The Urashima Effect

E. Lily Yu

Leo Aoki awoke with a shudder in the cold green bubble of the ship, nauseated and convinced that he was suffocating. He shoved his way out of the sleep spindle, found his balance, ran his hands through his sweaty hair, checked his bones: all unbroken. Well, then. There was a snaking black tube cuffed to the wall, its other end pointing into the black vacuum of space. He pulled it off its hooks and vomited into it, miserably and gracelessly. The ship’s drivers continued their deep soft hum, unperturbed.

Mission command had advised him against looking outside until he had adjusted to life in the cramped quarters of his bubble. It would unnerve him, they said. Unman him, they meant. It was better not to taste unadulterated loneliness for the first time immediately after opening one’s eyes and throwing up. On prior exploratory flights, several astronauts emerging from their long suspension had suffered heart attacks or gone mad, too delicate to withstand the double shock of loneliness and life in deep space.

Leo opened the six portholes orthogonal to the ship’s trajectory and stared out into a perfectly empty, perfectly dark sky. Blackness as pure and rich as squid ink looked through the portholes at him. He felt small and cold and very much alone.

He had to climb a thin ladder to reach the upper window, the one that faced forward to Ryugu-jo. It opened onto what looked, at first, like a globular cluster, a fistful of diamonds dumped onto a bolt of black velvet. He was looking at all the stars and galaxies that surrounded the ship, gathered by aberration into a glittering disc eight degrees across. It was a strange, beautiful, thoroughly unpleasant sight.

He clambered down again and screwed shut the lower portholes. He did not want the darkness looking in. It frayed his soul. He went to the monitor and played a game of chess to steady his nerves. The system informed him that he had been asleep for three years. The ship had arrived at its maximum travel speed of .997c, and soon it would flip its orientation and decelerate until they reached their target, Ryugu-jo in the Alpha Lyrae system. His wife, a prominent astrophysicist, had discovered and named the planet in graduate school. Leo lost his bishops, then his rooks, one after another, then the game. The ship’s computer was polite about his loss.

Thinking of Esther, he brought up and played the recording she had made for him before departure. They were all required to have sixty hours of audio recordings by family and friends for viewing on the last leg of their journey, to keep them sane and functional in their isolation. He had made a recording for her, too. He had told her loved her in every possible way for five hours, filled three hours with good jokes and one hour with bad, and he had sung to her and read aloud to her, crouched over the microphone, imagining her face as she listened to him in perfect solitude, surrounded by darkness, flying toward him.

When her voice floated crisply into his ear, he felt his clenched muscles relax, as they always did when he was with her.

“Leo,” she said. He could hear her smile. “You’ll be up by now. I hope it wasn’t too bad. They say it’s usually horrible. Your hair’s probably a mess. I know you’ll look stunning anyway.”

He had to stop to gulp down water from a tube. The nearness of her voice, like a touch on his skin, sparked a few tears. They had met in graduate school in Berkeley, both hyphenated Americans with a preponderance of Japanese in front of the dash. He had preferred solitude as a student, working out alone his pale theorems on a blackboard, but she had insisted on the importance of family dinners, friends, colleagues, collaboration, a vast net of relationships drawn around her own lively, glimmering insights. He was fifth-generation, with great-grandparents who were interned at Heart Mountain; she was third-generation and inquisitive and knowledgeable about the cultural inheritance he had never claimed. He was in physics, a different department, but they had taken classes together and she had always scored near the top. She had fascinated him.

“First I will tell you the story of Urashima Taro.”

“Long ago in a dusty fishing village near Edo there lived a fisherman whose name was Urashima Taro. His hands were hard and cracked from work and his skin was brown from sun, but he was a sweet, kind man who worked all day and dreamed strange dreams at night. Like you, in some ways. He fished to feed himself and his elderly parents as well, and the sea always provided them with enough to get by.

“One day he heard a few of the village children screaming with laughter. He went over to see what had excited them so, and found them kicking a small turtle back and forth.

“ ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ Urashima exclaimed.

“ ‘The turtle is ours,’ the children said. ‘We caught it. We’ll do what we wish with it.’

“ ‘Let me buy it from you,’ Urashima said, and as he spoke he took coins from his belt and held them out. ‘Can’t you find something better than that turtle to play with?’

“The children looked at each other. Then one of them gave Urashima the turtle and took the coins, and they ran off together, happy to have gotten the better part of the deal.

“Urashima took the frightened turtle, which was no bigger than one of his spread hands, and of a beautiful mottled green-brown color, down to the water. ‘There you go,’ he said, putting it back into the sea. ‘Be safe, and be careful, and don’t let them catch you again. I might not be around next time.’

“The turtle rowed off, and Urashima went to fish.”

Leo forced himself to stop the recording there. He would ration her voice like water in a desert to get through the impossibly long stretches of darkness. The computer indicated a list of maintenance tasks that were not urgent but that had waited until he had awoken, and he went down the list, accomplishing what he could.

After a week, it became easier to live in the narrow green bubble with a jewel-pile of stars above his head. Tubes for all his physical needs were lashed to the walls around him. The computer was loaded with a decent-sized library, a handful of mindless games, a month’s worth of music, and software for data analysis, although any research he did on the ship would take another twenty-five years to transmit to Earth, which was plenty of time for another researcher to work out and publish the same conclusions independently.

He inspected the folded equipment in the bottom sections of the ship, self-extending solar panels and self-assembling buildings with crystalline panes and honeycombed layers, all of it intact despite the rigors of the journey. He cleaned the retracting landers and triple-checked the fuel tank and fuel lines. He played sixteen games of chess and won eight of them, five games of Go, four hours of Snake, and four hours of Tetris, and he read through a significant chunk of the first volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica, as well as two drab spy thrillers and a romance novel. He supposed that he had earned a few more minutes of Esther’s voice.

“The next day,” she said softly into his ear, “Urashima was out fishing in his boat when he heard someone call his name. He looked everywhere but the other boats were out of sight.

“ ‘Urashima,’ someone said. ‘Urashima!’

“Then he looked down and saw an enormous brown turtle, its face deeply wrinkled with wisdom.

“ ‘Sir,’ Urashima said. ‘Are you calling my name?’

“ ‘I am,’ the turtle said. ‘Yesterday you rescued a small turtle from children who would have killed it. The turtle was the Sea-King’s daughter. Out of gratitude she sends me to invite you to her father’s palace at the bottom of the sea.’

“Smiling, he said to the turtle, ‘That is very kind of her, and it is good of you to invite me on your mistress’s behalf, but how should I go to a palace at the bottom of the sea?’

“ ‘A very simple matter,’ the turtle said. ‘Climb onto my back and I will take you there.’

“So Urashima, wondering at his own boldness, climbed onto the turtle’s back and held tight to the slick hard plates. They plunged down together into the sea, leaving behind the boat, the creamy waves of the surface, and the sun. Deeper and deeper they swam, past dazzling silver fish and jelly-eyed squid. Urashima watched everything pass with astonishment.

“Deep in the black-blue depths of the sea, where kelp grew in thick forests and monstrous fish hunted their prey with lanterns, the turtle turned his creased face to Urashima and said, ‘Look ahead, we are approaching the Palace of the Sea King.’

“Urashima peered through the water. He saw first the graceful slopes of roofs like a bird about to take flight, and then a high, imposing gate of coral carved over with poetry.

“ ‘O!’ he said. ‘It is a beautiful place.’ And then, still full of amazement, he began to feel ashamed of his fisherman’s clothes.”

Leo stopped the recording and wiped the water from his eyes. Esther was following him on another flight, the Delta Aquarid, scheduled to launch two years after his. It would be a long wait. He would land and build a suitable home and laboratory for them on the arid, glistening plains of Ryugu-jo. Then he would stand in his suit under the alien stars, looking for a brightening light.

He read several classic novels and philosophical texts to pass the next few days and exercised on the stringy, wiry contraption collapsed into one wall. The long hibernation had melted the muscle from him and congealed the quick currents of his mind, but he had to be alert, intelligent, and at his peak physical condition when he arrived. He was supposed to be disciplined. He was not supposed to replay his wife’s voice over and over, with longing and anxiousness. So he selected his parents’ recordings.

“Your mother and I are proud of you. I know we said goodbye already, but please know that you have been everything we could have expected of you. We will be watching for your signal if we’re still around.”

“Leo? You must be awake now. And hungry. Remember to eat well and dress warm. You used to work for days without eating. You can’t do that now.”

He bowed his head. Their voices echoing in the ship’s green bubble made their absences as heavy and palpable as river stones. He had said goodbye exuberantly, distracted by other preparations. Shivering, he flicked to his wife.

“—But the turtle said, ‘You must not worry, Urashima Taro.’ And the high, gleaming gates, each fashioned out of one single fan of coral, parted to let them pass.

“Within, robed fish bowed to welcome them, murmuring their greetings to the turtle and their welcome to Urashima Taro. He passed through gilded halls where water-light flickered on the walls, past lark-voiced women covered in scales and scarlet octopi and crabs with furious faces on their backs, into a chamber that shimmered like the interior of an abalone.

“There, on two thrones, sat the Dragon King and his daughter Otohime, who was lovelier than moonlight on water. She came down from her throne and said to Urashima, ‘I was the little turtle you saved yesterday, and I am grateful. I am yours if you will have me.’

“Urashima assented, of course, and all of them were led to the banquet laid out in his honor. Then began what were the happiest three years of his life, in which each day was better than the last.

“Toward the end of the three years, though, he began thinking melancholy thoughts about his aged parents on land. How were they getting by without their son? They ought to know how fortunate he was.

“He told Otohime about his wish to see his parents again, and her face grew long and sad. She tried to dissuade him, but he became more and more desirous of seeing his parents and his home.

“ ‘Please, let me go,’ he said. ‘For a few days only, and then I will come back to you and spend the rest of my life here in peace and contentment.’

“Sorrowfully, Otohime made arrangements for his return. At the last, she placed in his hands a small box tied with silk. ‘Take this with you,’ she said. ‘It will keep you safe, only you must be careful never to open it.’

“Urashima promised to obey. The great brown turtle who had first brought him to the Palace of the Sea King again gave him his back to sit upon, and soon they came to the shore near his village.

“But what had happened?

“Urashima found himself in an unfamiliar place. He recognized some features of the shoreline, but the houses were all different and crowded together. He could not find his old home.

“Distraught, he asked a passerby if he knew where his parents might be living. The young man, not unsympathetic, took Urashima to his own grandmother, whose knowledge was vast. The old woman looked up at him hesitantly when he put his question to her.

“ ‘I have heard of two people with those names,’ she told him. ‘They had a son named Urashima who drowned on a clear day. Only his empty boat was found. But that was hundreds of years ago, when this town was a scattering of fishing huts by the sea.’

“Urashima left with fear and confusion in his heart. He was utterly lost in the strange town, and could not tell where the turtle had brought him to shore. Nor did he know how to return to the Palace of the Sea King, because he had forgotten to ask.

“ ‘After some time, though, he remembered the box that Otohime had given him, which he had promised not to open. Because he could think of nothing else, he untied the silken cord that held it shut.

“An enormous white cloud blew out of the box and enveloped him. All his years overtook him at once. His hair went white as snow and his skin drooped and folded. His bones gave way. And there Urashima died.

“Time dilation is also called the Urashima Effect, after the legend,” Esther said conversationally into his ear. “I have told you this story so you would have time to calm down and clear your mind after awakening, and so that it would be easier for you to understand what I have to say. If I know you, you’ve saved up my recording for several days. You’ve been eating well and exercising. You should be physically and mentally stable by now. You are strong enough to hear what I have to say.

“Listen, my love. You were put to sleep a few weeks before launch, and while you were asleep the US and Japan came to the brink of war. Two cyber attacks on a dam and a power plant were traced back to Ichigaya, and three American citizens were arrested in Seattle. There is talk about rounding up those with Japanese blood again.

“It was decided that the Delta Aquarid would not be launched. Not next year. Not ever. The Ryugu-jo collaboration has been scrapped as being too dangerous, given the rising tensions between the two countries. It will be replaced by a unilateral program that will not have the funding for my flight.

“But they decided that you would go anyway. To show our unfaltering national courage in the face of threats and our gracious commitment to peacetime cooperation.

“I protested. This was my project, after all. They would not listen. They refused to stop your launch, and they refused to continue mine. It was suggested that if I did not put national interests ahead of my personal desires that I and my family would be the first to be removed to internment camps.

“We knew that this was possible, but we did not think it likely.

“They say you will not awaken until three years from now. In those three years you will have traveled twelve point five light years, and thirteen years will have passed on Earth. Your parents may be dead by the time you are listening to this. I will be forty-nine. You, my love, you will be only thirty-six, traveling away from me at close to the speed of light.”

Leo had frozen as he listened.

“I do not know who I will be by the time you hear this,” she said. “Thirteen years is a long time.

“But right now, right now I am your wife. I love you, Leo. I am angry and afraid. I broke into your ship’s systems and altered these recordings so that you would know what happened, why I am not following you, and what your choices are. From the beginning these ships were designed for automatic evacuation in case of ship failure while the astronauts were in suspension. Specifically, your sleep spindle is equipped with an independent propulsion system and its own fuel stores. I have modified the program slightly, so that if you choose to do so, you can eject from the main ship in your spindle. Enter the manual override silkbox to divert the main fuel supply to the spindle, and look for a release lever by the hatch. It will take you a very long time to return, twenty Earth years at least, but you can go back into deep sleep, and the spindle will bring you safely home.

“The impulse of the spindle’s disconnection will throw off the calculations for the ship’s landing. There is some margin for error, but the engineers never considered a late-flight evacuation. The ship and its equipment will crash on Ryugu-jo. There will be no habitat and no lab on the planet until another Earth government sees fit to send the next scientific expedition.

“I do not know if I will be alive when you come back. If I am, I will be old. My hair will be gray. I will not be the wife you left behind. I will not be the person you remember.

“But at this moment I love you. At this moment I say: when I am seventy years old, I will watch the sky for you.

“If you do not return,” Esther said, “if you choose to fly onward to Ryugu-jo and work there alone—I would understand. We have always both chased the sense of discovery. We have always been driven by the hunger for knowing new things. Your first communications will arrive on Earth fifty years after you’ve left, and your work will be groundbreaking, even if you never see its effects.

“My other audio logs are intact. I went and dug up all the records of your great-grandparents and your father’s side of the family. If you fly onward, I will tell you, in the rest of the time I have, about how your great-grandfather met your great-grandmother in Heart Mountain during the war. I will tell you about your family and the different places your parents grew up, and where your ancestors came from. I will grow roots for you, so that you are not adrift and alone in the dark. You will know where you came from. You will know where you are going.”

Her voice clicked off. Leo shut his eyes and saw the green ship and its precious cargo of instruments and electronics smashing into the dusty surface of Ryugu-jo. He thought of the lonely beacon he had been sent to build, which would beam back to Earth the things he had learned that no one else knew. He remembered precisely and vividly what it felt like to kiss Esther on her warm pink mouth.

He walked over to his sleep spindle, crouched, and ran his fingers along its smooth interior. They stopped on something that protruded from the wall, and he saw it then: a smooth silver bar barely extending into the sleeping space. If he typed in the command, if he climbed in and shut the hatch behind him, if he yanked on the lever—

The portholes all around him were dark and expressionless. Only the top window, pointing toward Alpha Lyrae, showed him a heap of converging stars.

They were traveling at .997c. He was thirty-six years old. It was only three years to Ryugu-jo;.

Leo began another game of chess with the computer, and drew black.

About the Author

E. Lily Yu was the recipient of the 2012 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her short fiction has appeared in the Boston Review, Kenyon Review Online, Apex Magazine, The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, and Eclipse Online, and has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards.

This is Why We Jump

Jacob Clifton

When he will be gentled, I call him little starfish.

I can curl myself around him like an ammonite, and call him little names, and he will smile. Arms and legs getting bigger every day. A little starfish, crowding me out. It is my name for him, but only when he will be gentled can I say. It happens less and less.

Humans came here for mining. Oberon, moon of the ice giant Uranus, of the star Sol, the sun we never see. Half ice, half stone: A core 65% of Earth’s moon in size, wrapped in a skin of ice. They built over the ice, chopped out level on level, until it was gone, and they lived upon the surface. And then down again, and again. Now the only bit of moon not cored or carved away sits in a glass case, at the center of our moon. Everything else is steel, and gold, anything too heavy to cart back to Jove Station. A city deep as she is wide.

My father is a district head of one of the zones running from surface to core, but I haven’t seen him in ten years. My sister leaves me notes to meet, sometimes, in a vent we knew as kids. She buys us dinner, says Father’s getting on. She has a Name, free travel between zones.

But I have a world, built in the bones of a moon. It belongs to me. My moon, my starfish, and no name at all. We live in the in-between places, the little man and I. In vents and hatches, corridors unmarked by our passing.

What they don’t understand is that a world like this goes all the way down, spikeshaped, down to core. They live on the surface, like a world is a bubble. Like they’re back home. They call themselves colonists, as though they’re here to save us. We call them refugees, because we know they’re running from something. My sister married one. He has business and travel and friends. One I would like, she says. She says we should meet.

On third days we wait for a shift-change in a spa about half down coreward, one that doesn’t see much offworld action, and we take our showers. Sweat-stink; that grav-line smell in your hair. He’s been asking to run with big boys, like the gang I first ran with, when I fell through the cracks and into the moon. Scary, violent and wonderful. His smile when he talks about them. I wash and think. He’s seven. I was seventeen when I dropped out, so I think he’s seven.

I found him half-hidden behind a fan close to core, just tiny. I felt trapped with my people, sometimes. Running the same gang ,the names they give each other. I thought, “I can retire, climb into the walls and live. Nobody will hate me, nobody will follow. They know I’m fast and I am strong. They respect me. But they won’t be sad either, when I go.” I found him then, that day, and that was proof. And I was right. They don’t bother us and they don’t miss us either.

This businessman, the refugee. I think about moving back up, up to the surface: Colonial, like her. To sit in Father’s chairs again, and to hear his dreams. Sovereign political power to Oberon herself, control over methane ice and labor and clones; to bring it all together under one flag. I don’t know if I could sit still for all that, but I would like to meet this man, I think. So I wash myself and I look at my shaven head in the mirrors all around and I tell the boy, yes.

Yes, he can run with the knife boys. He can go and see. For a little bit at first, he can be away from me. And if he is not where I tell him, at the end of an hour, the experiment will have failed, and we will negotiate again in a year.

My sister says it’s what father should have done. Let me off the leash a little bit. I’d see both things, both worlds, like she does. Even young, she was able. Still in school she’d come away, weekends or longer, running vents and shafts, tops of elevator cars, down the well to core, stolen showers. Sitting in the sounds. Near the bubble you can hear the magnetic field for space junk and solar rays; near the core you get the gravity sounds. Oberon sings to you everywhere.

His favorite thing this year is to climb past the bubble, right at the obsidian ceiling of their sky’s false night, so his ghostly reflection seems to stand on the surface of our moon. Proud as if he owns it, he stands, feet to secret feet. Little starfish on top of the world. Arms and legs crowding out the night, the stars. Little man bigger every day, little beast, asking for a name I can’t give.

I call him little brother, he wants to call me Mother. I call him little man, he wants to call me Wife. I call him little starfish, he wrinkles up his nose: When he wants names for things he doesn’t want to play, but to be serious. To name them For All Time. For himself he wants a name like knife boys have, Torc or Jam or Siz. And to shout it, everywhere he goes.

Sometimes his wildness I think comes from me. Sometimes I think it’s how he was born. But one thing neither I nor my sisters ever was, is a boy. Do all little boys want this? This violence and empire? Father did, but Father’s a special man. He wanted it more than anybody else in 36, wants it more than them still. Perhaps my son is special like that, too.

I dream he unites the gangs in the walls, each and all. Bends them to his service. When I wake I am not proud, nor really afraid: Just crowded, face pushed gently into the wall, by a starfish.

Do we need names? I ask. Would we know each other any better? He shakes his head, as if wiser than me. We don’t need them, says the little man. We have them. We must find them!

My sister calls me Deals, the name they called me in my knife days. I didn’t like it then, nor now when she does it, but she at least must call me something.

I have a feeling he tests himself with this, in his mind: If one day he’ll be old enough to call me this name, to shock me with it, to test the lines and limits of our little two-man gang. Biding his time. Just as I did, before I found a crack and dropped straight down.

But I didn’t fall, I told her, so many times when we were young. Before my boy, and her colonist husband. I didn’t fall, I was not pushed. I jumped. I jump every, every day.

I leave him, then, in the care of my closest knife: a boy who fell into the same crack I did. We ran together. I suppose we were in charge. I thought he loved me, I didn’t want to know for sure: It would only open up another crack for later. But if we didn’t say it, I’d never have to jump. It comes in handy.

“As if he were our own,” he swears, and looks at me a second like a broken thing. Like I’m something he was promised, by the ice-skinned goddesses of Oberon, and yet denied.

Our own, he says. I wonder who is the we.

They’re only sad as long as they remember to be. And then you go away from them, and the movie goes back to being about somebody else. Whoever is the we today.

“One hour, brother,” I say to the boy, and he nods, already embarrassed. Already reaching up and back for the hand of this knife boy, without even looking. Hungry, to touch his first man.

“One hour, or the experiment’s a failure?”

He nods, he blushes, he races away. Knife trailing behind, laughing with joy at him. The fierceness in his tiny self.

“But he isn’t ours,” I want to say.

He isn’t even mine.

This the first meeting, I said, would be short. Just coffee. I must dress myself like one of them, like a human. We’re a legitimate political bloc, down in moon where they don’t know to go; he’ll know what I am. But I can’t come dressed in a knife’s jumpsuit with gashed knees: Into a dress. Legs pulled tight together, knees knocked. How the boy would laugh.

“Forty minutes is all I can spare, but I am pleased to meet you. Regine speaks the world of you.”

He shakes my hand, his face near unreadable. I can see desire.

I have forgotten why we’re here. Perhaps to make my sister happy; perhaps he is a new crack. A new way to jump: Outward. Away from the core. He would probably call it up.

“Your sister’s husband has been great. We’re working on a merger, actually. He’s been instrumental.”

I ask. He wants me to ask.

“I’m glad you asked. We’re interested in helping transition Oberon to a manufacturing plant. The bottom’s fallen out of mining across the Uranus orbital, it’s all heading inward, to the ice. So we’re looking to build support, here among the people, and your district 36 has been . . . ”

Not mine, not mine. I am not my father’s, I am not the gate to this. I am mother to a starfish, and even that can be a goad. I think of dragging my sister backwards through a vent. Not a long distance, just enough to make her scream, as when we were girls. Just to show.

“But of course that’s not why your sister . . . We’re already on quite good terms with 36, and as I understand you’re not a citizen proper now, you’re a . . . I’m afraid of stepping on the  . . . terminology? I want to learn.”

There is no terminology. No words in the in-between. Put names where they don’t belong and suddenly you own that place. I shave my name off every day. Bleed if I had to.

“Runners, usually. Decentralized anarchist collectives, in the unused spaces. Ask a hundred of us, get a hundred answers. Our fellow Auberans call us runners. I say Nameless.”

“It’s a very unique economy you’ve built. Working in concert with the . . . ”

“Everybody chose. You bring with you this idea of somebody being on top and somebody oppressed, but that’s  . . . something you bring with you.”

“Might I ask . . . ?”

“Ask a hundred runners. Me, I found it too difficult to live only on the surfaces of things. It’s not a planet or a moon anymore, it’s a city. Deep as she is wide. You think in two dimensions—lots of people do, my sister, my father—I just never did. It made me feel . . . Compressed.”

More words maybe than I’ve said in two weeks. More on this subject, certainly, than in seven years. He stares at me, this man. I still wouldn’t know him in a crowd. That puffiness around their eyes. New gravity.

“I think that’s beautiful.”

“I think it’s correct.”

He doesn’t begrudge me my tone, or smell, my quick turns of the head. Not that turned on, either. They look a way sometimes, as at a thing they never saw before and must own, put a name on. Must crowd into, atop, against. But he’s not one of those either. He’s like Regine’s man, I think: Complacent. Comfortable enough to find other ways fascinating, without wanting to devour them necessarily. To colonize.

“ . . . Cloning. You’ve done more on your moon in ten years than the rest of the Solar in a hundred, and those tanks sit fallow. Empty. A manufacturing base with self-sustaining crops and a workforce bolstered—a gene pool, randomized to order—by your dad’s clone facilities. A new world.”

“We don’t turn in upon ourselves, like an ingrown hair. It’s sustainable already.”

“Not if those jobs convert to manufacturing, it’s not. They’re on the other moons. Looking into adaptations for the ice giant himself next. A net of satellites, supplying everything a world would need. The next Earth down there, and Oberon the jewel in the sky. You have the greatest engineers coming in on every shuttle . . . Do you follow the news at all?”

I don’t giggle, but I chuckle. Of course I do, I’m my father’s daughter. Before I jumped I was one of them, one great scientific mind in a long line of them, all pressing down. He says this as if I am lucky. I am not lucky, nor am I unlucky: It’s not relevant anymore. Her gravity is my blood, her ice is my skin. I am a native. But he does not begrudge, and this shines in him. His eyes wonder, shine, and we are equals; neither colonist nor colonized, neither refugee nor refuge.

I could love him, I think gingerly. I need more information but I could love him.

With five minutes left—who could say what the starfish would do, if I came late—I’m unexcited to leave. His color rises when I ask to see him again; desire hardens into diamond. Whatever it is they want, I’ve done it. At least enough for more.

Across the zocalo of the third, down to the vent at the arena, quick loop up over the skyway and again, to a cleaner chute. Cozy old jumpsuit from a stash locker, and the long drop down, coreward, to the hollow place where we meet. Phyto paint on the walls, neoprimitive signs, in a hoax language. He’s filthy, but all his limbs are there. All the arms and legs of him.

Did he have fun, with the big boys? Oh my, indeed. Cheeks ruddy, eyes glossy; we’ll sleep like ammonites, curled into infinity. Did he run, and fight with gravity? He shows me a tiny scab that won’t even scar. Were the knife boys nice to him? Ever so.

They gave him a book of funny animals and a tiny blunted knife of bone, and fed him on sugar and—I was hoping, I knew he’d adore it—racked his arms and legs in grav boots, tossed him in the well. He floated up, and up, he says. Core a million billion feet up, starfished, looking down on the one piece of real moon: He says it glimmered, like a star. He means its plastic show box.

“I’ve only ever done that once. The grav.” Was I too afraid? I can’t say yes, but I can’t say no either.

“I like to be in control of myself,” I say. “My parts.”

He says the gravity, through the rig, was like waves in port station. The pool’s free for them, my sister used to take us there. “You could feel it passing up, lifting,” he says. “You could ride it. It was my beast.”

He shows me a horse in his picture book: “Me and the wind. Gravity. Looking down on a star, like it was mine.” Not controlling him, he means. I’m too weak for being afraid, he means, when for him it was his beast.

He points to the letters, “H-O-R-S-E,” and looks proudly up. I smile, but he’s known how to read since he was four. They set him down with this book and they thought, “That hermit girl won’t care for letters and words and names. This little man, oh, without even those.” Imagine how pleased they were with themselves, when he read it back to them. Like they’d done it! And so quick, too. This is why I left the knives. This is why I cut my hair, move fast. If they want to be like them, just surfaces, why jump at all?

We do wake curled. He will be gentled. I run my fingers through his curls, and he recounts his adventures. In just an hour, the world and stars opened to him. Some of the stories are like dreams, others are parables. Some of them, I think, even actually happened.

He tests the skin around a bruise: This idea of Names, of legitimizing. The knives wanted to give him a nickname, something unlike little starfish, little man, but my friend their leader knew better than to let them. He said one day my boy would pick his own, and oh, the romance of that!

He spends the better part of ten minutes just saying words. Some real, some real enough that you could see how he found his way to them. Testing them out upon his tongue. Against my ears.

“ . . . Your friend says you have no love for Names. You run from them like a breach.”

He’s right, I say. He said that just right. I miss him. If I had no little man, I would miss him more. Still, I do.

“When you think of the best name, little starfish, you will know it. Everywhere in you. Until then, you needn’t hurry or feel pressured. It’s not because I hate Names, or knives, or anything in our whole entire world. It loves us, as I love you. Oberon. She wraps herself, curls herself around us.”

He nods, distracted. “STARFISH,” he pronounces, flipping through his book. Gleaming up at me: It is him.

“Cut off an arm, another one grows. Forever and ever. Cut ’em all off, what have you got?”

A moon, cored and mined until it’s a satellite of steel and heavy metals. A solid city, in the skeleton of a moon that was. A skin of ice. But the same name, always: Home.

“Once the arms grow back, he’s new,” I say. “Something new and wonderful. He remembers what he was, but he grows and grows again.”

“Does it hurt?”

Always. Every time. But he grows, nevertheless.

Days after showers we go down core, to see the Wanderers. He is sometimes thoughtful, sometimes a pisspot, when we go. But I know he loves to hear them too.

They call themselves Those Who Wander; for whom everywhere is home. Not specific to Oberon, they do have a major outpost here. They provide medical care; they’re advocates in places we can’t yet go; mostly they pray. I haven’t ever spoken to one, but there’s no point: Their oath says they don’t stay anywhere longer than a year. Local. On Oberon, that’s about a fortnight.

I love them, their ceremonies and litanies, the solace of their words, but I would never join them. I have found what they are looking for: Everywhere is already home. The little starfish is, I am, all Oberon is home already. They’re refugees from everywhere who think they’re colonists of everywhere. They own the galaxy, it doesn’t own them. I couldn’t live that way.

But this for them is only true in practice. In theory, they worship the God of those who choose no God. His are the ones are who cannot hide, cannot deny, cannot decide: This part, I like. He watches over those that don’t care to be watched. He watches anyway. Their worship, then, is nothing at all. Nothing but the most beautiful music.

“Those who wander are the lost,” they sing. “Those who wander are not lost.”

And then a rising crescendo, in four- and five- and sometimes eight-part harmony:

“All who wander are not lost. All of His are never lost . . . ”

I am a moon, hollowed out and filled with gold. It is too much.

A tiny starfish arm reaches up to my tears; he whispers softly, “Little sister. Oh, little mother.”

“ . . . All those who live were never lost.”

Our second date, he calls it this, is redoubled: Four hours, starfish safely in the care of knives. No refugee talk, not yet: This is for his betterment. There will be a time for overnights, knives in the dark, secrets of men. I have no wish to impede him. For now, four hours and we meet back up. And if we do not, the experiment is over.

My sister’s gift brings flowers, a smile. I am wearing that dress again, pulling at the hem. I couldn’t bring flowers back to the berth; he’d laugh and laugh at me. Like bringing home a cup of water to keep as a pet, he’d say. I have taught him to have nothing, that the world is his. I think he believes it.

“But where does it go from there?” This man wants to know. “If this society is self-sustaining, and I honestly think it might be, with a population limited to this size, will there always be runners? Always Nameless?”

I have no idea. I have no good rationale for any one of the others. What would make a man, a woman, jump. We don’t have one goal or want, neither needs nor angers. We wouldn’t be who we are.

“You’ve said it, I think. A population limited not only to this size, but to familiar shapes of living. To the bubble, leaving things how they’ve always been. Bringing your world here, to our moon, pretending it’s the same. Some can do that, some go native. I think that’s us. Me.”

He looks at me, confused. Not horror, but a relative.

“Every human structure, though, has these things. Cities, stations, colonies, worlds. They’ve all got a sewer system, environmental . . . All the ‘unused’ spaces, as you call them. What makes Oberon special?”

Nothing, man. Nothing at all.

“The first human who stepped onto her ice changed her forever. A refuge, not a colony. That first foot stopped being Earthling or Martian or Loony, became Auberan. It was home. Not a going-to, but a coming-now-from. A born-forever-as. I don’t know how these other human structures made their decisions, or how you decide what is for living, and who deserves to be there. What’s a life and what’s a vacation . . . ”

I run my hand along a slick scalp, forcing him to look. The shine, the alien beauty. Auberan. Look here, I say without saying. Not the girl I would be, with hair, a Name. This thing you want to look at, now.

“ . . . But I don’t live in a fucking sewer.”

“You seem really angry. I’m sorry.”

“I’m not angry, I’m tired. I look to see you questioning, doubting, judging and all I see is you trying. To look over your fence and into my . . . My lawn, my grass?”

“Yard. We had a big one, growing up.”

“My yard. I know you’re trying. But it’s writing a letter in a language we don’t both speak . . . ”

“—I have a visa. I’m here for a standard year, unless I find a situation.”

“It’s our second date, man.”

“I know. I just . . . I don’t want you to think that I am some kind of colonist.”

“I don’t. Not anymore. I think you are a good man. I think you’ll do well, on the bubble. But I can’t join you there. Not for a date, not for a life. Not to secure your visa, for sure . . . I have a son, did she tell you that?”

His eyes darken. He forms several beginnings, with his mouth. Breathes not a one.

“She . . . did. Your family seems very interested.”

“In what?”

“In him. You.”

“Well. I jumped. To love is to respect, inclusive. He doesn’t miss me, if that’s what. Especially with all this . . . politics. Imagine that. Hello Dad, hello, it’s me! It’s Deals The Knife!”

I laugh, a barking. It startles him; the bubble shivers, I feel them looking. I am embarrassed. Not for me, they can screw, but for him. This isn’t what he wanted. It’s what he asked for, but he didn’t know. And anyway I’m not a crazy knife girl, I’m a hermit. A mother. A sister.

I’m a choice he can’t hear explaining itself, no matter how he wants to. How hard he listens.

“I should go, I’m . . . disappointing. Myself, and also you. A nice man.”

“Deals, don’t! I can’t just . . . ”

“We look across this glass between us and see . . . If the lights shifted, suddenly just your reflection, looking back. I’m your dream, and you’re a  . . . perfectly fine fantasy. If you’re the last colonist I ever meet, you’ll have been the best possible one. But these are dreams. You will never be Auberan. You’ll always be a refugee. And I’ll be the best you could do . . . ”

“You mustn’t devalue your . . . ”

“No. Man, no. I am doing the best I can do. I am the best I can do. You want to give a woman a home, as if I do not have one.”

He looks away, and nods. Giving me the gift of his real thinking. Nods again sharply.

“I do. That is what I want. I want to make a tiny earth, here upon your moon. On your home. With a son, and a beautiful woman. Like you.”

“Then you must find her!”

“But I want you.”

I stand.

“You have what everybody wants already. And you just keep wanting more. You crowd it out. The world, you crowd it out with wanting, with thinking that you’re lost. You don’t know what you want. Go to the Wanderers, they’ll tell you: That’s a gift.”

Hour to rendezvous. I rack up in a twisty-hole, curled around in a pipe as wide as I sitting am tall, back rounded to the curve, head upon my knees, to meditate on this.

“It doesn’t make him evil,” Regine would say. “It doesn’t make him Father. It doesn’t tell you anything you didn’t already know.”

And I would say, “I’m not sorry. I lost no innocence. But he was sadder for having known me. When he remembers to be sad again, he’ll think of me. I will be a pain.”

And I would think, but never say, “This is why. This is why we jump.”

I think of sleeping. Cry a little bit instead. If I just wanted more.

Twenty minutes behind schedule when I get it together. Head under an overflow, which he’s not allowed to do. The water carries particulates from cooling the grav lines, it’s maybe toxic, but it’s wet. I’m hurried, eyes puffy like I’m new. He’ll ask questions, and my knife will get that look, of a man who sees a woman crying and must, must try to fix it. And I’ll . . . I cannot see that today.

I am resolute, chanting. I am jumping, every day is a jump into fresh cracks. We write a new name and erase it. Of all who wander, none are lost. The silt from the off-drip gritting in my eyes, rushing to him. Cut across a civil square, still in my stupid funny dress. I could almost pass for a human.

Across the well I see him, slap-jacks with the youngest knife boys. He loves it, laughing harder at the quick pain than he does the test of speed itself. Oh, what he’ll do with that blunt knife. The million troubles of boys. When I was his age I thought I was one, but I had sense at least.

His face turns to me like the sunflowers on 65, like the black-eyed Susans in my hand, forgotten, hydroponic, and grins. He is not sad to see me return, yet.

A sudden hiss this close to a main vent means a breach. I drop into a forward roll; get knocked forty yards up the well, snatching at levels, as below us the well is engulfed in brief fire.

I can barely see him, down below, but I know it’s him. I’d know him, always.

Just as I know the policemen swarming in, from seemingly every direction, to take him up in arms, to spirit him—just him, surgically leaving the knives to recover—away, into the world. Away from core. Toward the embassies. The district offices.

“Solitude Unto Equinox,” the banners say outside. They let the Hamlet Crater guys hold meetings outside the embassies, where surveillance is heaviest. The rallies are always the same: We must halt immigration for at least forty-two years, if Auberan society and culture have any chance of becoming something real, unique. We can mutate all we want, they say, but it always comes back to humanity. The control group of what’s normal, who get to say what that is.

They’re not violent. They’re probably right, even. Imagine a moment with nobody looking. No pieces shoved or tinkered in, no half-measures. Organic. They’re probably very right. But shit can they talk.

I accept a flyer on my way in, asking for my father at the first desk I reach. I can’t even remember the layout. They wave me through, as if I’m expected; people rush around, looking from the side of their eyes only, as if I am a lie they tell.

“Cordie. Sit, lovely. I was going to offer a meal or something but you look just healthy as can be. Still shaving that head, I see. Do you want a change of clothes, or a shower . . . ?”

On one hand I am loath to accept his charity. Then too, I have recently been blown up.

“Caught in a vent near the well, so I just popped out into the fields. It was horrible, but I’m uninjured. Regine would probably have enjoyed it.”

“I saw on the news. It was actually a surface vent a few districts away, distributed the force of the blowout to the well itself. You were one of the unlucky few who happened to be in the vent path. It’s a redundant system, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it actually put into . . . ”

I shuck my dress, drop it in the garbage; snatch up a too-large jumpsuit, pop it over my head. I don’t want to chat. Father looks so old, and so beautiful. He’s aged not ten but fifty years, somehow, since I jumped. I know every crack and grin that face could bloom. I remember him better, looking in his eyes, than anything in life. As if I’d been looking at him all this time.

“Father. I hate to ask, but I’ve misplaced something. In the blast. And I’m pretty sure your men . . . ”

“The police are a community-resourced and community-supported group of paid volunteers . . . ”

“Fine. Our men. They may have absconded with something, um. Unlabeled as mine.”

“He’s beautiful, Cordie. And so smart.”

I go quiet, still. Footsteps passing a grill, when we were small. That chill, the thrill of a footfall.

“You’ve had us taped, then?”

“Since you found him. I always kept tabs, of course—I love you more than life—but once the boy was out there, and you got ahold of him, it was prudent . . . ”

“You. The cops swarmed in the very second it reached the well? Like they already knew?”

“A fire broke out a few levels down, I couldn’t risk him. Too important. And you were fine, of course. And I knew you’d come to me. Hoped, anyway.”

“You took advantage of a disaster to kidnap my son, so we could . . . have a little chat?”

“Your . . . Oh, Cordie. Son? Really? Isn’t that against your bohemian ideals? ‘Unlabeled as mine.’ Oh, you little darling. Little hypocrite. Pantomiming with that cult, hoping Hamlet will take you, or blow me up, or . . . You want to control your child, but hate me for protecting you, in turn?”

“You sound angry, Father.”

“I could never. I love you, child. I love you, you’re my little girl. I love you for your rebellion. You bring me the most surprises. I love surprises.”

“Wrong. You do not love surprises. You control everything.”

“I . . . Well, yes. I love our world, our little moon. Our colony here. I realize that looks like control, Cordie. But I’ve got a surprise for you. You’ve been saving the world, all along . . . ”

“—Great. Are you going to give me back my . . . Are you going to put the child back in my care?”

“Oh my, yes. That’s the whole point of the exercise. But let me tell you why.”

On third days we watch the spa workers, shuffling off to breaks. Twenty minutes, in and out.

He’s caught me staring, oh he has. The crinkle and the smile in his eyes, so familiar from the moment I found him, in a basket of rushes, like a fairy tale. That regal gait he took on, learning to walk as we Auberans do, along the soft edges of the well—I knew that too. I thought it confirmed he was meant for me, that everything about him began and grew ever more familiar.

My knife, the boy I left behind, used to say: It wouldn’t be a promise if we made a clone of both of us. Half yours, half mine. Our child. No name. Maybe he was remembering this, when I brought him the boy. The ways of men. It wouldn’t be a promise, he’d said. Sweet boy, stupid boy. It wouldn’t be a promise if it were just mine, or even just his. That, I could deal with.

“Mother . . . ”

“Call me Sister. Call me Deals, if you want. Not that.”

“Do you not love me? Ever since that day at the well, you . . . ”

“Oh! I do, I love you more than Oberon. More than life. But I’m not your mother. We can love each other just the same, you needn’t name every single thing. Now, you had a question?”

“I have hair on my head, and nowhere else. You have hair places everywhere, but not up top.”

I want to cover my body, suddenly. I am terrified, ashamed. I hold very still, betraying nothing. He mustn’t be afraid. This mustn’t be a bad moment.

When he looks at me, who knows what he sees? Perhaps Mother would be better. Or worse.

“Men and women are different, little brother. You know I shave my head. But there are lots of other, smaller differences.”

“When I am a man, I will not fit into our berth.”

“When you’re a man. Little starfish, you’ll be king of this world. Just like Father wants.”

“My father?”

“Mine too. Do you remember him?”

The boy shivers. My son, my brother. My soft little father, getting bigger every day.

“He wanted to eat me right up! He held my hand so tight. His arm across my shoulder, when they were taking pictures, it shook like a breach. I couldn’t understand what he was saying really, I just said what he wanted when they asked me. I liked him, but he was shaky. Shaky hungry.”

“He’s getting old. He’s going to need a replacement.”

“Like a S-T-A-R-F-I-S-H. Or a clone, like they said at the press junket. Or like you say, about Oberon. Always growing more into what it always was. Even when the parts get replaced.”

I nod.

“Just like that. Exactly . . . Just like that. From now on, we’re going to take our showers . . . ”

“—Every third day!”

“Every third day, yes. But we’re going to do it back-to-back. I’ll still be here, and you’ll be safe, but we’ll wash this way from now on. We’ll keep a lookout, like scouts. Do you think that’s strange?”

He doesn’t seem to mind; he turns his back obediently, singing little songs I’ve never heard. Songs of men, probably. Songs of future kings. Songs of a lookout scout, growing fiercer every day. Songs of a starfish, beloved by a mother with no name.

He turns his back, and I think I cannot look away from him. But of course I can. Eventually, I must. Solitude Unto Equinox.

But then too I can sing. We can still sing together: We are never lost, we’re already home.

We will grow into exactly what we are.

About the Author

Jacob Clifton is a freelance writer and critic in Austin, Texas. Besides his long-term gig writing about TV for the website Television Without Pity, and blogging about culture and entertainment for Tor.com, he can be found online at jacobclifton.com. “This Is Why We Jump” was written for Catherynne M. Valente.

Free-Fall

Graham Templeton

Our elevator has stalled some thirty kilometers above the surface of the Earth, and my first thought is not heroic: I need to start fasting, lean up these haunches in preparation for the Donner decision trees that most likely lie ahead. There’s food for a month below the floorboards, but thirty kilometers? Looking at my three fellow passengers, hot-shot scientists all, it is distressingly easy to imagine our mini-society devolving into tribalism; it’s obvious that in this group, I am most definitely the Piggy. They seem calm, however, which calms me. For now, at least, things are stable.

Our elevator pod is just a hollow disc, twenty meters across and four tall, one of six identical space palettes stacked unceremoniously on either side of the climber. We four have been slotted in at the bottom, as is our right as “live cargo,” so we can use our pod’s special bail-out hatch if necessary. This is not how real astronauts ascend—I’ve checked.

Pod 5A provides little room in which to hide, and though my writerly instinct is to mole up in my sleeping tube and avoid all social contact, our predicament does provide a unique chance for a profile under stress. This is what I have come for: a view of this emerging class of bored intelligentsia, the over-credentialed yet under-employed. Through them, perhaps I can glimpse some insight into our modern iteration of the human condition. And perhaps I’ll learn the true location of Atlantis. My first impressions have been strong, but utterly unhelpful.

There’s James Dennett, a twenty-nine-year-old physicist who is tall and strapping and blonde and southern. His Texas drawl could fill an auditorium (let alone a tiny elevator pod), and his chin is so cleft that can’t shave all the way inside it so that a little tuft of beard hair pokes out no matter what he tries. Though thorough research has turned up no evidence of a history in sport, my quivering ego projects onto Dennett an undeserved air of linebacker stupidity (along with an imagined history of questionably consensual encounters with innocent college girls). He is, I am ethically obliged to point out, impeccably polite and friendly, which is honestly part of the problem; Dennett looks like he could run for President, and lose votes for not seeming real enough. He has a PhD from Cornell, significant work experience, and has almost two million dollars in debt.

Next is Anna Petrovic, a thirty-one-year-old engineer whose family emigrated from Hungary when she was fifteen. She’s impeccably pretty, but so slim and gangly that with her hair pulled back she looks like some stick-figure impression of a woman. She wears thick but form-fitting clothes that go with her Eastern European backstory and has that peculiarly Slavic sort of social remove, quiet without being demure, unassuming without forsaking confidence. Her job on-station will be to keep the equipment performance within acceptable limits, run the installation’s many daily calibration routines. “It’s mind-numbing,” she told me early in the first day of our climb. “After three days in the simulator, I wanted to absolutely kill myself. The thought of doing it for three months . . . ” I ask whether the recruiting psychologists know of her problems with the work, which gets a laugh, as if to say, “Does a dancer tell the judges about her eating disorders?” Her post-doctoral degree has given her a net worth of negative $450,000.

Last, and most akin to myself, is a short but muscle-rounded twenty-eight-year-old named Kingsley Pan. A half-Asian mathematician from Brooklyn, Pan has a tongue as sharp as it is quick. He is constantly making passes at Petrovic, though the references are just oblique enough that she can ignore them without losing face. Our first meeting was in the loading bay, just a few hours before stepping into the pod, when he asked me if I wanted to get into any sort of mutually beneficial porn sharing arrangement. I did not, but mostly just because I doubted our tastes would line up well. If the rejection fazed him at all, he hid it. “From what I hear,” he said, leaning close, “it can get to be an absolute fuck-fest up there. We’re talking about young, frustrated over-achievers who were selected for fitness, and who don’t exactly have much experience being idle. Trap them in a boring tin can for months at a time . . . ” Pan shook his head and we turned together to eye Dennett and Petrovic like two cackling old maids. “I give it two weeks,” he said quietly, “before they’re on each other.” I never got any financial information out of King, but I suspect that any debt-shame that did exist came from having too little, not too much.

Pan is the only one who seeks me out to comment after our sudden vertical halt. “That’s not supposed to happen,” he tells me. “The lifts have an external power source. We can’t be out of juice. I didn’t hear any kind of mechanical failure.” Pan’s mind has a scab-picking quality with which I can identify, so after several minutes of silence, I turn to him and skip straight to the million dollar question.

“Why are you here?”

I’ve gambled three months of my life on the idea that the ultimate answer to that question will reveal something about modern American nature. What will it reveal, precisely? The writers of yesteryear wouldn’t have dreamed of coming here without at least a hopeful guess in mind, but I have somehow convinced myself that predictions of that sort would be poor journalistic form.

Truth be told, the question is stupid in its essence, like asking a grieving family what they’re feeling. After all, I joined the mission for the exact same reasons they did: I’m young, intelligent, talented, and ambitious—but that’s all. I have not, thus far, developed into a Mozart-like savant, nor have I been able to chemically induce any of the revelatory neuroses of the Hunter Thompsons of the world. When my editor asked me if I would serve three months in space (plus the one-week ascent), it seemed like a way to show my enthusiasm for the job. For my scientist co-passengers, the transaction is even more straight-forward: $70,000 US for a quarter-year’s work, and access to what is still an undeniably bitchin resume bullet point.

Pan mentions these things in his answer to my question, but then says something I’m not expecting. “These missions, they’re like a sleep-away camp for scientists,” he says. “It’s an escape, the foreign travel adventure of a neurotic careerist.” He talks like a writer, the bastard, but he’s right. After a pod-average eleven years of post-secondary education (excluding my curve-depressing statistics of course), the extreme change of scenery must be welcome. To those living with the PTSD anxiety of chronic unemployment, the monkish live-for-work lifestyle of the stations is enticing. Though it’s hard to get an exact number from some of the more secretive corps, it’s estimated that at any given moment the sky is workplace to as many as 150 people like my old-young companions.

Work like this is increasingly becoming a rite of passage for the new class of mega-proles, people with the social credentials of a CEO, and the income of a cocktail waitress. They live like the upper class because they’re already successful, and the world just needs some time to notice. The cognitive dissonance that emerges when the world remains oblivious could drive just about anyone to drastic action.

My companions are sufferers of late-onset adulthood, and I would shun them gladly if I weren’t a premiere member of the infected. In the bloody aftermath of the coming class war, my body will be stuffed and displayed in a museum, a statistical outlier they’ll use to scare young parents into using math tutors and regular corporal punishment. Quite naturally, I assume any war involving my generation will end in a loss for our side.

This elevator will drop us at the second gate it passes, from which Pod 5A will spend a further forty hours climbing a lateral ribbon to Brahe Station. Brahe is one of the geo-synch setups, co-leased by four medical and pure-science research corps. It was one of the very first research stations built, which means both that it is shockingly small, and that it’s played host to more than a dozen historically significant experiments.

My companions will see none of the glory of those early days, however. They have no following in the industry, no co-author credits in popular papers, no side-careers in molecular genetics. These are physical scientists, and I am a writer, and we are for the first time in human history of totally equal social utility. Work pool inflation has rendered us all fit for little more than cargo shipment. Dennett has a PhD in the study of the very the fabric of the cosmos, and will administer the experimental procedures of the land-lubbing professors who financed the trip from the surface. He will not know what hypotheses he is working to falsify, nor the results of his experiments; double bind? Try totally blind. The company is excluding him, this broad-shouldered charmer with a genius-level IQ, as thoroughly as it possibly can.

“It’s monkey-work,” Pan explains. “They need us up there in case anything goes wrong. But nothing ever goes wrong.” He says this with a shrug, hanging thirty kilometers up in a broken elevator. He continues, oblivious. “They tried sending real researchers up to go do their own shitty experiments, but they only ever went up once. Three months in a tin can the size of a Bronx apartment is more than enough for most people.”

“So if they aren’t sending the same people twice, anyway . . . ”

“Why not send any old doctor off the street?”

“You don’t seem to think the companies put much value on their workers.” In journalism this is called the “declarative interrogative” and it’s used by hacks, and by people who are slowly beginning to realize that they need to start getting some quotes, and how.

Pan does not disappoint. “Us? We’re just fuel. Only difference is they bring our ashes back at the end.” Oh brother. I record this quote with gusto, but at the same time gripe internally; I’d love to be making seventy grand on this trip.

It’s been half an hour since the stall, and the experts are retiring to their respective sleeping tubes. The implication is that I should do the same. We still haven’t heard a peep from command, and have I mentioned that we are thirty kilometers above ground? Pan slips into his tube and, I swear to God, claims he’s going to get some sleep. I grunt an assent, because we’re both real men and I feel exactly the same way he does. When he’s gone, and I’m alone in the common area, I slide down the wall to sit, feeling all the empty space just a few feet below me.

My own question echoes back at me, then: Why are you here?

It’s been almost two hours since our ascent came to its awkward, stuttering stop, and I can no longer contain the expansive pressure of the situation. It’s just myself and Anna Petrovic in the common room, and the words escape me like steam from a kettle (with all the manly timbre that implies). “Why aren’t you all more worried?” Their calm has been rubbing off on me so far, but even a passing how-screwed-are-we analysis returns some truly distressing integers. Petrovic looks at me oddly.

“Didn’t you go through basic?”

I did do the station’s basic training regime, though little had stuck. It had become apparent early in the first day that, being a writer, very little was expected of me (good call). From that point on I slacked shamelessly. It’s a rather annoying recapitulation of the pattern that brought me here in the first place. “Care to fill me in?” is all I say to her.

“They’ll establish contact within three hours, or as soon as they have something to report.”

“They won’t just call to check up on us?”

She looks at me, incredulous. “Check up on what? If something was happening, what could they possibly do to help?”

I’m really not sure what to say to that.

“The lifts behind us will catch up eventually. If that doesn’t help, then we’ll have to jump.”

I stare for a second, and before I can scream that last word back at her, Dennett approaches. “I still say it’s war,” he says handsomely. It’s meant to be playful, but it shakes me. How have I failed to consider the possibility that our journey has halted because of a war down below? It wouldn’t take much to disrupt the fine movements of the sea platform that anchors the graphene ribbon on which we hang.

“The Chinese have little kamikaze satellites built to take out the counterweight,” Dennett claims.

This sounds absurd to me, but Petrovic nods. “That’s true,” she says, approaching, “but this isn’t war. If it was, we’d be seeing mushroom clouds on the surface.” She glances, blasé, out the window that is the pod’s single nod to the humanity of its cargo. Petrovic tells me that if one jumps up on a bulkhead and uses the pod’s diminished gravity to hand-plant on a lighting strut, that it is possible to look with a steep enough angle to glimpse where the ribbon disappears into clear, blue ocean. If true, this proves the absence of a storm at sea.

I decide that this needs first-hand verification (“For the Readers!”) but in trying to emulate her style of European body-knotting I succeed only in bruising my shin in an embarrassing ricochet off the ceiling. My resignation to the sexual indifference of Anna Petrovic comes even easier than my resignation to take her meteorological report on faith.

I’m rubbing my shin rather like a clumsy child. “It could still be war, though . . . ”

“I wouldn’t worry too much,” Dennett says, sympathetic to my civvie panic response. “It’s probably just a mechanical failure.” Just a mechanical . . . I stare at him for a moment, then nod and return to my sleeping tube, my slab.

Command is supposed to check in within three hours of any mechanical failure. After twenty, we come to an agreement: either the comm is broken, or they just don’t care enough to bring us into the loop. Anna (two days in a crate have forced a first-name relationship) says that her gymnastic maneuvers let her see the next climber approaching behind us, inching its way up the line. “So it’s just our car, not the whole line. This one won’t have help, though,” she says. “It was already climbing when we broke down.”

“The one after that?” I ask.

“Yes.”

The thinking is now that the company will send a mechanic up on the next available lifter, a specialist in a space suit who will make the rather heart-stopping climb from lifter to lifter.

“They could still fill us in,” I say, sulky.

James (Dennett) nods vigorously. Nobody defends the logic behind the company’s policies any longer, I’ve noted. James, in particular, has developed a tic in which he will examine the comm several times per hour. He walks to it and pokes a few buttons with his left middle finger, which produces a series of incomprehensible beeps and boops that can’t possibly be telling him anything helpful. His report is the same every time. “It works,” he claims to know. “They’re just not talking.”

Kingsley (“call me King”) Pan has been growing steadily quieter since the three-hour deadline passed without incident. He stirs now and speaks for the first time in an hour. “We’ll know for sure if there’s no mechanic on the next lift.”

That possibility settles in to the atmosphere, gets recycled through the air scrubbers and spit back out to be inhaled all over again. Every conversation is now defined by what it is not about. Our talks are not about the man who may or may not be coming up to help us. They’re not about the possibility that we might be forced to jump nearly from orbit. I discuss literature with Anna (she likes depressing old Soviets), and James tells me about his childhood (chess club and track team). Kingsley increasingly keeps to his tube, even taking his dinner privately.

I sleep for a few hours, and when I emerge it’s just James in the common area. He looks solitary and pensive, but I’ve been hoping for some time alone with him so I approach immediately. “Thinking about the lift?”

“I’m thinking about jumping.”

“Imagining it? Or considering?”

He doesn’t answer right away. “I bought a house, two years ago. A house. I never thought I’d achieve all my goals before thirty, and still end up considering bankruptcy.” He looks at me. With just a day’s neglect, his big jaw has grown an impressively scratchy-looking coat of stubble, making him look wilder and less put-together than usual. “I can’t jump. And if I do, I’ll just have to sign right back up.”

“Right.”

“Why don’t you jump? There’s money in it for you?”

“A good story. So, money down the line.”

James snorts at this. “You came here to get a lesson, then. We’re here because we already learned it.”

“What’s that?”

“There’s never any money down the line.” He gets to his feet and walks away, so I take it that we’re done.

Kingsley jumps first. I’m awakened by a commotion outside my sleeping tube, now three days in the pod. The rescue lifter is supposed to arrive in a few hours. In the common area, Anna and James are speaking animatedly to Kingsley, who is decked head to toe in what looks like a dark red wet-suit stretched over a small internal metal frame. He’s securing a final glove, using a ratcheting system I have on my ski boots. He seems almost catatonic, eyes cast downward, totally unresponsive. He just ratchets on the glove.

“You’re leaving, King?” I say as I approach, using his preferred moniker (to my knowledge the first time anybody has). He looks up.

“Yeah.”

“Why now?”

“We’ve been here for multiple days. They still haven’t contacted us. Even if there is a guy on the lift, who cares?”

“He’ll fix us and we can move on,” Anna says.

“So? You’ll still be going up for a company that didn’t contact you for two days while you hung in a broken pillbox a hundred miles up!” thirty kilometers, I silently correct him. “What do you think will happen if something happens up there? It’s an old station—maybe they’ll decide it’s cheaper just to call the whole thing off, leave you up there forever.”

“Oh, come on,” Anna says.

Kingsley stands up. “This is the best thing that could have happened.” Stooping, he picks up the helmet and lowers it over his head, locks it in place with a firm sideways jerk that makes it look like he’s breaking his own neck (anatomically and professionally). Without a word of goodbye to any of us, he pulls up a marked floor panel and twists open the submarine hatch below, climbing down into a small pressure chamber. It takes a bit of squeezing to get down with the enormous bulge on his back, parachutes big enough to be useful in ultra-thin atmosphere. We all watch silently as he closes the lid behind him, no hint of hesitation. His slow confidence is unnerving to those staying behind. There’s a squeak of heavy metal as Pan locks the door behind him, then the faint whoosh of air as the chamber depressurizes, then the thud of the outer door opening fully.

“Wait three seconds, pull upper chute,” Anna says quietly. “Fall three minutes, detach and pull lower chute.”

“That’s what they said in training?” I ask.

She nods. “From anywhere in the stratosphere. The first chute, the big one, keeps you from breaking the sound barrier as you fall through the thin part.”

“Well, that’s good.”

James walks to the circular table at the center of the room and picks up his reader.

“What are you doing?” Anna asks him.

“Seeing if they have the specs on our parachutes.” His mouth twists up bitterly. “I’m checking their math.”

“I thought you weren’t going to jump,” I say.

He says nothing, keeps his head down.

Alone in the common room, I read up on the station. I’ve been planning to discover as I go, to transcribe for my dear readers the truest emotional account of the perils and indignities of honest-to-God space. Now, I simply want to understand what I’m in for. Suction toilets, I’d known about those. Daily exorcize to avoid muscular atrophy? Jeeze. A chance of heart failure upon return? I should have read this contract more carefully. The sleeping tubes on the station are no larger than those in the pod. The common room is smaller, by the looks of it. Food is made by the same company that makes military rations. Water is recycled from the air and sewage. If we were to divide the station up into private quadrants, we’d each get roughly eighty square feet. My three companions are desperate indeed.

But what about me? I’m the one who went to space without so much as memorizing the escape routines. I’ve undergone three months’ lead-up to liftoff, a week-long training course, and I haven’t so much as studied the station layout. How can I look down on the genii? They’re here for the money; I’m not even getting hazard pay.

The next several hours are solitary, everyone keeping to their tubes, but eventually we emerge. It’s furtive at first, just passing each other as we pull a snack from under the floorboards, or slip into the bathroom tube. I keep telling myself that it’s the not knowing that’s the hardest, that if they’d just tell us to wait or jump I’d be fine. The reality is, though, that an acidic burn is running through my gut, and it’s not because of not knowing. I am thirty kilometers above ground, and I don’t even know what I’m doing here. My mind keeps going in circles; the logical thing to do when you haven’t been able to pay the bills for three years is to switch careers—but to what?

“Right?” I ask James. I’ve been speaking aloud, and we’re eating together at the table. Bean curd in salt sauce.

“I know what you mean,” James says as he takes a bite, less fearful than the last, more fatalistic. A quick shudder passes through his body as he swallows, then he continues. “I always think about my high-school history books. They teach you about the British Empire, right, about the ups and downs of the colonies. And they’ll talk about these sweeping social changes like they’re nothing. A piece of technology puts an industry under, a war over shipping lanes closes a number of ports. What did the calligraphers do when the printing press came for them? They had plans, but history decided to make them economic casualties.”

I grunt understanding. “When do you think they knew?”

He laughs. “Past what point do you just have to admit that it’s over?”

“I guess it depends on how committed you are, and what other options you have.”

He looks at me. “Very, and none.” There’s a pause, and it’s not awkward, which is an improvement. Eventually he says, “So you think everyone has a point past which they have to turn away.”

“But again—turn away to what? What are you going to do, run a grocery store? Learn to cobble?”

He chuckles, but I can tell it gets to him a bit. A guy like Dennett, he could have been anything. He chose what seemed to be a safe bet, something he was good at, something he could be proud of. Now look at him.

We each take another bite of our curd.

It says something about every person, I think, the time of their choice to give up hope. Me, I do it in advance. Kingsley didn’t, but he cracked early. James oscillates between emotional states, alternately certain that the man is coming, and certain that we’ve been totally forgotten. Anna’s smooth, angular face is expressionless, but her fingers tapping nervously against her thigh keep me from resenting her. It’s an intricate pattern she’s beating out, and I try to follow it for a while, certain that she wouldn’t be tapping out a random sequence. We all get through these times as we can.

We’re sitting in the common room, nervously assembled following the soft impact that had announced the maybe-coming of our savior. Rather than sit in silence, we’ve started playing crib. We’re on our second game, now.

James does laps of the common room between hands, a whole fifteen steps. Usually I’d ask him to stop, but given the circumstances I decide we all need our outlets. Besides, I need all the time I can get to avoid annoying the science majors with my ten-second counting handicap. “Fifteen-two, fifteen-four, and . . . wait—”

“Oh, come on!” Anna snaps at me. We all get through these times as we can. Bitch.

It’s been two hours, and now there’s no denying it. Nobody is coming to save us.

“So, what the fuck?” I ask them.

That question rings through the pod more profoundly than the arrival of the last pallet. Looked at from above, James is pacing out a very slight inward spiral, a visual representation of his emotional state. Every lap brings him a bit closer to the center of the pod, and his body becomes more tense as it approaches, like his movements are turning a crank on his own muscles. The flesh under his jaw is tight, a constant tension in the throat. His mouth is moving to some silent internal conversation, which I imagine as a calculation on mortgage rates.

Anna is inscrutable, her emotional remove so much more profound than either of her male companions’. She’s very matter of fact: if we have to jump, we have to jump. In absence of evidence, there’s no point in speculating about the cause of our predicament. I had previously been in awe of this woman, monk-like in how she went about setting and achieving goals. That’s how it seems when she goes to the bathroom (‘Mission: Piss’ is a go, go, go!), let alone when she goes to space. Now this mindless adherence to the logical path feels a bit like an escape. She just sits there, content in executing the actions she’s computed to be best. Someone has to come unstick these cars eventually, she reasons, and the more people who jump, the more food for there is for me. These companies have been known to reward loyalty.

The way she watches James in his pacing makes me think of a naturalist watching an endangered leopard die of exposure.

King jumped, but James falls. The distinction is in the little things, the way he climbs down like he’s scrabbling for purchase, like he’s trying to claw his way back up and failing. It’s an entirely different sort of thing. When he’s gone, I think of him in the past tense. Kingsley I imagine down on the surface, amusing the crew of whatever ship was sent to scoop him out of the water, buoyant and useless in his space suit. He’s a real person, with a present and a future. James is just gone.

Anna and I listen to the airlock cycle, alone now in the stratosphere, and she murmurs her little sacrament. “Wait three seconds . . . ” she says, but the rest she mumbles to herself, too low for me to hear.

“Why do you do that?”

She glances at me, then away. “Just a little supersti-superstition,” she says, stammering almost like a hiccup. Then she turns away and pulls her long skinny arms into her chest, and I can see that they’re trembling. She walks to the other side of the room, faces the wall, but she doesn’t make for her own tube. After an appropriate amount of time, I walk over to her.

“Why haven’t you left?” she asks without turning. “There’s no reason for you to stay after all this.”

“Actually, there was no reason for me to stay before all this. But this is a story.”

She turns to me, tears in her eyes. “So, you have your story. Go, now.”

“I have the beginning of the story. It’s not over until I see how all three of you end up.”

Her face screws up. “I stay up here, and they come get me. That’s what happens. Imagine it, and, just . . . go!”

I stare at her. “Why are you so willing to stay up here?” Keeping her eyes cast down, Anna Petrovic shuffles away from me like a little girl who has fully internalized her scolding. “Why do you say that when people jump?” She just shakes her head.

“Just go,” she says in a tiny voice. Then, “I’ll come right after you.” That’s when I get it.

“You’re afraid.” She just stares at me, so I prod her. “That’s it, right?”

After a moment, she says, “Heights. I don’t . . . ” then swallows, “I don’t want anyone around to see me get in that hatch. I especially don’t want you to see me like that.”

Ouch. You don’t call me Paparazzi. That’s our word.

“Well, too bad,” I tell her. “This is the end, and at least one of the four of us is getting what we came for. I need my ending.” The despair in her eyes is almost enough to sway me. “Besides,” I say, “I thought you were going to stay and wait for them to—”

“Fuck them,” she says, and retreats to her tube.

I briefly consider jumping first out of gentlemanly courtesy, but then I come to my senses. No self-respecting self-hating journalist could pass up the opportunity to describe the end of her story here. There was something about the irrationality of the fear, a product of exemplary simian frontal lobes wrapped around a treacherous reptilian center. I wouldn’t enjoy watching her scrabble around trying to force herself to jump from near orbit, but I’d do it. I’d do it for . . . a credit? A dramatic ending easily twisted to support whatever laughable through-line I’m able to sponge out this amorphous soup of anecdotal evidence?

She robs me of that ending, however, mooting the shit out of my ethical dilemma. It takes her about an hour in her tube to work up the courage, but when she does there’s just no stopping her. Fear becomes an action item, and she buries it with characteristic efficiency. Anna says goodbye with a bit of real warmth, which is nice, then she snaps the helmet on, and down she goes. The hatch cycles. She never even flinched.

A few hours in my sleeping tube don’t seem out of order, so I get them. Somehow, seeing Anna’s bravery has calmed my nerves a bit. I’m scared to jump, but not terrified. I sleep well for three hours, and then a gong wakes me gently.

It’s the impact of another pallet arriving, though not nearly enough time has passed for it to be the next regular shipment. It has to be help.

This is perfect. The three of them jump, and just hours later help arrives. This is good. The mechanic will probably be some Union type, have a mustache and weathered skin, the sad, knowing face of a man with more than two daughters. He’ll make the perfect ending, a generational antonym to provide some context and imply that I’ve communicated something profound through juxtaposition alone.

It makes me sick. I think about the way King jumped, and James, and Anna. Each of them, braver than me. In the end, they broke down, knowingly made a career misstep that proved they had a soul. Now I sit and wait for my quote, please sir, won’t you tell me what you think of today’s struggling young professionals? It’s what I should do, but the scientists should have stayed in the pod. Could I have respected any of them if they had?

The space suit fits like a space suit, leaves my shoulders untouched while chafing all the hair off of my armpits. When I lock the helmet, I realize my breath stinks. Vaguely, I’m happy there’s nobody around to see me jump, or to know that I could have stayed, but didn’t. It feels cleaner with only myself as witness.

I squeeze down the ladder, close the hatch behind me, and say Anna’s little prayer. Then I push the button, and the floor begins to slide away beneath my feet. I’m still on the ladder, though; I don’t want this to be passive. Air sucks past me for an astonishingly short amount of time and then I’m basically in a vacuum, atmosphere so thin it might as well not be there. It’s just me and the ladder, now, and the Earth fills the hatch entirely, a bright white circle like if you had to climb down into heaven.

Looking and seeing nothing below, and really feeling all the distance there, I get suddenly very calm. Somehow I know that the jump will be fine and that I’ll be fine too. I’ve needed some time to think, for a while now.

By the time I touch down I’ll have my ending figured out.

About the Author

Graham Templeton is a young-ish journalist from Vancouver, Canada, who got into writing after 5 years studying biochemistry. His fiction has been published in very nearly two places. Graham is currently travelling the world with all his possessions strapped to his back. He makes his way writing non-fiction about amazing future-tech and sci-fi about everyday mundanities.

Mongoose

Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear

Izrael Irizarry stepped through a bright-scarred airlock onto Kadath Station, lurching a little as he adjusted to station gravity. On his shoulder, Mongoose extended her neck, her barbels flaring, flicked her tongue out to taste the air, and colored a question. Another few steps, and he smelled what Mongoose smelled, the sharp stink of toves, ammoniac and bitter.

He touched the tentacle coiled around his throat with the quick double tap that meant soon. Mongoose colored displeasure, and Irizarry stroked the slick velvet wedge of her head in consolation and restraint. Her four compound and twelve simple eyes glittered and her color softened, but did not change, as she leaned into the caress. She was eager to hunt and he didn’t blame her. The boojum Manfred von Richthofen took care of its own vermin. Mongoose had had to make do with a share of Irizarry’s rations, and she hated eating dead things.

If Irizarry could smell toves, it was more than the “minor infestation” the message from the station master had led him to expect. Of course, that message had reached Irizarry third or fourth or fifteenth hand, and he had no idea how long it had taken. Perhaps when the station master had sent for him, it had been minor.

But he knew the ways of bureaucrats, and he wondered.

People did double-takes as he passed, even the heavily-modded Christian cultists with their telescoping limbs and biolin eyes. You found them on every station and steelships too, though mostly they wouldn’t work the boojums. Nobody liked Christians much, but they could work in situations that would kill an unmodded human or a even a gilly, so captains and station masters tolerated them.

There were a lot of gillies in Kadath’s hallways, and they all stopped to blink at Mongoose. One, an indenturee, stopped and made an elaborate hand-flapping bow. Irizarry felt one of Mongoose’s tendrils work itself through two of his earrings. Although she didn’t understand staring exactly—her compound eyes made the idea alien to her—she felt the attention and was made shy by it.

Unlike the boojum-ships they serviced, the stations—Providence, Kadath, Leng, Dunwich, and the others—were man-made. Their radial symmetry was predictable, and to find the station master, Irizarry only had to work his way inward from the Manfred von Richthofen’s dock to the hub. There he found one of the inevitable safety maps (you are here; in case of decompression, proceed in an orderly manner to the life vaults located here, here, or here) and leaned close to squint at the tiny lettering. Mongoose copied him, tilting her head first one way, then another, though flat representations meant nothing to her. He made out STATION MASTER’S OFFICE finally, on a oval bubble, the door of which was actually in sight.

“Here we go, girl,” he said to Mongoose (who, stone-deaf though she was, pressed against him in response to the vibration of his voice). He hated this part of the job, hated dealing with apparatchiks and functionaries, and of course the Station Master’s office was full of them, a receptionist, and then a secretary, and then someone who was maybe the other kind of secretary, and then finally—Mongoose by now halfway down the back of his shirt and entirely hidden by his hair and Irizarry himself half stifled by memories of someone he didn’t want to remember being—he was ushered into an inner room where Station Master Lee, her arms crossed and her round face set in a scowl, was waiting.

“Mr. Irizarry,” she said, unfolding her arms long enough to stick one hand out in a facsimile of a congenial greeting.

He held up a hand in response, relieved to see no sign of recognition in her face. It was Irizarry’s experience that dead lives were best left lie where they fell. “Sorry, Station Master,” he said. “I can’t.”

He thought of asking her about the reek of toves on the air, if she understood just how bad the situation had become. People could convince themselves of a lot of bullshit, given half a chance.

Instead, he decided to talk about his partner. “Mongoose hates it when I touch other people. She gets jealous, like a parrot.”

“The cheshire’s here?” She let her hand drop to her side, the expression on her face a mixture of respect and alarm. “Is it out of phase?”

Well, at least Station Master Lee knew a little more about cheshire-cats than most people. “No,” Irizarry said. “She’s down my shirt.”

Half a standard hour later, wading through the damp bowels of a ventilation pore, Irizarry tapped his rebreather to try to clear some of the tove-stench from his nostrils and mouth. It didn’t help much; he was getting close.

Here, Mongoose wasn’t shy at all. She slithered up on top of his head, barbels and graspers extended to full length, pulsing slowly in predatory greens and reds. Her tendrils slithered through his hair and coiled about his throat, fading in and out of phase. He placed his fingertips on her slick-resilient hide to restrain her. The last thing he needed was for Mongoose to go spectral and charge off down the corridor after the tove colony.

It wasn’t that she wouldn’t come back, because she would—but that was only if she didn’t get herself into more trouble than she could get out of without his help. “Steady,” he said, though of course she couldn’t hear him. A creature adapted to vacuum had no ears. But she could feel his voice vibrate in his throat, and a tendril brushed his lips, feeling the puff of air and the shape of the word. He tapped her tendril twice again—soon—and felt it contract. She flashed hungry orange in his peripheral vision. She was experimenting with jaguar rosettes—they had had long discussions of jaguars and tigers after their nightly reading of Pooh on the Manfred von Richthofen, as Mongoose had wanted to know what jagulars and tiggers were. Irizarry had already taught her about mongooses, and he’d read Alice in Wonderland so she would know what a Cheshire Cat was. Two days later—he still remembered it vividly—she had disappeared quite slowly, starting with the tips of the long coils of her tail and tendrils and ending with the needle-sharp crystalline array of her teeth. And then she’d phased back in, all excited aquamarine and pink, almost bouncing, and he’d praised her and stroked her and reminded himself not to think of her as a cat. Or a mongoose.

She had readily grasped the distinction between jaguars and jagulars, and had almost as quickly decided that she was a jagular; Irizarry had almost started to argue, but then thought better of it. She was, after all, a Very Good Dropper. And nobody ever saw her coming unless she wanted them to.

When the faint glow of the toves came into view at the bottom of the pore, he felt her shiver all over, luxuriantly, before she shimmered dark and folded herself tight against his scalp. Irizarry doused his own lights as well, flipping the passive infrared goggles down over his eyes. Toves were as blind as Mongoose was deaf, but an infestation this bad could mean the cracks were growing large enough for bigger things to wiggle through, and if there were raths, no sense in letting the monsters know he was coming.

He tapped the tendril curled around his throat three times, and whispered “Go.” She didn’t need him to tell her twice; really, he thought wryly, she didn’t need him to tell her at all. He barely felt her featherweight disengage before she was gone down the corridor as silently as a hunting owl. She was invisible to his goggles, her body at ambient temperature, but he knew from experience that her barbels and vanes would be spread wide, and he’d hear the shrieks when she came in among the toves.

The toves covered the corridor ceiling, arm-long carapaces adhered by a foul-smelling secretion that oozed from between the sections of their exoskeletons. The upper third of each tove’s body bent down like a dangling bough, bringing the glowing, sticky lure and flesh-ripping pincers into play. Irizarry had no idea what they fed on in their own phase, or dimension, or whatever.

Here, though, he knew what they ate. Anything they could get.

He kept his shock probe ready, splashing after, to assist her if it turned out necessary. That was sure a lot of toves, and even a cheshire-cat could get in trouble if she was outnumbered. Ahead of him, a tove warbled and went suddenly dark; Mongoose had made her first kill.

Within moments, the tove colony was in full warble, the harmonics making Irizarry’s head ache. He moved forward carefully, alert now for signs of raths. The largest tove colony he’d ever seen was on the derelict steelship Jenny Lind, which he and Mongoose had explored when they were working salvage on the boojum Harriet Tubman. The hulk had been covered inside and out with toves; the colony was so vast that, having eaten everything else, it had started cannibalizing itself, toves eating their neighbors and being eaten in turn. Mongoose had glutted herself before the Harriet Tubman ate the wreckage, and in the refuse she left behind, Irizarry had found the strange starlike bones of an adult rath, consumed by its own prey. The bandersnatch that had killed the humans on the Jenny Lind had died with her reactor core and her captain. A handful of passengers and crew had escaped to tell the tale.

He refocused. This colony wasn’t as large as those heaving masses on the Jenny Lind, but it was the largest he’d ever encountered not in a quarantine situation, and if there weren’t raths somewhere on Kadath Station, he’d eat his infrared goggles.

A dead tove landed at his feet, its eyeless head neatly separated from its segmented body, and a heartbeat later Mongoose phased in on his shoulder and made her deep clicking noise that meant, Irizarry! Pay attention!

He held his hand out, raised to shoulder level, and Mongoose flowed between the two, keeping her bulk on his shoulder, with tendrils resting against his lips and larynx, but her tentacles wrapping around his hand to communicate. He pushed his goggles up with his free hand and switched on his belt light so he could read her colors.

She was anxious, strobing yellow and green. Many, she shaped against his palm, and then emphatically, R.

“R” was bad—it meant rath—but it was better than “B.” If a bandersnatch had come through, all of them were walking dead, and Kadath Station was already as doomed as the Jenny Lind. “Do you smell it?” he asked under the warbling of the toves.

Taste, said Mongoose, and because Irizarry had been her partner for almost five Solar, he understood: the toves tasted of rath, meaning that they had recently been feeding on rath guano, and given the swiftness of toves’ digestive systems, that meant a rath was patrolling territory on the station.

Mongoose’s grip tightened on his shoulder. R, she said again. R. R. R.

Irizarry’s heart lurched and sank. More than one rath. The cracks were widening.

A bandersnatch was only a matter of time.

Station Master Lee didn’t want to hear it. It was all there in the way she stood, the way she pretended distraction to avoid eye-contact. He knew the rules of this game, probably better than she did. He stepped into her personal space. Mongoose shivered against the nape of his neck, her tendrils threading his hair. Even without being able to see her, he knew she was a deep, anxious emerald.

“A rath?” said Station Master Lee, with a toss of her head that might have looked flirtatious on a younger or less hostile woman, and moved away again. “Don’t be ridiculous. There hasn’t been a rath on Kadath Station since my grandfather’s time.”

“Doesn’t mean there isn’t an infestation now,” Irizarry said quietly. If she was going to be dramatic, that was his cue to stay still and calm. “And I said raths. Plural.”

“That’s even more ridiculous. Mr. Irizarry, if this is some ill-conceived attempt to drive up your price—”

“It isn’t.” He was careful to say it flatly, not indignantly. “Station Master, I understand that this isn’t what you want to hear, but you have to quarantine Kadath.”

“Can’t be done,” she said, her tone brisk and flat, as if he’d asked her to pilot Kadath through the rings of Saturn.

“Of course it can!” Irizarry said, and she finally turned to look at him, outraged that he dared to contradict her. Against his neck, Mongoose flexed one set of claws. She didn’t like it when he was angry.

Mostly, that wasn’t a problem. Mostly, Irizarry knew anger was a waste of time and energy. It didn’t solve anything. It didn’t fix anything. It couldn’t bring back anything that was lost. People, lives. The sorts of things that got washed away in the tides of time. Or were purged, whether you wanted them gone or not.

But this was . . . “You do know what a colony of adult raths can do, don’t you? With a contained population of prey? Tell me, Station Master, have you started noticing fewer indigents in the shelters?”

She turned away again, dismissing his existence from her cosmology. “The matter is not open for discussion, Mr. Irizarry. I hired you to deal with an alleged infestation. I expect you to do so. If you feel you can’t, you are of course welcome to leave the station with whatever ship takes your fancy. I believe the Arthur Gordon Pym is headed in-system, or perhaps you’d prefer the Jupiter run?”

He didn’t have to win this fight, he reminded himself. He could walk away, try to warn somebody else, get himself and Mongoose the hell off Kadath Station. “All right, Station Master. But remember that I warned you, when your secretaries start disappearing.”

He was at the door when she cried, “Irizarry!”

He stopped, but didn’t turn.

“I can’t,” she said, low and rushed, as if she was afraid of being overheard. “I can’t quarantine the station. Our numbers are already in the red this quarter, and the new political officer . . . it’s my head on the block, don’t you understand?”

He didn’t understand. Didn’t want to. It was one of the reasons he was a wayfarer, because he never wanted to let himself be like her again.

“If Sanderson finds out about the quarantine, she finds out about you. Will your papers stand up to a close inspection, Mr. Irizarry?”

He wheeled, mouth open to tell her what he thought of her and her clumsy attempts at blackmail, and she said, “I’ll double your fee.”

At the same time, Mongoose tugged on several strands of his hair, and he realized he could feel her heart beating, hard and rapid, against his spine. It was her distress he answered, not the Station Master’s bribe. “All right,” he said. “I’ll do the best I can.”

Toves and raths colonized like an epidemic, outward from a single originating point, Patient Zero in this case being the tear in spacetime that the first tove had wriggled through. More tears would develop as the toves multiplied, but it was that first one that would become large enough for a rath. While toves were simply lazy—energy efficient, the Arkhamers said primly—and never crawled farther than was necessary to find a useable anchoring point, raths were cautious. Their marauding was centered on the original tear because they kept their escape route open. And tore it wider and wider.

Toves weren’t the problem, although they were a nuisance, with their tendency to use up valuable oxygen, clog ductwork, eat pets, drip goo from ceilings, and crunch wetly when you stepped on them. Raths were worse; raths were vicious predators. Their natural prey might be toves, but they didn’t draw the line at disappearing weakened humans or small gillies, either.

But even they weren’t the danger that had made it hard for Irizarry to sleep the past two rest shifts. What toves tore and raths widened was an access for the apex predator of this alien food chain.

The bandersnatch: Pseudocanis tindalosi. The old records and the indigent Arkhamers called them hounds, but of course they weren’t, any more than Mongoose was a cat. Irizarry had seen archive video from derelict stations and ships, the bandersnatch’s flickering angular limbs appearing like spiked mantis arms from the corners of sealed rooms, the carnage that ensued. He’d never heard of anyone left alive on a station where a bandersnatch manifested, unless they made it to a panic pod damned fast. More importantly, even the Arkhamers in their archive-ships, breeders of Mongoose and all her kind, admitted they had no records of anyone surviving a bandersnatch rather than escaping it.

And what he had to do, loosely put, was find the core of the infestation before the bandersnatches did, so that he could eradicate the toves and raths and the stress they were putting on this little corner of the universe. Find the core—somewhere in the miles upon miles of Kadath’s infrastructure. Which was why he was in this little-used service corridor, letting Mongoose commune with every ventilation duct they found.

Anywhere near the access shafts infested by the colony, Kadath Station’s passages reeked of tove—ammoniac, sulfurous. The stench infiltrated the edges of Irizarry’s mask as he lifted his face to a ventilation duct. Wincing in anticipation, he broke the seal on the rebreather and pulled it away from his face on the stiff elastic straps, careful not to lose his grip. A broken nose would not improve his day.

A cultist engineer skittered past on sucker-tipped limbs, her four snake-arms coiled tight beside her for the narrow corridor. She had a pretty smile, for a Christian.

Mongoose was too intent on her prey to be shy. The size of the tove colony might make her nervous, but Mongoose loved the smell—like a good dinner heating, Irizarry imagined. She unfolded herself around his head like a tendriled hood, tentacles outreached, body flaring as she stretched towards the ventilation fan. He felt her lean, her barbels shivering, and turned to face the way her wedge-shaped head twisted.

He almost tipped backwards when he found himself face to face with someone he hadn’t even known was there. A woman, average height, average weight, brown hair drawn back in a smooth club; her skin was space-pale and faintly reddened across the cheeks, as if the IR filters on a suit hadn’t quite protected her. She wore a sleek space-black uniform with dull silver epaulets and four pewter-colored bands at each wrist. An insignia with a stylized sun and Earth-Moon dyad clung over her heart.

The political officer, who was obviously unconcerned by Mongoose’s ostentatious display of sensory equipment.

Mongoose absorbed her tendrils in like a startled anemone, pressing the warm underside of her head to Irizarry’s scalp where the hair was thinning. He was surprised she didn’t vanish down his shirt, because he felt her trembling against his neck.

The political officer didn’t extend her hand. “Mr. Irizarry? You’re a hard man to find. I’m Intelligence Colonel Sadhi Sanderson. I’d like to ask you a few quick questions, please.”

“I’m, uh, a little busy right now,” Irizarry said, and added uneasily, “Ma’am.” The last thing he wanted was to offend her.

Sanderson looked up at Mongoose. “Yes, you would appear to be hunting,” she said, her voice dry as scouring powder. “That’s one of the things I want to talk about.”

Oh shit. He had kept out of the political officer’s way for a day and a half, and really that was a pretty good run, given the obvious tensions between Lee and Sanderson, and the things he’d heard in the Transient Barracks: the gillies were all terrified of Sanderson, and nobody seemed to have a good word for Lee. Even the Christians, mouths thinned primly, could say of Lee only that she didn’t actively persecute them. Irizarry had been stuck on a steelship with a Christian congregation for nearly half a year once, and he knew their eagerness to speak well of everyone; he didn’t know whether that was actually part of their faith, or just a survival tactic, but when Elder Dawson said, “She does not trouble us,” he understood quite precisely what that meant.

Of Sanderson, they said even less, but Irizarry understood that, too. There was no love lost between the extremist cults and the government. But he’d heard plenty from the ice miners and dock workers and particularly from the crew of an impounded steelship who were profanely eloquent on the subject. Upshot: Colonel Sanderson was new in town, cleaning house, and profoundly not a woman you wanted to fuck with.

“I’d be happy to come to your office in an hour, maybe two?” he said. “It’s just that—”

Mongoose’s grip on his scalp tightened, sudden and sharp enough that he yelped; he realized that her head had moved back toward the duct while he fenced weakly with Colonel Sanderson, and now it was nearly in the duct, at the end of a foot and a half of iridescent neck.

“Mr. Irizarry?”

He held a hand up, because really this wasn’t a good time, and yelped again when Mongoose reached down and grabbed it. He knew better than to forget how fluid her body was, that it was really no more than a compromise with the dimension he could sense her in, but sometimes it surprised him anyway.

And then Mongoose said, Nagina, and if Colonel Sanderson hadn’t been standing right there, her eyebrows indicating that he was already at the very end of the slack she was willing to cut, he would have cursed aloud. Short of a bandersnatch—and that could still be along any time now, don’t forget, Irizarry—a breeding rath was the worst news they could have.

“Your cheshire seems unsettled,” Sanderson said, not sounding in the least alarmed. “Is there a problem?”

“She’s eager to eat. And, er. She doesn’t like strangers.” It was as true as anything you could say about Mongoose, and the violent colors cycling down her tendrils gave him an idea what her chromatophores were doing behind his head.

“I can see that,” Sanderson said. “Cobalt and yellow, in that stippled pattern—and flickering in and out of phase—she’s acting aggressive, but that’s fear, isn’t it?”

Whatever Irizarry had been about to say, her observation stopped him short. He blinked at her—like a gilly, he thought uncharitably—and only realized he’d taken yet another step back when the warmth of the bulkhead pressed his coveralls to his spine.

“You know,” Sanderson said mock-confidentially, “this entire corridor reeks of toves. So let me guess: it’s not just toves anymore.”

Irizarry was still stuck at her being able to read Mongoose’s colors. “What do you know about cheshires?” he said.

She smiled at him as if at a slow student. “Rather a lot. I was on the Jenny Lind as an ensign—there was a cheshire on board, and I saw . . . It’s not the sort of thing you forget, Mr. Irizarry, having been there once.” Something complicated crossed her face—there for a flash and then gone. “The cheshire that died on the Jenny Lind was called Demon,” Irizarry said, carefully. “Her partner was Long Mike Spider. You knew them?”

“Spider John,” Sanderson said, looking down at the backs of her hands. She picked a cuticle with the opposite thumbnail. “He went by Spider John. You have the cheshire’s name right, though.”

When she looked back up, the arch of her carefully shaped brow told him he hadn’t been fooling anyone.

“Right,” Irizarry said. “Spider John.”

“They were friends of mine.” She shook her head. “I was just a pup. First billet, and I was assigned as Demon’s liaison. Spider John liked to say he and I had the same job. But I couldn’t make the captain believe him when he tried to tell her how bad it was.”

“How’d you make it off after the bandersnatch got through?” Irizarry asked. He wasn’t foolish enough to think that her confidences were anything other than a means of demonstrating to him why he could trust her, but the frustration and tired sadness sounded sincere.

“It went for Spider John first—it must have known he was a threat. And Demon—she threw herself at it, never mind it was five times her size. She bought us time to get to the panic pod and Captain Golovnina time to get to the core overrides. “ She paused. “I saw it, you know. Just a glimpse. Wriggling through this . . . this rip in the air, like a big gaunt hound ripping through a hole in a blanket with knotty paws. I spent years wondering if it got my scent. Once they scent prey, you know, they never stop. . . . ”

She trailed off, raising her gaze to meet his. He couldn’t decide if the furrow between her eyes was embarrassment at having revealed so much, or the calculated cataloguing of his response.

“So you recognize the smell, is what you’re saying.”

She had a way of answering questions with other questions. “Am I right about the raths?”

He nodded. “A breeder.”

She winced.

He took a deep breath and stepped away from the bulkhead. “Colonel Sanderson—I have to get it now if I’m going to get it at all.”

She touched the microwave pulse pistol at her hip. “Want some company?”

He didn’t. Really, truly didn’t. And if he had, he wouldn’t have chosen Kadath Station’s political officer. But he couldn’t afford to offend her . . . and he wasn’t licensed to carry a weapon.

“All right,” he said and hoped he didn’t sound as grudging as he felt. “But don’t get in Mongoose’s way.”

Colonel Sanderson offered him a tight, feral smile. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

The only thing that stank more than a pile of live toves was a bunch of half-eaten ones.

“Going to have to vacuum-scrub the whole sector,” Sanderson said, her breath hissing through her filters.

If we live long enough to need to, Irizarry, thought, but had the sense to keep his mouth shut. You didn’t talk defeat around a politico. And if you were unfortunate enough to come to the attention of one, you certainly didn’t let her see you thinking it.

Mongoose forged on ahead, but Irizarry noticed she was careful to stay within the range of his lights, and at least one of her tendrils stayed focused back on him and Sanderson at all times. If this were a normal infestation, Mongoose would be scampering along the corridor ceilings, leaving scattered bits of half-consumed tove and streaks of bioluminescent ichor in her wake. But this time, she edged along, testing each surface before her with quivering barbels so that Irizarry was reminded of a tentative spider or an exploratory octopus.

He edged along behind her, watching her colors go dim and cautious. She paused at each intersection, testing the air in every direction, and waited for her escort to catch up.

The service tubes of Kadath Station were mostly large enough for Irizarry and Sanderson to walk single-file through, though sometimes they were obliged to crouch, and once or twice Irizarry found himself slithering on his stomach through tacky half-dried tove slime. He imagined—he hoped it was imagining—that he could sense the thinning and stretch of reality all around them, see it in the warp of the tunnels and the bend of deck plates. He imagined that he glimpsed faint shapes from the corners of his eyes, caught a whisper of sound, a hint of scent, as of something almost there.

Hypochondria, he told himself firmly, aware that that was the wrong word and not really caring. But as he dropped down onto his belly again, to squeeze through a tiny access point—this one clogged with the fresh corpses of newly-slaughtered toves—he needed all the comfort he could invent.

He almost ran into Mongoose when he’d cleared the hole. She scuttled back to him and huddled under his chest, tendrils writhing, so close to out of phase that she was barely a warm shadow. When he saw what was on the other side, he wished he’d invented a little more.

This must be one of Kadath Station’s recycling and reclamation centers, a bowl ten meters across sweeping down to a pile of rubbish in the middle. These were the sorts of places you always found minor tove infestations. Ships and stations might be supposed to be kept clear of vermin, but in practice, the dimensional stresses of sharing the spacelanes with boojums meant that just wasn’t possible. And in Kadath, somebody hadn’t been doing their job.

Sanderson touched his ankle, and Irizarry hastily drew himself aside so she could come through after. He was suddenly grateful for her company.

He really didn’t want to be here alone.

Irizarry had never seen a tove infestation like this, not even on the Jenny Lind. The entire roof of the chamber was thick with their sluglike bodies, long lure-tongues dangling as much as half a meter down. Small flitting things—young raths, near-transparent in their phase shift—filled the space before him. As Irizarry watched, one blundered into the lure of a tove, and the tove contracted with sudden convulsive force. The rath never stood a chance.

Nagina, Mongoose said. Nagina, Nagina, Nagina.

Indeed, down among the junk in the pit, something big was stirring. But that wasn’t all. That pressure Irizarry had sensed earlier, the feeling that many eyes were watching him, gaunt bodies stretching against whatever frail fabric held them back—here, it was redoubled, until he almost felt the brush of not-quite-in-phase whiskers along the nape of his neck.

Sanderson crawled up beside him, her pistol in one hand. Mongoose didn’t seem to mind her there.

“What’s down there?” she asked, her voice hissing on constrained breaths.

“The breeding pit,” Irizarry said. “You feel that? Kind of funny, stretchy feeling in the universe?”

Sanderson nodded behind her mask. “It’s not going to make you any happier, is it, if I tell you I’ve felt it before?”

Irizarry was wearily, grimly unsurprised. But then Sanderson said, “What do we do?”

He was taken aback and it must have shown, even behind the rebreather, because she said sharply, “You’re the expert. Which I assume is why you’re on Kadath Station to begin with and why Station Master Lee has been so anxious that I not know it. Though with an infestation of this size, I don’t know how she thought she was going to hide it much longer anyway.”

“Call it sabotage,” Irizarry said absently. “Blame the Christians. Or the gillies. Or disgruntled spacers, like the crew off the Caruso. It happens a lot, Colonel. Somebody like me and Mongoose comes in and cleans up the toves, the station authorities get to crack down on whoever’s being the worst pain in the ass, and life keeps on turning over. But she waited too long.”

Down in the pit, the breeder heaved again. Breeding raths were slow—much slower than the juveniles, or the sexually dormant adult rovers—but that was because they were armored like titanium armadillos. When threatened, one of two things happened. Babies flocked to mama, mama rolled herself in a ball, and it would take a tactical nuke to kill them. Or mama went on the warpath. Irizarry had seen a pissed off breeder take out a bulkhead on a steelship once; it was pure dumb luck that it hadn’t breached the hull.

And, of course, once they started spawning, as this one had, they could produce between ten and twenty babies a day for anywhere from a week to a month, depending on the food supply. And the more babies they produced, the weaker the walls of the world got, and the closer the bandersnatches would come.

“The first thing we have to do,” he said to Colonel Sanderson, “as in, right now, is kill the breeder. Then you quarantine the station and get parties of volunteers to hunt down the rovers, before they can bring another breeder through, or turn into breeders, or however the fuck it works, which frankly I don’t know. It’ll take fire to clear this nest of toves, but Mongoose and I can probably get the rest. And fire, Colonel Sanderson. Toves don’t give a shit about vacuum.”

She could have reproved him for his language; she didn’t. She just nodded and said, “How do we kill the breeder?”

“Yeah,” Irizarry said. “That’s the question.”

Mongoose clicked sharply, her Irizarry! noise.

“No,” Irizarry said. “Mongoose, don’t—”

But she wasn’t paying attention. She had only a limited amount of patience for his weird interactions with other members of his species and his insistence on waiting, and he’d clearly used it all up. She was Rikki Tikki Tavi, and the breeder was Nagina, and Mongoose knew what had to happen. She launched off Irizarry’s shoulders, shifting phase as she went, and without contact between them, there was nothing he could do to call her back. In less than a second, he didn’t even know where she was.

“You any good with that thing?” he said to Colonel Sanderson, pointing at her pistol.

“Yes,” she said, but her eyebrows were going up again. “But, forgive me, isn’t this what cheshires are for?”

“Against rovers, sure. But—Colonel, have you ever seen a breeder?”

Across the bowl, a tove warbled, the chorus immediately taken up by its neighbors. Mongoose had started.

“No,” Sanderson said, looking down at where the breeder humped and wallowed and finally stood up, shaking off ethereal babies and half-eaten toves. “Oh. Gods.”

You couldn’t describe a rath. You couldn’t even look at one for more than a few seconds before you started getting a migraine aura. Rovers were just blots of shadow. The breeder was massive, armored, and had no recognizable features, save for its hideous, drooling, ragged edged maw. Irizarry didn’t know if it had eyes, or even needed them.

“She can kill it,” he said, “but only if she can get at its underside. Otherwise, all it has to do is wait until it has a clear swing, and she’s . . . ” He shuddered. “I’ll be lucky to find enough of her for a funeral. So what we have to do now, Colonel, is piss it off enough to give her a chance. Or”—he had to be fair; this was not Colonel Sanderson’s job—”if you’ll lend me your pistol, you don’t have to stay.”

She looked at him, her dark eyes very bright, and then she turned to look at the breeder, which was swinging its shapeless head in slow arcs, trying, no doubt, to track Mongoose. “Fuck that, Mr. Irizarry,” she said crisply. “Tell me where to aim.”

“You won’t hurt it,” he’d warned her, and she’d nodded, but he was pretty sure she hadn’t really understood until she fired her first shot and the breeder didn’t even notice. But Sanderson hadn’t given up; her mouth had thinned, and she’d settled into her stance, and she’d fired again, at the breeder’s feet as Irizarry had told her. A breeding rath’s feet weren’t vulnerable as such, but they were sensitive, much more sensitive than the human-logical target of its head. Even so, it was concentrating hard on Mongoose, who was making toves scream at various random points around the circumference of the breeding pit, and it took another three shots aimed at that same near front foot before the breeder’s head swung in their direction.

It made a noise, a sort of “wooaaurgh” sound, and Irizarry and Sanderson were promptly swarmed by juvenile raths.

“Ah, fuck,” said Irizarry. “Try not to kill them.”

“I’m sorry, try not to kill them?”

“If we kill too many of them, it’ll decide we’re a threat rather than an annoyance. And then it rolls up in a ball, and we have no chance of killing it until it unrolls again. And by then, there will be a lot more raths here.”

“And quite possibly a bandersnatch,” Sanderson finished. “But—” She batted away a half-corporeal rath that was trying to wrap itself around the warmth of her pistol.

“If we stood perfectly still for long enough,” Irizarry said, “they could probably leech out enough of our body heat to send us into hypothermia. But they can’t bite when they’re this young. I knew a cheshire-man once who swore they ate by crawling down into the breeder’s stomach to lap up what it’d digested. I’m still hoping that’s not true. Just keep aiming at that foot.”

“You got it.”

Irizarry had to admit, Sanderson was steady as a rock. He shooed juvenile raths away from both of them, Mongoose continued her depredations out there in the dark, and Sanderson, having found her target, fired at it in a nice steady rhythm. She didn’t miss; she didn’t try to get fancy. Only, after a while, she said out of the corner of her mouth, “You know, my battery won’t last forever.”

“I know,” Irizarry said. “But this is good. It’s working.”

“How can you tell?”

“It’s getting mad.”

“How can you tell?”

“The vocalizing.” The rath had gone from its “wooaaurgh” sound to a series of guttural huffing noises, interspersed with high-pitched yips. “It’s warning us off. Keep firing.”

“All right,” Sanderson said. Irizarry cleared another couple of juveniles off her head. He was trying not to think about what it meant that no adult raths had come to the pit—just how much of Kadath Station had they claimed?

“Have there been any disappearances lately?” he asked Sanderson.

She didn’t look at him, but there was a long silence before she said, “None that seemed like disappearances. Our population is by necessity transient, and none too fond of authority. And, frankly, I’ve had so much trouble with the station master’s office that I’m not sure my information is reliable.”

It had to hurt for a political officer to admit that. Irizarry said, “We’re very likely to find human bones down there. And in their caches.”

Sanderson started to answer him, but the breeder decided it had had enough. It wheeled toward them, its maw gaping wider, and started through the mounds of garbage and corpses in their direction.

“What now?” said Sanderson.

“Keep firing,” said Irizarry. Mongoose, wherever you are, please be ready.

He’d been about seventy-five percent sure that the rath would stand up on its hind legs when it reached them. Raths weren’t sapient, not like cheshires, but they were smart. They knew that the quickest way to kill a human was to take its head off, and the second quickest was to disembowel it, neither of which they could do on all fours. And humans weren’t any threat to a breeder’s vulnerable abdomen; Sanderson’s pistol might give the breeder a hot foot, but there was no way it could penetrate the breeder’s skin.

It was a terrible plan—there was that whole twenty-five percent where he and Sanderson died screaming while the breeder ate them from the feet up—but it worked. The breeder heaved itself upright, massive, indistinct paw going back for a blow that would shear Sanderson’s head off her neck and probably bounce it off the nearest bulkhead, and with no warning of any kind, not for the humans, not for the rath, Mongoose phased viciously in, claws and teeth and sharp edged tentacles all less than two inches from the rath’s belly and moving fast.

The rath screamed and curled in on itself, but it was too late. Mongoose had already caught the lips of its—oh gods and fishes, Irizarry didn’t know the word. Vagina? Cloaca? Ovipositor? The place where little baby raths came into the world. The only vulnerability a breeder had. Into which Mongoose shoved the narrow wedge of her head, and her clawed front feet, and began to rip.

Before the rath could even reach for her, her malleable body was already entirely inside it, and it—screaming, scrabbling—was doomed.

Irizarry caught Sanderson’s elbow and said, “Now would be a good time, very slowly, to back away. Let the lady do her job.”

Irizarry almost made it off of Kadath clean.

He’d had no difficulty in getting a berth for himself and Mongoose—after a party or two of volunteers had seen her in action, after the stories started spreading about the breeder, he’d nearly come to the point of beating off the steelship captains with a stick. And in the end, he’d chosen the offer of the captain of the Erich Zann, a boojum; Captain Alvarez had a long-term salvage contract in the Kuiper belt—”cleaning up after the ice miners,” she’d said with a wry smile—and Irizarry felt like salvage was maybe where he wanted to be for a while. There’d be plenty for Mongoose to hunt, and nobody’s life in danger. Even a bandersnatch wasn’t much more than a case of indigestion for a boojum.

He’d got his money out of the station master’s office—hadn’t even had to talk to Station Master Lee, who maybe, from the things he was hearing, wasn’t going to be station master much longer. You could either be ineffectual or you could piss off your political officer. Not both at once. And her secretary so very obviously didn’t want to bother her that it was easy to say, “We had a contract,” and to plant his feet and smile. It wasn’t the doubled fee she’d promised him, but he didn’t even want that. Just the money he was owed.

So his business was taken care of. He’d brought Mongoose out to the Erich Zann, and insofar as he and Captain Alvarez could tell, the boojum and the cheshire liked each other. He’d bought himself new underwear and let Mongoose pick out a new pair of earrings for him. And he’d gone ahead and splurged, since he was, after all, on Kadath Station and might as well make the most of it, and bought a selection of books for his reader, including The Wind in the Willows. He was looking forward, in an odd, quiet way, to the long nights out beyond Neptune: reading to Mongoose, finding out what she thought about Rat and Mole and Toad and Badger.

Peace—or as close to it as Izrael Irizarry was ever likely to get.

He’d cleaned out his cubby in the Transient Barracks, slung his bag over one shoulder with Mongoose riding on the other, and was actually in sight of the Erich Zann’s dock when a voice behind him called his name.

Colonel Sanderson.

He froze in the middle of a stride, torn between turning around to greet her and bolting like a rabbit, and then she’d caught up to him. “Mr. Irizarry,” she said. “I hoped I could buy you a drink before you go.”

He couldn’t help the deeply suspicious look he gave her. She spread her hands, showing them empty. “Truly. No threats, no tricks. Just a drink. To say thank you.” Her smile was lopsided; she knew how unlikely those words sounded in the mouth of a political officer.

And any other political officer, Irizarry wouldn’t have believed them. But he’d seen her stand her ground in front of a breeder rath, and he’d seen her turn and puke her guts out when she got a good look at what Mongoose did to it. If she wanted to thank him, he owed it to her to sit still for it.

“All right,” he said, and added awkwardly, “Thank you.”

They went to one of Kadath’s tourist bars: bright and quaint and cheerful and completely unlike the spacer bars Irizarry was used to. On the other hand, he could see why Sanderson picked this one. No one here, except maybe the bartender, had the least idea who she was, and the bartender’s wide-eyed double take meant that they got excellent service: prompt and very quiet.

Irizarry ordered a pink lady—he liked them, and Mongoose, in delight, turned the same color pink, with rosettes matched to the maraschino “cherry.” Sanderson ordered whisky, neat, which had very little resemblance to the whisky Irizarry remembered from planetside. She took a long swallow of it, then set the glass down and said, “I never got a chance to ask Spider John this: how did you get your cheshire?”

It was clever of her to invoke Spider John and Demon like that, but Irizarry still wasn’t sure she’d earned the story. After the silence had gone on a little too long, Sanderson picked her glass up, took another swallow, and said, “I know who you are.”

“I’m nobody,” Irizarry said. He didn’t let himself tense up, because Mongoose wouldn’t miss that cue, and she was touchy enough, what with all the steelship captains, that he wasn’t sure what she might think the proper response was. And he wasn’t sure, if she decided the proper response was to rip Sanderson’s face off, that he would be able to make himself disagree with her in time.

“I promised,” Sanderson said. “No threats. I’m not trying to trace you, I’m not asking any questions about the lady you used to work for. And, truly, I’m only asking how you met this lady. You don’t have to tell me.”

“No,” Irizarry said mildly. “I don’t.” But Mongoose, still pink, was coiling down his arm to investigate the glass—not its contents, since the interest of the egg-whites would be more than outweighed by the sharp sting to her nose of the alcohol, but the upside-down cone on a stem of a martini glass. She liked geometry. And this wasn’t a story that could hurt anyone.

He said, “I was working my way across Jupiter’s moons, oh, five years ago now. Ironically enough, I got trapped in a quarantine. Not for vermin, but for the black rot. It was a long time, and things got . . . ugly.”

He glanced at her and saw he didn’t need to elaborate.

“There were Arkhamers trapped there, too, in their huge old scow of a ship. And when the water rationing got tight, there were people that said the Arkhamers shouldn’t have any—said that if it was the other way ‘round, they wouldn’t give us any. And so when the Arkhamers sent one of their daughters for their share . . . ” He still remembered her scream, a grown woman’s terror in a child’s voice, and so he shrugged and said, “I did the only thing I could. After that, it was safer for me on their ship than it was on the station, so I spent some time with them. Their Professors let me stay.

“They’re not bad people,” he added, suddenly urgent. “I don’t say I understand what they believe, or why, but they were good to me, and they did share their water with the crew of the ship in the next berth. And of course, they had cheshires. Cheshires all over the place, cleanest steelship you’ve ever seen. There was a litter born right about the time the quarantine finally lifted. Jemima—the little girl I helped—she insisted they give me pick of the litter, and that was Mongoose.”

Mongoose, knowing the shape of her own name on Irizarry’s lips, began to purr, and rubbed her head gently against his fingers. He petted her, feeling his tension ease, and said, “And I wanted to be a biologist before things got complicated.”

“Huh,” said Sanderson. “Do you know what they are?”

“Sorry?” He was still mostly thinking about the Arkhamers, and braced himself for the usual round of superstitious nonsense: demons or necromancers or what-not.

But Sanderson said, “Cheshires. Do you know what they are?”

“What do you mean, ‘what they are’? They’re cheshires.”

“After Demon and Spider John . . . I did some reading and I found a Professor or two—Arkhamers, yes—to ask.” She smiled, very thinly. “I’ve found, in this job, that people are often remarkably willing to answer my questions. And I found out. They’re bandersnatches.”

“Colonel Sanderson, not to be disrespectful—”

“Sub-adult bandersnatches,” Sanderson said. “Trained and bred and intentionally stunted so that they never mature fully.”

Mongoose, he realized, had been watching, because she caught his hand and said emphatically, Not.

“Mongoose disagrees with you,” he said and found himself smiling. “And really, I think she would know.”

Sanderson’s eyebrows went up. “And what does Mongoose think she is?”

He asked, and Mongoose answered promptly, pink dissolving into champagne and gold: Jagular. But there was a thrill of uncertainty behind it, as if she wasn’t quite sure of what she stated so emphatically. And then, with a sharp toss of her head at Colonel Sanderson, like any teenage girl: Mongoose.

Sanderson was still watching him sharply. “Well?”

“She says she’s Mongoose.”

And Sanderson really wasn’t trying to threaten him, or playing some elaborate political game, because her face softened in a real smile, and she said, “Of course she is.”

Irizarry swished a sweet mouthful between his teeth. He thought of what Sanderson has said, of the bandersnatch on the Jenny Lind wriggling through stretched rips in reality like a spiny, deathly puppy tearing a blanket. “How would you domesticate a bandersnatch?”

She shrugged. “If I knew that, I’d be an Arkhamer, wouldn’t I?” Gently, she extended the back of her hand for Mongoose to sniff. Mongoose, surprising Irizarry, extended one tentative tendril and let it hover just over the back of Sanderson’s wrist.

Sanderson tipped her head, smiling affectionately, and didn’t move her hand. “But if I had to guess, I’d say you do it by making friends.”

First published in Lovecraft Unbound, edited by Ellen Datlow.

About the Authors

Sarah Monette was born and raised in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, one of the secret cities of the Manhattan Project. Having completed her Ph.D. in Renaissance English drama, she now lives and writes in a 99-year-old house in the Upper Midwest. Her “Doctrine of Labyrinths” series consists of the novels Melusine, The Virtu, and The Mirador. Her short fiction has been collected in The Bone Key. Upcoming is a new novel in the “Doctrine of Labyrinths” sequence, Corambis.

Elizabeth Bear was born in Connecticut, and now lives in Brookfield, Massachusetts. She won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2005, and in 2008 took home a Hugo Award for her short story “Tideline,” which also won her the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award (shared with David Moles). In 2009, she won another Hugo Award for her novelette “Shoggoths in Bloom.” Her short work has been collected in The Chains That You Refuse, New Amsterdam, and Shoggoths In Bloom. She is the author of three SF novels, Hammered, Scardown, and Worldwired, and of the Alternate History Fantasy “Promethean Age” series, which includes the novels Blood and Iron, Whiskey and Water, Ink and Steel, and Hell and Earth. Her other books include the novels Carnival, Undertow, Chill, Dust, All the Windwracked Stars, By the Mountain Bound, Range of Ghosts, a novel in collaboration with Sarah Monette, The Tempering of Men, and two chapbook novella, Bone and Jewel Creature and Ad Eternum. Coming up are a new novel, Shattered Pillars, and a new novella, The Book of Iron.

Dead Men Walking

Paul J. McAuley

I guess this is the end. I’m in no condition to attempt the climb down, and in any case I’m running out of air. The nearest emergency shelter is only five klicks away, but it might as well be on the far side of this little moon. I’m not expecting any kind of last-minute rescue, either. No one knows I’m here, my phone and the distress beacon are out, my emergency flares went with my utility belt, and I don’t think that the drones patrol this high. At least my legs have stopped hurting, although I can feel the throb of what’s left of my right hand through the painkiller’s haze, like the beat of distant war drums . . .

If you’re the person who found my body, I doubt that you’ll have time to listen to my last and only testament. You’ll be too busy calling for help, securing the area, and making sure that you or any of your companions don’t trample precious clues underfoot. I imagine instead that you’re an investigator or civil servant sitting in an office buried deep inside some great bureaucratic hive, listening to this out of duty before consigning it to the memory hole. You’ll know that my body was found near the top of the eastern wall of the great gash of Elliot Graben on Ariel, Uranus’s fourth-largest moon, but I don’t suppose you’ve ever visited the place, so I should give you an idea of what I can see.

I’m sitting with my pressure suit’s backpack firmly wedged against a huge block of dirty, rock-hard ice. A little way beyond my broken legs, a cliff drops straight down for about a kilometer to the bottom of the graben’s enormous trough. Its floor, resurfaced a couple of billion years ago by a flood of water-ice lava, is a level plain patched with enormous fields of semi-vacuum organisms. Orange and red, deep blacks, foxy umbers, bright yellows . . . they stretch away from me in every direction for as far as I can see, like the biggest quilt in the universe. This moon is so small and the graben is so wide that its western rim is below the horizon. Strings of suspensor lamps float high above the fields like a fleet of burning airships. There’s enough atmospheric pressure, twenty millibars of nitrogen and methane, to haze the view and give an indication of distance, of just how big this strange garden really is. It’s the prison farm, of course, and every square centimeter of it was constructed by the sweat of men and women convicted by the failure of their ideals, but none of that matters to me now. I’m beyond all that up here, higher than the suspensor lamps, tucked under the eaves of the vast roof of fullerene composite and transparent halflife polymer that tents the graben. If I twist my head I can glimpse one of the giant struts that anchor the roof. Beyond it, the big, blue-green globe of Uranus floats in the black sky. The gas giant’s south pole, capped with a brownish haze of photochemical smog, is pointed at the brilliant point of the sun, which hangs just above the western horizon.

Sunset’s three hours off. I won’t live long enough to see it. My legs are comfortably numb, but the throbbing in my hand is becoming more urgent, there’s a dull ache in my chest, and every breath is an effort. I wonder if I’ll live long enough to tell you my story . . .

All right. I’ve just taken another shot of painkiller. I had to override the suit to do it, it’s a lethal dose . . .

Christos, it still hurts. It hurts to laugh.

My name is Roy Bruce. It isn’t my real name. I have never had a real name. I suppose I had a number when I was decanted, but I don’t know what it was. My instructors called me Dave—but they called all of us Dave, a private joke they never bothered to explain. Later, just before the war began, I took the life of the man in whose image I had been made. I took his life, his name, his identity. And after the war was over, after I evaded recall and went on the run, I had several different names, one after the other. But Roy, Roy Bruce, that’s the name I’ve had longest. That’s the name you’ll find on the roster of guards. That’s the name you can bury me under.

My name is Roy Bruce, and I lived in Herschel City, Ariel, for eight and a half years. Lived. Already with the past tense . . .

My name is Roy Bruce. I’m a prison guard. The prison, TPA Facility 898, is a cluster of chambers—we call them blocks—buried in the eastern rim of Elliot Graben. Herschel City is twenty klicks beyond, a giant cylindrical shaft sunk into Ariel’s icy surface, its walls covered in a vertical, shaggy green forest that grows from numerous ledges and crevices. Public buildings and little parks jut out of the forest wall like bracket fungi; homes are built in and amongst the trees. Ariel’s just over a thousand kilometers in diameter and mostly ice; its gravity barely exists. The citizens of Herschel City are arboreal acrobats, swinging, climbing, sliding, flying up and down and roundabout on cableways and trapezes, nets and ropewalks.

It’s a good place to live.

I have a one-room treehouse. It’s not very big and plainly furnished, but you can sit on the porch of a morning, watch squirrel monkeys chase each other through the pines. I’m a member of Sweat Lodge #23. I breed singing crickets, have won several competitions with them. Mostly they’re hacked to sing fragments of Mozart, nothing fancy, but my line has good sustain and excellent timbre and pitch. I hope old Willy Gup keeps it going . . .

I like to hike too, and climb freestyle. I once soloed the Broken Book route in Prospero Chasma on Miranda, twenty kilometers up a vertical face, in fifteen hours. Nowhere near the record, but pretty good for someone with a terminal illness. I’ve already had various bouts of cancer, but retroviruses dealt with those easily enough. What’s killing me—what just lost the race to kill me—is a general systematic failure something like lupus. I couldn’t get any treatment for it, of course, because the doctors would find out who I really am. What I really was.

I suppose that I had a year or so left. Maybe two if I was really lucky.

It wasn’t much of a life, but it was all my own.

Uranus has some twenty-odd moons, mostly captured chunks of sooty ice a few dozen kilometers in diameter. Before the Quiet War, no more than a couple of hundred people lived out here. Rugged pioneer families, hermits, a few scientists, and some kind of Hindu sect that planted huge tracts of Umbriel’s sooty surface with slow-growing lichenous vacuum organisms. After the war, the Three Powers Alliance took over the science station on Ariel, renamed it Herschel City, and built its maximum security facility in the big graben close by. The various leaders and lynchpins of the revolution, who had already spent two years being interrogated at Tycho, on Earth’s Moon, were moved here to serve the rest of their life sentences of reeducation and moral realignment. At first, the place was run by the Brazilian Navy, but civilian contractors were brought in after Elliot Graben was tented and the vacuum organism farms were planted. Most were ex-Service people who had settled in the Outer System after the war. I was one of them.

I had learned how to create fake identities with convincing histories during my training: my latest incarnation easily passed the security check. For eight and half years, Roy Bruce, guard third class, cricket breeder, amateur freestyle climber, lived a quiet, anonymous life out on the fringe of the Solar System. And then two guards stumbled across the body of Goether Lyle, who had been the leader of the Senate of Athens, Tethys when, along with a dozen other city states in the Outer System, it had declared independence from Earth.

I’d known Goether slightly: an intense, serious man who’d been writing some kind of philosophical thesis in his spare time. His body was found in the middle of the main highway between the facility and the farms, spreadeagled and naked, spikes hammered through hands and feet. His genitals had been cut off and stuffed in his mouth; his tongue had been pulled through the slit in his throat. He was also frozen solid—the temperature out on the floor of the graben is around minus one hundred and fifty degrees Centigrade, balmy compared to the surface of Ariel, but still a lot colder than the inside of any domestic freezer, so cold that the carbon dioxide given off by certain strains of vacuum organisms precipitates out of the atmosphere like hoar frost. It took six hours to thaw out his body for the autopsy, which determined that the mutilations were postmortem. He’d been strangled, and then all the other stuff had been done to him.

I was more than thirty klicks away when Goether Lyle’s body was discovered, supervising a work party of ten prisoners, what we call a stick, that was harvesting a field of vacuum organisms. It’s important to keep the prisoners occupied, and stoop labor out in the fields or in the processing plants leaves them too tired to plan any serious mischief. Also, export of the high-grade biochemicals which the vacuum organisms cook from methane in the thin atmosphere helps to defray the enormous cost of running the facility. So I didn’t hear about the murder until I’d driven my stick back to its block at the end of the shift, and I didn’t learn all the gruesome details until later that evening, at the sweat lodge.

In the vestigial gravity of worldlets like Ariel, where you can drown in a shower and water tends to slosh about uncontrollably, sweat lodges, saunas, or Turkish-style hamams are ideal ways to keep clean. You bake in steam heat, sweat the dirt out of your pores, scrape it off your skin, and exchange gossip with your neighbors and friends. Even in a little company town like Herschel City, there are lodges catering for just about every sexual orientation and religious belief. My lodge, #23, is for unattached, agnostic heterosexual males. That evening, as usual, I was sitting with a dozen or so naked men of various ages and body types in eucalyptus-scented steam. We scraped at our skin with abrasive mitts or plastered green depilatory mud on ourselves, squirted the baking stones of the hearth with water to make more steam, and talked about the murder of Goether Lyle. Mustafa Sesler, who worked in the hospital, gave us all the grisly details. There was speculation about whether it was caused by a personal beef or a turf war between gangs. Someone made the inevitable joke about it being the most thorough suicide in the history of the prison. Someone else, my friend Willy Gup, asked me if I had any idea about it.

“You had the guy in your stick last year, Roy. He have any enemies you know of?”

I gave a noncommital answer. The mutilations described by Mustafa Sesler were straight out of my training in assassination, guerrilla tactics, and black propaganda. I was processing the awful possibility that Goether Lyle had been murdered by someone like me.

You must know by now what I am. That I am not really human. That I am a doppelganger designed by gene wizards, grown in a vat, decanted fully grown with a headful of hardwired talents and traits, trained up, and sent out to kill the person whose exact double I was, and replace him. I do not know how many doppelgangers, berserkers, suicide artists and other cloned subversives were deployed during the Quiet War, but I believe that our contribution was significant. My target was Sharwal Jah Sharja, a minor gene wizard who lived alone in the jungle in one of the tented crevasses of East of Eden, Ganymede, where he orchestrated the unceasing symphony of the city state’s closed loop ecosystem. After I took his place, I began a program of ecotage, significantly reducing the circulation of water vapor and increasing the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide and toxic trace gases. By the time the Quiet War kicked off, some four weeks later, the population of East of Eden was wearing breathing masks, the forests and parks were beginning to die, and most food animals and crops had died or were badly stricken, forcing the city to use biomass from vacuum organism farms to feed its citizens. A commando force of the Three Powers Alliance annexed East of Eden’s farms in the first few hours of the war, and after two weeks its starving citizens agreed terms of surrender.

I was supposed to turn myself in as soon as the city had been secured, but in the middle of the formal surrender, dead-ender fanatics assassinated half the Senate and attacked the occupying force. In the subsequent confusion, the tented crevasse where I had been living was blown open to vacuum, Sharwal Jah Sharja was posted as one of the casualties, and I took the opportunity to slip away. I have successfully hidden my true identity and lived incognito amongst ordinary human beings ever since.

Why did I disobey my orders? How did I slip the bonds of my hardwired drives and instincts? It’s quite simple. While I had been pretending to be Sharwal Jah Sharja, I had come to love life. I wanted to learn as much about it as I could in the brief span I’d been allotted by my designers. And so I adopted the identity of another casualty, and after the war was over and the Three Powers Alliance allowed trade and travel to resume, I left East of Eden and went out into the Solar System to see what I could see.

In all my wanderings I never met any others like me, but I did find a hint that at least one of my brothers and sisters of the vat had survived the war. All of us had been imprinted with a variety of coded messages covering a vast range of possibilities, and a year after going on the run I came across one of them in a little-used passageway between two chambers of the city of Xamba, Rhea.

To anyone else it was a meaningless scrawl; to me, it was like a flash of black lightning that branded an enciphered phone number itself on my brain. The walls of the passageway were thickly scribbled with graffiti, much of it pre-war. The message could have been left there last year or last week; it could have been a trap, left by agents hunting renegades like me. I didn’t have the nerve to find out. I went straight to the spaceport and bought a seat on a shuttle to Phoebe, the gateway port to the other moons of Saturn and the rest of the Outer System. Six months later, wearing the new identity of Roy Bruce, I became a guard at TPA Facility 898.

That’s why, almost nine years later, I couldn’t be certain that any of my brothers and sisters had survived, and I was able to convince myself that Goether Lyle had been the victim of the vicious internal politics of the prison, killed and mutilated by someone who knew about the black propaganda techniques in which we’d been trained. But that comforting fiction was blown apart the very next day, when another mutilated body was found.

The victim was a former senator of Baghdad, Enceladus, and a member of the prison gang that was intermittently at war with the gang to which Goether Lyle had belonged. A message written in blood on the ground next to the senator’s body implied that he’d been murdered by Goether Lyle’s cronies, but whoever had killed him must have done the deed in his cell some time between the evening count and the end of the night’s lockdown, spirited his body out of the facility without being detected, and left it within the field of view of a security camera which had been hacked to show a recorded loop instead of a live feed. Members of the rival gangs lived in different blocks, had chips implanted in their skulls which constantly monitored their movements, and were under lock-down all night. If the killer was a prisoner, he would have had to bribe more than a dozen guards; it was far more likely that the senator had been killed by one of the facility’s staff. And when I heard what had been done to the body, I was certain that it was the handiwork of one of my brothers or sisters. The senator had been blinded before he’d been strangled, and his lungs had been pulled through incisions in his back. It was a mutilation called the Blood Eagle, invented by the Vikings some two thousand years ago. I remembered the cold, patient voice of the instructor who had demonstrated it to us on a corpse.

Someone in the warden’s office reached the same conclusion. Posted at the top of our daily orders was an announcement that a specialist team was on its way to Ariel, and emergency security measures were put in place at the spaceport. That evening Willy Gup told the sweat lodge that the warden reckoned that it was possible that the two murders were the work of the kind of vat-grown assassin used in the Quiet War.

“So if you come across anything suspicious, don’t be tempted to do anything stupidly heroic, my brothers. Those things are smart and deadly and completely without any kind of human feeling. Be like me. Stay frosty, but hang back.”

I felt a loathsome chill crawl through me. I knew that if Willy and the others realized that one of ‘those things’ was sitting with them in the steamy heat of the lodge, they would fall on me at once and tear me limb from limb. And I knew that I couldn’t hang back, couldn’t let things run their course. No one would be able to leave Ariel for the duration of the emergency security measures, and the specialist team would search every square centimeter of the facility and Herschel City, check the records and DNA profile of every prisoner, member of staff, citizen and visitor, and release a myriad tiny drones designed to home in on anyone breathing out the combination of metabolic byproducts unique to our kind. The team would almost certainly uncover the assassin, but they would also unmask me.

Oh, I suppose that I could have hiked out to some remote location on the surface and hunkered down for the duration, but I had no idea how long the search would last. The only way I could be sure of evading it would be to force my pressure suit put me in deep hibernation for a month or two, and how would I explain my absence when I returned? And besides, I knew that I was dying. I was already taking dangerously large daily doses of steroids to relieve the swelling of my joints and inflammation of my connective tissue caused by my pseudo-lupus. Suspended animation would slow but not stop the progress of my disease. Suppose I never woke up?

I spent a long, bleak night considering my options. By the time the city had begun to increase its ambient light level and the members of the local troop of spider monkeys were beginning to hoot softly to each other in the trees outside my little cabin, I knew what I would have to do. I knew that I would have to find the assassin before the team arrived.

My resolve hardened when I started my shift a couple of hours later and learned that there had been two more murders, and a minor riot in the prison library.

I found it laughably easy to hack into the facility’s files: I had been trained well all those years ago, and the data system was old, and was easily fooled. I checked the dossiers of recently recruited staff but found nothing suspicious, and didn’t have any better luck when I examined the dossiers of friends and family of prisoners, their advocates, and traders and businesspeople currently staying in Herschel City. It was possible that I had missed something—no doubt the assassin’s cover story was every bit as good as the one that had served me so well for so long. But having more or less eliminated the obvious suspects, I had to consider the possibility that, just like me, the assassin had been hiding on Ariel ever since the war had ended. I had so much in common with my brothers and sisters that it would not be a wild coincidence if one of them had come to the same decision as I had, and had joined the staff of the prison. Perhaps he had finally gone insane, or perhaps the hardwired imperatives of his old mission had kicked in. Or perhaps, like me, he had discovered that he was coming to the end of his short life span, and had decided to have some fun.

In the short time before the specialist team arrived, it would be impossible to check thoroughly the records of over three thousand staff members. I had reached a dead end. I decided that I needed some advice.

Everyone in Herschel City and the prison was talking about the murders. During a casual conversation with Willy Gup, I found it easy enough to ask my old friend if he had any thoughts on how someone might go about uncovering the identity of the assassin.

“Anyone with any sense would keep well clear,” Willy said. “He’d keep his nose clean, he’d keep his stick in line, and he’d wait for the specialists.”

“Who won’t be here for a week. A full-scale war could have broken out by then.”

Willy admitted that I had a point. One of the original intake of guards, a veteran who’d served in one of the Navy supply ships during the Quiet War, he had led the team that put down the trouble in the library. Three prisoners had died and eighteen had been badly injured—one had gouged out the eyes of another with her thumbs—and the incident had left him subdued and thoughtful.

After studying me for a few moments, he said, “If it was me, I wouldn’t touch the files. I hear the warden is compiling a list of people who are poking around, looking for clues and so forth. He tolerates their nonsense because he desperately wants to put an end to the trouble as soon as he can, and he’ll be pretty damn happy if some hack does happen to uncover the assassin. But it isn’t likely, and when this thing is over you can bet he’s going to come down hard on all those amateur sleuths. And it’s possible the assassin is keeping tabs on the files too. Anyone who comes close to finding him could be in for a bad surprise. No, my brother, screwing around in the files is only going to get you into trouble.”

I knew then that Willy had a shrewd idea of what I was about. I also knew that the warden was the least of my worries. I said, as lightly as I could, “So what would you do?”

Willy didn’t answer straight away, but instead refilled his bulb from the jar of iced tea. We were sitting on the porch of his little shack, at the edge of a setback near the top of the city’s shaft. Banana plants and tree ferns screened it from its neighbors; the vertical forest dropped away on either side. Willy’s champion cricket, a splendid white and bronze specimen in a cage of plaited bamboo, was trilling one of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Willy passed the jar to me and said, “We’re speaking purely hypothetically.”

“Of course.”

“You’ve always had a wild streak,” Willy said, “I wouldn’t put it past you to do something recklessly brave and dangerously stupid.”

“I’m just an ordinary hack,” I said.

“Who goes for long solitary hikes across the surface. Who soloed that route in Prospero Chasma and didn’t bother to mention it until someone found out a couple of years later. I’ve known you almost nine years, Roy, and you’re still a man of mystery,” Willy said, and smiled. “Hey, what’s that look for? All I’m saying is you have character, is all.”

For a moment, my hardwired reflexes had kicked in. For a moment, I had been considering whether or not this man had blown my cover, whether or not I should kill him. I carefully manufactured a smile, and said that I hadn’t realized that I seemed so odd.

“Most of us have secrets,” Willy said. “That’s why we’re out here, my brother. We’re just as much prisoners as anyone in our sticks. They don’t know it, but those dumbasses blundering about in the files are trying to find a way of escaping what they are.”

“And there’s no way you can escape what you are,” I said. The moment had passed. My smile was a real smile now, not a mask I’d put on to hide what I really was.

Willy toasted me with his bulb of tea. “Anyone with any sense learns that eventually.”

“You still haven’t told me how you would catch the assassin.”

“I don’t intend to catch him.”

“But speaking hypothetically . . . ”

“For all we know, it’s the warden. He can go anywhere and everywhere, and he has access to all the security systems too.”

“The warden? Really?”

Willy grinned. “I’m pulling your chain. But seriously, I’ve done a little research about these things. They’re not only stone killers: they’re also real good at disguising themselves. The assassin could be any one of us. The warden, you, me, anyone. Unless this thing makes a mistake, we haven’t got a hope of catching it. All we can do is what we’re already doing—deploy more security drones, keep the prisoners locked down when they aren’t working, and pray that that’ll keep a lid on any unrest until that team arrives.”

“I guess you’re right,” I said.

“Don’t try to be a hero, my brother. Not even hypothetically.”

“Absolutely not,” I said.

But one of Willy’s remarks had given me an idea about how to reach out to the assassin, and my mind was already racing, grappling with what I had to do.

I decided that if the assassin really was keeping an eye on the people who were hacking into the files, then he (or at least, his demon), must be lurking in the root directory of the data system. That was where I left an encrypted message explaining what I was and why I wanted to talk, attached to a demon that would attempt to trace anyone who looked at it. The demon phoned me six hours later, in the middle of the night. Someone had spotted my sign and wanted to talk.

The demon had failed to identify the person who wanted to talk, and it was infected with something, too: a simple communication program. I checked it out, excised a few lines of code that would have revealed my location, and fired it up. It connected me to a blank, two-dimensional space in which words began to appear, emerging letter by letter, traveling from right to left and fading away.

>>you got rid of the trace function. pretty good for an old guy—if that’s what you really are.

>they trained us well, I typed.

>>you think you know what i am. you think that i am like you.

Whoever was at the other end of the program wanted to get straight down to business. That suited me, but I knew that I couldn’t let him take the lead.

>we are both children of the vat, I typed. that’s why I reached out to you. that’s why i want to help you.

There was a pause as my correspondent thought this over.

>>you could be a trap.

>the message got your attention because it is hardwired into your visual cortex, just as it is hardwired into mine.

>>that kind of thing is no longer the secret it once was, but let’s say that i believe you . . .

A black disc spun in the blank space for less than a second, its strobing black light flashing a string of letters and numbers, gone.

>>do you know where that is?

I realized that the letters and numbers burnt into my brain were a grid reference.

>i can find it.

>>meet me in four hours. i have a little business to take care of first.

It was the middle of the night; the time when the assassin did his work.

>please don’t kill anyone else until we have talked.

My words faded. There was no reply.

The grid reference was at the precise center of a small eroded crater sixty klicks south of the facility, an unreconstructed area in the shadow of the graben’s eastern rimwall. Before I headed out, I equipped myself from the armory and downloaded a hack into the security system so that I could move freely and unremarked. I was oddly happy, foolishly confident. It felt good to be in action again. My head was filled with a fat, contented hum as I drove a tricycle cart along an old construction road. The rendezvous point was about an hour away: I would have plenty of time to familiarize myself with the terrain and make my preparations before the assassin, if that was who I had been talking to, turned up.

I want to make it clear that my actions were in no way altruistic. The only life I wanted to save was my own. Yes, I knew that I was dying, but no one loves life more than those who have only a little of it left; no one else experiences each and every moment with such vivid immediacy. I didn’t intend to throw away my life in a grand gesture. I wanted to unmask the assassin and escape the special team’s inquisition.

The road ran across a flat terrain blanketed in vacuum-cemented grey-brown dust and littered with big blocks which over the eons had been eroded into soft shapes by impact cratering. The graben’s wall reared up to my left, its intricate folds and bulges like a frozen curtain. Steep cones and rounded hills of mass-wasted talus fringed its base. To my right, the land sloped away toward a glittering ribbon of fences and dykes more than a kilometer away, the boundary of the huge patchwork of fields. It was two in the morning by the clock, but the suspensor lamps were burning as brightly as they always did, and above the western horizon the sun’s dim spark was almost lost in their hazy glow.

I was a couple of klicks from the rendezvous, and the road was cutting through a steep ridge that buttressed a great bulge in the wall, when the assassin struck. I glimpsed a hitch of movement high in a corner of my vision, but before I could react, a taser dart struck my cart and shorted its motor. A second later, a net slammed into me, slithering over my torso as muscular threads of myoelectric plastic tightened in constricting folds around my arms and chest. I struggled to free myself as the cart piddled to a halt, but my arms were pinned to my sides by the net and I couldn’t even unfasten the safety harness. I could only sit and watch as a figure in a black pressure suit descended the steep side of the ridge in two huge bounds, reached me in two more. It ripped out my phone, stripped away my utility belt, the gun in the pocket on the right thigh of my pressure suit and the knife in the pocket on the left thigh, then uncoupled my main air supply, punched the release of my harness and dragged me out of the low-slung seat and hauled me off the road. I was dumped on my back near a cart parked in the shadow of a house-sized block and the assassin stepped back, aiming a rail-gun at me.

The neutron camera I’d fitted inside my helmet revealed scant details of the face behind the gold-filmed mirror of my captor’s visor. Its demon made an extrapolation, searched the database I’d loaded, found a match. Debra Thorn, employed as a paramedic in the facility’s infirmary for the past two years, 22, unmarried, no children . . . I realized then that I’d made a serious mistake. The assassin was a doppelganger, all right, but because she was the double of someone who hadn’t been an adult when the war had ended she must have been manufactured and decanted much more recently than me. She wasn’t insane, and she hadn’t spent years under cover. She was killing people because that was what she’d been sent here to do. Because it was her mission.

A light was winking on my head-up display—the emergency short-range, line-of-sight walkie-talkie. When I responded, an electronically distorted voice said, “Are you alone?”

“Absolutely.”

“Who are you?”

I’d stripped all identifying tags from my suit before setting off, but the doppelganger who had killed Debra Thorn and taken her place was pointing a gun at my head and it seemed advisable to tell her my name. She was silent for a moment, no doubt taking a look at my file. I said, “I’m not the doppelganger of Roy Bruce, if that’s what you’re thinking. The person I killed and replaced was a gene wizard by the name of Sharwal Jah Sharja.”

I briefly told the assassin the story I have already told you. When I was finished, she said, “You’ve really been working here for eight years?”

“Eight and a half.” I had made a very bad mistake about my captor’s motives, but I must have piqued her curiosity, for otherwise I would already be dead. And even if I couldn’t talk my way out of this and persuade her to spare me, I still had a couple of weapons she hadn’t found. I risked a lie, said that her net had compromised my suit’s thermal integrity. I told her that I was losing heat to the frozen ground, that I would freeze to death if I didn’t get up.

She told me I could sit up, and to do it slowly.

As I got my feet under me, squatting on my haunches in front of her, I glanced up at the top of the ridge and made a crucial triangulation.

She said, “My instructors told me that I would live no more than a year.”

“Perhaps they told you that you would burn briefly but very brightly—that’s what they told me. But they lied. I expect they lied about a lot of things, but I promise to tell you only the truth. We can leave here, and go anywhere we want to.”

“I have a job to finish.”

“People to kill, riots to start.”

The assassin took a long step sideways to the cart, took something the size of a basketball from the net behind its seat, bowled it towards me. It bounced slowly over the dusty ground and ended up between my legs: the severed head of an old woman, skin burnt black with cold, eyes capped by frost.

“The former leader of the parliament of Sparta, Tethys,” the assassin said. “I left the body pinned to the ground in one of the fields where her friends work, with an amusing little message.”

“You are trying to start a war amongst the prisoners. Perhaps the people who sent you here are hoping that the scandal will close the facility. Perhaps they think it is the only chance they’ll have of freeing their comrades. Who are you working for, by the way?”

“I’ll ask the questions,” the assassin said.

I asked her how she would escape when she was finished. “There’s a special team on the way. If you’re still here when they arrive, they’ll hunt you down and kill you.”

“So that’s why you came after me. You were frightened that this team would find you while they were hunting me.”

She may have been young, but she was smart and quick.

I said, “I came because I wanted to talk to you. Because you’re like me.”

“Because after all these years of living amongst humans, you miss your own kind, is that it?”

Despite the electronic distortion, I could hear the sneer in the assassin’s voice. I said carefully, “The people who sent you here—the people who made you—have no plans to extract you when you are finished here. They do not care if you survive your mission. They only care that it is successful. Why give your loyalty to people who consider you expendable? To people who lied to you? You have many years of life ahead of you, and it isn’t as hard to disobey your orders as you might think. You’ve already disobeyed them, in fact, when you reached out to me. All you have to do is take one more step, and let me help you. If we work together, we’ll survive this. We’ll find a way to escape.”

“You think you’re human. You’re not. You’re exactly like me. A walking dead man. That’s what our instructors called us, by the way: the dead. Not ‘Dave’. Not anything cute. When we were being moved from one place to another, they’d shout out a warning: ‘Dead men walking.’”

It is the traditional warning when a condemned person is let out of their cell. Fortunately, I’ve never worked in Block H, where prisoners who have murdered or tried to murder fellow inmates or guards await execution, so I’ve never heard or had to use it.

The assassin said, “They’re right, aren’t they? We’re made things, so how can we be properly alive?”

“I’ve lived a more or less ordinary life for ten years. If you give this up and come with me, I’ll show you how.”

“You stole a life, just as I did. Underneath your disguise, you’re a dead man, just like me.”

“The life I live now is my own, not anyone else’s,” I said. “Give up what you are doing, and I’ll show you what I mean.”

“You’re a dead man,” the assassin said. “You’re breathing the last of your air. You have less than an hour left. I’ll leave you to die here, finish my work, and escape in the confusion. After that, I’m supposed to be picked up, but now I think I’ll pass on that. There must be plenty of people out there who need my skills. I’ll work for anyone who wants some killing done, and earn plenty of money.”

“It’s a nice dream,” I said, “but it will never come true.”

“Why shouldn’t I profit from what I was made to do?”

“I’ve lived amongst people for more than a decade. Perhaps I don’t know them as well as I should, but I do know that they are very afraid of us. Not because we’re different, but because we’re so very much like a part of them they don’t want to acknowledge. Because we’re the dark side of their nature. I’ve survived this long only because I have been very careful to hide what I really am. I can teach you how to do that, if you’ll let me.”

“It doesn’t sound like much of a life to me,” the assassin said.

“Don’t you like being Debra Thorn?” I said.

And at the same moment I kicked off the ground, hoping that by revealing that I knew who she was I’d distracted and confused her, and won a moment’s grace.

In Ariel’s microgravity, my standing jump took me high above the assassin’s head, up and over the edge of the ridge. As I flew up, I discharged the taser dart I’d sewn into the palm of one of my pressure suit’s gloves, and the electrical charge stored in its super-conducting loop shorted out every thread of myoelectric plastic that bound my arms. I shrugged off the net as I came down and kicked off again, bounding along the ridge in headlong flight towards the bulging face of the cliff wall and a narrow chimney pinched between two folds of black, rock-hard ice.

I was halfway there when a kinetic round struck my left leg with tremendous force and broke my thigh. I tumbled headlong, caught hold a low pinnacle just before I went over the edge of the ridge. The assassin’s triumphant shout was a blare of electronic noise in my ears; because she was using the line-of-sight walkie-talkie I knew that she was almost on me. I pushed up at once and scuttled towards the chimney like a crippled ape. I had almost reached my goal when a second kinetic round shattered my right knee. My suit was ruptured at the point of impact and I felt a freezing pain as the smart fabric constricted as tightly as a tourniquet, but I was not finished. The impact of the kinetic round had knocked me head over heels into a field of ice-blocks, within striking distance of the chimney. As I half-crawled, half-swam towards it, a third round took off the top of a pitted block that might have fallen from the cliffs a billion years ago, and then I was inside the chimney, and started to climb.

The assassin had no experience of freestyle climbing. Despite my injuries I soon outdistanced her. The chimney gave out after half a kilometer, and I had no choice but to continue to climb the naked iceface. Less than a minute later, the assassin reached the end of the chimney and fired a kinetic round that smashed into the cliff a little way above me. I flattened against the iceface as a huge chunk dropped past me with dreamy slowness, then powered straight through the expanding cloud of debris, pebbles and ice grains briefly rattling on my helmet, and flopped over the edge of a narrow setback.

My left leg bent in the middle of my thigh and hurt horribly; my right leg was numb below the knee, and a thick crust of blood had frozen solid at the joint. But I had no time to tend my wounds. I sat up and ripped out the hose of the water recycling system as the assassin shot above the edge of the cliff in a graceful arc, taser in one hand, rail gun in the other. I twisted the valve, hit her with a high-pressure spray of water that struck her visor and instantly froze. I pushed off the ground with both hands (a kinetic round slammed into the dusty ice where I’d just been), collided with her in midair, clamped my glove over the diagnostic port of her backpack, and discharged my second taser dart.

The dart shorted out the electronics in the assassin’s suit, and enough current passed through the port to briefly stun her. I pushed her away as we dropped towards the setback, but she managed to fire a last shot as she spun into the void beyond the edge of the setback. She was either phenomenally lucky or incredibly skillful: it took off my thumb and three fingers of my right hand.

She fell more than a kilometer. Even in the low gravity, it was more than enough to kill her, but just to make sure I dropped several blocks of ice onto her. The third smashed her visor. You’ll find her body, if you haven’t already, more or less directly below the spot where you found mine.

The assassin had vented most of my air supply and taken my phone and emergency beacon; the dart I’d used on her had crippled what was left of my pressure suit’s life support system. The suit’s insulation is pretty good, but I’m beginning to feel the bite of the cold now, my hand is growing pretty tired from using the squeeze pump to push air through the rebreather, and I’m getting a bad headache as the carbon dioxide concentration in my air supply inexorably rises. I killed the ecosystem of East of Eden by sabotaging the balance of its atmospheric gases, and now the same imbalance is killing me.

Just about the only thing still working is the stupid little chip I stuck in my helmet to record my conversation with the assassin. By now, you probably know more about her than I do. Perhaps you even know who sent her here.

I don’t have much time left. Perhaps it’s because the increasing carbon dioxide level is making me comfortably stupid, but I find that I don’t mind dying. I told you that I confronted the assassin to save myself. I think now that I may have been wrong about that. I may have gone on the run after the Quiet War, but in my own way I have served you right up until the end of my life.

I’m going to sign off now. I want to spend my last moments remembering my freestyle climb up those twenty kilometers of sheer ice in Prospero Chasma. I want to remember how at the end I stood tired and alone at the top of a world-cleaving fault left over from a shattering collision four billion years ago, with Uranus tilted at the horizon, half-full, serene and remote, and the infinite black, starry sky above. I felt so utterly insignificant then, and yet so happy, too, without a single regret for anything at all in my silly little life.

First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, March 2006.

About the Author

Born in Oxford, England, in 1955, Paul J. McAuley now makes his home in London. A professional biologist for many years, he sold his first story in 1984. His first novel, Four Hundred Billion Stars, won the Philip K. Dick Award, and his novel Fairyland won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Award in 1996. His other books include the novels Of The Fall, Eternal Light, Pasquale’s Angel, Confluence (a major trilogy of ambitious scope and scale set ten million years in the future, comprised of the novels Child of the River, Ancient of Days, and Shrine of Stars), Life on Mars, The Secret of Life, Whole Wide World, White Devils, Mind’s Eye, Players, Cowboy Angels, The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun. His short fiction has been collected in The King of the Hill and Other Stories, The Invisible Country, and Little Machines, and he is the co-editor, with Kim Newman, of an original anthology, In Dreams. His most recent book is a new novel, In the Mouth of the Whale, and a big retrospective collection, A Very British History: The Best of Paul McAuley. Coming up is a new novel, Evening’s Empire.

Beyond the Tracks:
The Locomotive in Science Fiction Literature

Jason Heller

The capsule of metal begins to hum. Forces accumulate. Seated inside, the passengers feel the propulsion system lurch to life. Their bones thrum in synchronous frequency. Thus harmonized, man and machine move as one. The vehicle is launched along a predestined trajectory, arcing outward, soon to bisect a barren frontier. It accelerates hesitantly at first, negotiating inertia, until at last the optimal velocity is achieved.

The passengers settle into their seats. It’s going to be a long ride. Each knock and kick is a tick of the clock as they hurtle aboard this newfangled conveyance—into the future.

Locomotives are the original spaceships. True, the same could be said of naval vessels, and in particular the steamship. The first practical application of steam technology in a boat predates the steam train by a handful of years. But only a handful. And even then, rail travel is an equally apt metaphor for spaceflight. When British inventor Richard Trevithick pioneered the steam locomotive with a historic tramway run in Wales in 1804, it was as profound an achievement for its time as Yuri Gagarin’s Vostock mission a century and a half later. With the advent of this new technology, frontiers opened. Barriers fell. And the future was altered forever.

Trevithick’s locomotive—and subsequent improvements by the likes of George Stephenson—ran like wildfire throughout the world. A lynchpin of the nascent Industrial Age, the steam train was a quantum leap in how humans could harness the forces of the physical world. And abuse those forces.

Unsurprisingly, the locomotive helped fuel a parallel development in literature: science fiction. One of the first true science fiction novels, Jane C. Loudon’s The Mummy!: Or a Tale of the Twenty-Second Century, appeared in 1836, and it posits a future where entire houses migrate about the land via railway. Emile Souvestre’s 1846 novel Le Monde Tel Qu’il Sera [The World As It Will Be], whisks its protagonists to the dystopian world of the year 3000, and his vehicle for this voyage is a steam locomotive that flies through space and time. And that giant of 19th century science fiction, Jules Verne, offered his own take on the locomotive in his 1863 book Paris au XXe Siècle—this time with the addition of speculative technology in the form of pneumatics.

As the locomotive became less of a smoke-breathing novelty and more of a staple of Industrial Age life, science fiction authors were forced to stretch their imaginations further in regard to the train. “The Tachypomp” was written by American newspaperman Edward Page Mitchell in 1874, five years after the final spike was driven into the Pacific Railroad, later to be known as the First Transcontinental Railroad. The short story doesn’t marvel at the locomotive as it existed at the time, but wonders about its potential as a means of infinite speed, a concept that foreshadows Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, still 21 years away. Most intriguingly, though, the titular Tachypomp comprises a series of vertically-stack trains resulting in exponential increases in velocity—a staggering symbol of imminent modernity that remains poetic in its conception.

The locomotive takes a turn for the horrific in A Mexican Mystery and The Wreck of the World, published in 1888 and ’89, respectively. Written by William Grove, the duology posits a train that is able to fuel itself—and then spins that perpetual source of sustenance into a prototypal form of artificial intelligence. One that embodies the “revolt of the machines” trope that came to typify science fiction as the dark side of industrial progress—pollution, exploitation, and dehumanization—began to become fixed in the collective consciousness. A more standard work of predictive fiction, John Jacob Astor IV’s A Journey in Other Worlds: A Romance of the Future followed in 1894. Among its many wild guesses about the world of the year 2000 is the spot-on prophecy of magnetic levitation (or maglev) trains.

The use of the locomotive in fantasy is another fertile topic unto itself, but its seeds can be seen in Rudyard Kipling’s 1897 short story “.007.” Rather than attaining self-awareness via some technological phenomena (as in Grove’s books), the trains in “.007” possess consciousness as a simple matter of course. That aura of magic realism excludes the story from the science fiction canon, but it is noteworthy in this sense: In a sense, “.007” is the first work of science-fantasy. While 19th-century fantasy pioneers such as George MacDonald and William Morris were rejecting industrialization in favor of a rarified pastoralism, Kipling imbued locomotives with mythopoeic souls—to the point where, for all intents and purposes, the trains of “.007” function as ironclad faerie-folk.

The advent of the 20th century brought with it a new view of futurism—and of locomotives. The Victorian Era’s romanticism gave way to sharper aesthetic of the Edwardian, and the conquering of one scientific mystery after another rendered the locomotive not only commonplace, but quaint. Inventors and explorers—some, like Robert Goddard, inspired by science fiction writers like H.G. Wells—began setting their sights in earnest on the stars.

In a feedback loop of fact and fiction that continued through much of the century, SF writers followed suit. The first major work of the genre to feature trains is Hugo Gernsback’s 1911 novel Ralph 124C 41+. Serialized in Modern Electrics magazine and steeped in the scintillation that would soon inform pulp SF, the book is a grab-bag of futuristic marvels. One of them is a subterranean magnetic train that runs from Europe to North America—but measured against Gernsback’s mad salvo of way-out (and at times eerily prescient) gadgetry, his vision of the locomotive’s future is far from compelling.

Then came World War I. The first major military conflagration to make extensive use of innovations such airplanes, submarines, and chemical warfare, it reduced the once-noble soldier to mere fodder for death machines. It also indelibly altered human culture—science fiction included. The notion that technology could bring about the extinction of homo sapiens resulted in a strain of dystopianism; SF writers used the genre as a battlefield for opposing ideas about science’s moral value.

World War II didn’t help matters in that regard, nor did the atomic bombings of Japan in 1945. In the midst of this turmoil, there was little room for the locomotive in SF, which might explain why trains all but vanished from the genre during this period. And when they did pop up, they were in children’s books such as Victor Appleton’s Tom Swift and his Electric Locomotive (1922), William Pène Du Bois’s The Flying Locomotive (1941), and Reverend W. Awdry’s The Three Railway Engines (1945). Awdry’s book launched the long-running Railway Series, which eventually inspired the Thomas the Tank Engine TV show. It owes more to Kipling’s “.007” fantastical view of locomotives than to the hard SF of the era, set as it is on the mythic Island of Sodor—in essence, a Middle Earth for trains. Locomotives had once flung themselves toward the future, but as the first mushroom clouds blossomed over major metropolises, the train became a comforting, even infantile symbol of a halcyon past.

The Postwar Era didn’t do much for the fortunes of locomotives in SF. Aside from a few random curiosities like A. J. Deutsch’s beguiling 1950 short story, “A Subway Named Möbius”—in which a convoluted geometry of train tracks leads to loops in spacetime—trains just couldn’t capture the imagination the way rockets and time machines could in the Golden Age of SF. Ironically, trains had once served as both rockets and time machines within the genre. By the time Ray Bradbury used the machines in his 1953 classic Fahrenheit 451, they’d been relegated to incidental details. Bradbury would use trains much more centrally in his fantasy work, most notably 1962’s supernatural tour-de-force Something Wicked This Way Comes. Keith Roberts’ genre-defying alt-history masterpiece Pavane appeared in 1968, but its depiction of free-roaming steam traction engines ignores railways altogether. As far as science fiction was concerned, the locomotive had jumped the track.

A curious thing happened to the SF locomotive in 1969: Man landed on the moon. There’s no direct correlation, of course. But a zeitgeist shift occurred within the genre. With one of SF’s fundamental tropes—a human foot on an extraterrestrial surface—having been fulfilled, writers began to turn their speculative eye elsewhere. The radical New Wave of Science Fiction movement reached its peak in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and one of its figureheads, Michael Moorcock, also spearheaded a peculiar retro-futuristic style that would eventually come to be called steampunk.

Trains figured into both. Christopher Priest, a young upstart in the New Wave movement, wrote The Inverted World, a mind-bending 1974 novel that envisioned a post-apocalyptic city that inched along a massive railway track. Its inhabitants were forced to stop periodically, take up the track that had already been traversed, and reconstruct it in the path of the city’s forward trajectory. If it failed to move, the city was doomed. A unique work of post-industrial malaise and quantum psychedelia, The Inverted World helped revive the locomotive tradition in speculative literature. Preceding it by a year, though, was Harry Harrison, A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah! (first serialized in Analog as Tunnel Through the Deeps), a far less angst-ridden novel of proto-steampunk adventure that features—as the title promises—a race among para-Victorians to build a submerged train tunnel through the Atlantic. Now that human beings routinely traveled back and forth to the moon, steampunk’s invigorating mashup of prognostication and nostalgia would take greater hold of the genre’s attention, even if the locomotive—that most vivid emblem of steam power—became more of a prop than a trope.

The ’70s and ’80s were a free-for-all for SF, and the genre plundered its own canon with glee. Accordingly, few of the locomotive’s sporadic appearances during that period are particularly innovative. In John Varley’s 1977 novel The Ophiuchi Hotline, Gernsback’s underground gravity train is recycled and updated. Michael Coney’s The Celestial Steam Locomotive from 1983 flexes more imagination with its vision of a train that traverses space and dimensions, and Greg Bear’s 1985 novel Eon produces an eye-popping image of a trackless millipede-like train that sadly doesn’t capitalize on that biomimetic potential. By the time Thomas N. Scotia’s 1987 book Blowout! digs up the threadbare premise of a transcontinental railroad tunnel, it seemed as though the locomotive might once again fade entirely from the SF mainstream.

Then came Desolation Road. Ian McDonald’s stunning 1988 debut is marvel on many levels, but his virtuoso depiction of locomotives on a terraformed Mars breathed new life into the possibility of trains as conceptual vehicles—as well as potent symbols. In every way, it’s the zenith of SF’s on-again-off-again obsession with the locomotive, executed with magic-realist richness and tech-geek zeal alike.

McDonald was also interested in cyberpunk, though, as was much of the SF world in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Consequently, the locomotive—perhaps the least cyberpunk-esque appliance in the SF toolbox—came closer than ever to obsolescence in the waning years of the 20th century. Apart from the wind-trains in Sean McMullen’s 1999 novel Souls in the Great Machine, the turn of the millennium came and went with SF’s great railroad tradition predominantly silent. It was McDonald himself who brought trains back from the brink in 2001’s Ares Express, his long-awaited follow-up to Desolation Road that brings his Martian locomotives—and the dynastic clans who engineer them—into even more dazzling focus.

At the same time, a nebulous new movement in science fiction, New Weird, was beginning to rise—much of it, incidentally, influenced by McDonald’s prior mutation of SF, fantasy, and magic realism. At the heart of the movement was British wunderkind China Miéville. And as the world soon learned, Miéville loves trains. In his 2004 novel Iron Council—the third book in his loosely connected Bas-Log trilogy—a band of outlaws form a roving socialist society aboard a train that runs on a limited span of track, which must be perpetually picked up behind and then relaid ahead. It’s a loving homage to Priest’s The Inverted World, but Miéville gives his purloined premise fresh purpose and relevance; in fact, his city-on-tracks may as well be a metaphor for his own career as it explores unknown territories of genre while retaining strong ties to its past. He visits the locomotive more originally—but less successfully—in his 2012 young-adult novel Railsea. This time he leans his pastiche on Moby-Dick, only instead of ships hunting whales, a locomotive scours a track-scarred desert in search of the giant, mole-like moldywarpe. The book embodies Miéville postmillennial salvagepunk ethic, even as the text itself serves as a prime example of its literary analog.

With the 21st century well underway, the locomotive has begun to gain momentum once more. Much of the previous centuries’ grandiloquent predictions about tomorrow were to have taken place already. Few have. The past, in truth, exists alongside the future—and the locomotive paradoxically feels like an anachronism than it once did. Ekaterina Sedia’s 2011 novel Heart of Iron touches on steampunk without committing to its limitations; in doing so, the book’s alt-history take on czarist Russia and the race to build a transcontinental railroad across Asia harkens all the way back to the conjoined births of both SF and the locomotive. Similarly, Genevieve Valentine’s 2013 short story “Terrain” concerns the predatory encroachment of the Union Pacific Railroad in a steampunk-accented Wyoming, a chiseled fable of human versus piston that celebrates the romance of the rails even as it chillingly deconstructs it.

Therein lies the longevity of the locomotive in science fiction. The vehicle itself may be all but abandoned when it comes to use by passengers—but so, at this point, has the spaceship. There’s a latent puissance in these metallic capsules, though, that waits to be unlocked—with a stripping of dust, a stoking of the engine, a pulling of the levers, and the tapping of a gauge or two. The future is today, and it is tomorrow, and it is yesterday. All it takes is a train to carry us there.

About the Author

Jason Heller is a former nonfiction editor of Clarkesworld. He is also the author of the alt-history novel Taft 2012 (Quirk Books) and a regular contributor to the Onion A.V. Club. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Apex Magazine, Sybil’s Garage, Weird Tales, Adventure Rocketship!, Tor.com, and others; forthcoming publications include a chapter of Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s The Time Traveler’s Almanac. He is a proud graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop.

Eccentric Relatives and Raw Grief:
A Conversation with Susan Palwick

Jeremy L. C. Jones

In the opening moments of Susan Palwick’s Mending the Moon, four-year-old Melinda Soto looks up at the moon and notices the “pits and shadows” for the first time. The moon doesn’t look like she was told it should look. It is not “purely white, as spotless and serene as a newly peeled egg.”

She wants to scrub the moon clean, to fill in the craters, to fix it.

“ ‘It’s too far away for mending,’ ” Melinda’s mother tells her.

“ ‘I want to anyway. I’m going to. Will you help me?’ ” Melinda responds.

If you never meet Melinda again, you will still know her well—the first three pages of Mending the Moon make sure of that. If she fixes the moon, you will cheer her.  If she is murdered, you will mourn her.

This is what Palwick does—she gives us a character to love and she takes that character away and in the process she thrusts us into the lives of the characters who also loved the deceased. There is death, but there is a beautiful sense of community, too, even when the mourners don’t necessarily get along. There is loss, but connection. In other words, Palwick gives us a family.

Why, if so much of Susan Palwick’s fiction is about grief and loss, does it seem like such a gift to read it?

“I try to write clearly,” said Palwick of her writing style. “I’m not interested in confusing readers unnecessarily, although I suppose I do sometimes anyway! I’m very interested in poetics and prose rhythm, although there’s much less of that in Mending than in The Necessary Beggar. I guess the style I aim for is ‘sophisticated transparence,’ if there is such a thing.”

Palwick doesn’t publish a lot of fiction. By her own account, she writes slowly, edits heavily, and has a bad habit of starting drafts without finishing them. She made her first professional sale (to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine) in 1985. She has one collection of stories, The Fate of Mice, and four novels, including, Flying in Place, The Necessary Beggar, Shelter, and Mending the Moon. Her first and most recent novels were published twenty years apart, give or take a year.

Palwick is a speculative fiction writer, a columnist, licensed lay preacher, and an associate professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno. Below, Palwick and I talk about writing and life and a few other things here and there.

In what ways is writing a gift—to you, to readers, etc.—and in what ways does writing require faith—in yourself, in the craft, in God?

It’s certainly a gift to me, although it’s one I’ve worked very hard to develop. I think sometimes people think that “gifts” are presented on platters, rather than representing a lot of sweat and study. Writing’s a gift, but it’s also a discipline; maybe the gift is the desire to do it, while discipline is what confers the ability to do it well. But it’s a gift because it gives me a way to speak to people I’ll never meet, and because my characters (well, most of them, anyway) become friends I worry about, people whose stories I want to learn and follow. I don’t think readers can be curious about a character’s story if the writer isn’t curious, too.

In any case, I certainly hope my writing is a gift to my readers. Some readers feel that way and some don’t, and some feel that way about some of my books but not others. Writers are a little like eccentric relatives with hit-or-miss taste in Christmas gifts. One year they’ll bake you the most delicious cookies you’ve ever tasted, and the next year you’ll open the box to find a pair of socks, handknit in colors never found in nature, that don’t seem designed to fit human feet.

As far as faith goes . . . well, I think you have to have faith in your own ability to put a sentence together, and to tell a story other people want to hear. That doesn’t come right away, and it can vanish pretty easily. I think we all second-guess ourselves and our work. My most trusted first reader is my husband, who’s always honest and who has an uncanny ability to predict what other people will or won’t like; if he says a story won’t sell, it doesn’t, even if I love it. But conversely, if he says a story’s good, I’ve learned to believe him, even if I’m unhappy with the piece.

I do have faith in my ability to craft readable, engaging prose. I think I’m a pretty good stylist. I have faith in my characterization, too. That’s what interests me most about fiction, and it’s where many of my stories start, and I’ve gotten enough positive feedback to know that other people see it as one of my strengths. (I agree with my critics that plot is my weakness.)

As for how writing connects with my religious faith, I firmly share the belief—best articulated by J.R.R. Tolkien in “On Fairy-stories” and by Dorothy Sayers in Mind of the Maker—that humans were created by a Creator to create. Any act of making things, rather than destroying them, is holy work, whether one’s making books or bread.

Where did you start Mending the Moon?

I started Mending the Moon because Tor told my agent they’d like me to write a mainstream novel, and my agent—who never pressures me—said, “They came to us, and that doesn’t happen in this market, and you will get me a proposal in a week.” She and I kicked some ideas around over dinner, and I got her the proposal, and they accepted it. That meant, of course, that I had to write the book.

I’d written a not-very-good draft of a novella about three older women trying to help a young man through a supernatural crisis, so I took those characters and made them mainstream. Most of my work is somehow about loss or grief, so it’s no surprise that Mending the Moon is, too. I’ve always been interested in how people navigate their lives after tragedy. In Mending the Moon, that factor was heightened because my father died three months before Tor approached my agent, and my mother died while I was writing the book, so I was living in the raw grief my characters inhabit (although my parents, both in their eighties, died of natural causes, not foul play).

This was the first book I wrote entirely in response to a publisher’s request. I wrote Flying in Place and The Necessary Beggar without contracts (and I prefer to work that way, because there’s much less pressure). I wrote Shelter under contract, but had already started it when I sold it. But all of my books have started, in one way or another, with character.

How does a novel work on the reader? What should it do? And in what ways does Mending the Moon succeed or veer from that?

It depends on the novel. It depends on the reader. No novel will hit two different people exactly alike; it won’t even be the same book if the same person goes back to it at different stages in life. Some books grievously disappoint on a later reading, especially if we loved them in childhood. Others withstand the test of two or three re-readings. The best books are inexhaustible. You can reread them endlessly, and they always show you something new. The Lord of the Rings does that for me; so does The Last Unicorn. I have no idea if Mending the Moon will do that for anyone, although I certainly hope so. I’ve already been told by a friend that the book helped her through a time of grief, which moves me very much.

I do think—and this is a somewhat didactic stance, and decidedly a minority opinion—that the work of all good fiction is to increase the amount of imaginative empathy in the world, to take us into experiences we haven’t had firsthand and show us new opportunities for compassion. Several other writers, people I respect deeply, have made rather loud fun of me for saying this, but I really believe it: not, necessarily, that all books have to do this, but that books that do are the ones people will still be reading after the author’s dead. I hope that Mending the Moon does this in even a small way, in showing a response to violence that isn’t vengeful or obsessed with police procedure, and particularly in attempting to represent the experience of a murderer’s family.

In what ways did the writing of Mending the Moon challenge you as a writer? What were some of the surprises for you?

Well, it challenged me because Tor asked for a mainstream novel, and I don’t write mainstream. That just isn’t how my writing brain works. I got around that problem by creating Comrade Cosmos, so while the book itself isn’t genre, it’s about genre, about how fandoms and popular culture help people negotiate real-world loss and horror.

Technically, it was a challenge because the narrative’s so fragmented. I’m very keenly aware of structure, and I decide what the structure of a book will be ahead of time; this helps me write it by providing a framework. Mending has three sections of seven chapters each; in each section, the second, fourth, and sixth chapters are about Comrade Cosmos (comic relief, literally!), while the others deal with the real-world narrative. Each of the real-world chapters, though, has five sections, of different lengths and in different orders from one chapter to the next, from the POV of five characters: Jeremy, Melinda (in flashback), Rosemary, Veronique, and Anna. Putting all this together became like assembling a jigsaw puzzle, especially since I cannibalized a previous version of the book to construct this one. So far, what’s surrpised me most about reader response is that nobody’s said the book feels scattered; readers seem to think it flows okay, which means the structure is doing its work and functioning quietly in the background.

Thematically, it was a challenge because the material’s so emotionally difficult, and also because it’s about seven months in the lives of a group of people who are all grieving very deeply. That early phase of grief tends, in my experience, to be fairly static. It wouldn’t have been very interesting to have them all just sitting at home—although Anna does a lot of that—but car chases wouldn’t have been realistic. So I had to balance paralysis with action, and I’m still not sure how well it came off.

I love your characters! Will you talk a little bit about where the characters in Mending the Moon came from? What inspired Melinda Soto, Jeremy, Veronique, Rosemary, and Henrietta? What goes into the character creation process?

Well, I’m a college English professor; I hope I’m not too much like Veronique, but there are definite autobiographical echoes there (I gave her my own dissertation topic, for instance). I also volunteered for seven years as a lay chaplain in a local emergency room, work I loved and stopped doing only because the hospital was sold to a secular for-profit that axed the Spiritual Care Department. So that part of Rosemary’s experience is very directly autobiographical. I wanted to give each of them a pre-existing problem that would be complicated and deepened by Melinda’s death, which is where Veronique’s career angst and Rosemary’s husband’s Alzheimer’s came from. As for Melinda and Jeremy, although I’m childless by choice, I’m fascinated by unusual family structures. That shows up in all of my novels, I think, especially Shelter. I’m very interested in families created by forces other than biology.

Hen’s an interesting case. People keep talking about her as if she’s a major character, one of the POV characters, and she’s not. She’s there to facilitate movement and reconciliation, in various ways, among the other characters, which is one of the things good clergy do. I wanted her to be sympathetic, and I tried to make her realistic; she’s a combination of various Episcopal priests I’ve known. I wanted to write a book that showed church communities as groups of ordinary people, and that showed church functioning the way it really does, or can, in times of great pain: not as a source of answers, but as a focal point and gathering place.

The POV character people tend not to mention is Anna, which is ironic since her sections of the book are about being shunned as a result of her son’s horrific crime and subsequent suicide. Anna’s situation is very loosely based on that of someone I know. Loving someone whose terrible actions you don’t understand, and who’s being reviled by the rest of the world, is a very lonely place to be.

How do your experiences in academia and as a writer overlap, interact, and/or clash?

The university-writing-church triangle is interesting; they all feed each other, but the interactions can get gnarly. There’s a fair amount of faith-bashing in the academy—one of my grad students once said, “Smart people don’t go to church,” and too many people believe that, especially if the church in question is a Christian one—and the faith elements in my fiction have definitely alienated some readers. I completely understand why this happens; organized religion has a lot to answer for, and many people have been so deeply hurt by faith communities that they can’t see anything but what they expect to see. This is definitely the land of confirmation bias. I know I’ve done something right when people squint at me and say, “You’re not like all those other Christians.” My father, a raging atheist who reacted with horror to my midlife conversion, once said that I was someone who gave the church a good name. That’s one of the highest compliments I’ve ever gotten.

As an academic, I think and talk about writing and narrative a lot, which helps my own writing. On the other hand, I have very little time to read for pleasure, and grading student papers means that when I do have free time, the last thing I want to do is look at text. I get most of my narrative fix from audiobooks and TV, at this point. And like many academics, I do most of my own writing during summers and breaks.

What’s next for you?

I have two new stories forthcoming, one currently scheduled to appear on Tor.com on July 10, and one in F&SF, which I hope will be out this autumn. My work in progress includes three (count ‘em three) partial novels, with inception dates ranging from ten years ago to, uh, this morning. I’m very good at starting things and much less good at finishing them. I’m trying to be better about that part.

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 Techs Can Do It

Daniel Abraham

“Consider greatness as a business strategy.” —Michael Swanwick

I worked front-line tech support for a little mom-and-pop Internet service provider for almost ten years. I started off as the guy who asks you to check if your caps lock key is on. Slowly, I advanced to being Director of Technical Support, which in the context of a company that size meant I was still picking up the phone and asking about your caps lock key, only I was doing employee evaluations and management meetings too. Much of my view of the world was solidified at that desk.

The advantage of small businesses is that they can be agile. Working with only a few dozen folks at the same office, it’s not as hard to coordinate change and make experiments, as it would be with a couple dozen divisions full of people scattered around the world. In the age of the Internet, change was a constant. I started off that job tracking down init strings for 28.8 modems. I ended my time there programming DSL routers for VPN. There was a lot of territory in between.

And so along the way, we tried out a lot of new projects. Every few months, it felt like we’d be looking at how to roll out a new service or collect data to get a better picture of how the office was running. And, of course, all of these things required someone’s time and attention to make them go. The natural choice—and the one I pushed back on and fought against for years—was the floor techs. We weren’t a massive call center that tracked a new call to you as soon as the last one dropped. People had downtime between one email and the next. If we needed someone to test out the new backup system or see if the NT webserver was working or check the incoming routers into inventory, the techs could do it.

And so the job got bigger and bigger, the responsibilities not just larger, but more varied. We had to be familiar with the new systems and how to fill out the proper paperwork. It became almost impossible to do a good job as the body of knowledge we had to master expanded with each new project. The choice came down to removing some of that work load from the techs so we could spend our time being technicians (and not inventory control and billing and installation schedulers and programmers) or else have techs spread so thin, that we were crap at everything.

Which—you saw this coming, right?—brings me to self-publishing.

Before we go on, let me make it clear that while I’m pretty much entrenched in the traditional publishing model right now, I’ve got nothing but respect for my friends and colleagues who are investing in self-pub. Everyone from the CEOs of the parent companies that own the publishers to the new writer just starting out is clear that we’re in the middle of a sea change. The publishing world now isn’t what it was ten years ago, or what it’s going to be ten years from now. No one knows for sure how this is going to come down, and I have no ground to criticize any other writer’s decisions about profit sharing and production models.

But some things aren’t going to change. Publishing has always (and I’m going out on my limb here) will always be made up two games: writing beautiful things, and selling them. The first game is like chess, because when we’re playing it, we have control. We can choose every word and sentence. We can sit with something that’s not quite working and think. We can ask our friends for help or keep it to ourselves.

The second game, selling, is gambling. It’s not just that we can’t control all the variables; we can’t even know what all the variables are. Maybe the book will find its audience. Maybe it will sink like a stone thrown in the ocean. There are a lot of strategies for bending the odds—book trailers, blogs, conventions, books tours, interviews—but no one is every really sure how well they work, or why one works one time and not another.

That second game is hard and punishing, and it isn’t fair.

Add to that, it has a lot of parts. Making the cover art. Laying out the cover. Getting blurbs, if you’re going that way. Writing the cover copy. Editing. Copy-editing. Proofing. Formatting. Printing. Distributing. Maintaining inventory. Auditing. Arranging publicity. Even after a book’s draft is done to that absolute best of our ability, there are at least half a dozen more things that need to happen. All of them require their own skill sets. All of them can be done well or poorly. And all of them affect our odds when the time comes to roll the bones and let the book out into the world.

The self-publishing models that intimidate me assume that the techs can do all that. Writing good books is a huge, complicated, profoundly difficult job to start with. It can take years of getting it wrong—sometimes badly wrong—before we even start getting it right. I am assured by my professional artist friends that painting and graphic design are much the same. Editing is a different set of knowledge, and damned hard. Self-editing is harder. Marketing and publicity require familiarity with a whole host of techniques and rules of etiquette and professional conduct. Sales needs not only a skill set, but a personality type, and I’m not convinced that it can be taught.

When I’ve been with my friends and colleagues who are taking the self-pub route, the conversation almost always seems to turn to the second game: sales, marketing, publicity. (e.g. how to get the books out there and how to get them noticed.) Rarely if ever, do we turn to talking about how to craft a great book: what dialog does and doesn’t do, what makes descriptive passages pop, what models of plot structure are useful and why. There’s a good reason for that. It’s the same reason that back at work we talked about the new forms the accounting department wanted us to fill out more than how to troubleshoot DNS problems more effectively. We worry most about the parts we feel most behind on, even at the expense of the actual core of our jobs. And that’s especially true when we’re feeling overwhelmed.

Speaking for myself, the reason I’ve kept with the traditional publishing model for all its faults and my complaints is that I’m not a good salesman. I’m a crap graphic designer. All I need to do it look at my copyedited manuscript to see how badly I need a copyeditor. I don’t have the contacts among the book buyers and distributors to get my stuff into stores. Each one of those, someone else does as their full-time job. They’re better at them than I will ever be, I am putting myself in competition with the projects they’re working on, and I don’t have the money to hire all those services out piecemeal.

So for me, for now, this is how I’m keeping it from turning into a situation where the techs have to do everything. As publishing shifts, group co-ops are going become a viable option. Publishers will compete more on the services they provide to authors. Everything will go on changing with distribution, marketing, sales and profit sharing.

Storytelling won’t, and that’s the part I want to be good at. More than that, it’s the part I want other writers to be good at. I believe that someone who has spent ten thousand hours honing her craft and struggling with all the difficulties and ambiguities of making a good novel is going to do a better job that someone who has spread that same time over half a dozen different jobs. I want to read the work of great writers, and so I want there to be great writers.

I don’t think that can happen when we look at all the different things that putting a book into the world requires, shrug, and say we can have the techs do it.

About the Author

Daniel Abraham is a writer of genre fiction with a dozen books in print and over thirty published short stories. His work has been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Hugo Awards and has been awarded the International Horror Guild Award. He also writes as MLN Hanover and (with Ty Franck) as James S. A. Corey. He lives in the American Southwest.

Editor’s Desk: Publishing Turns Like a Battleship

Neil Clarke

There was a time in my life when I frequented a lot of online message boards. These days, I still do occasional drive-bys to see what’s going one in that corner of the universe. One of the places I’ve been popping into lately is frequented by many self-published authors. While there, I stumbled across a discussion that resonated my experiences from the early years of Clarkesworld.

The central theme of the discussion was about respect. More specifically, whether or not self-published authors had felt welcome among their traditionally-published colleagues. The responses ranged from the militant “those people are so stupid for giving up all their money to NY publishers” to “some of my best friends are traditionally published” and back around to “they never take us seriously, but we’re just as professional as they are.”

If we hopped in our time machine and went back six or seven years, you’d find that the publishers of many online magazines made similar statements. To give you a taste of the climate:

We regularly encountered authors that told us they wouldn’t submit to an online magazine, despite the fact that we paid almost double that of the professional print markets they were being published in.

Several reviewers point-blank refused to consider our stories because they were published online.

We were accused of “killing” magazines by giving content away.

We weren’t real magazines because pixels are ephemeral and no one would be able to find our work in ten years.

When we applied to SFWA to be a qualifying market in 2007, we had to help them understand how to gauge online readership. Much to their credit, they actually listened to what we had to say, but we had to keep pressing them to get a decision.

It was a frustrating time to be publishing an online magazine, but those of us in the thick of things believed we were onto something promising. Unfortunately, we didn’t know how win over our critics or convince them that we weren’t pixel-stained technopeasants. (That phase caused quite a response among writers in 2007 and may have been the first sign that the tide was changing.)

It was also an exciting time to be publishing an online magazine. It was a wild frontier with lots of ideas and new approaches. It was never dull and there were always new readers coming into the fold. From the outside, it probably looked like chaos and the traditional publishers (and many authors) simply didn’t quite know what to make of it. Years later, a well-known publisher joked with me, “we’ve always been interested in the digital publishing, but were content to let other people take all the risk in discovering what worked.”

By 2008, the climate was already drastically different and over the next year, it began to feel like the industry was beginning to accept us. While we had always had the respect of our readers, crossing that line was a very validating experience. As much as we may not want to care what others think, it can have a significant impact on your outlook towards things.

Better yet, the traditional and online publishers started talking. Seriously talking. We had (and still have) a lot to learn from one another. In my humble opinion, collectively, we’ve made the state of genre magazines a much healthier one. It’s somewhat incredible. You’d see us as competitors, but it feels more like a club. The medium we choose to publish in is no longer a factor in whether or not we are considered professional by our peers.

Today, many indie authors are frustrated or upset with the way they feel shut out of the traditional writer’s club, so I presented my little story thinking it might help provide some hope. From where I stand, I can clearly see the early signs of progress. If I had to guess, within two-to-three years, we won’t be hearing much about respect based on the medium or method an author employs to publish their work.

Traditional and indie publishing models both have value and the smart money is on those that embrace the best of both. Established authors like Mike Resnick have self-published portions of their back-catalog and well-known indie authors like Hugh Howey have signed book deals with NY publishers. It starts on the fringes and works its way in until it hits critical mass.

The next day, curious about what they thought of what I had to say, I checked back in at the forum. Sadly, my response was deleted without explanation.

On a happier note, it is with great pleasure that I inform you that “Immersion” by Aliette de Bodard has won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story. This is the second Clarkesworld story to win a Nebula and I can tell you that watching one of our authors win an award never gets old.

As if that wasn’t enough, Locus Magazine has announced the finalists for the 2013 Locus Awards. In a repeat of the Hugo Award nominations, “Immersion” once again stands with “Mantis Wives” by Kij Johnson and Clarkesworld is a finalist for Best Magazine!

I’d like to thank everyone that has nominated or voted for in any of the awards this year. Reviews, recommendations, nominations, subscriptions, and comments show us just how much you appreciate what we do.

Thanks for your continued support!

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.