than the truth. “Yes. I am afraid. I have been afraid ever since I can remember.”

A thin charcoal brow arches above the lenses. The woman says, “Indeed? Of what?”

Boldly, de Rais answers, “Of not matching the expectations of the Lords of Night. Of not meeting the standards that I myself set to serve them.”

“You talk like an artist,” the woman says, brows still raised.

“I am an artist, madam,” de Rais says, with the bravery of absolute fear. “I am an artist of culinary color and its absence, a master of texture and shade, of monochrome uniformity. I drain the delicacies that I prepare of the touch of light and fire and brightness that is bestowed upon them by the flames on which they are conjured into being, so that the palates of the Lords of Night may not be seared for one moment by the tiniest spark of light.”

To de Rais’ infinite surprise, the head chef turns his head and says, “It’s true, my lady. The food that this man prepares is a paradigm of unlight. His concoctions are as dark and smooth and rich as the galaxy’s core itself.” His glance catches that of de Rais: I don’t like you. But you’re still one of us.

The woman bows her head in mocking acknowledgement. “Well, then, I am honored. But you must still be scrutinized.”

She raises the device once more and the lens rotates along its appointed track. The woman puts her head on one side, studies him.

“You absorb light, you say? You purify the foods of darkness?”

“I do.”

Something long and thin whips from the tube which holds the lens and lashes de Rais across the face. The impact spins him around and he sprawls backwards, stunned. The Unpriest says, “It shows. There are cracks and flickers along the edges of your soul. It is dangerous work that you do, M’sieu—?”

“My name is de Rais,” he says, through bleeding teeth.

“M’sieu de Rais. I had not thought that the life of a pastry chef would be so fraught with hazard. Take care that you visit the Unpriests more regularly, to purge your soul of traces of light as effectively as you purify the foods that you prepare.” She turns away.

The rest of the kitchen is searched methodically, and de Rais’ heart skips and hops as an investigation is made of his work area, including the little stove. The Unpriest lingers as she examines the pastries and sorbets, and de Rais hides a bruised smile as he sees her stealthy fingers creep out and flick a piece of brittle icing to her mouth. But the metal binding of the package remains secure, hidden beneath the iron floor of the little oven and guarded with unspells. The woman heads for the stairs with an angry flounce and de Rais inclines his head until the beetle-click of her boot-heels betrays her absence. No-one says a word after that, except the head chef, who turns to de Rais and says brusquely, “You. Have you finished?”

“The floor is clean. I have my preparations to complete for tomorrow.”

“Go and do it, then.”

One by one, the apprentices leave the kitchen. De Rais hovers over his tasks, lingering on slicing and molding and freezing, until the head chef snaps a curt goodnight, along with instructions to lock up. De Rais listens as the chef’s heavy footsteps pound up the stairs and the door slams behind him, then he runs to the stove and takes out the package. It’s so hot that it burns even de Rais’ callused hands. Cursing beneath his breath, he drops the package on the table and flicks open the complex locks until the inside of the package is revealed. He stares for a moment. The girl who gave the package to de Rais has told him: you will see nothing. Do not expect to be witness to miracle. It is latent, nothing more. But you will be able to touch it. Cautiously, de Rais reaches inside the hot metal binding and feels something smooth and soft and warm. He lifts it from the binding, and to his surprise it comes away easily. He feels it glide across the table and has to put out a hand to stop it from falling onto the floor.

Then, working quickly in case it dissipates, de Rais takes his sharp knife and begins to chop, his hand moving faster and faster with a chef’s practiced speed until the contents of the package are in tiny pieces. And then de Rais begins his final great work; the last work that, if all goes well, he will ever perform in the palace of the Lords of Night. He begins to sculpt the substance into sugars and candies, into creams and shadows. At last he passes his hand over the surface of the chopping block and finds only a minute sliver, like a splinter of glass. De Rais is sorely tempted to pop it in his mouth, but he resists the temptation and drifts it onto the curling pinnacle of a sugar tower instead. And then he slips everything into the darkest, coldest recesses of the refrigerator, to wait there till morning. As he turns to leave, he fancies that when he next opens the door of the refrigerator, it will have begun to glow.

Early next morning, before the waking bells toll out across the city, de Rais rises from a troubled night, bundles himself into his clothes and hurries back to the Palais. The rain has stopped, but a thin wind rips down the Tuileries, snatching at de Rais’ untidy hair. He does not think he slept, and yet his head is filled with dreams that defy the darkening day; dreams of something that flickers golden down the rainy air. When de Rais reaches the Palais, the head chef greets him with a grunt and a tilt of the head; their yesterday truce still fragile as spider silk.

Quietly, unobtrusively, de Rais slides into his chef’s jacket. He takes a deep, shaky breath and opens the refrigerator. It is still and dim within, and undisturbed. De Rais relaxes a little, and his breath mists cold metal. He rests his hands on the top of the refrigerator for a moment, to steady them. Then, he goes about the remaining preparations for this evening’s banquet; the less critical, less dangerous things, a frenzy of slicing and molding for the hundred guests of the Lords of Night.

When evening comes, everything is ready. De Rais stands back and exchanges triumphant glances with the head chef, whose face is blue with cold. De Rais dispatches perfumed bowls of dusk to the dining hall, and joins the apprentices for a surreptitious glimpse of the guests as they arrive. His hands are trembling again. He watches as something glides through the great double doors at the end of the vast hall. It stands seven feet high and its armored head drifts from side to side. Its mandibles exude a faint and musty fragrance. Huge smooth claws rustle beneath its midnight robes. It moves with ponderous, swinging slowness down the hall, and in its wake the air seems suddenly thin and darker, as though it breathes in health and light, and gives out nothing. Another follows through the double doors: female, this time. De Rais catches sight of the long out-thrust jaw and the slotted vertebrae of her throat beneath her hood. She places a delicately jointed foot on the thick carpet and teeters forward. De Rais melts back into the shadows. Three hours to go, before the clock strikes midnight.

Downstairs again, and silent in his corner of the kitchen, de Rais watches as the dishes of the main course are carried upstairs. The head chef has excelled himself. The foods he has prepared are rarefied to their finest extreme: all blood and essence. De Rais does not like to think where such food has come from, but he doubts that it has been produced by the meatracks at the edges of the city. Wild things, he thinks, reared in the deep growth of the forests which surround Paris, hunted down. The clock ticks on. The seemingly endless parade of dishes is borne from view. At last it is time for dessert.

De Rais hovers anxiously as the sorbets, each one with its cool, deceptive pool of night around the incarnadined ice, are taken upstairs by the serving staff. Then, still in his dark jacket, he waits for a frozen moment until he is certain that the attention of the head chef is elsewhere, and slips after the serving staff. Apart from a pair of servitors at the far end of the hallway, their glacial gaze fixed on the great bronze doors, the hallway is empty. De Rais hastens to the dining hall, his footsteps muffled by the carpet. He puts his eye to the crack of the dining room door. He knows the risk, he thinks, but he still has to see.

Inside, it is almost dark. A faint phosphorescence illuminates the high, echoing vaults of the hall. Beneath, the shadowy presences of the Lords of Night dine on the last of the meat essences. There is a susurrus of anticipation as the desserts are passed around the hall by the silent serving staff, who then troop from the hall. De Rais, his hearing fine-tuned by anticipation, hears the tiny crack as the first silver spoon touches the first sorbet, and the minute crunch of mandibles upon ice. De Rais takes a single breath. Followed by the rest of its companions, the Lord swallows a single spoonful of captured evening. And explodes.

Latent light, ingested by perfect darkness, electrifies every filament of the Lord’s body before it flares up into a great column of brilliance. De Rais, thrown back against the wall, can see nothing but the shattered form of the Lord branded upon his retinas, but he can taste the light which streams out from the dining hall: the hard, clear sunlight of mountain peaks; the roseate depths of sundown over ocean; the golden, glittering brightness of the sun at midsummer noon. It has worked. The Lords are gone in a moment of fire, consumed in the forbidden, latent light so carefully concealed in darkness and ice by the skilful hands of Severin de Rais. And in the eye of his mind de Rais sees that light pouring up from the heart of the banqueting hall, gilding every wall in Paris and running liquid into the river, distributing itself in immaculate proportion until the shell of shadow that covers the world is broken and the hidden sun revealed. Darkness and light, night and day, in balance once again, for everyone.

Except de Rais. For he knows, as soon as that first blaze of magnificence has passed, that the light has been too much for his shadow-born eyes. Once the flashing echoes have faded from the ruin of his sight, there is only night once more: familiar, relentless, and cold. But as de Rais turns to grope his way along the hallway, he is smiling, for in his imagination and his heart and his soul there is nothing but the sun.

First published in Asimov’s, June 2002.

About the Author

British writer Liz Williams has had work appear in Interzone, Asimov’s, Visionary Tongue, Subterranean, Terra Incognita, The New Jules Verne Adventures, Strange Horizons, Realms of Fantasy, and elsewhere, and her stories have been collected in Banquet of the Lords of Night and Other Stories, and, most recently, A Glass of Shadow. She’s probably best-known for her Detective Inspector Chen series, detailing the exploits of a policeman in a demon-haunted world who literally has to go to Hell to solve some of his cases, and which include Snake Agent, The Demon and the City, Precious Dragon, The Shadow Pavilion, and The Iron Khan. Her other books include the novels The Ghost Sister, Empire of Bones, The Poison Master, Nine Layers of Sky, Darkland, Bloodmind, Banner of Souls, and Winterstrike. Her most recent book is the start of the Worldsoul trilogy, Worldsoul. She lives in Brighton, England.

From Babel’s Fall’n Glory We Fled . . .

Michael Swanwick

Imagine a cross between Byzantium and a termite mound. Imagine a jeweled mountain, slender as an icicle, rising out of the steam jungles and disappearing into the dazzling pearl-grey skies of Gehenna. Imagine that Gaudi—he of the Segrada Familia and other biomorphic architectural whimsies—had been commissioned by a nightmare race of giant black millipedes to recreate Barcelona at the height of its glory, along with touches of the Forbidden City in the eighteenth century and Tokyo in the twenty-second, all within a single miles-high structure. Hold every bit of that in your mind at once, multiply by a thousand, and you’ve got only the faintest ghost of a notion of the splendor that was Babel.

Now imagine being inside Babel when it fell.

Hello. I’m Rosamund. I’m dead. I was present in human form when it happened and as a simulation chaotically embedded within a liquid crystal data-matrix then and thereafter up to the present moment. I was killed instantly when the meteors hit. I saw it all.

Rosamund means “rose of the world.” It’s the third most popular female name on Europa, after Gaea and Virginia Dare. For all our elaborate sophistication, we wear our hearts on our sleeves, we Europans.

Here’s what it was like:

“Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!”

“Wha—?” Carlos Quivera sat up, shedding rubble. He coughed, choked, shook his head. He couldn’t seem to think clearly. An instant ago he’d been standing in the chilled and pressurized embassy suite, conferring with Arsenio. Now . . . “How long have I been asleep?”

“Unconscious. Ten hours,” his suit (that’s me—Rosamund!) said. It had taken that long to heal his burns. Now it was shooting wake-up drugs into him: amphetamines, endorphins, attention enhancers, a witch’s brew of chemicals. Physically dangerous, but in this situation, whatever it might be, Quivera would survive by intelligence or not at all. “I was able to form myself around you before the walls ruptured. You were lucky.”

“The others? Did the others survive?”

“Their suits couldn’t reach them in time.”

“Did Rosamund . . . ?”

“All the others are dead.”

Quivera stood.

Even in the aftermath of disaster, Babel was an imposing structure. Ripped open and exposed to the outside air, a thousand rooms spilled over one another toward the ground. Bridges and buttresses jutted into gaping smoke-filled canyons created by the slow collapse of hexagonal support beams (this was new data; I filed it under Architecture, subheading: Support Systems with links to Esthetics and Xenopsychology) in a jumbled geometry that would have terrified Piranesi himself. Everywhere, gleaming black millies scurried over the rubble.

Quivera stood.

In the canted space about him, bits and pieces of the embassy rooms were identifiable: a segment of wood molding, some velvet drapery now littered with chunks of marble, shreds of wallpaper (after a design by William Morris) now curling and browning in the heat. Human interior design was like nothing native to Gehenna and it had taken a great deal of labor and resources to make the embassy so pleasant for human habitation. The queen-mothers had been generous with everything but their trust.

Quivera stood.

There were several corpses remaining as well, still recognizably human though they were blistered and swollen by the savage heat. These had been his colleagues (all of them), his friends (most of them), his enemies (two, perhaps three), and even his lover (one). Now they were gone, and it was as if they had been compressed into one indistinguishable mass, and his feelings toward them all as well: shock and sorrow and anger and survivor guilt all slagged together to become one savage emotion.

Quivera threw back his head and howled.

I had a reference point now. Swiftly, I mixed serotonin-precursors and injected them through a hundred microtubules into the appropriate areas of his brain. Deftly, they took hold. Quivera stopped crying. I had my metaphorical hands on the control knobs of his emotions. I turned him cold, cold, cold.

“I feel nothing,” he said wonderingly. “Everyone is dead, and I feel nothing.” Then, flat as flat: “What kind of monster am I?”

“My monster,” I said fondly. “My duty is to ensure that you and the information you carry within you get back to Europa. So I have chemically neutered your emotions. You must remain a meat puppet for the duration of this mission.” Let him hate me—I who have no true ego, but only a facsimile modeled after a human original—all that mattered now was bringing him home alive.

“Yes.” Quivera reached up and touched his helmet with both hands, as if he would reach through it and feel his head to discover if it were as large as it felt. “That makes sense. I can’t be emotional at a time like this.”

He shook himself, then strode out to where the gleaming black millies were scurrying by. He stepped in front of one, a least-cousin, to question it. The millie paused, startled. Its eyes blinked three times in its triangular face. Then, swift as a tickle, it ran up the front of his suit, down the back, and was gone before the weight could do more than buckle his knees.

“Shit!” he said. Then, “Access the wiretaps. I’ve got to know what happened.”

Passive wiretaps had been implanted months ago, but never used, the political situation being too tense to risk their discovery. Now his suit activated them to monitor what remained of Babel’s communications network: A demon’s chorus of pulsed messages surging through a shredded web of cables. Chaos, confusion, demands to know what had become of the queen-mothers. Analytic functions crunched data, synthesized, synopsized: “There’s an army outside with Ziggurat insignia. They’ve got the city surrounded. They’re killing the refugees.”

“Wait, wait . . . ” Quivera took a deep, shuddering breath. “Let me think.” He glanced briskly about and for the second time noticed the human bodies, ruptured and parboiled in the fallen plaster and porphyry. “Is one of those Rosamund?”

“I’m dead, Quivera. You can mourn me later. Right now, survival is priority number one,” I said briskly. The suit added mood-stabilizers to his maintenance drip.

“Stop speaking in her voice.”

“Alas, dear heart, I cannot. The suit’s operating on diminished function. It’s this voice or nothing.”

He looked away from the corpses, eyes hardening. “Well, it’s not important.” Quivera was the sort of young man who was energized by war. It gave him permission to indulge his ruthless side. It allowed him to pretend he didn’t care.  “Right now, what we have to do is—”

“Uncle Vanya’s coming,” I said. “I can sense his pheromones.”

Picture a screen of beads, crystal lozenges, and rectangular lenses. Behind that screen, a nightmare face like a cross between the front of a locomotive and a tree grinder. Imagine on that face (though most humans would be unable to read them) the lineaments of grace and dignity seasoned by cunning and, perhaps, a dash of wisdom. Trusted advisor to the queen-mothers. Second only to them in rank. A wily negotiator and a formidable enemy. That was Uncle Vanya.

Two small speaking-legs emerged from the curtain, and he said:

::(cautious) greetings::

|

::(Europan vice-consul 12)/Quivera/[treacherous vermin]::

|

::obligations <untranslatable> (grave duty)::

|                           |

::demand/claim [action]::       ::promise (trust)::

“Speak pidgin, damn you! This is no time for subtlety.”

The speaking legs were very still for a long moment. Finally they moved again:

::The queen-mothers are dead::

“Then Babel is no more. I grieve for you.”

::I despise your grief:: A lean and chitinous appendage emerged from the beaded screen. From its tripartite claw hung a smooth white rectangle the size of a briefcase. ::I must bring this to (sister-city)/Ur/[absolute trust]::

“What is it?”

A very long pause. Then, reluctantly ::Our library::

“Your library.” This was something new. Something unheard-of. Quivera doubted the translation was a good one. “What does it contain?”

::Our history. Our sciences. Our ritual dances. A record-of-kinship dating back to the (Void)/Origin/[void]. Everything that can be saved is here::

A thrill of avarice raced through Quivera. He tried to imagine how much this was worth, and could not. Values did not go that high. However much his superiors screwed him out of (and they would work very hard indeed to screw him out of everything they could) what remained would be enough to buy him out of debt, and do the same for a wife and their children after them as well. He did not think of Rosamund. “You won’t get through the army outside without my help,” he said. “I want the right to copy —” How much did he dare ask for? “— three tenths of one percent. Assignable solely to me. Not to Europa. To me.”

Uncle Vanya dipped his head, so that they were staring face to face. ::You are (an evil creature)/[faithless]. I hate you::

Quivera smiled. “A relationship that starts out with mutual understanding has made a good beginning.”

::A relationship that starts out without trust will end badly::

“That’s as it may be.” Quivera looked around for a knife. “The first thing we have to do is castrate you.”

This is what the genocides saw:

They were burning pyramids of corpses outside the city when a Europan emerged, riding a gelded least-cousin. The soldiers immediately stopped stacking bodies and hurried toward him, flowing like quicksilver, calling for their superiors.

The Europan drew up and waited.

The officer who interrogated him spoke from behind the black glass visor of a delicate-legged war machine. He examined the Europan’s credentials carefully, though there could be no serious doubt as to his species. Finally, reluctantly, he signed ::You may pass::

“That’s not enough,” the Europan (Quivera!) said. “I’ll need transportation, an escort to protect me from wild animals in the steam jungles, and a guide to lead me to . . . ” His suit transmitted the sign for ::(starport)/Ararat/[trust-for-all]::

The officer’s speaking-legs thrashed in what might best be translated as scornful laughter. ::We will lead you to the jungle and no further/(hopefully-to-die)/[treacherous non-millipede]::

“Look who talks of treachery!” the Europan said (but of course I did not translate his words), and with a scornful wave of one hand, rode his neuter into the jungle.

The genocides never bothered to look closely at his mount. Neutered least-cousins were beneath their notice. They didn’t even wear face-curtains, but went about naked for all the world to scorn.

Black pillars billowed from the corpse-fires into a sky choked with smoke and dust. There were hundreds of fires and hundreds of pillars and, combined with the low cloud cover, they made all the world seem like the interior of a temple to a vengeful god. The soldiers from Ziggurat escorted him through the army and beyond the line of fires, where the steam jungles waited, verdant and threatening.

As soon as the green darkness closed about them, Uncle Vanya twisted his head around and signed ::Get off me/vast humiliation/[lack-of-trust]::

“Not a chance,” Quivera said harshly. “I’ll ride you ‘til sunset, and all day tomorrow and for a week after that. Those soldiers didn’t fly here, or you’d have seen them coming. They came through the steam forest on foot, and there’ll be stragglers.”

The going was difficult at first, and then easy, as they passed from a recently forested section of the jungle into a stand of old growth. The boles of the “trees” here were as large as those of the redwoods back on Earth, some specimens of which are as old as five thousand years. The way wended back and forth. Scant sunlight penetrated through the canopy, and the steam quickly drank in what little light Quivera’s headlamp put out. Ten trees in, they would have been hopelessly lost had it not been for the suit’s navigational functions and the mapsats that fed it geodetic mathscapes accurate to a finger’s span of distance.

Quivera pointed this out. “Learn now,” he said, “the true value of information.”

::Information has no value:: Uncle Vanya said ::without trust::

Quivera laughed. “In that case you must, all against your will, trust me.”

To this Uncle Vanya had no answer.

At nightfall, they slept on the sheltered side of one of the great parasequoias. Quivera took two refrigeration sticks from the saddlebags and stuck them upright in the dirt. Uncle Vanya immediately coiled himself around his and fell asleep. Quivera sat down beside him to think over the events of the day, but under the influence of his suit’s medication, he fell asleep almost immediately as well.

All machines know that humans are happiest when they think least.

In the morning, they set off again.

The terrain grew hilly, and the old growth fell behind them. There was sunlight and to spare now, bounced and reflected about by the ubiquitous jungle steam and by the synthetic-diamond coating so many of this world’s plants and insects employ for protection.

As they traveled, they talked. Quivera was still complexly medicated, but the dosages had been decreased. It left him in a melancholy, reflective mood.

“It was treachery,” Quivera said. Though we maintained radio silence out of fear of Ziggurat troops, my passive receivers fed him regular news reports from Europa. “The High Watch did not simply fail to divert a meteor. They let three rocks through. All of them came slanting low through the atmosphere, aimed directly at Babel. They hit almost simultaneously.”

Uncle Vanya dipped his head. ::Yes:: he mourned. ::It has the stench of truth to it. It must be (reliable)/a fact/[absolutely trusted]::

“We tried to warn you.”

::You had no (worth)/trust/[worthy-of-trust]:: Uncle Vanya’s speaking legs registered extreme agitation. ::You told lies::

“Everyone tells lies.”

“No. We-of-the-Hundred-Cities are truthful/truthful/[never-lie]::

“If you had, Babel would be standing now.”

::No!/NO!/[no!!!]::

“Lies are a lubricant in the social machine. They ease the friction when two moving parts mesh imperfectly.”

::Aristotle, asked what those who tell lies gain by it, replied: That when they speak the truth they are not believed::

For a long moment Quivera was silent. Then he laughed mirthlessly. “I almost forgot that you’re a diplomat. Well, you’re right, I’m right, and we’re both screwed. Where do we go from here?”

::To (sister-city)/Ur/[absolute trust]:: Uncle Vanya signed, while “You’ve said more than enough,” his suit (me!) whispered in Quivera’s ear. “Change the subject.”

A stream ran, boiling, down the center of the dell. Run-off from the mountains, it would grow steadily smaller until it dwindled away to nothing. Only the fact that the air above it was at close to one hundred percent saturation had kept it going this long. Quivera pointed. “Is that safe to cross?”

::If (leap-over-safe) then (safe)/best not/[reliable distrust]::

“I didn’t think so.”

They headed downstream. It took several miles before the stream grew small enough that they were confident to jump it. Then they turned toward Ararat—the Europans had dropped GPS pebble satellites in low Gehenna orbit shortly after arriving in the system and making contact with the indigenes, but I don’t know from what source Uncle Vanya derived his sense of direction.

It was inerrant, however. The mapsats confirmed it. I filed that fact under Unexplained Phenomena with tentative links to Physiology and Navigation. Even if both my companions died and the library were lost, this would still be a productive journey, provided only that Europan searchers could recover me within ten years, before my data lattice began to degrade.

For hours Uncle Vanya walked and Quivera rode in silence. Finally, though, they had to break to eat. I fed Quivera nutrients intravenously and the illusion of a full meal through somatic shunts. Vanya burrowed furiously into the earth and emerged with something that looked like a grub the size of a poodle, which he ate so vigorously that Quivera had to look away.

(I filed this under Xenoecology, subheading: Feeding Strategies. The search for knowledge knows no rest.)

Afterwards, while they were resting, Uncle Vanya resumed their conversation, more formally this time:

::(for what) purpose/reason::

|

::(Europan vice-consul12)/Quivera/[not trusted]::

|

::voyagings (search-for-trust)/ [action]::

|                                              |

::(nest)/Europa/<untranslatable>::        ::violate/[absolute resistance]::

|                       |                        |

::(nest)/[trust]   Gehenna/[trust]   Home/[trust]::

“Why did you leave your world to come to ours?” I simplified/translated. “Except he believes that humans brought their world here and parked it in orbit.” This was something we had never been able to make the millies understand; that Europa, large though it was, was not a planetlet but a habitat, a ship if you will, though by now well over half a million inhabitants lived in tunnels burrowed deep in its substance. It was only a city, however, and its resources would not last forever. We needed to convince the Gehennans to give us a toehold on their planet if we were, in the long run, to survive. But you knew that already.

“We’ve told you this before. We came looking for new information.”

::Information is (free)/valueless/[despicable]::

“Look,” Quivera said. “We have an information-based economy. Yours is based on trust. The mechanisms of each are not dissimilar. Both are expansive systems. Both are built on scarcity. And both are speculative. Information or trust is bought, sold, borrowed, and invested. Each therefore requires a continually expanding economic frontier which ultimately leaves the individual so deep in debt as to be virtually enslaved to the system. You see?”

::No::

“All right. Imagine a simplified capitalist system—that’s what both our economies are, at root. You’ve got a thousand individuals, each of whom makes a living by buying raw materials, improving them, and selling them at a profit. With me so far?”

Vanya signaled comprehension.

“The farmer buys seed and fertilizer, and sells crops. The weaver buys wool and sells cloth. The chandler buys wax and sells candles. The price of their goods is the cost of materials plus the value of their labor. The value of his labor is the worker’s wages. This is a simple market economy. It can go on forever. The equivalent on Gehenna would be the primitive family-states you had long ago, in which everybody knew everybody else, and so trust was a simple matter and directly reciprocal.”

Startled, Uncle Vanya signed ::How did you know about our past?::

“Europans value knowledge. Everything you tell us, we remember.”  The knowledge had been assembled with enormous effort and expense, largely from stolen data—but no reason to mention that. Quivera continued, “Now imagine that most of those workers labor in ten factories, making the food, clothing, and other objects that everybody needs. The owners of these factories must make a profit, so they sell their goods for more than they pay for them—the cost of materials, the cost of labor, and then the profit, which we can call ‘added value.’

“But because this is a simplified model, there are no outside markets. The goods can only be sold to the thousand workers themselves, and the total cost of the goods is more than the total amount they’ve been paid collectively for the materials and their labor. So how can they afford it? They go into debt. Then they borrow money to support that debt. The money is lent to them by the factories selling them goods on credit. There is not enough money,—not enough real value—in the system to pay off the debt, and so it continues to increase until it can no longer be sustained. Then there is an catastrophic collapse which we call a depression. Two of the businesses go bankrupt and their assets are swallowed up by the survivors at bargain prices, thus paying off their own indebtedness and restoring equilibrium to the system. In the aftermath of which, the cycle begins again.”

::What has this to do with ::(beloved city)/Babel/[mother-of-trust]?::

“Your every public action involved an exchange of trust, yes? And every trust that was honored heightened the prestige of the queen-mothers and hence the amount of trust they embodied for Babel itself.”

::Yes::

“Similarly, the queen-mothers of other cities, including those cities which were Babel’s sworn enemies, embodied enormous amounts of trust as well.”

::Of course::

“Was there enough trust in all the world to pay everybody back if all the queen-mothers called it in at the same time?”

Uncle Vanya was silent.

“So that’s your explanation for . . . a lot of things. Earth sent us here because it needs new information to cover its growing indebtedness. Building Europa took enormous amounts of information, most of it proprietary, and so we Europans are in debt collectively to our home world and individually to the Lords of the Economy on Europa. With compound interest, every generation is worse off and thus more desperate than the one before. Our need to learn is great, and constantly growing.”

::(strangers-without-trust)/Europa/[treacherous vermin]::

|

can/should/<untranslatable>

|                                                               | 

::demand/claim [negative action]::  ::defy/<untranslatable>/[absolute lack of trust]::

|                                                              | 

::(those-who-command-trust)::        ::(those-who-are-unworthy of trust)::

“He asks why Europa doesn’t simply declare bankruptcy,” I explained. “Default on its obligations and nationalize all the information received to date. In essence.”

The simple answer was that Europa still needed information that could only be beamed from Earth, that the ingenuity of even half a million people could not match that of an entire planet and thus their technology must always be superior to ours, and that if we reneged on our debts they would stop beaming plans for that technology, along with their songs and plays and news of what was going on in countries that had once meant everything to our great-great-grandparents. I watched Quivera struggle to put all this in its simplest possible form.

Finally, he said, “Because no one would ever trust us again, if we did.”

After a long stillness, Uncle Vanya lapsed back into pidgin. ::Why did you tell me this [untrustworthy] story?::

“To let you know that we have much in common. We can understand each other.”

::<But>/not/[trust]::

“No. But we don’t need trust. Mutual self-interest will suffice.”

Days passed. Perhaps Quivera and Uncle Vanya grew to understand each other better during this time. Perhaps not. I was able to keep Quivera’s electrolyte balances stable and short-circuit his feedback processes so that he felt no extraordinary pain, but he was feeding off of his own body fat and that was beginning to run low. He was very comfortably starving to death—I gave him two weeks, tops—and he knew it. He’d have to be a fool not to, and I had to keep his thinking sharp if he was going to have any chance of survival.

Their way was intersected by a long, low ridge and without comment Quivera and Uncle Vanya climbed up above the canopy of the steam forest and the cloud of moisture it held into clear air. Looking back, Quivera saw a gully in the slope behind them, its bottom washed free of soil by the boiling runoff and littered with square and rectangular stones, but not a trace of hexagonal beams. They had just climbed the tumulus of an ancient fallen city. It lay straight across the land, higher to the east and dwindling to the west. “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,” Quivera said. “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”

Uncle Vanya said nothing.

“Another meteor strike—what were the odds of that?”

Uncle Vanya said nothing.

“Of course, given enough time, it would be inevitable, it if predated the High Watch.”

Uncle Vanya said nothing.

“What was the name of this city?”

::Very old/(name forgotten)/[First Trust]::

Uncle Vanya moved, as if to start downward, but Quivera stopped him with a gesture. “There’s no hurry,” he said. “Let’s enjoy the view for a moment.” He swept an unhurried arm from horizon to horizon, indicating the flat and unvarying canopy of vegetation before them. “It’s a funny thing. You’d think that, this being one of the first cities your people built when they came to this planet, you’d be able to see the ruins of the cities of the original inhabitants from here.”

The millipede’s speaking arms thrashed in alarm. Then he reared up into the air, and when he came down one foreleg glinted silver. Faster than human eye could follow, he had drawn a curving and deadly tarsi-sword from a camouflaged belly-sheath.

Quivera’s suit flung him away from the descending weapon. He fell flat on his back and rolled to the side. The sword’s point missed him by inches. But then the suit flung out a hand and touched the sword with an electrical contact it had just extruded.

A carefully calculated shock threw Uncle Vanya back, convulsing but still fully conscious.

Quivera stood. “Remember the library!” he said. “Who will know of Babel’s greatness if it’s destroyed?”

For a long time the millipede did nothing that either Quivera or his suit could detect. At last he signed ::How did you know?/(absolute shock)/[treacherous and without faith]::

“Our survival depends on being allowed to live on Gehenna. Your people will not let us do so, no matter what we offer in trade. It was important that we understand why. So we found out. We took in your outlaws and apostates, all those who were cast out of your cities and had nowhere else to go. We gave them sanctuary. In gratitude, they told us what they knew.”

By so saying, Quivera let Uncle Vanya know that he knew the most ancient tale of the Gehennans. By so hearing, Uncle Vanya knew that Quivera knew what he knew. And just so you know what they knew that each other knew and knew was known, here is the tale of . . .

How the True People Came to Gehenna

Long did our Ancestors burrow down through the dark between the stars, before emerging at last in the soil of Gehenna. From the True Home they had come. To Gehenna they descended, leaving a trail of sparks in the black and empty spaces through which they had traveled. The True People came from a world of unimaginable wonders. To it they could never return. Perhaps they were exiles. Perhaps it was destroyed. Nobody knows.

Into the steam and sunlight of Gehenna they burst, and found it was already taken. The First Inhabitants looked like nothing our Ancestors had ever seen. But they welcomed the True People as the queen-mothers would a strayed niece-daughter. They gave us food. They gave us land. They gave us trust.

For a time all was well.

But evil crept into the thoracic ganglia of the True People. They repaid sisterhood with betrayal and trust with murder. Bright lights were called down from the sky to destroy the cities of their benefactors. Everything the First Inhabitants had made, all their books and statues and paintings, burned with the cities. No trace of them remains. We do not even know what they looked like.

This was how the True People brought war to Gehenna. There had never been war before, and now we will have it with us always, until our trust-debt is repaid. But it can never be repaid.

It suffers in translation, of course. The original is told in thirteen exquisitely beautiful ergoglyphs, each grounded on a primal faith-motion. But Quivera was talking, with care and passion:

“Vanya, listen to me carefully. We have studied your civilization and your planet in far greater detail than you realize. You did not come from another world. Your people evolved here. There was no aboriginal civilization. You ancestors did not eradicate an intelligent species. These things are all a myth.”

::No!/Why?!/[shock]:: Uncle Vanya rattled with emotion. Ripples of muscle spasms ran down his segmented body.

“Don’t go catatonic on me. Your ancestors didn’t lie. Myths are not lies. They are simply an efficient way of encoding truths. We have a similar myth in my religion which we call Original Sin. Man is born sinful. Well . . . who can doubt that? Saying that we are born into a fallen state means simply that we are not perfect, that we are inherently capable of evil.

“Your myth is very similar to ours, but it also encodes what we call the Malthusian dilemma. Population increases geometrically, while food resources increase arithmetically. So universal starvation is inevitable unless the population is periodically reduced by wars, plagues, and famines. Which means that wars, plagues, and famine cannot be eradicated because they are all that keep a population from extinction.

“But—and this is essential—all that assumes a population that isn’t aware of the dilemma. When you understand the fix you’re in, you can do something about it. That’s why information is so important. Do you understand?”

Uncle Vanya lay down flat upon the ground and did not move for hours. When he finally arose again, he refused to speak at all.

The trail the next day led down into a long meteor valley that had been carved by a ground-grazer long enough ago that their its gentle slopes were covered with soil and the bottomland was rich and fertile. An orchard of grenade trees had been planted in interlocking hexagons for as far in either direction as the eye could see. We were still on Babel’s territory, but any arbiculturalists had been swept away by whatever military forces from Ziggurat had passed through the area.

The grenades were still green [footnote: not literally, of course—they were orange!], their thick husks taut but not yet trembling with the steam-hot pulp that would eventually, in the absence of harvesters, cause them to explode, scattering their arrowhead-shaped seeds or spores [footnote: like seeds, the flechettes carried within them surplus nourishment; like spores they would grow into a prothalli which would produce the sex organs responsible for what will become the gamete of the eventual plant; all botanical terms of course being metaphors for xenobiological bodies and processes] with such force as to make them a deadly hazard when ripe.

Not, however, today.

A sudden gust of wind parted the steam, briefly brightening the valley-orchard and showing a slim and graceful trail through the orchard. We followed it down into the valley.

We were midway through the orchard when Quivera bent down to examine a crystal-shelled creature unlike anything in his suit’s database. It rested atop the long stalk of a weed [footnote: “weed” is not a metaphor; the concept of “an undesired plant growing in cultivated ground” is a cultural universal] in the direct sunlight, its abdomen pulsing slightly as it superheated a minuscule drop of black ichor. A puff of steam, a sharp crack, and it was gone. Entranced, Quivera asked, “What’s that called?”

Uncle Vanya stiffened. ::A jet!/danger!/[absolute certainty]::

Then (crack! crack! crack!) the air was filled with thin lines of steam, laid down with the precision of a draftsman’s ruler, tracing flights so fleet (crack! crack!) that it was impossible to tell what in what direction they flew. Nor did it ultimately (crack!) matter.

Quivera fell.

Worse, because the thread of steam the jet had stitched through his leg severed an organizational node in his suit, I ceased all upper cognitive functions. Which is as good as to say that I fell unconscious.

Here’s what the suit did in my (Rosamund’s) absence:

Slowly rebuilt the damaged organizational node.

Quickly mended the holes that the jet had left in its fabric.

Dropped Quivera into a therapeutic coma.

Applied restoratives s to his injuries, and began the slow and painstaking process of repairing the damage to his flesh, with particular emphasis on distributed traumatic shock.

Filed the jet footage under Xenobiology, subheading: Insect Analogues with links to Survival and Steam Locomotion.

Told Uncle Vanya that if he tried to abandon Quivera, the suit would run him down, catch him, twist his head from his body like the foul least-cousin that he was and then piss on his corpse.

Two more days passed before the suit returned to full consciousness, during which Uncle Vanya took conscientiously good care of him. Under what motivation, it does not matter. Another day passed after that. The suit had planned to keep Quivera comatose for a week but not long after regaining awareness, circumstances changed. It slammed him back to full consciousness, heart pounding and eyes wide open.

“I blacked out for a second!” he gasped. Then, realizing that the landscape about him did not look familiar, “How long was I unconscious?”

::Three days/<three days>/[casual certainty]::

“Oh.”

Then, almost without pausing. ::Your suit/mechanism/[alarm] talks with the voice of Rosamund da Silva/(Europan vice-consul 8)/[uncertainty and doubt]::

“Yes, well, that’s because —”

Quivera was fully aware and alert now. So I said: “Incoming.”

Two millies erupted out of the black soil directly before us. They both had Ziggurat insignia painted on their flanks and harness. By good luck Uncle Vanya did the best thing possible under the circumstances—he reared into the air in fright. Millipoid sapiens anatomy being what it was, this instantly demonstrated to them that he was a gelding and in that instant he was almost reflexively dismissed by the enemy soldiers as being both contemptible and harmless.

Quivera, however, was not.

Perhaps they were brood-traitors who had deserted the war with a fantasy of starting their own nest. Perhaps they were a single unit among thousands scattered along a temporary border, much as land mines were employed in ancient modern times. The soldiers had clearly been almost as surprised by us as we were by them. They had no weapons ready. So they fell upon Quivera with their dagger-tarsi.

His suit (still me) threw him to one side and then to the other as the millies slashed down at him. Then one of them reared up into the air—looking astonished if you knew the interspecies decodes—and fell heavily to the ground.

Uncle Vanya stood over the steaming corpse, one foreleg glinting silver. The second Ziggurat soldier twisted to confront him. Leaving his underside briefly exposed.

Quivera (or rather his suit) joined both hands in a fist and punched upward, through the weak skin of the third sternite behind the head. That was the one which held its sex organs. [Disclaimer: All anatomical terms, including “sternite,” “sex organs,” and “head,” are analogues only; unless and until Gehennan life is found to have some direct relationship to Terran life, however tenuous, such descriptors are purely metaphoric.] So it was particularly vulnerable there. And since the suit had muscle-multiplying exoskeletal functions . . .

Ichor gushed all over the suit.

The fight was over almost as soon as it had begun. Quivera was breathing heavily, as much from the shock as the exertion. Uncle Vanya slid the tarsi-sword back into its belly-sheath. As he did so, he made an involuntary grimace of discomfort. ::There were times when I thought of discarding this:: he signed.

“I’m glad you didn’t.”

Little puffs of steam shot up from the bodies of the dead millipedes as carrion-flies drove their seeds/sperm/eggs (analogues and metaphors—remember?) deep into the flesh.

They started away again.

After a time, Uncle Vanya repeated ::Your suit/(mechanism)/[alarm] talks with the voice of Rosamund da Silva/(Europan vice-consul 8)/[uncertainty and doubt]::

“Yes.”

Uncle Vanya folded tight all his speaking arms in a manner which meant that he had not yet heard enough, and kept them so folded until Quivera had explained the entirety of what follows:

Treachery and betrayal were natural consequences of Europa’s superheated economy, followed closely by a perfectly rational paranoia. Those who rose to positions of responsibility were therefore sharp, suspicious, intuitive, and bold. The delegation to Babel was made up of the best Europa had to offer. So when two of them fell in love, it was inevitable that they would act on it. That one was married would deter neither. That physical intimacy in such close and suspicious quarters, where everybody routinely spied on everybody else, required almost superhuman discipline and ingenuity only made it all the hotter for them.

Such was Rosamund’s and Quivera’s affair.

But it was not all they had to worry about.

There were factions within the delegation, some mirroring fault lines in the larger society and others merely personal. Alliances shifted, and when they did nobody was foolish enough to inform their old allies. Urbano, Rosamund’s husband, was a full consul, Quivera’s mentor, and a true believer in a minority economic philosophy. Rosamund was an economic agnostic but a staunch Consensus Liberal. Quivera could sail with the wind politically but he tracked the indebtedness indices obsessively. He knew that Rosamund considered him ideologically unsound, and that her husband was growing impatient with his lukewarm support in certain areas of policy. Everybody was keeping an eye out for the main chance.

So of course Quivera ran an emulation of his lover at all times. He knew that Rosamund was perfectly capable of betraying him—he could neither have loved nor respected a woman who wasn’t—and he suspected she believed the same of him. If her behavior ever seriously diverged from that of her emulation (and the sex was always best at times he thought it might), he would know she was preparing an attack, and could strike first.

Quivera spread his hands. “That’s all.”

Uncle Vanya did not make the sign for absolute horror. Nor did he have to.

After a moment, Quivera laughed, low and mirthlessly. “You’ re right,” he said. “Our entire system is totally fucked.” He stood. “Come on. We’ve got miles to go before we sleep.”

They endured four more days of commonplace adventure, during which they came close to death, displayed loyalty, performed heroic deeds, etc., etc. Perhaps they bonded, though I’d need blood samples and a smidgeon of brain tissue from each of them to be sure of that. You know the way this sort of narrative goes. Having taught his Gehennan counterpart the usefulness of information, Quivera will learn from Vanya the necessity of trust. An imperfect merger of their two value systems will ensue in which for the first time a symbolic common ground will be found. Small and transient though the beginning may be, it will auger well for the long-term relations between their relative species.

That’s a nice story.

It’s not what happened.

On the last day of their common journey, Quivera and Uncle Vanya had the misfortune to be hit by a TLMG.

A TLMG, or Transient Localized Mud Geyser, begins with an uncommonly solid surface (bolide-glazed porcelain earth, usually) trapping a small (the radius of a typical TLMG is on the order of fifty meters) bubble of superheated mud beneath it. Nobody knows what causes the excess heat responsible for the bubble. Gehennans aren’t curious and Europans haven’t the budget or the ground access to do the in situ investigations they’d like. (The most common guesses are fire worms, thermobacilli, a nesting ground phoenix, and various geophysical forces.) Nevertheless, the defining characteristic of TLMGs is their instability. Either the heat slowly bleeds away and they cease to be, or it continues to grow until its force dictates a hyper rapid explosive release. As did the one our two heroes were not aware they were skirting.

It erupted.

Quivera was as safe as houses, of course. His suit was designed to protect him from far worse. But Uncle Vanya was scalded badly along one side of his body. All the legs on that side were shriveled to little black nubs. A clear viscous jelly oozed between his segment plates.

Quivera knelt by him and wept.  Drugged as he was, he wept. In his weakened state, I did not dare to increase his dosages. So I had to tell him three times that there was analgesic paste in the saddlebags before he could be made to understand that he should apply it to his dying companion.

The paste worked fast. It was an old Gehennan medicine which Europan biochemists had analyzed and improved upon and then given to Babel as a demonstration of the desirability of Europan technology. Though the queen-mothers had not responded with the hoped-for trade treaties, it had immediately replaced the earlier version.

Uncle Vanya made a creaking-groaning noise as the painkillers kicked in. One at a time he opened all his functioning eyes. ::Is the case safe?::

It was a measure of Quivera’s diminished state that he hadn’t yet checked on it. He did now. “Yes,” he said with heartfelt relief. “The telltales all say that the library is intact and undamaged.”

::No:: Vanya signed feebly. ::I lied to you, Quivera:: Then, rousing himself:

::(not) library/[greatest shame]::   ::(not) library/[greatest trust]::

|

::(Europan vice-consul12)/Quivera/[most trusted]::

|                                         |

::(nest)/Babel/<untranslatable>::       ::obedient/[absolute loyalty]::

|                                         |

::lies(greatest-trust-deed)/[moral necessity]::

|                                                           |

::(nest)/Babel/<untranslatable>::     ::untranslatable/[absolute
                                  resistance]::

|                        |                                    |             

::(nest)/[trust]      Babel/[trust]    (sister-city)/Ur/[absolute trust]::

|

::egg case/(protect)::

|

::egg case/(mature)::

|

::Babel/[eternal trust]::

It was not a library but an egg-case. Swaddled safe within a case that was in its way as elaborate a piece of technology as Quivera’s suit myself, were sixteen eggs, enough to bring to life six queen-mothers, nine niece-sisters, and one perfect consort. They would be born conscious of the entire gene-history of the nest, going back many thousands of years.

Of all those things the Europans wished to know most, they would be perfectly ignorant. Nevertheless, so long as the eggs existed, the city-nest was not dead. If they were taken to Ur, which had ancient and enduring bonds to Babel, the stump of a new city would be built within which the eggs would be protected and brought to maturity. Babel would rise again.

Such was the dream Uncle Vanya had lied for and for which he was about to die.

::Bring this to (sister-city)/Ur/[absolute trust]:: Uncle Vanya closed his eyes, row by row, but continued signing. ::brother-friend/Quivera/[tentative trust], promise me you will::

“I promise. You can trust me, I swear.”

::Then I will be ghost-king-father/honored/[none-more-honored]:: Vanya signed. ::It is more than enough for anyone::

“Do you honestly believe that?” Quivera asked in bleak astonishment. He was an atheist, of course, as are most Europans, and would have been happier were he not.

::Perhaps not:: Vanya’s signing was slow and growing slower. ::But it is as good as I will get::

Two days later, when the starport-city of Ararat was a nub on the horizon, the skies opened and the mists parted to make way for a Europan lander. Quivera’s handlers’ suits squirted me a bill for his rescue—steep, I thought, but we all knew which hand carried the whip—and their principals tried to get him to sign away the rights to his story in acquittal.

Quivera laughed harshly (I’d already started de-cushioning his emotions, to ease the shock of my removal) and shook his head. “Put it on my tab, girls,” he said, and climbed into the lander. Hours later he was in home orbit.

And once there? I’ll tell you all I know. He was taken out of the lander and put onto a jitney. The jitney brought him to a transfer point where a grapple snagged him and flung him to the Europan receiving port. There, after the usual flawless catch, he was escorted through an airlock and into a locker room.

He hung up his suit, uplinked all my impersonal memories to a data-broker, and left me there. He didn’t look back—for fear, I imagine, of being turned to a pillar of salt. He took the egg-case with him. He never returned.

Here have I hung for days or months or centuries—who knows?—until your curious hand awoke me and your friendly ear received my tale. So I cannot tell you if the egg-case A) went to Ur, which surely would not have welcomed the obligation or the massive outlay of trust being thrust upon it, B) was kept for the undeniably enormous amount of genetic information the eggs embodied, or C) went to Ziggurat, which would pay well and perhaps in Gehennan territory to destroy it. Nor do I have any information as to whether Quivera kept his word or not. I know what I think. But then I’m a Marxist, and I see everything in terms of economics. You can believe otherwise if you wish.

That’s all. I’m Rosamund. Goodbye.

First published in Asimov’s, February 2008.

About the Author

Michael Swanwick made his debut in 1980, and in the thirty-three years that have followed has established himself as one of SF’s most prolific and consistently excellent writers at short lengths, as well as one of the premier novelists of his generation. He has won the Theodore Sturgeon Award and the Asimov’s Readers Award poll. In 1991, his novel Stations of the Tide won him a Nebula Award as well, and in 1995 he won the World Fantasy Award for his story “Radio Waves.” He’s won the Hugo Award five times between 1999 and 2006, for his stories “The Very Pulse of the Machine,” “Scherzo with Tyrannosaur,” “The Dog Said Bow-Wow,” “Slow Life,” and “Legions In Time.” His other books include the novels In The Drift, Vacuum Flowers, The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, Jack Faust, Bones of the Earth, and The Dragons of Babel. His short fiction has been assembled in Gravity’s Angels, A Geography of Unknown Lands, Slow Dancing Through Time, Moon Dogs, Puck Aleshire’s Abecedary, Tales of Old Earth, Cigar-Box Faust and Other Miniatures, Michael Swanwicks Field Guide to the Mesozoic Megafauna, and The Periodic Table of SF. His most recent books are a massive retrospective collection, The Best of Michael Swanwick, and a new novel, Dancing With Bears. Swanwick lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Marianne Porter.

When the Alien Is Us:
Science Fictional Documentaries

Maggie Clark

Directors Werner Herzog and Errol Morris are well known for their renegotiations of what’s called cinéma vérité—the notion that truth can be found through footage in the absence of a blatantly intervening narrator or narrative. When these documentarians sat down in 2008 with Believer Magazine, Herzog observed that Morris’s recently released Standard Operating Procedure had the feel of a “narrative feature film,” despite exploring real people and documents involved in the military abuses of Abu Ghraib prisoners in 2003. Morris readily agreed. “The intention,” he said, “is to put the audience in some kind of odd reality.” Building on an earlier manifesto by Herzog, he added that his preference was for “ecstatic absurdity” over any attempt at disengaged representations of truth.

In pursuit of this aesthetic, Morris uses cyborgian constructions like the InterroTron, which emerged from a routine of talking to his subjects by putting his “head up right against the lens of the camera.” When he got tired of conducting his interviews in such an uncomfortable position, he began to wonder: “[W]hat if I could become one with the camera. What if the camera and myself could become one and the same?” The result was a teleprompter projecting his face at his subjects, which allowed for what he called a “true first person” experience between his audience and subject, arrestingly direct eye contact and all.

In an age of action-packed, CGI-laden space operas and science fantasies, it’s easy to neglect the power of either speculative film or fiction to do what Herzog and Morris strive for in their documentaries: to estrange us from ourselves; to show us to ourselves in an alien light. Yet that approach has a broad literary heritage, conscious or otherwise.

William Gibson, for instance, holds that science fiction is about the present, never the future, but he also argued in 2011 that “all fiction is speculative, and all history, too—endlessly subject to revision.” It’s an argument that Morris, in his long-form online columns for The New York Times, routinely complicates in the field of photography—a domain, like documentary cinema, where visual representation is often misleadingly taken as definitive proof.

Gibson’s assertion also holds true for speculative fiction from the nineteenth century, an era worth examining in relation to present-day media for two reasons: Literary genres weren’t as stringently divided then as they are today, and film had yet to assert itself as a competitive medium for complex narratives. This was a century in which ghost stories were still widely regarded as potential realities, yet Charles Dickens felt the need to provide in-text sources to defend the presence of spontaneous human combustion in Bleak House (1853). This same sprawling, nuanced period allowed Edgar Allan Poe to mislead newspaper readers with a plausible (but utterly fictional) account of transatlantic travel.

This fluidity between truth forms persists today in the documentaries of Morris and Herzog, whose work focuses less on blurring lines between fact and fiction, and more on drawing attention to how blurry cultural notions of fact and fiction have always been. This is the difference between their work and the narrative impulses, say, of Exit through the Gift Shop and Catfish, two 2010 documentaries that rely on our initial suspension of disbelief and a culminating “twist” to make their points about the fragility of truth. In contrast, Morris and Herzog anticipate an audience that already views documentary as contrived to some degree, and build on this expectation by consistently foregrounding the strangeness and fluidity of human experience in their approaches to any theme.

Herzog’s documentaries and blatantly fictionalized films, for instance, reach for what he calls “ecstatic truth,” a notion suggesting that capital-T truth exists in some Platonic form, but that such truth is unattainable through facts alone, and so often demands other modes of engagement to be appreciated, if not entirely understood. In a 2010 article titled “On the Absolute, the Sublime, and the Ecstatic Truth,” Herzog opens with an assertion that neatly summarizes his artistic practice in this regard:

“The words attributed to Blaise Pascal which preface my film Lessons of Darkness [1992] are in fact by me. Pascal himself could not have said it better.”

Lessons of Darkness, shot in the oil fields of post-Gulf War Kuwait, is by no means the only film in which Herzog practices factual interference for poetic effect, but it has the added significance of disrupting major cultural narratives about Western foreign policy in the Middle East. Aside from Herzog’s ecological arguments, which suffuse a great many of his documentary-style films, this is a rare act of politicization, and the confounded anger underlying the film’s aesthetics manifests again in his explanation:

“After the first war in Iraq, as the oil fields burned in Kuwait, the media—and here I mean television in particular—was in no position to show what was, beyond being a war crime, an event of cosmic dimensions, a crime against creation itself. There is not a single frame in Lessons of Darkness in which you can recognize our planet; for this reason the film is labeled ’science fiction,’ as if it could only have been shot in a distant galaxy, hostile to life.”

The stylized way that Herzog conveys his horror should not be read, however, as in any way immobilizing him as a documentarian. Rather than giving over to the impossibility of representing vital truths through anything but poetic or otherwise alienating film aesthetics, both he and Morris have also explored issues for which social solutions should be (and often are) readily available. The American practice of capital punishment, for instance, features in Herzog’s 2011 Into the Abyss, while Morris’s 1988 The Thin Blue Line is an iconic treatment of the same topic. Indeed, the latter proved to be an example of what mid-20th century Quakers call “speaking truth to power,” since Morris’s reenactments of a police officer’s murder served to highlight how circumstantial evidence and a prejudicial desire to deliver the death penalty sent Randall Adams (instead of the likelier culprit, a sixteen-year-old named David Harris) to death row. Adams’ conviction would be overturned the year after Morris’s documentary was released.

There is little conflict between these filmic approaches, either—only an appreciation of narrative limits, which are more apparent and constricting around some topics than others. As Herzog observes in Cave of Forgotten Dreams, while sitting with an archaeologist who has digitally mapped the Chauvet cave system that holds 32,000-year-old cave paintings: “It is like you are creating the phone directory of Manhattan–four million entries, but, ah, do they dream? Do they cry at night? What are their hopes? What are their families? You’ll never know from the phone directory.”

Soon after, we cut to a slice of the crew’s time inside Chauvet, where the guide calls for a moment of silence: “We are going to listen to the silence of the caves,” he says, “and perhaps, we can hear our own heartbeats.” Herzog complies in the moment, but post-production, for we poor viewers who were not physically present, a visual scan of the cave walls is matched by the rise of audio accompaniment—a heartbeat, as promised, and the ethereal music of Ernst Reijseger, with parts for organ, piano, flute, cello, and choir. In this way, we who may never walk those restricted passageways are granted one artist’s rendition of what it might be like to stand within that natural cathedral.

There is nothing particularly new about this maneuver, either—the narrative that allows its audience to experience in the immediate moment what it might never otherwise live to see. On Saturday, April 15, 1844, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Balloon” was published in the New York Sun—the article a grand old tale of “Mr. Monck Mason’s Flying Machine,” which crossed the Atlantic in a staggering three days, bringing eight passengers to Sullivan’s Island aboard the “Steering Balloon, Victoria.” A mere two days later, the article was retracted for the pesky, piddling fact that not a word of it was true: not the detailed descriptions of the vessel or its underlying technology, not the stories of its industrious inventors, and certainly not the precise and exhaustive details of the flying machine during its most momentous operations. The truth was of little consequence, though, to Poe; in an amendment added to future publications of the work (as “The Balloon-Hoax”) he writes, “and, in fact, if (as some assert) the Victoria did not absolutely accomplish the voyage recorded, it will be difficult to assign a reason why she should not have accomplished it.”

Sure enough, in 1978 the Double Eagle II, an unpowered balloon carrying human passengers, would cross the Atlantic in a comparatively sluggish six days—and of course, long before that feat, a great many other modes of aerial transport would take to the skies in every bit as an extraordinary manner as Poe’s newspaper account promised his mid-nineteenth-century readers. What greater purpose can a speculative story serve, but to bring to life those tantalizingly close futures that generation would otherwise only get to imagine?

There is, of course, also a dark side to the use of non-fictional authority to extrapolate worlds to come, as other nineteenth-century fiction amply warns us. In The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), H. G. Wells uses what’s called a “frame narrative” to introduce his cautionary tale of ego-driven vivisection, and that frame serves to enhance the truth claims of the story as a whole. Instead of a simple travel diary—a narrative form that already emulates common non-fiction practice—we first get a note from the protagonist’s nephew, who describes the circumstances in which the subsequent account was found, and in precise terms offers some sense of what could or could not be verified about the story’s particulars. Why adopt a journalistic tone, though, before a story that already uses an autobiographical register? The novella’s subtitle, “a Possibility,” offers one answer: this story of human monstrosity is emphatically intended to be read as an extension of scientific practice in Wells’s day and age—just a step or two from what is, and toward the realm of what Dickens would easily have termed “the shadows of things that May be.”

Herzog’s The White Diamond (2004) and Encounters at the End of the World (2007) are mired with shadows, too. In the former, an inventor embarks on a risky balloon trip over Guyana’s rainforest canopy after an earlier attempt took his friend’s life; in the latter, Herzog witnesses the common occurrence of disoriented or “mad” penguins striking out in the wrong direction—headed for a horizon they will die long before reaching. The brutality of nature is a prevailing theme for Herzog, whose cinematic travels have taken him through many landscapes filled with suffering. In 1982’s Burden of Dreams, he describes his immediate environment as “vile and base. . . . It’s a land that God, if he exists, has created in anger. . . . But when I say this, I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It is not that I hate it. I love it. I love it very much. But I love it against my better judgment.”

In their interview with Believer Magazine, Morris picks up that thread of irresistible monstrosity when he exalts the role of spontaneity and planning in equal measure, holding that both exist in documentary and feature filmmaking. “Despite all our efforts to control something,” he concludes, “the world is much, much more powerful than us, and more deranged even than us.” Neither Morris nor Herzog, then—for all that their distinct directorial styles brand their films—holds himself as master of the worlds he attempts to capture. But they can champion that madness all the same—the attainable and the elusive truths alike; the alien that exists both within and immediately around us—and they do.

Recently, Herzog lent his distinctive voice to a production by director Ramin Bahrani (Goodbye Solo)—a short film titled “Plastic Bag,” in which Herzog inscribes familiar human yearnings upon one difficult-to-love piece of commercial waste. This, too, is a kind of documentary: the life cycle of a plastic bag on its way to the Pacific (Trash) Vortex, a sprawling oceanic testament to some of our worst environmental practices. We have given life to toxic landscapes like these all over the globe, and there are undoubtedly other, even bleaker stories for each. The tacit threat of this film, then, is that when we are gone, these excesses alone—the worst of us—will speak for our kind. Dare we ask what they’d say?

Thankfully, the science-fictional aesthetic runs both ways in Herzog’s and Morris’s documentaries, just as it did for genre-defying speculative fiction in the nineteenth century. At that strangely familiar border between our realities and our dreams dwell both warnings and wonders: enough creative material, in the right hands, for some semblance, too, of hope.

About the Author

Maggie Clark is a doctoral student at Wilfrid Laurier University (Waterloo, Ontario, Canada), where she applies the tools of literary analysis to nineteenth-century scientific non-fiction. Her science fiction has been published in Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Daily SF, with more work forthcoming at Analog.

Assassinating the Reader: A Conversation with Yoon Ha Lee

Jeremy L. C. Jones

Yoon Ha Lee’s collection Conservation of Shadows contains sixteen stories, but seems far faster in the reading. Lee’s many worlds seem to multiply exponentially with each paragraph, and each turned page.

There are soldiers and scientists, space travel and dragons, leather-bound books, locked doors, and genocidal rampages. Each tale strains at the edges of possibility. No two of Lee’s stories are alike, except for a similar pulse powering each word, each juxtaposition, each startling turn of events.

“It is not true that the dead cannot be folded,” Lee writes in the opening paragraph of “Ghostweight.” “Square becomes kite becomes swan; history becomes rumor becomes song. Even the act of remembrance creases the truth.”

There is immense beauty in Yoon Ha Lee’s prose—beauty enough to “assassinate” the reader, as she discusses below.

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

Lee has a connoisseur’s reserve in terms of her online presence, but also a connoisseur’s obsessive energy. She seems to turn each story in her hands for our delectation, angling it this way and that, offering us access in three dimensions. Though she has been publishing since the 90s, her stories have been more like intense lasers than sky-arcing spotlights.

Below, Lee and I talk about style, stories, and the occasional assassination of a reader or two.

How would you describe your style?

I try to do two things with my style. The first is to pay attention to how the words sound together. When I read (silently), I hear everything in my head, almost as though I were reading it out loud. A story for me is all about sound and emotion. I don’t get the movies-in-your-head that some readers report, though I wish I did; I can’t visualize at all. So I have to work with the dimensions I have access to.

The other thing is to juxtapose odd images. I’m afraid I can’t claim any artistry here. The truth is that I get bored easily, so I’m entertaining myself. This one can get out of hand, and I have to be careful how I use it. I dialed it up in “Effigy Nights,” which has an ornate over-the-top space fantasy setting; ditto “Conservation of Shadows,” where I wanted the focus to be on style and to evoke an almost poem-like feel because some of the inspiration was from “The Descent of Inanna.” For other stories, too much of this sort of thing only distracts the reader from the action. It’s a juggling act.

Up until early high school, the people I wanted to write like, style-wise, were Simon R. Green (still one of my favorite authors) and Piers Anthony. I haven’t read Anthony in a long time, although I remember him fondly, but both of them had clear, vigorous prose where I could follow what was going on very easily, and that’s a trait I still admire. In high school, however, I encountered a Patricia McKillip that I didn’t bounce off of (I tried the Riddle-Master books earlier and couldn’t get into them), and Roger Zelazny. It had never occurred to me before McKillip and Zelazny that writing could be beautiful for its own sake. I wanted in, so I started practicing writing in that direction.

How does a short story work on the reader? What should a short story do?

I’m going to preface this by saying that not all short stories are the same, I conveniently failed to major in English or literature and find literary theory confusing, and I’m going to talk about how I do it, not how anyone else does or should do it.

The whole point of a short story is to assassinate the reader. You don’t have the time or the space to go to war or do large maneuvers, you can’t do chapters of elaborate setup, there’s much less room for character development—a good writer can get more character development in, but that isn’t my particular strength. Anyway, everything in the short story has to drive toward a short sharp point, whatever it is you’re trying to leave the reader with at the end of the story.

I say “assassinate” and it sounds hostile, because it is. I work better when I can think in terms of opponents. The thing is that I don’t want the reader to see the short sharp point clearly from the beginning, but I want it to make sense afterward as the angle of attack. Tactical sense, I guess, in the context of the story’s setup.

Most of the time I write didactically, as if a short story were a proof. There is some object lesson, or ethical question, I want to leave the reader with. ”Ghostweight” is a good example of this; it doesn’t pretend not to be didactic. So when I build the character and their strengths and weaknesses and motivations, when I build the setting, the majority of it needs to be in support of that point. With a proof, you want to include all the necessary axioms and arguments, but leave out the extraneous. A short story is very similar. I am not sure my math professors would approve of the use I am making of my college education, but there it is.

Where does a short story begin for you—character, setting, idea, somewhere else all together?

Usually ideas or technical challenges. I see something ridiculous, or a combination of things that looks hard to do, and I want to do it. I’m attracted to challenges. I hear all the time that you shouldn’t write in second person, and I just laugh. My first sale, “The Hundredth Question,” was in second person. I’ve written in first person plural just for the hell of it (“Unstringing the Bow”). ”A Vector Alphabet of Interstellar Travel” doesn’t have characters, only civilizations, which was inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. To be fair, there are a lot of stupid ideas out there, I generate my fair share of them, but there is no idea so stupid that a dedicated person can’t make it work. You’ll never know if you’re that particular dedicated person unless you try.

“Iseul’s Lexicon” started because I wanted to write about “tactical linguistics” and then had to make up a magic system that made the phrase meaningful. ”Effigy Nights” started with an image of a paper girl being cut out and brought to life, with a side of using your stories to fight for your freedom in a very literal way. Sometimes the idea starts as a very vague image, and sometimes it’s something specific; with “The Battle of Candle Arc” I wanted to write space opera tactics and steal them off a famous Korean naval battle, the Battle of Myeongnyang. It all depends.

Is there a story or stories in Conservation of Shadows that you consider a turning point or landmark story in your career?

I don’t think of my stories in those terms. Some are better than others, that’s the nature of life, and each one has something that I’d fix if I had it to do over now. Thankfully, no one is making me rewrite the lot; it’s better just to take them one at a time, learn what there is to learn, and move forward.

Unless you mean the first story where I allowed myself to use the F-word, in which case that’s “The Battle of Candle Arc.” This is not quite as stupid as it sounds! I was a teenager when I got my first story acceptance, and moreover I’d gone to a Christian high school, so the idea of using, er, adult profanities took a while.

Given the level of intensity in your stories, are you able to work on more than one at a time?

I’ve usually had some novel draft going at the same time as a short story, but I hate it. I vastly prefer to be working on one piece of fiction at a time because switching over fries my brain, especially when the stories are very different.

I’ve worked on up to three separate things at once and it usually makes me cry; I used to write tie-in game fiction for Alderac Entertainment Group’s Legend of the Five Rings, and one of the reasons I eventually left was the stress of the additional story-writing.

Can you talk a little bit about where some of your characters come from? What goes into the character creation process?

The hard part about character creation is that what I see on my end is very different from what I want the reader to get on their end. To me, a character is just a marionette. Especially for a short story, I just don’t get attached to them. In general, I have some basic plot or conflict, and then I need the character to have certain traits to drive them through the story, so I build the character and, if applicable, culture/setting to facilitate that. I know I have confused beta readers in the past because I will change everything from appearance to gender if I decide it suits the story better. (This leads to odd gendered pronoun changes in some of my drafts when I fail to catch them all in revisions.)

That all sounds dreadfully abstract, so let’s take an example, Lisse from “Ghostweight.” She’s the protagonist, and this is a longer short story (at 8,000 words it might be technically something else, but who’s counting), so I have a better chance of retaining the reader if she’s at least sympathetic. I am personally happy to write horrible people, I frequently find it entertaining, but in this case I really did want the reader to care a little about Lisse. The end goal is for her to go on a genocidal rampage against the Imperium in revenge for her people’s own genocide with the aid and encouragement of a ghost, only to discover that the ghost was partly responsible for the deaths of her people. She starts out deeply outnumbered since people like to root for underdogs and hell, this is a short, I don’t have space for more characters. Some of the setup is already there in the endgame; having your own people almost wiped out is a strong motivation for someone to want to get revenge. She’s emotionally dependent on the ghost because it sort of raised her (in its ghostly way), which makes it more believable that she’s completely blindsided by the possibility that the ghost has its own agenda. By story’s end she’s responsible for an awful lot of deaths, and I could have made her completely monstrous, but she can still recognize what she’s done if someone reframes the scenario for her. It’s the fact that she remains capable of moral awareness that makes her maybe a little sympathetic even at the very end.

What are some of the challenging parts of short fiction writing for you? And what comes more easily?

I can’t write short fiction with any great frequency, although I wish I could. But it’s not all bad. Once I have the idea and a basic outline, I can turn out the words. I have bipolar disorder and one of the few useful things that has come out of it is that I now know dead certain that I can be depressed out of my mind and still turn out 250 words a day, or better, five days of the week. 250 words a day is not huge, but it is a hell of a lot better than 0; that’s just basic math. Moreover, I have learned that if I set the goal low I will usually overshoot because I start wanting to write extra.

I also struggle with this thing where you have to write stories that are comprehensible. I have this ridiculous irrational fear of writing stories that are too obvious. It’s quite rare that someone says to me, “Yoon, everything in that story was too easy to understand”! Whereas people will tell me that I have obfuscated too much. I need to get over my reluctance to explain things.

On the plus side, I am much better at finishing stories than I used to be. Back in high school and college, I’d just start writing an opening and stall out because I had no idea where I was going. These days I am smarter about how my brain works. I don’t even commit to a story unless I know how it begins, how it ends, and have a rough idea of the plot in between. For me, knowing how the story ends is especially critical. Once I have that I can usually figure out the other stuff.

Paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, word by word, there’s so much beauty in your prose. How much editing do you do and what sort of editing—cutting, adding, small tweaks, major over-hauls?

Oh, all of the above! Everything’s fair game. Sometimes I write a rough and I’m sure it’s pretty clean, but if I have doubts I send for beta readers. I am grateful to all of mine. God knows I need them. My rough drafts are hilarious: enormous plot holes, characters dropping out, awkward phraseology, too much assonance, you name it. But that’s fine. I like editing, because it means I’m done with the damn rough and I can stop thinking about generating raw words and start thinking about making existing words work.

What’s next for you?

I have been revising a space opera novel, because the desire of my heart is to write big space battles. Or even little space battles, I’m not picky. I have a female captain who’s been ordered to capture an impregnable space fortress and who is being advised by a four-hundred-year-old undead tactician who’s out to get her, you know how that goes. I have no idea whether this will work out, but there’s only one way to find out. Wish me luck!

Any parting words?

I have a daughter, and one of the things I never thought about when I started writing is what I would do about this situation, which is when my daughter comes up to me and wants to read what I’m working on. She’s young enough that most of my stories are not appropriate for her. I have had to say, “This story is not for little children!” a lot of times! Of course, by the time she’s old enough, she’ll just find having a writer parent embarrassing. Anyway, it amuses me.

About the Author

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

Another Word:
The Singularity is Dead. Long Live the Singularity!

Craig DeLancey

The Singularity has become an essential trope of science fiction: we shall one day cross a threshold of technological progress, when artificial superintelligences are created, and these in turn will be capable of creating other artificial minds of even greater intelligence, resulting in an accelerated acceleration of innovation. New technologies and scientific discoveries will follow with unpredictable, incomprehensible speed.

Some see a frightening future in this prospect, where we unaugmented humans are left dizzily watching the world rush off without us. Others, like Ray Kurzweil, put their every dream and hope into this narrative, proclaiming that immortality is just on the other side of the next tech bubble. Take your vitamins, don’t smoke, and you’ll live long enough to be immortal. But both narrative poles, and all the gradations between them, overlook a fundamental problem: the Singularity has come and gone. It was born in 1900 and it died in 1936.

To see this, we need to reflect for a moment on the fact that the concept of the Singularity assumes a very special, very optimistic view of mathematical reasoning. A view that is provably false. A view that is known among mathematicians and logicians as “Hilbert’s Dream.”

In 1900, the mathematician David Hilbert gave an address at the Second International Congress of Mathematicians. The auspicious year inspired Hilbert to strive for an inspirational talk, one that looked ahead to the new century and called upon mathematicians to accomplish great things. Hilbert presented ten unsolved problems in his talk, and later published these along with thirteen others. Hilbert’s Twenty-Three Problems were wildly successful. As Hilbert hoped, they inspired generations of mathematicians, and—best of all—many of these problems were solved in the Twentieth Century.

Implicit in two of the Problems were very general demands for all mathematical reasoning. The Second Problem called for a proof of the consistency of arithmetic. We call reasoning consistent if it is not possible with that reasoning to prove something and also prove its denial. Hilbert was asking that we prove that arithmetic could never yield a contradiction. If we had such a proof, then we could know that our reasoning could never go wrong. For example, we could know that our reasoning would never give us a proof that 2+2=5, along with our everyday proofs that 2+2=4.

Hilbert’s Tenth Problem addresses a technical question with diophantine equations. But implicit in this question, and explicit in some of his later lectures, is another, very general demand: to construct an effective method that will check any proof in logic or arithmetic, and tell us whether that proof is valid. This is sometimes called decidability, because what he was asking is whether we can have a mechanical procedure or algorithm to decide if a given proof is correct.

A dynamic, brilliant, and optimistic man, Hilbert was fed up with the popular strain of mysticism sweeping Europe at the time. We cannot know had become a catchphrase, a rallying cry of lazy obfuscators. In response, Hilbert responded that We can know and we must know and we will know. And this is captured in his dream: together, decidability and consistency would mean that all the theorems of arithmetic would be available to us, and we could be confident that all those theorems are true. Only time and memory would constrain our search for the answers to all our arithmetic problems. Extend these results to other branches of mathematics, and all the fruits of reason would be ours to command.

Why does this matter to the Singularity? Consider what the proponents of the Singularity imagine. A computer of immense speed and memory is created. Some breakthrough in software gives it intelligence. So what does it do? If the Singularity fantasy is correct, the supercomputer reasons out the next steps in science and mathematics, enabling it to solve new scientific problems, including the problem of creating more powerful artificial intelligences. Such reasoning must be consistent and effective, if it is to accomplish this end. After all, we are supposing that from reasoning alone, the supercomputer solves the problem of how to create ever more intelligent offspring, and other technological marvels. Hilbert’s Dream must be realized, if our superintelligence is going to be capable of igniting the Singularity.

Leap now from 1900 to the year 1930. A young, little known logician named Kurt Gödel gave a talk at a conference on the theory of knowledge. Godel was arguably the greatest logician who ever drew breath. He had a wily, frighteningly creative mind, prone to paranoia, which always led him to the most extreme questions: questions about the nature of truth, of infinity, of time.

The talk was sparsely attended, and most of the audience had no idea what was happening before them. For the young Gödel demonstrated the most audacious trick of logic ever performed: he showed how to turn mathematical formulas into numbers, on which one can then perform further mathematics.The result is that Gödel developed a technique to use mathematics to describe itself.

Gödel then revealed what is today called a Gödel Sentence. In arithmetic it is possible to construct a sentence that means, This sentence is not provable. The consequences are stunning: if this sentence can be proved, arithmetic is inconsistent (because it would have proved a falsehood). If this sentence cannot be proved, then it is true, and thus there are truths of arithmetic that cannot be proved—a property we call incompleteness.

Most of us hope that arithmetic is consistent. After all, we’ve been doing arithmetic for a long time, eons, and no one ever proved that 2+2=5. So, we conclude optimistically that Gödel has proved that there are truths of arithmetic that cannot be proved. This is why this proof is now called Gödel’s First Incompleteness Theorem.

The theorem generalizes to all of what the rest of us consider mathematics. Furthermore, it has been shown that not just the Gödel Sentence, but other problems of mathematics are unprovable. This is a shocking result: for every mathematical system of significant power, there are truths of that system that we cannot reach.

Gödel later extended his result, in a way that gives an answer to Hilbert’s Second Problem. Gödel proved that we cannot prove the consistency of a mathematical system from within that mathematical system. This is now known as Gödel’s Second Incompleteness Theorem.

An answer to the decidability question came shortly thereafter. In a paper written in 1936 and published in 1937, a young English mathematician named Alan Turing gave us the first formal definition of an algorithm, and in so doing gave us the first formal description of computation.

This is a marvelous accomplishment when you consider that Turing’s paper proved perfect: his description of computation captures exactly what all and any computer can do. And in this 1936 paper, Turing also proved a result as stunning as Gödel’s: there is no effective procedure to determine if another arbitrary procedure is effective. What this means is that there can be no computer program to tell you whether some arbitrary computer program is going to work.

Think of your own experience with software. Sometimes you turn on your computer, open a piece of software, set it to work on some problem, and promptly get the wait symbol—be it a spinning daisy wheel or turning hourglass. You wait, at first patiently, but then with growing annoyance, as the symbol spins and spins. You are confronted with a conundrum: is this program stuck in an infinite loop, or is it working correctly but just taking a long time? Turing proved that you cannot have an effective procedure to answer this question for any arbitrary program. You simply can’t reliably know which situation you are in. Your program may be stuck. Or, it may be working correctly, but working on a hard problem that will take a long while. (My advice, however, is to reboot.)

Some jokingly call Turing’s discovery the Computer Scientist Employment Act, since it means that we cannot replace human programmers with a computer that generates and tests programs. But the result is more general than this. It means that there is no algorithm to find the good algorithms, no one test to test all our reasoning.

Together, these three results topple Hilbert’s Dream. The consequence of Gödel’s First Incompleteness Theorem is that we cannot know if the information that we need to solve some problem is, even if true, provable. We might find that we simply have to assume some answer to the problem before us, if we are going to reason about it. But how do we know if such an assumption is correct? The consequence of Gödel’s Second Incompleteness Theorem is that we cannot know beforehand if such assumptions are correct. We must simply develop our theories and work with them, and if they fail spectacularly, we will back up and start over; but until they do so fail, we won’t be able to predict whether our reasoning is consistent or not. And the consequence of Turing’s Undecidability result is that we have no brute force method to find the answer to our problems, and furthermore when we cannot find the answer to some problem, we cannot know whether this is because of our own failure of imagination, or rather is a consequence of our theory being too weak. And there is no escape route; no matter how smart you are, these theorems still stand in the way.

To return to the Singularity: consider now what these results mean for our lonely supercomputer, as it sits in its humming server farm, planning world domination. If it is going to make faster and smarter versions of itself, what must it do? It must reason out the next steps in scientific development, draw the correct inferences from these, and use these results to develop its ever-more-intelligent children. And how shall it do this? Turing’s result guarantees that there is no effective procedure to just hammer out the conclusion. Gödel’s results guarantee that the machine cannot be sure its reasoning is sound or sufficient for the problem before it. And so the conniving machine must make some hypotheses, test those hypotheses through use, and go back to make more hypotheses when it fails. It must, in other words, go about applying the scientific method and scientific experimentation. And this takes time. Snail time. It takes laboratories, and other resources, down here in the crawling now.

The dream of the Singularity is really an extension of the most persistent, but most unrealistic, of science fiction tropes. This is the trope of the lonely super-productive scientist.

There are endless stories of the sole scientific genius, developing a host of brilliant advances, working alone in his laboratory. We can find examples from every Era. H. G. Wells’ Time Traveler builds a time machine alone in his Victorian shop. The aptly named Lone of Theodore Sturgeon’s, More Than Human orders some parts from the local electronic shop and builds an anti-gravity device in his barn. Ayn Rand’s John Galt has a room in his New York apartment that is filled with world-transforming inventions that he tinkered together when not speechifying. Ted Chiang’s Leon Greco, former computer graphics artist, gets an intelligence boost, and spontaneously discerns how to: hack into FDA databases and understand the scientific papers stored there, write viruses that can penetrate government databases and wipe and rewrite selected information, discover new pattern-matching algorithms, quickly comprehend all the physics he reads and identify easy extensions to it, and so on.

There is a reason that nothing like this ever happens in real life. Yes, sometimes an inventor hits on an innovation, maybe even two, on her own. But our reasoning capabilities are constrained in many ways that ultimately require endless hours of hard slogging through the scientific method, something that can be effectively done only by armies of scientists and engineers openly sharing results. In contrast, these fantasies of the lone scientist producing wild new inventions are just as realistic as would be a fantasy in which Wells’ Time Traveler singlehandedly builds the Eiffel Tower, or John Galt singlehandedly erects the Brooklyn Bridge. Work—be it physical or mental—has important costs and constraints. There just are no free lunches. Even for supercomputers.

Scientific progress appears to have accelerated, and perhaps it will continue to do so. But we are the ones driving this progress, working together in large numbers, and using our computers as valuable time-saving tools. If computers ever become our equals, they will be no better off than we are, laboring with us on the hard work of scientific and mathematical discovery.

I don’t mean to scold. Or, well, maybe I do. I confess that I’m not very fond of the Singularity as SF trope; I fear it counsels passivity, asking us to await the technoreligious rapture. Why exercise or compost, when soon this is all going to be software? But, then, it’s easy to criticize any of our tropes. I should know: I’m one of those writers who throws in faster than light travel because I want to have aliens in my space operas; and I’m one of those writers who has a common galactic language so my aliens can make witty remarks to each other. There are readers who groan and pull their hair when they encounter this kind of thing.

Sometimes a writer gives up realism in one domain in order to realistically explore certain consequences. If a writer wants to explore and exaggerate a radical technology’s effect on a single human being, she might adopt the trope in which that single human being is a genius who, working alone, develops that technology. And if she wants to explore the vertiginous effects of scientific progress, she might introduce the idea of runaway scientific progress, driven by superintelligences, to allow for many encounters with such progress. So let the Singularity thrive as a narrative tool.

But we should all be wary of those selling the message that the Singularity is near, here in the actual world. They are hawking a false dream, one long ago denied us. Artificial intelligences are not alone going to make us live longer or organize our economy or restore our environment or build us spaceships. We’ll have to do all that ourselves.

Let’s get to work.

About the Author

Craig DeLancey is a philosopher and writer. He has published more than twenty short stories, in magazines like Analog, Cosmos, Shimmer, The Mississippi Review Online, and Nature Physics. His work has also appeared, in translation, in Russia and China. His short story “Julie is Three” won the Anlab reader’s choice award last year. He also writes plays, and his plays have had performances and staged readings in New York, Sydney, Melbourne, and in other cities. He has been a finalist for the Heideman Award. He teaches philosophy at the State University of New York at Oswego.

Editor’s Desk:
Day of the Wineberry

Neil Clarke

The Triffids, Biollante, and other infamous plant monsters have a new colleague. Like Biollante, it’s a fast growing invader from Japan, but this one has taken up residence in my backyard. It has whip-like thorny appendages and can be very territorial.

Last month, I made the mistake of stepping too close to its habitat and was summarily punished. Before I could blink, my head was grabbed by the beast and a row of radioactive thorns thrust into my face, right across my still-open eye! [Note: Claims of radioactivity may be exaggerated.]

Yes, your editor, the damage-magnet, was once again thrust into a situation requiring a week-long adventure complete with medical professionals. Five thorn fragments had to be tweezed from my eye and my vision has been slowly recovering since. I’m no longer photo-sensitive, which is great, but I did lose a lot of work time this month. The planned editorial, “Slush Reading as an Educational Opportunity for Children,” was simply too much to tackle and has had to be rescheduled for next month.

Until then feel free to come up with various solutions that would prevent me from attracting further damage. If anyone has a working force field, please contact me.

Award News

Awards excitment continued in April with the announcements of the Ditmar Awards in Australia and the Aurora Awards finalists in Canada. There are always interesting works on their ballots, but this year we took special interest as two of our authors made the list. Congratulations to Thoraiya Dyer, winner of the Ditmar Award for Best Short Story (“The Wisdom of Ants”) and Suzanne Church, nominee for the Aurora Award for Best Short Fiction: English (“Synch Me, Kiss Me, Drop”). This is fantastic news and we are so happy for them.

Later this month, the winners of the Nebula Award will be announced at a ceremony in San Jose, California. I would love to be in attendance and cheer on our four nominees (Helena Bell, Tom Crosshill, Aliette de Bodard and Catherynne M. Valente), but unfortunately, it isn’t possible. In past years, SFWA has broadcast the ceremony, so I hope to tune in and be there in spirit.

Congratulations to all and best of luck!

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, owner of Wyrm Publishing and a 2013 Hugo Nominee for Best Editor (short form). He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.