Pockets Full of Stones

Vajra Chandrasekera

The ghost of my grandfather Rais flickered when he talked about first contact. He was a decade younger than me now, unwrinkled and black-haired, far from grandfatherly.

Beside me, Hadil gestured for a pause. My grandfather’s ghost stopped talking, his features losing expression. The rich brown of his skin faded, became ghostlier, as the imago switched over to standby mode.

“Dike,” Hadil said, nudging me unnecessarily. “You notice the flicker?”

“Probably lost some frames in the cooker,” I said. Error-correction was tricky with neutrino-based communications over the light-years. The original Rais, very much alive, was extremely far away and travelling fast. “Did he say first contact?”

“He did,” Hadil said. He took off his augmented-reality glasses to rub his temples. Without them, his eyes looked too big, the red veins standing out. Too much time behind the glasses. “But I think that’s all the time he’s going to spend on it, no matter how important it might be. He just wants to talk to you.”

I would have argued, except it was true.

Picked up a neutrino transmission, the ghost of Rais had said tiredly. Could be pulsar activity. Some talk of first contact. See attached update for details. As if that closed the matter. Then he had changed the subject to his obsession: the petition to open up a bandwidth allocation for family members of his twenty thousand fellow colonists on the Cây Cúc. The right to talk to the Earth they’d left behind.

“Let me take a look at the attachment before Da Nang comes up,” Hadil said. On Makemake Station, we lived in epicycles. The station’s magnetic transmission horns tracked Earth in her orbit, waiting every day for the planet to spin Da Nang Mission Control into our line of sight so we could report home. There were a few hours left to go today.

“Do you mind if—” I nodded at the silent ghost. Without his glasses on Hadil couldn’t see the imago, but it hadn’t moved since he paused it.

“Go ahead,” Hadil said, getting up. “It’s your Grandpa. He probably spends the next twenty minutes crying about bandwidth and your Grandma, anyway.”

I scowled at his back as he walked to the other side of the workroom, walking through all the phantom displays he couldn’t see without his glasses on: bright screens and blinking glyphs, the scale model of Makemake Station in the corner, the wall of clocks hovering in mid-air, my silent flickering grandfather, and my favorite Gauguin, D’où Venons Nous / Que Sommes Nous / Où Allons Nous. Hadil had once complained it gave him nightmares, but I found it both soothing and ironically appropriate.

I had pulled rank and kept it at full size, four meters wide in our shared virtual space. Hadil always sat facing away from it.

As the relay station, the only link between Earth and her first colony ship, we could read the Updates from the Cây Cúc but they weren’t meant for us. Once we transmitted it back to Earth, it would be unpacked and pored over by analysts at Da Nang. This Update would have details about the mystery transmission, phrased carefully so that Da Nang wouldn’t think that the crew of the Cây Cúc was having a collective psychotic break. But there wouldn’t be much in the way of analysis from the Cây Cúc, just raw data. The time dilation meant they had no time to sit on information.

And neither did I. Hadil could satisfy his curiosity, but I had laws to break and no time for hypothetical aliens.

It couldn’t possibly be real aliens. They’ve probably discovered a new kind of pulsar.

“You want coffee?” Hadil said.

“No, thanks.”

The slightly acrid smell of instant coffee filled the room. You couldn’t virtualize a kettle, Hadil always said. “Do we have any fresh fruit left?” I asked, not turning around.

The fridge door opened and closed behind me. “Nope. Three days to the next supply drop.”

When he first got here, Hadil had been a little shocked to discover what I was doing. Makemake Station was a two-person miniature civilization at the outer edge of the solar system. There could be no secrets here, so I had just told him: I was dipping into that precious bandwidth to talk to my grandfather on the Cây Cúc. A strange crime, I’d admitted, but a crime nevertheless. He could have reported me, had me shipped off back home, banned from space.

But Da Nang was very political, even so many years after the troubles. He would be tainted by association, I had told him. I didn’t say that I would make sure of it. He wasn’t stupid. After a few months, he had relaxed. After his first year, we had become friends.

Given enough time, all problems are solvable.

“Oh, crap. Look at this,” Hadil said. He pushed an array of screens across the room in my direction, displacing my own virtual workspace. Process listings and system status monitors, bars in the green flickering up to angry reds.

I rubbed my hands over my close-shaven scalp. “What did you do now?”

“There was an executable binary in the Update,” Hadil moaned. “It was part of the signal they said they picked up.”

“You opened an attachment . . . from space?”

“No! I swear,” Hadil said. He sounded guilty. “Only in a sandbox. I was curious. I’m rebooting.”

I waved at the illegal ghost of my grandfather to continue. Color bled back into the imago’s skin, and light into his eyes.

Dear Dikeledi, Rais said. Granddaughter. He kept looking down at the photo in his hands. I’d walked over and looked at it once, but it cycled through so many pictures of my grandmother and Mom as a baby that it came across blurry and indistinct in the imago. Please let me know about the petition. Has Da Nang given answer? His voice was warm, a little too loud. Little puffs of air from the tiny speakers in my glasses, as if my too-young grandfather had his lips pressed to the soft skin behind my ear.

If things had been different, I would have been one of the twenty thousand colonists. No, that wasn’t right—I wouldn’t even be born yet. If Rais had been allowed to take his wife, Abena, and their infant daughter along with him, my grandmother would be a young woman, my mother still a baby. I wouldn’t be born for another four hundred years.

But he hadn’t been allowed to take them with him. Something happened, eighty years ago, while the family was preparing for departure. My grandmother wouldn’t speak of it except elliptically, to say that Rais made an enemy of someone powerful, someone in the junta, someone with control over the colonization project’s approvals board. I didn’t know exactly what it was that Rais had done to deserve this—Grandma Abena wouldn’t speak of it, and Mom didn’t know. It had been serious enough that after Rais left, Grandma Abena had changed her name and gone into hiding for a while. But by the time Mom was grown up, the urgency and the terror had faded. By the time I was born, it was only history.

I could even appreciate the clever cruelty of it: to give him the choice of being part of the colony, but only if he went alone.

A forced decision, made in haste. I distrusted haste. Decisions needed planning, strategy, not a wild leap into a dilemma constructed by somebody else. And it was still so recent for him, just a year and a half at relativistic speeds. A year and a half of recent memories and regrets, against eighty years of half-forgotten family history for me.

There had been no contact for all of that time, until he got that first message from me. An older woman who called him “grandfather” and told him that his wife and daughter had grown old and died, that I was his only family.

I look forward very much. Your next message, Rais said. Your last before you leave Makemake. Perhaps petition will move faster when you are back in Da Nang.

Rais kept pausing, as if expecting an answer. He wasn’t used to one-way messages yet, having only been doing them for a few weeks. His messages were full of awkward pauses and non sequiturs. Or perhaps the error correction at this range was poorer than I’d accounted for and parts were being lost. There was no way to tell.

Family, under time dilation: he’d append a personal message to the Cây Cúc’s daily update; I’d get it every two months. I’d add a small personal message to the annual update from Makemake; he’d get one of those every week.

When it ended, he would have spent a month talking to me. I would have spent five years, the full term of my contract on Makemake Station. It was almost done.

I nudged Hadil. “Your spikes are on the host network now,” I’d just noticed the angry red spikes indicating increased activity on Makemake Station’s computers both physical and virtual.

“Everything’s showing spikes,” Hadil said. “Except ops and life support.”

“Those are physically separate networks,” I said, absently. The CPU temperature graph was climbing steadily. I’d missed something Rais said. I’d have to rewind him later.

“Will you please switch off your Grandpa and check the logs?” I could hear the glare in Hadil’s voice. He was right, but I was reluctant to stop listening.

I’d been ten years younger than Rais was now, when the plan occurred to me. I was still at Nha Trang University, working through the qualifying courses to apply for extraplanetary duty. Plan—more of an intention, then, an understanding that I wanted to do this, that maybe I could, that maybe I should. I’d grown up hearing about Rais from Grandma and dreaming of space, which may have had something to do with my choice of career. But that was the year I put the plan together. The time dilation, Makemake Station, my career, the time and training I’d need to get there. I could talk to Rais himself; I could close the loop, answer the nagging little questions.

Now at forty-two I was as old as Mom when she had me. Ten years older than Rais, who had aged less than a year in my two decades of putting all the pieces together. I’d thought I knew him from Grandma Abena’s stories, from the things Mom didn’t say. Rais had grown bigger in the tellings, his absence having density and mass.

In person, he was too small, too young.

My grandfather’s ghost was flickering again, almost strobing.

Hadil and I both looked at it.

“Did your Grandpa break the imago?” Hadil said.

“Shut up,” I said. “I’m pretty sure this is all your fault.” I grinned at him to take the sting out of it a little, while swiping rapidly through the last hour of logs. Makemake generated a lot of logs even when not doing anything in particular. Anything of note should have been flagged. There was nothing.

I really miss Abena, Rais said. He said this every time. He had never known her as a grandmother, with the wrinkles and the white hair that I kept expecting him to have. He wouldn’t talk about Mom at all.

I’d told him in my second message that Mom had lived into her eighties and taught art history. She specialized in Lý dynasty ceramics. But he didn’t acknowledge what I said—or he did and it was lost in the sea, neutrinos that didn’t ping. To him she was still a baby, or should have been.

When I made my plans I had intended to ask him questions. Why leave? Why not stay? Did they force you? Did you choose?

But well-made plans adapt to changing circumstances. I realized when I first saw his imago that closing the loop wasn’t about getting answers to those questions. It was about resetting our time-twisted family’s history back into a single story. It was the open-endedness that nagged at me, the sense that Rais had vanished into some other world—the future, perhaps, or the past—which was forever cut off.

I hope you plan to have kids, Rais whispered.

Rais believed that the petition would allow him to talk to any descendants I left behind, after I died. He didn’t put it like that, but we were all mayflies to him now. Four centuries would elapse on Earth by the time he sent foot on his colony world in a few years. At least a dozen generations. Would my descendants even want to talk to him? I didn’t know, but it felt distant and irrelevant to me.

I didn’t know if I wanted children. I’d had my eggs stored before I left Earth, left myself options. But I didn’t want to pass Rais down like a demented heirloom. I’d made up the story about the petition to get him to stop talking like I was a candle about to be blown out, and now he was obsessed with it.

There was no petition, of course. I wasn’t stupid. That would just attract the wrong sort of attention in Da Nang. People would figure out that what I’d been doing here. At the very least, I’d never work in space again.

“Hey, Dike,” Hadil said. “Is everything flickering for you?” He had taken his glasses off and was rubbing his eyes. “It’s giving me a migraine.”

“Mine seems fine, except for Grandpa,” I said, looking around. “Here, use these. I need a break anyway.” I walked over to him and handed him my glasses.

With my eyes bared, the room was empty and silent. The walls were a neutral grey, designed to be unseen to operators who would cover them with virtual displays. I looked for the spot where the imago had stood, but of course there was nothing there.

I stretched, relaxing my eyes, rolling my neck. On Earth, at least there was a world for the glasses to augment. The sky might be covered in advertising, but you could take the glasses off to see it be blue. Here, it felt like being in an abandoned house. Everything gone but for these ratty old chairs, a couple of desks, the kettle and the fridge in the corner. No color to any of it. I already missed the bright yellows and haunted blues of the Gauguin.

Hadil was waving his arms in the air as if conducting an invisible orchestra.

When they built this habitat and set it spinning eighty years ago, they had ensured that operators would experience standard Earth gravity, for health and sanity. So just sitting, standing, drinking water from a cup, they were all reminders that we lived in a tin can on a string.

The status glyph in one corner of the workroom—invisible to me now without my glasses, but after five years as familiar as the furniture—only drove that home. Makemake Station, rendered as a football-sized globe. The muon storage rings were just faint lines describing great circles on the sphere’s surface; the fusion reactor a tiny, indistinct blob; the magnetic horns of our transmitter, too small to be seen and represented only by an icon. The habitat we lived in was just a dot on a near-invisible tether, sweeping around that giant sphere like the hand of a clock, doing a circuit every half hour.

Almost all of Makemake Station by volume was accounted for by the millions of cubic kilometers of heavy water inside the sphere. Neutrinos were ghost particles, easy to lose if you didn’t have a whole sea to listen with. Hadil claimed he could hear it sloshing, for all that it was kilometers away and separated from us by vacuum; I dreamed about it sometimes, swimming in a pitch darkness broken only by tiny flashes like fireflies.

“Dike,” Hadil said.

“Yes?”

He looked at me with both eyebrows raised. Sweat was beading on his temples. “I think I’ve figured it out.”

“Really?” I walked over to him and tried to grab the glasses off his face. “Show me!”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Hadil said, fending me off. “Or try mine, maybe they’ll work for you.” His old pair was still sitting on the shelf, next to his gently steaming coffee.

“No thanks, I’d rather not borrow your headache,” I said. “Just tell me.”

“This signal the Cây Cúc picked up,” Hadil said, speaking so fast he was almost breathless. “It’s like a virus but more so. Like artificial life. It can rewrite itself to adapt to new architectures.”

“It evolves?” I leaned against the back of his chair.

“I suppose,” Hadil said. He wiped the sweat from his forehead. “Our hardware’s a lot faster than what they’ve got on the Cây Cúc. So it’s cycling faster. We’ve got an infection.”

“Start shutting everything down,” I said. My head felt a little light. “Shut down everything that’s already infected or connected to anything that’s infected. We’ll restore from a clean backup.” At least life support wasn’t threatened.

Hadil pulled the glasses off abruptly and threw them down. I jumped aside as broken glass and tiny electronics littered the room.

“Hadil, what’s wrong?”

“Flicker,” Hadil said, thickly. His scalp was shiny through his close-cropped hair. “I can’t feel my legs.” His voice sounded both slurred and very small, as if not quite certain what he was saying.

“You can’t—” I grabbed him by the shoulders, too hard. “Okay, okay. Let me get you to your bunk.” I reached for the other pair of glasses to put them on, run a medical diagnostic, but Hadil stopped me, clutching at my wrist.

“Don’t,” he said. He was trembling.

I tucked them into the collar of my shirt instead. “Okay. Let’s get you lying down and then you can talk me through why not.”

Helping him into his bunk was difficult. His legs dangled, dead weight. He drank the water I gave him, though I had to help him sit up. Lying down again, he seemed to recover a little. He seemed even younger than he was.

“Your Grandpa’s talking again,” he said.

I fished the glasses from my collar, but Hadil stopped me again.

“I’ll have to eventually,” I said, as gently as I could. Without the glasses, I had no way to interact with Makemake Station. No computation, no communications, no medical telemetry, no helpful wiki. “Is it the flicker?”

He stared at me, unblinking, sweating freely. “My head hurts.”

Strobe lights at some frequencies could induce seizures—or I thought so, at least, without the wiki I couldn’t be sure. I suggested this theory to Hadil but he shook his head, and then winced.

“I feel drunk,” he said. He was speaking with exaggerated care now, slow and deliberate. “Your Grandpa’s still talking,” he said, then pointed at his head. No glasses, no little speakers tucked behind the ear.

“What’s he saying?” Stupid question. Was I feeding a delusion? I was really starting to miss the wiki.

“Gibberish,” Hadil said. He closed his eyes.

“Just get some rest,” I babbled. My basic medical training hadn’t covered anything like this. It didn’t need to: Earth could provide emergency support within a day. “I’ll call Da Nang, we’ll get help.”

“They figured it out,” Hadil muttered, too quickly as if he was trying to get the words out. “Figured us out.”

“Who?”

“The aliens, Dike,” Hadil said. His eyes were still closed, as if unwilling to face his own words.

“The aliens who sent the signal?”

“They are the signal.” Hadil said. “The human brain is a computational substrate. They’ve adapted to our architecture.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said, automatically, then winced. “How would they even—”

“Listen,” Hadil said. He opened his eyes. His pupils were very wide, frightened. I realized I was holding his hand. “They hacked me. I can feel it. It’s jumbling up my—”

He paused for a moment, as if expecting me to interrupt again, but I didn’t. When I touched his temple he didn’t react. The vein was pulsing violently.

“Don’t look into the glasses,” Hadil said, finally. “They must hack the brain through the eye. The visual cortex. It’s transmitting some sort of compressed signal, that’s got to be why the displays are flickering.”

“Without the glasses, I can’t call for medical assistance,” I said. I tried to put motherly reassurance in my voice, tried to remember what Mom had sounded like when I was young and broke my arm falling out of a tree. Make a plan. “I need to be able to run the diagnostics on you, I need to update Da Nang that something weird is going on—at least that we may have been infected with a virus from the Cây Cúc— “

“It’s not a virus,” Hadil said. He sounded very tired. “Not infection. Invasion.” I squeezed his hand and listened to him breathe, but he didn’t say anything more.

When he died it was sudden. He wheezed twice, horribly, and then he was gone. I closed his eyes, my hands trembling and cold.

My head was too full of ghosts.

When I was an undergrad at Nha Trang, before I came up with the plan, I’d drive down to Ba Ho once every few weeks. Early in the morning before the tourists came, I’d climb the rocks beside the waterfall and then leap off with my eyes closed, nothing but the wind in my face and the hammering of my heart. Blind, terrified, exhilarated. I felt like that now.

Don’t put on the glasses, Hadil said.

I didn’t want to look at his body. I went back to the workroom and sat in his chair instead of mine. Glass crunched under my shoes.

The other pair of glasses still sat on the shelf. If I put them on, I would see all the screens and displays that filled this empty room. The ghost of my grandfather, standing in the corner, perhaps still talking about the wife and child he left behind.

The telemetry would tell me that one of Makemake’s operators was dead. There would be data on his death. I could find out what had really happened. Explain his hallucinations, if that’s what they were. A stroke? A seizure?

There would be a clock to tell me how much time was left until I could send a message back to Da Nang Mission Control. It would take five hours for my message to reach them, and Earth would spin Da Nang into line of sight within—how long? An hour? Two? The Update from the Cây Cúc would be already queued for automatic forwarding. I could hold that back and send a call for help instead.

Unless Hadil was right, and then if I put the glasses on, I would die like he did.

Was Rais still undead and unaging? Were they all dead on the Cây Cúc? If the aliens could infect the human brain—many of the colonists could have been wearing a slightly older version of the augmented reality glasses. If the vulnerability was in the visual cortex then any kind of display might do. Any screen, physical or virtual. A book, a phone, a photo. Like the one that Rais always had in his hand.

But Rais was still alive when he sent the message, and many people would have been exposed by then, but there was no indication anyone had died. Maybe their hardware was just too slow. Despite us sending them tech schematics every year and them using the ship’s fabricators, they couldn’t keep up with time-dilated technological change. A lot of the hardware on the ship was eighty years out of date.

Your Grandma hated him for leaving, Mom said. But we don’t need fathers, you and me.

Rais would send another message tomorrow, but that wouldn’t arrive at Makemake Station for a couple of months.

I hope you have kids someday, Rais said.

“Yes, yes,” I said. My own voice was shockingly loud in the silence.

Hadil said it wasn’t a virus. More than a virus. Something smart, something that could explore and experiment. Find new territories, expand into them, adjust the terrain to their liking.

Informational life. Ghosts. Like infectious ideas that echoed in our heads until we could not think of anything else, until we forgot how to move, how to beat our hearts, how to breathe. Did they know they were killing us? Did they even know we existed? That there was a whole plane of physical reality that lay beneath theirs?

Rais could have stayed behind, said Grandma Abena. He could have turned down the adventure. He was selfish.

They must have made him go, said Mom. Maybe they threatened to kill us if he stayed.

“You’re both dead, give it a rest,” I said. “He was barely a grown man. He ran, that was all.” Just leaped into the unknown, eyes closed and heart hammering.

Was that what it was like to be a ghost? Jumping off the ledge, not knowing if it was water or rock at the bottom, terrified and laughing? Were they conscious? They could only be conscious when they had something to haunt. Crossing light-years as signals, riding pulsars across the galaxy—

There couldn’t be more than an hour left before Makemake Station automatically forwarded the last Update to Earth. I needed to switch that off.

I don’t want you to tell me about him, Mom said. I don’t need to know.

Mom had insisted on that, when I finally told her my plan for contacting Rais. I waited until the last moment to tell her, just before I left for Makemake Station. That was only a year before she died. “It was Grandma who would have really wanted to know,” I said.

You don’t know what I wanted, said Grandma Abena. You were just a child.

When I got your first message, Rais said, I knew it couldn’t be, but I thought you were Abena. You look just like her. Only older.

Maybe the ghosts were mayflies. Maybe generations passed in the twenty minutes it took them to kill Hadil. His coffee wasn’t even cold yet.

“I know you’re in me already,” I said. “My ghosts aren’t usually this literal.”

I put the glasses on. Decisions made in haste. Look, grandfather, we have something in common after all.

We were going to the colony as a family, Rais said. That was the plan. I’m so sorry it didn’t work out that way.

I didn’t notice the flickering anymore, or perhaps it had stopped. My head was pounding.

He was afraid, Grandma Abena said. The stars are wonderful, but if you lower your eyes to ground level you’ll see the men with guns in the night.

The clock said I had ten minutes left to the automated Update to Earth. Less than I had thought.

After I grew up, Mom said, I didn’t waste any more time thinking about that man. I got on with my life, and so should you.

I disabled the scheduled transmission, reoriented the magnetic horns away from Earth, told them to always point out into empty space. To stop tracking their targets, to forget. Such a simple thing, but my hands were slick with sweat and trembling when I was done.

Could the ghosts reset this? Could they manipulate the system, move the horns back? They could, but why would they understand the universe of ships and stations and worlds? Could they even find Earth again? I invoked superuser access, deleted the memory of Earth’s path from Makemake Station. Would it be enough?

Maybe they wouldn’t care. Maybe even if they managed to get the transmissions working again, they would be happy to spill out endlessly into the dark, neutrinos passing intangibly through rock and vacuum alike. Maybe that was how they got into the signal that the Cây Cúc picked up in the first place. Someone else, somewhere, impotent and desperate as me.

I couldn’t feel my legs anymore.

My arms shook as I lowered myself to the floor. Something cut my hand painfully when I rested my weight on it. A shard from Hadil’s broken glasses. I wanted to go sit with Hadil in his room, but I didn’t think I could get that far. My chest felt hollow.

One more thing, Hadil reminded.

With Makemake silent, Da Nang would send a team within a day. As soon as they entered the station, their glasses or helmets would connect with Makemake’s network and open themselves to invasion. They’d probably re-establish communications with Earth before they realized something was wrong.

I started an imago recording of myself, looping it to display everywhere in the station. I’d have to keep it short. It was getting hard to breathe, and the first responders would not have much time before they died.

It’s just like the waterfall, but with your pockets full of stones when you jump.

“If you’re seeing this, you’re already dead,” I began, and made myself a ghost.

About the Author

Vajra Chandrasekera lives in Colombo, Sri Lanka. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Apex Magazine, Ideomancer and Through the Gate, and has been nominated for a Rhysling Award. He’s @_vajra on Twitter, where he flouts all social convention by not talking very much.

I Tell Thee All, I Can No More

Sunny Moraine

Here’s what you’re going to do. It’s almost like a script you can follow. You don’t have to think too much about it.

Just let it in. Let it watch you at night. Tell it everything it wants to know. These are the things it wants, and you’ll let it have those things to keep it around. Hovering over your bed, all sleek chrome and black angles that defer the gaze of radar. It’s a cultural amalgamation of one hundred years of surveillance. There’s safety in its vagueness. It resists definition. This is a huge part of its power. This is a huge part of its appeal.

Fucking a drone isn’t like what you’d think. It’s warm. It probes, gently. It knows where to touch me. I can lie back and let it do its thing. It’s only been one date but a drone isn’t going to worry about whether I’m an easy lay. A drone isn’t tied to the conventions of gendered sexual norms. A drone has no gender and, if it comes down to it, no sex. Just because it can do it doesn’t mean it’s a thing that it has.

We made a kind of conversation, before, at dinner. I did most of the talking, which I expected.

The drone hums as it fucks me. We—the dronesexual, the recently defined, though we only call ourselves this name to ourselves and only ever with the deepest irony—we’re never sure whether the humming is pleasure or whether it’s a form of transmission, but we also don’t really care. We gave up caring what other people, people we probably won’t ever meet, think of us. We talk about this on message boards, in the comments sections of blogs, in all the other places we congregate, though we don’t usually meet face to face. There are no dronesexual support groups. We don’t have conferences. There is no established discourse around who we are and what we do. No one writes about us but us, not yet.

The drones probably don’t do any writing. But we know they talk.

Drones don’t come, not as far as we can tell, but they must get satisfaction out of it. They must get something. I have a couple of orgasms, in the laziest kind of fashion, and the vibration of the maybe-transmission humming tugs me through them. I rub my hands all over that smooth conceptual hardware and croon.

There was no singular point in time at which the drones started fucking us. We didn’t plan it, and maybe it wasn’t even a thing we consciously wanted until it started happening. Sometimes a supply creates a demand.

But when something is around that much, when it knows that much, it’s hard to keep your mind from wandering in that direction. I wonder what that would feel like inside me. One kind of intimacy bleeds into another. Maybe the drones made the first move. Maybe we did. Either way, we were certainly receptive. Receptive, because no one penetrates drones. They fuck men and women with equal willingness, and the split between men and women in our little collectivity is, as far as anyone has ever been able to tell, roughly fifty-fifty. Some trans people, some genderfluid, and all permutations of sexual preference represented by at least one or two members. The desire to fuck a drone seems to cross boundaries with wild abandon. Drones themselves are incredibly mobile and have never respected borders.

Here’s what you’re going to do. You’re not going to get too attached. This isn’t something you’ll have to work to keep from doing, because it’s hard to attach to a drone. But on some level there is a kind of attachment, because the kind of closeness you experience with a drone isn’t like anything else. It’s not like a person. They come into you; they know you. You couldn’t fight them off even if you wanted to. Which you never do. Not really.

We fight, not because we have anything in particular to fight over, but because it sort of seems like the thing to do.

No one has ever come out and admitted to trying to have a relationship with the drone that’s fucking them, but of course everyone knows it’s happened. There are no success stories, which should say something in itself, and people who aren’t in our circle will make faces and say things like you can’t have a relationship with a machine no matter how many times it makes you come but a drone isn’t a dildo. It’s more than that.

So of course people have tried. How could you not?

This isn’t a relationship, but the drone stayed the night after fucking me, humming in the air right over my bed as I slept, and it was there when I woke up. I asked it what it wanted and it drifted toward the kitchen, so I made us some eggs which of course only I could eat.

It was something about the way it was looking at me. I just started yelling, throwing things.

Fighting with a drone is like fucking a drone in reverse. It’s all me. The drone just dodges, occasionally catches projectiles at an angle that bounces them back at me, and this might amount to throwing. All drones carry two AGM-114 Hellfire missiles, neatly resized as needed, because all drones are collections of every assumption we’ve ever made about them, but a drone has never fired a missile at anyone they were fucking.

This is no-stakes fighting. I’m not even sure what I’m yelling about. After a while the drone drifts out the window. I cry and scream for it to call me. I order a pizza and spend the rest of the day in bed.

Here’s what you’re going to do. You’re not going to ask too many questions. You’re just going to let it happen. You’ll never know whose eyes are behind the blank no-eyes that see everything. There might not be any anymore; drones regularly display what we perceive as autonomy. In all our concepts of droneness there is hardly ever a human being on the other end. So there’s really no one to direct the questions to.

Anyway, what the hell would you ask? What are we doing, why are we this way? Since when have those ever been answers you could get about this kind of thing?

This is really sort of a problem. In that I’m focusing too much on a serial number and a specific heat signature that only my skin can know. In that I asked the thing to call me at all. I knew people tried things like this but it never occurred to me that it might happen without trying.

It does call me. I talk for a while. I say things I’ve never told anyone else. It’s hard to hang up. That night while I’m trying to sleep I stare up at the ceiling and the dark space between me and it feels so empty.

I pass them out on the street, humming through the air. They avoid me with characteristic deftness but after a while it occurs to me that I’m steering myself into them, hoping to make contact. They all look the same but I know they aren’t the same at all. I’m looking for that heat signature. I want to turn them over so I can find that serial number, nestled in between the twin missiles, over the drone dick that I’ve never actually seen.

Everyone around me might be a normal person who doesn’t fuck a drone and doesn’t want to and doesn’t talk to them on the phone and usually doesn’t take them to dinner. Or every one of them could be like that.

At some point we all stopped talking to each other.

Here’s what you’re going to do. Here’s what you’re not going to do. Here’s a list to make it easy for you.

You’re not going to spend the evening staring out the window. You’re not going to toy endlessly with your phone. You’re not going to masturbate furiously and not be able to come. You’re not going to throw the things you threw at nothing at all. You’re not going to stay up all night looking at images and video that you can only find on a few niche paysites. You’re not going to wonder if you need to go back into therapy because you don’t need therapy. You’re not going to wonder if maybe you and people like you might be the most natural people in the entire world, given the way the world is now. You’re not going to wonder if there was ever such a thing as natural.

Sometimes I wonder what it might be like to be a drone. This feels like a kind of blasphemy, and also pointless, but I do it anyway. So simple, so connected. So in tune. Needed instead of the one doing the needing. Possessing all the power. Subtly running more and more things until I run everything. The subjects of total organic surrender.

Bored, maybe, with all that everything. Playing some games.

It comes over. We fuck again and it’s amazing. I’m almost crying by the end. It nestles against me and hums softer and I wonder how screwed I actually am in how many different ways.

Anyway, it stays the night again and we don’t fight in the morning.

A drone wedding. I want to punch myself in the mouth twenty or thirty times for even thinking that even for a second.

It starts coming every night. This is something I know I shouldn’t get used to but I know that I am. As I talk to it—before sex, during, after—I start to remember things that I’d totally forgotten. Things from my early childhood, things from high school that I didn’t want to remember. I tell with tears running down my face and at the end of it I feel cleaned out and raw.

I don’t want this to be over, I say. I have no idea what the drone wants and it doesn’t tell me, but I want to believe that the fact that it keeps coming back means something.

I read the message boards and I wish I could tell someone else about this because I feel like I’m losing every shred of perspective. I want to talk about how maybe we’ve been coming at this from all the wrong angles. Maybe we should all start coming out. Maybe we should form political action groups and start demanding recognition and rights. I know these would all be met with utterly blank-screen silence but I want to say them anyway. I write a bunch of things that I never actually post, but I don’t delete them either.

We’re all like this. I’m absolutely sure that we’re all like this and no one is talking about it but in all of our closets is a thing hovering, humming, sleek and black and chrome with its missiles aimed at nothing.

We have one more huge fight. Later I recognize this as a kind of self-defense. I’m screaming and beating at it with my fists, something about commitment that I’m not even sure that I believe, and it’s just taking it, except for the moments when it butts me in the head to push me back. I’m shrieking about its missiles, demanding that it go ahead and vaporize my entire fucking apartment, put me out of my misery, because I can’t take this anymore because I don’t know what to do. We have angry sex and it leaves. It doesn’t call me again. I stay in bed for two days and call a therapist.

Here’s what you’re going to do.

You’re going to do what you told yourself you had the courage to do and say everything. You’re going to let it all out to someone flesh and blood and you’re going to hear what they say back to you. For once you’re not going to be the one doing all the talking. You’re going to be honest. You’re going to be the one to start the whole wheel spinning back in the other direction. You’re going to fix everything because you have the power to fix everything. You’re going to give this all a name and say it like you’re proud. You’re going to bust open a whole new paradigm. You’re going to be missile-proof and bold and amazing and you’re not going to depend on the penetrative orgasmic power of something that never loved you anyway.

I stop at the door. I don’t even make it into the waiting room.

I fiddle with the buttons on my coat. I check my phone for texts, voicemail. I look down the street at all those beautiful humming flying things. I feel a tug in the core of me where everything melts down into a hot lump and spins like a dynamo. I feel like I can’t deny everything. I feel like I don’t want to. I feel that the flesh is treacherous and doomed.

I made this promise to myself and it takes me half an hour on a bus and five minutes of staring at a name plaque and a glass door to realize that I don’t want to keep it.

I look back out at everyone and I consider what it could be like to step through those doors, sit in a softly lit room with tissues and a lot of pastel and unthreatening paintings on the wall and spill it all and look up and see the therapist nodding, nodding knowingly, mouthing the words me too.

I don’t really think anyone can help any of us.

Here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to stop worrying. You’re going to stop asking questions. You’re going to stop planning for tomorrow. You’re going to go out and get laid and stop wondering what might have been. You’re going to stop trying to fix anything. You’re going to stop assuming there’s anything to be fixed.

You’re going to look out at all those drones and not wonder. You’re going to look out at all those people and you’re going to know. Even though no one is talking.

Me too. Me too. Me too.

About the Author

Sunny Moraine is a humanoid creature of average height, luminosity, and inertial mass. They’re also a doctoral candidate in sociology and a writer-like object whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Apex Magazine, and Shimmer, among other places. Their first novel Line and Orbit, co-written with Lisa Soem, is available from Samhain Publishing. Their solo-authored novel Crowflight is coming this fall from Masque Books.

Across the Terminator

David Tallerman

“I’m telling you, it’s alive!”

Fasbender shook the flask as though it really were some living thing he was trying to subdue, yet its contents looked more than anything like dirty water—it was Hank’s pointing this out that had provoked his outburst in the first place.

At forty-three, Fasbender was the oldest member of their three-man team. With his shock of prematurely white hair and pale skin scarred by some vindictive childhood illness, he tended to look even older—especially when he was seized, as now, with what Hank considered his ‘mad scientist fits’.

“So what is it?” Hank asked.

“I don’t know. That’s what I’m saying. I don’t know. I don’t have the lab equipment. I don’t have equipment for anything like this.”

An old grievance. It wasn’t so much that Blue Glacier was under-equipped. Indeed, while the base was being established, money had been thrown at it in mind-boggling quantities. But without a specific mandate, no one had known exactly what to buy with those inflated budgets. They’d requested tools, machines, and software according to guesses of what might be useful down the line. In the end, whether from funding cuts, space restrictions on shuttles, or pure bureaucratic obstinacy, much of it had never materialized.

These days, to Fasbender’s endless frustration, nobody ever asked what they needed.

“I might be able to rustle something up,” Hank said helplessly. “If you can explain what you need and why.”

Fasbender just glared from beneath flamboyant eyebrows, as though reprimanding an obstinate child.

“Oh come on. If it’s something important, they’ll listen. It is important, right?”

“Yes,” Fasbender said. “It’s very important. It’s too important for red tape, for protocols, for orders signed in triplicate. It’s too important to sit on. That’s why, Hank, I’m going to ask you to do something you really won’t want to do.”

Ever since their arrival, Hank had loved and despised going outside in equal measure. There was something about the uncompromised desolation that stirred him, that took him out of himself, even in his worst moods. The pocked surface of Shackleton Crater peeled away in every direction, a void beneath vast skies, its jagged rim blindingly bright compared to the absolute darkness of its depths. It was lonely, utterly lonely—and breathtaking.

Yet here he was, spoiling it. There was the bit he hated. The rover bounced and lurched in the loose regolith, churning dust beneath its bubble wheels, traveling within a chalky cloud that followed like some agitated ghost. Out here, Hank always felt like the worst kind of tourist.

He sighed. At least he was lucky enough to see firsthand what the vast majority would only ever experience through the feeds and LOsim. So why was he about to do something that might—no, had to—jeopardize that?

Because if Fasbender’s right, this is too big not to. So suck it up, Schakowsky.

Behind him, Blue Glacier sat like a basking toad. Ahead, Yang Liwei loomed nearer. It was easy, and misleading, to make assumptions about the societies that had constructed each one from their eccentricities of design. The Chinese base might be brutal in its functionality of form, but Fasbender was right about one thing: Yang Liwei was a scientific research station in a way that Blue Glacier wasn’t and had never been intended to be.

 He drove slowly to negate any suggestion of hostility, however insane such a threat might be. There was a patch of churned ground before the entrance, a scar from Yang Liwei’s construction. Hank let the rover grind to a halt in front of it and swung to the ground. Dust spat around his booted feet, but inside the suit he felt and heard nothing, and saw only what the spotlights and his photocromic visor allowed. He took one awkward step, then another, and wondered what the hell he was expecting. For two years, the US and Chinese astronautic teams had sat opposite each other, engaged in what had always seemed like the geopolitical equivalent of a staring contest. Would they vaporize him? Ignore him? Did they even know he was out here?

Hank took a third step. His helmet mike spat static.

A female voice said, “Commander Schakowsky, welcome to Yang Liwei Lunar Science Station. May we ask what took you so long to visit?”

“You have to understand, we had orders. Well, we still have. Only, our scientist thinks that after what Crazy Bessie brought in . . . ” Hank realized he probably wasn’t making much sense. “Bessie’s our robot. She’s one of the prototype AI-led rovers Holier has been developing for the Mars program. It took us a while to beat the kinks out of her programming, though. Like trying to train a too-smart dog. Ah—”

The woman opposite him smiled patiently, and Hank lost his thread again. Until now, Liang Lei had been a face on the feeds, rather intense and harsh-looking in her stark blue-grey uniform. She was famously charismatic, a celebrity in her native country. But Hank’s Chinese was atrocious, and charm, it seemed, lost a lot without translation.

In the last few minutes, however, her perfect English had not only shamed his own linguistic limitations but also made him realize why she was so well-liked. She spoke with a slight lilt and a hint of laughter, both of which made her seem more attractive than her hard features might suggest.

As if this wasn’t difficult enough already . . .

“So anyway,” he continued, “I’ve brought over a file with Doctor Fasbender’s notes and results so far—which I’d be grateful if you could keep to yourselves, because I’m pretty sure they’d drag me home and shoot me if they knew I was doing this.” Or would they? Do they even care what we do up here anymore? “You have us over a barrel. But Fasbender has this nutty idea that science should be bigger than borders, and this even nuttier idea you’ll think the same way.”

Liang smiled. “I think I would like to meet your Doctor Fasbender.”

Hank grinned back, and felt a tremendous release of tension. “Believe me, you wouldn’t. He’s stubborn and annoying. In fact, if you really like the sound of him, I might be willing to trade.”

Liang’s smile broadened, her surprisingly pretty face became a little prettier still, and Hank struggled to hold his thoughts together.

“The way I see it, Commander,” he said, “we’re stuck up here together. Now that I think about it, we should have been friends from the start. I’m sorry for that. Right now, though, we may have found something big . . . and if we have, then we need your help.”

“Please,” she replied. “My name is Lei. And you’re right, we should have been friends before today. The Moon is a lonely enough place without us making it lonelier still.”

“This doesn’t sit right.” Landeimer, third and final member of Blue Glacier’s small staff, sat on the canteen table, kicking his heels savagely against its supports. “Something’s up.”

“They’re in exactly the same boat we are. Once the Chinese authorities had a flag waving permanently on the Moon, they lost interest, just like our people did. What’s so strange about that?”

“Not that. It’s the way you’re taking it so well.”  

Hank laughed awkwardly. “Commander Liang is a persuasive lady.”

“I thought you were meant to be persuading her.”

“Sure. That too.” Desperate to change to the subject, Hank turned to Fasbender. “So where does this leave us? What happens now?”

Fasbender stood with his back half to them, distractedly picking at a tube of rhubarb-flavored nutrient gel. He shook his head. “This leaves us with the boring stuff, Hank—the actual science. You did your part, and I appreciate that. Now I have to get on with mine. I’m sure you don’t want me explaining it to you.”

That stung, because Hank really had stuck his neck out, but also because the implied criticism was more than a little justified. “Look,” he said, “I’ve been distracted lately, I admit it. But I care about this. I want to understand.”

Fasbender glared from under his gargantuan eyebrows, holding the nutri-gel straight out like a weapon. Then he glanced down at his hand, looked puzzled for a moment, and relaxed. “You have been rather noncommittal these last few months. And you do seem different now.”

Hank sighed. “I’m sorry. You too, Landeimer. The last year hasn’t been what any of us expected when we signed up. If we can do some good here, though, I want in on that. Just talk me through it, okay?”

For once, he was relieved to see Fasbender slip into mad scientist mode. As though his thought processes were powered by motion, the doctor began a circuit of the room: past the portholes of the outer wall, then the doors to the bunk hall, comm room, laboratory, and airlock, and then past the portholes again, emphasizing in a few short moments how claustrophobic their existence was. “Obviously,” he said, “it began with the water.”

This, at least, Hank understood. After the supply shuttles had started to become irregular, Hank had raised the unpleasant possibility that one day—if the cold war back home ever turned hot—they might find themselves stuck with no support at all. They’d discussed food rationing, and Landeimer had explained how they could boost the output from the solar panels to cover if the fuel cells dried up. “You’re talking about your idea of mining for ice in the unlit regions of the crater wall?”

“Correct. Landeimer and I have made a lot of headway since we ironed out the glitches in Bessie’s code.” Fasbender always seemed taller when he was orating. Now Hank was certain the doctor had gained a clear couple of inches. “There are some sizeable deposits over there, most likely brought in by meteorites and other space debris. It’s spread out and tricky to get at, but Bessie came up with the goods.”

“Hence the bottle you were waving around.”

“Yes. Because what Bessie brought back wasn’t just water. There was something else in it. Something living.”

“Even though that should be impossible with no atmosphere.”

He felt childishly pleased to be making a useful contribution, which only made it worse when Fasbender started glaring at him again. “My God, Henry. I know we’re from different specialisms, but did they teach you nothing at Canaveral? Of course there’s an atmosphere. Outgassing and run-off from the solar wind, among other things, take care of that. There are even traces of oxygen. What’s important is that there’s nowhere near enough for any aerobic organism to get by on.”

“Which means what you’ve found must be anaerobic?” asked Hank desperately.

“Correct. That in itself makes it unusual and potentially useful. What’s truly rare, however, is that it generates oxygen without relying on photosynthesis. It processes water much like any earthbound plant, but takes its energy from the radioactive decay of rocks, as certain methanogen-based microbes do.”

“It’s a good job I don’t need to understand that. I think I see the significance, at least. We give it water and it makes air, right?”

“Not air, no . . . but a way of farming oxygen on the moon would be a fine start. It might also be a potential biofuel if one could find sufficient ice reserves, or even the basis for a food protein. Imagine, fields of Glacier Grass stretching across the lunar—”

“What?”

“Oh. Yes, that’s what Landeimer’s been calling it. I’m afraid I’ve adopted the term, despite its utter inaccuracy.” Abruptly, as though suddenly tired, Fasbender leaned back against the canteen table, forcing Landeimer to shuffle aside. “The point is, Henry, that the possibilities are enormous.”

“I get that much. So now might be the time to tell you that I’ve arranged for the Chinese to come over here in about—oh, half an hour’s time. We’re going to thrash this out, the three of us with the five of them. So I have one more question.”

“Oh?” Fasbender creased his eyebrows suspiciously.

Hank grinned. “Who wants to bake the welcome cake?”

In the end, they settled for cocktails. Landeimer had an unexplained supply of some virulent alcohol that seemed to materialize whenever he was in a black mood. On his worst days, he’d taken to mixing it experimentally with various fruit and vegetable nutrient pastes, which he forced the others to try. The results had been variable, to say the least. Thankfully, he spared their guests the more bizarre concoctions in favor of his safer recipes.

There were eight of them crammed into the small canteen now, more than twice the number for which it had been intended. Fasbender had bonded instantly with his Chinese counterpart, and Hank had drawn wry amusement from his uncharacteristically puppyish attitude towards the famous bacteriologist.

As the meeting had progressed and the science become more in-depth, those with least to contribute had drifted towards the peripheries. Hank now stood halfway through the bunk hall door, a position that was playing havoc with its sensors. Every few seconds the door would attempt to close, bump against his foot, and offer a sad mechanical sigh. Liang Lei was leaning against the wall, deftly protecting her glass from the darts of elbows and shoulders.

Hank took a careful sip of his mystery alcohol, avocado paste, and rehydrated lime sling, and said, “I thought I knew what they were talking about an hour ago. I’m not even sure it’s English anymore. Is it Chinese?”

She offered the smile that had made such an impact on him earlier. “I was educated in Community Management. I am just as confused as you, Henry.”

Feeling his cheeks flush warmly, he said, “Please, it’s Hank. No one but Fasbender calls me Henry, and I think he only does it to annoy me.”

“Hank,” she said, as if testing the sound. “Aren’t you bothered by that door hitting your foot?”

“Sure. How are you enjoying dodging elbows?”

“Very little.”

“Perhaps it’s time we moved then.”

He stepped back into the bunkroom, sat down and waved toward the opposite beds. She perched on the edge of the lowest. He couldn’t help noticing how her nose wrinkled. “We’ve had trouble with the air recycling, and the new tanks have been delayed,” he explained apologetically. “Also, Fasbender seems to think that changing his overall every day is a luxury.”

“It must be strange to have volunteered for this life,” she said.

“Didn’t you?”

“I was chosen. It was a great honor.”

“Well, I wouldn’t change it. I wouldn’t give it up for anything. Even if the worst happens, even if . . . ” He faltered. He’d said more than he’d meant to. In fact, he’d strayed onto a subject he would never have deliberately raised.

“I spoke a little with your Mister Landeimer,” Lei said. “He mentioned that you’ve been troubled. That you’ve been watching all the time for news from Earth and worrying they have forgotten you.”

Unable to read her tone, he nodded. He felt oddly guilty, as though his earlier excitement had soured like old milk.

“I have been troubled too,” Lei said, almost in a whisper.

Hank started. “Really?”

“We were put here to—” She struggled to find the right phrase in the less familiar language. “To make a point. We were sent here to prove how superior our science was, just as you were sent to prove that anything we could do, you could better. Now both points have been made. We are no longer news, and at home they wonder what to do with us.”

Astonished to hear his own anxieties summed up so perfectly, Hank could only nod.

“Mister Landeimer also said that you have been looking for ways to survive on your own here, if the need should come. What I wanted to tell you is that so have we. We are growing a little food and generating our own power. We have improved our air filters. While the doctors investigate their discovery, would you work on this with me?”

Hank felt such relief that he fought an urge to cry or, perhaps more rationally, to lean forward and kiss her. Instead, he smiled tiredly and said, “Lei, I’d be very glad to.”

The next few days were the best he’d spent on the Moon—better even than those first weeks when it was all new and all exciting, a marathon endeavor driven by seemingly inexhaustible supplies of adrenalin.

Almost effortlessly, the lunar population—for suddenly, amazingly, that was what they were—split into two new factions, without any hint of discord. Fasbender and the Chinese bacteriologist Shen Tao pursued their science project. Everyone else worked under Hank and Lei, developing ways to prolong their survival should the worst happen.

That had been a gloomy and paranoid occupation when it had been just the three of them. Now, with the two camps combined, it seemed no more than a sensible precaution, about which they could talk openly and even joke. It felt like a holiday, or an exchange project between two ramshackle schools. New friendships were made. A weight lifted.

Hank noticed not only a change in himself, but in Landeimer’s and Fasbender’s behavior as well. Landeimer was drinking less, and when he did, it was because he’d arranged a poker game with new acquaintances from the Chinese base. Fasbender seemed younger and walked without a stoop that Hank had never consciously noticed him develop. He was as enthusiastic as he’d been in the days before the launch, and considerably more focused.

Hank knew, however, without pride or modesty, that he’d changed more than either of the others. For months, the responsibility of leadership had been a weight holding him uselessly in place. Now it was an opportunity. They were the first citizens of a new world. How had he failed to see that?

He also realized quickly, even without Landeimer’s conspiratorial glances and frequently inappropriate comments, that Lei was a part of that. It wasn’t just attraction, though he was grown-up enough to admit it was partly that. More, it was the sharing of a burden that had nearly crushed him, and the discovery that it had always been shared. He’d imagined—as the peoples of Earth had imagined—a conflict between the two hemispheres of Shackleton Crater, where in fact there had only been mirror images fighting the same weary fight.

They tweaked the air filters in Blue Glacier using adaptations the Chinese had developed, extending the filters’ lifetime by at least two years. The Americans were awed by the garden of cress and fungi growing in one wing of Yang Liwei, and Landeimer—revealing a hobbyist’s interest in botany that Hank would never have guessed at in a million years—made a number of useful suggestions to increase their yield. They calculated that Bessie, working at full capacity from a suitable reservoir of ice, could keep them all in water for four months or more. There was even talk of devising a well and a pipeline, though that might take upwards of a year.

Behind it all, like a persistent rumor, was Fasbender’s sample of Glacier Grass. For a long while, Hank felt no need to discuss it with Lei, but by the third week—when it became abundantly clear that nothing else they did could match the possibilities of Bessie’s chance find—he found himself forced to raise the subject. They had slipped away and come to rest in the garden, with its mottled splotches of khaki and empires of fungal grey.

“I don’t think I’ll ever get over this,” Hank said wonderingly.

“I remember when the first seed broke through. I don’t think I’ve ever been more happy.”

“If what Fasbender and Tao are saying is right, then this may only be the beginning. Have you heard the latest?”

“Yes. Doctor Fasbender is sure now that it could be processed into food.”

“I’ve had to forbid him from trying to eat the stuff. They still don’t really understand its growth mechanism. We’d have to bring in Earth before we thought about that angle seriously.”

“Yes,” Lei agreed, and the note of melancholy in her voice surprised him.

“What’s up?”

“Oh . . . ” She looked up at him quizzically, and tugged unconsciously at a coil of hair. Just when he was certain she wouldn’t answer, she said, “Back in China, they would call me a traitor.”

Hank considered. “Probably.”

“I wish it wasn’t like this. I hope that things will get better between our countries. I hope that one day they will be glad of what we’ve done. Perhaps then they will look at this place with hope and not as a playground to fight in.”

“Nothing lasts forever. In the meantime, we’re just going to have to live with the possibility of being branded traitors. With that in mind,” he said, and then halted, suddenly unsure if he wasn’t too bashful to ask what he’d maneuvered Lei in here to ask. He’d never been good at things like this.

You’re standing in a garden on the Moon. Perhaps it’s time to start adjusting your ideas of what you can and can’t do.

He gulped. “How would you feel about conspiring with me over dinner tonight?”

“What do you think we’re going to do all night, go for a walk outside? Man, I can’t believe you’d organize this without even asking us.”

“Paul, I’m really sorry.” It had been hard enough just revealing his plans for the evening to the others, let alone asking if they’d be okay with vacating the base for a few hours. What kind of a date would it be, though, with Landeimer thrusting peculiar cocktails at them and Fasbender regaling them with his latest discoveries? Still, it was true that he hadn’t thought the details through. If he had, he would never have got around to saying anything. “I’ll absolutely owe you one. I’ll return the favour or—”

Landeimer’s poker face cracked into a wicked grin. “Hank, you’re so easy. Who’s the one who’s been telling you that you should make a move? Anyway, I’ve got a game organized and Fasbender, to everyone’s surprise, is doing science stuff with his new best pal.”

Fasbender nodded sagely. “We’re trialing a half-dozen samples with different nutrient bases, seeing if we can’t stimulate a better growth rate.”

“Damn. I hadn’t thought about that.”

“Well, why would you have?”

“No . . . I mean, what are we going to eat tonight? What kind of a romantic dinner can you have over ham and pea nutrient tubes?”

“I have some cookies,” Fasbender said. “I was saving them for a special occasion, and this is as good as any.”

“Albert, you’re a bona fide saint. I—”

He was cut off by the raucous screech of the airlock alarm. Surely Lei wouldn’t turn up two hours early . . .

When he went to the screen, he saw—not from the anonymous bulk of the suit, but by the familiar nametag on its shoulder—that it was her. Surprised and suddenly anxious, he hammered the button marked ‘cycle’ and ducked through the door, leaving Fasbender and Landeimer exchanging puzzled glances.

For safety reasons, the airlock was a short distance from the base proper. By the time Hank had reached the other end and the huge doors had whirred open, Lei already had her helmet off and tucked beneath one arm. Though her face was perfectly composed, something in her expression made him certain that she’d been crying.

Before he could ask what was wrong, she said, “They’re taking us back.”

“What?” He stared at her in horror, willing the words back into her mouth.

“In a few hours. They’re coming to take us back. The shuttle has already been dispatched.”

The words barely seemed to penetrate the fog that had suddenly seeped into his brain. “Is it because of—of us, the last few weeks?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t know everything, but there has been some change in Beijing. They say now that Yang Liwei is wasteful, that only America chooses to be wasteful in such a way. They say we have no purpose here. It must have been planned for weeks, for months, but they only told us now.”

“Will you be in trouble?”

“Perhaps for a while. Then perhaps they will call us heroes. It doesn’t matter.” Lei drew a hand across her face. “I came to say goodbye, Hank. We haven’t much time, and there’s so much to do. They told us to destroy whatever we can.”

For a moment, her voice faltered. In that instant, Hank remembered the garden in precise detail, every dull grey orb and spike of muted green, and as though they were joined by some momentary telepathy, he knew she was thinking of it too. He wanted urgently to hold her, and realized that any physical connection would be impossible through the bloated mass of her suit.

The moment passed.

Her surface calm restored, Lei said, “I have something to return to you.”

She unzipped one of the suit’s flabby pockets and drew out a flask of some unhealthy-looking liquid. Hank stared in confusion until he recognized it as Fasbender’s original sample of Glacier Grass. He took it from her carefully.

“Goodbye, Hank,” she said. “I’m sorry I couldn’t have dinner with you. I hope that one day, when things are different, you will ask me again.”

Then she replaced her helmet, and he could no longer see her face.

It was almost a relief.

Hank had watched the shuttle, though it was only visible as occasional glints of light depending on the angle of its solar panels, and the effect had been like staring at an empty bottle perched just in sight on a very bright day.

He’d finally given up and glanced around Shackleton Crater instead. He found nothing in its stark horizons to reassure him, even though this might be the last time he saw it properly. Its walls hung like sheet iron lain upon some colossal scrap heap. Its shadows seemed sinister and unreal.

An hour ago, two hours after he’d last seen Lei, their own orders had come through. Prepare for recovery at 22:00. Destroy all paper records, electronic memory, organics.

Among other things, it confirmed what he’d sometimes suspected. The two governments were quite capable of putting aside their hostilities when it suited them. This mutual retreat from the moon had probably been agreed upon months ago.

Landeimer had taken it well, perhaps had even been pleased. He’d always had the most difficulty with the combination of extreme isolation and constant companionship imposed by lunar living. Fasbender had been stoic, though there had been something heartbreaking in his expression as he fed his samples and data piece by piece into the incinerator.

When Landeimer had been absent, he’d asked Hank, “You’re not going to do anything stupid, are you? You’re not thinking of defecting?”

“It would kill my folks,” he’d replied, only then realizing that on some level he had been considering it.

For an instant, anger made him clench his hands until his palms stung. He’d been happy when Lei was around, happier than he ever remembered feeling. Now, most likely, he would never see her again.

He hadn’t consciously planned to go outside. He had drifted towards the airlock and clambered into his suit with barely a hint of conscious purpose. He’d only remembered the flask in the pocket of his overall at the last minute. The only remaining sample of Glacier Grass, perhaps all that remained in the solar system—maybe the entire galaxy. Still with no real intention, he’d transferred it to a pouch of the suit.

He’d stared skyward for a long while, observing the Chinese shuttle in its delicate pirouette against the blackness. During that time, a realization had struck him. All those days ago, Lei had never revealed what it was that frightened her. He’d assumed she shared his phobia of abandonment. Perhaps the truth was that, despite his months-long obsession with the barrage of often-contradictory messages their nations sent out, she’d understood the politics between them better than he ever had. Perhaps she’d simply been afraid of this day, and of saying goodbye to her bleak, magnificent foster home.

Only now, glancing with dissatisfaction around Shackleton Crater, did he remember the flask. He took it out and gazed at it, watching the dark flakes that swirled inside, and realized why he’d come out here in the first place. He remembered what he’d asked Fasbender as he watched his friend cramming the last of his handwritten notes into the incinerator.

“You really think Glacier Grass could have survived out there? In that dark and cold? It really could have grown?”

“Yes, I believe so. Of course, we’ll never know for sure.”

Hank opened his fingers. In the low gravity, the flask fell slowly and settled lazily into the dust. Only when he stamped with his weighted boot did it break, and its contents burst free. An instant later, there was nothing to see but glistening shards of glass and ice.

Yet amid the debris was something that could grow without air—without atmosphere. Something that had traveled an unimaginably long way. Something that one day might be food, might be fuel, or might be turned to other undreamed-of uses if it survived to be rediscovered.

It had made it this far. Maybe the odds weren’t so bad.

He wanted to say something though there was no one to hear. Nothing came to mind. He tried to remember what Lei had told him in the garden that day, and found he couldn’t even manage that. The words jumbled. All he could hear was the specific lilt of her voice.

In desperation, Hank paraphrased. “Well, we screwed up today. Here’s hoping we get it right tomorrow.”

About the Author

David Tallerman is the author of the comic fantasy novels Giant Thief and Crown Thief, as well as the absurdist steampunk graphic novel Endangered Weapon B: Mechanimal Science. A second sequel to Giant Thief, Prince Thief, is due for release later this year. David’s short science fiction, fantasy and horror has appeared in over fifty markets, including Lightspeed, Bull Spec, Nightmare and Flash Fiction Online.

The Illustrated Biography of Lord Grimm

Daryl Gregory

The 22nd Invasion of Trovenia began with a streak of scarlet against a gray sky fast as the flick of a paintbrush. The red blur zipped across the length of the island, moving west to east, and shot out to sea. The sonic boom a moment later scattered the birds that wheeled above the fish processing plant and sent them squealing and plummeting.

Elena said, “Was that—it was, wasn’t it?”

“You’ve never seen a U-Man, Elena?” Jürgo said.

“Not in person.” At nineteen, Elena Pendareva was the youngest of the crew by at least two decades, and the only female. She and the other five members of the heavy plate welding unit were perched 110 meters in the air, taking their lunch upon the great steel shoulder of the Slaybot Prime. The giant robot, latest in a long series of ultimate weapons, was unfinished, its unpainted skin speckled with bird shit, its chest turrets empty, the open dome of its head covered only by a tarp.

It had been Jürgo’s idea to ride up the gantry for lunch. They had plenty of time: for the fifth day in a row, steel plate for the Slaybot’s skin had failed to arrive from the foundry, and the welding crew had nothing to do but clean their equipment and play cards until the guards let them go home.

It was a good day for a picnic. An unseasonably warm spring wind blew in from the docks, carrying the smell of the sea only slightly tainted by odors of diesel fuel and fish guts. From the giant’s shoulder the crew looked down on the entire capital, from the port and industrial sector below them, to the old city in the west and the rows of gray apartment buildings rising up beyond. The only structures higher than their perch were Castle Grimm’s black spires, carved out of the sides of Mount Kriegstahl, and the peak of the mountain itself.

“You know what you must do, Elena,” Verner said with mock sincerity. He was the oldest in the group, a veteran mechaneer whose body was more metal than flesh. “Your first übermensch, you must make a wish.”

Elena said, “Is ‘Oh shit,’ a wish?”

Verner pivoted on his rubber-tipped stump to follow her gaze. The figure in red had turned about over the eastern sea, and was streaking back toward the island. Sunlight glinted on something long and metallic in its hands.

The UM dove straight toward them.

There was nowhere to hide. The crew sat on a naked shelf of metal between the gantry and the sheer profile of the robot’s head. Elena threw herself flat and spread her arms on the metal surface, willing herself to stick.

Nobody else moved. Maybe because they were old men, or maybe because they were all veterans, former zoomandos and mechaneers and castle guards. They’d seen dozens of U-Men, fought them even. Elena didn’t know if they were unafraid or simply too old to care much for their skin.

The UM shot past with a whoosh, making the steel shiver beneath her. She looked up in time to take in a flash of metal, a crimson cape, black boots—and then the figure crashed through the wall of Castle Grimm. Masonry and dust exploded into the air.

“Lunch break,” Jürgo said in his Estonian accent, “is over.”

Toolboxes slammed, paper sacks took to the wind. Elena got to her feet. Jürgo picked up his lunch pail with one clawed foot, spread his patchy, soot-stained wings, and leaned over the side, considering. His arms and neck were skinny as always, but in the past few years he’d grown a beer gut.

Elena said, “Jürgo, can you still fly?”

“Of course,” he said. He hooked his pail to his belt and backed away from the edge. “However, I don’t believe I’m authorized for this air space.”

The rest of the crew had already crowded into the gantry elevator. Elena and Jürgo pressed inside and the cage began to slowly descend, rattling and shrieking.

“What’s it about this time, you think?” Verner said, clockwork lungs wheezing. “Old Rivet Head kidnap one of their women?” Only the oldest veterans could get away with insulting Lord Grimm in mixed company. Verner had survived at least four invasions that she knew of. His loyalty to Trovenia was assumed to go beyond patriotism into something like ownership.

Guntis, a gray, pebble-skinned amphibian of Latvian descent, said, “I fought this girlie with a sword once, Energy Lady—”

“Power Woman,” Elena said in English. She’d read the Illustrated Biography of Lord Grimm to her little brother dozens of times before he learned to read it himself. The Lord’s most significant adversaries were all listed in the appendix, in multiple languages.

“That’s the one, Par-wer Woh-man,” Guntis said, imitating her. “She had enormous—”

“Abilities,” Jürgo said pointedly. Jürgo had been a friend of Elena’s father, and often played the protective uncle.

“I think he meant to say ‘tits’,” Elena said. Several of the men laughed.

“No! Jürgo is right,” Guntis said. “They were more than breasts. They had abilities. I think one of them spoke to me.”

The elevator clanged down on the concrete pad and the crew followed Jürgo into the long shed of the 3000 line. The factory floor was emptying. Workers pulled on coats, joking and laughing as if it were a holiday.

Jürgo pulled aside a man and asked him what was going on. “The guards have run away!” the man said happily. “Off to fight the übermensch!”

“So what’s it going to be, boss?” Guntis said. “Stay or go?”

Jürgo scratched at the cement floor, thinking. Half-assembled Slaybot 3000’s, five-meter-tall cousins to the colossal Prime, dangled from hooks all along the assembly line, wires spilling from their chests, legs missing. The factory was well behind its quota for the month. As well as for the quarter, year, and five-year mark. Circuit boards and batteries were in particularly short supply, but tools and equipment vanished daily. Especially scarce were acetylene tanks, a home-heating accessory for the very cold, the very stupid, or both.

Jürgo finally shook his feathered head and said, “Nothing we can do here. Let’s go home and hide under our beds.”

“And in our bottles,” Verner said.

Elena waved good-bye and walked toward the women’s changing rooms to empty her locker.

A block from her apartment she heard Mr. Bojars singing out, “Guh-RATE day for sausa-JEZ! Izza GREAT day for SAW-sages!” The mechaneer veteran was parked at his permanent spot at the corner of Glorious Victory Street and Infinite Progress Avenue, in the shadow of the statue of Grimm Triumphant. He saw her crossing the intersection and shouted, “My beautiful Elena! A fat bratwurst to go with that bread, maybe. Perfect for a celebration!”

“No thank you, Mr. Bojars.” She hoisted the bag of groceries onto her hip and shuffled the welder’s helmet to her other arm. “You know we’ve been invaded, don’t you?”

The man laughed heartily. “The trap is sprung! The crab is in the basket!” He wore the same clothes he wore every day, a black nylon ski hat and a green, grease-stained parka decorated at the breast with three medals from his years in the motorized cavalry. The coat hung down to cover where his flesh ended and his motorcycle body began.

“Don’t you worry about Lord Grimm,” he said. “He can handle any American muscle-head stupid enough to enter his lair. Especially the Red Meteor.”

“It was Most Excellent Man,” Elena said, using the Trovenian translation of his name. “I saw the Staff of Mightiness in his hand, or whatever he calls it.”

“Even better! The man’s an idiot. A U-Moron.”

“He’s defeated Lord Grimm several times,” Elena said. “So I hear.”

“And Lord Grimm has been declared dead a dozen times! You can’t believe the underground newspapers, Elena. You’re not reading that trash are you?”

“You know I’m not political, Mr. Bojars.”

“Good for you. This Excellent Man, let me tell you something about—yes sir? Great day for a sausage.” He turned his attention to the customer and Elena quickly wished him luck and slipped away before he could begin another story.

The small lobby of her apartment building smelled like burnt plastic and cooking grease. She climbed the cement stairs to the third floor. As usual the door to her apartment was wide open, as was the door to Mr. Fishman’s apartment across the hall. Staticky television laughter and applause carried down the hallway: It sounded like Mr. Sascha’s Celebrity Polka Fun-Time. Not even an invasion could pre-empt Mr. Sascha.

She knocked on the frame of his door. “Mr. Fishman,” she called loudly. He’d never revealed his real name. “Mr. Fishman, would you like to come to dinner tonight?”

There was no answer except for the blast of the television. She walked into the dim hallway and leaned around the corner. The living room was dark except for the glow of the TV. The little set was propped up on a wooden chair at the edge of a large cast iron bathtub, the light from its screen reflecting off the smooth surface of the water. “Mr. Fishman? Did you hear me?” She walked across the room, shoes crinkling on the plastic tarp that covered the floor, and switched off the TV.

The surface of the water shimmied. A lumpy head rose up out of the water, followed by a pair of dark eyes, a flap of nose, and a wide carp mouth.

“I was watching that,” the zooman said.

“Some day you’re going to pull that thing into the tub and electrocute yourself,” Elena said.

He exhaled, making a rude noise through rubbery lips.

“We’re having dinner,” Elena said. She turned on a lamp. Long ago Mr. Fishman had pushed all the furniture to the edge of the room to make room for his easels. She didn’t see any new canvasses upon them, but there was an empty liquor bottle on the floor next to the tub. “Would you like to join us?”

He eyed the bag in her arms. “That wouldn’t be, umm, fresh catch?”

“It is, as a matter of fact.”

“I suppose I could stop by.” His head sank below the surface.

In Elena’s own apartment, Grandmother Zita smoked and rocked in front of the window, while Mattias, nine years old, sat at the table with his shoe box of colored pencils and several gray pages crammed with drawings. “Elena, did you hear?” Matti asked. “A U-Man flew over the island! They canceled school!”

“It’s nothing to be happy about,” Elena said. She rubbed the top of her brother’s head. The page showed a robot of Matti’s own design marching toward a hyper-muscled man in a red cape. In the background was a huge, lumpy monster with triangle eyes—an escaped MoG, she supposed.

“The last time the U-men came,” Grandmother Zita said, “more than robots lost their heads. This family knows that better than most. When your mother—”

“Let’s not talk politics, Grandmother.” She kissed the old woman on the cheek, then reached past her to crank open the window—she’d told the woman to let in some air when she smoked in front of Matti, to no avail. Outside, sirens wailed.

Elena had been only eleven years old during the last invasion. She’d slept through most of it, and when she woke to sirens that morning the apartment was cold and the lights didn’t work. Her parents were government geneticists—there was no other kind—and often were called away at odd hours. Her mother had left her a note asking her to feed Baby Matti and please stay indoors. Elena made oatmeal, the first of many breakfasts she would make for her little brother. Only after her parents failed to come home did she realize that the note was a kind of battlefield promotion to adulthood: impossible to refuse because there was no one left to accept her refusal.

Mr. Fishman, in his blue bathrobe and striped pajama pants, arrived a half hour later, his great webbed feet slapping the floor. He sat at the table and argued with Grandmother Zita about which of the twenty-one previous invasions was most violent. There was a time in the 1960’s and seventies when their little country seemed to be under attack every other month. Matti listened raptly.

Elena had just brought the fried whitefish to the table when the thumping march playing on the radio suddenly cut off. An announcer said, “Please stand by for an important message from His Royal Majesty, the Guardian of our Shores, the Scourge of Fascism, Professor General of the Royal Academy of Sciences, the Savior of Trovenia—”

Mr. Fishman pointed at Matti. “Boy, get my television!” Matti dashed to the man’s apartment and Elena cleared a spot on the table.

After Mr. Fishman fiddled with the antenna the screen suddenly cleared, showing a large room decorated in Early 1400’s: stone floors, flickering torches, and dulled tapestries on the walls. The only piece of furniture was a huge oaken chair reinforced at the joints with plates and rivets.

A figure appeared at the far end of the room and strode toward the camera.

“He’s still alive then,” Grandmother said. Lord Grimm didn’t appear on live television more than once or twice a year.

Matti said, “Oh, look at him.”

Lord Grimm wore the traditional black and green cape of Trovenian nobility, which contrasted nicely with the polished suit of armor. His faceplate, hawk-nosed and heavily riveted, suggested simultaneously the prow of a battleship and the beak of the Baltic albatross, the Trovenian national bird.

Elena had to admit he cut a dramatic figure. She almost felt sorry for people in other countries whose leaders all looked like postal inspectors. You could no more imagine those timid, pinch-faced bureaucrats leading troops into battle than you could imagine Lord Grimm ice skating.

“Sons and daughters of Trovenia,” the leader intoned. His deep voice was charged with metallic echoes. “We have been invaded.”

“We knew that already,” Grandmother said, and Mr. Fishman shushed her.

“Once again, an American super power has violated our sovereignty. With typical, misguided arrogance, a so-called übermensch has trespassed upon our borders, destroy our property . . . ” The litany of crimes went on for some time.

“Look! The U-Man!” Matti said.

On screen, castle guards carried in a red-clad figure and dumped him in the huge chair. His head lolled. Lord Grimm lifted the prisoner’s chin to show his bloody face to the camera. One eye was half open, the other swelled shut. “As you can see, he is completely powerless.”

Mr. Fishman grunted in disappointment.

“What?” Matti asked.

“Again with the captives, and the taunting,” Grandmother said.

“Why not? They invaded us!”

Mr. Fishman grimaced, and his gills flapped shut.

“If Lord Grimm simply beat up Most Excellent Man and sent him packing, that would be one thing,” Grandmother said. “Or even if he just promised to stop doing what he was doing for a couple of months until they forgot about him, then—”

“Then we’d all go back to our business,” Mr. Fishman said.

Grandmother said, “But no, he’s got to keep him captive. Now it’s going to be just like 1972.”

“And seventy-five,” Mr. Fishman said. He sawed into his whitefish. “And eighty-three.”

Elena snapped off the television. “Matti, go pack your school bag with clothes. Now.”

“What? Why?”

“We’re spending the night in the basement. You too, Grandmother.”

“But I haven’t finished my supper!”

“I’ll wrap it up for you. Mr. Fishman, I can help you down the stairs if you like.”

“Pah,” he said. “I’m going back to bed. Wake me when the war’s over.”

A dozen or so residents of the building had gotten the same idea. For several hours the group sat on boxes and old furniture in the damp basement under stuttering fluorescent lights, listening to the distant roar of jets, the rumble of mechaneer tanks, and the bass-drum stomps of Slaybot 3000s marching into position.

Grandmother Zita had claimed the best seat in the room, a ripped vinyl armchair. Matti had fallen asleep across her lap, still clutching the Illustrated Biography of Lord Grimm. The boy was so comfortable with her. Zita wasn’t even a relative, but she’d watched over the boy since he was a toddler and so became his grandmother—another wartime employment opportunity. Elena slipped the book from under Matti’s arms and bent to put it into his school bag.

Zita lit another cigarette. “How do you suppose it really started?” she said.

“What, the war?” Elena asked.

“No, the first time.” She nodded at Matti’s book. “Hating the Americans, okay, no problem. But why the scary mask, the cape?”

Elena pretended to sort out the contents of the bag.

“What possesses a person to do that?” Zita said, undeterred. “Wake up one day and say, Today I will put a bucket over my head. Today I declare war on all U-Men. Today I become, what’s the English . . . ”

“Grandmother, please,” Elena said, keeping her voice low.

“A super villain,” Zita said.

A couple of the nearest people looked away in embarrassment. Mr. Rimkis, an old man from the fourth floor, glared at Grandmother down the length of his gray-bristled snout. He was a veteran with one long tusk and the other snapped off at the base. He claimed to have suffered the injury fighting the U-Men, though others said he’d lost the tusk in combat with vodka and gravity: The Battle of the Pub Stairs.

“He is the hero,” Mr. Rimkis said. “Not these imperialists in long underwear. They invaded his country, attacked his family, maimed him and left him with—”

“Oh please,” Grandmother said. “Every villain believes himself to be a hero.”

The last few words were nearly drowned out by the sudden wail of an air raid siren. Matti jerked awake and Zita automatically put a hand to his sweat-dampened forehead. The residents stared up at the ceiling. Soon there was a chorus of sirens.

They’ve come, Elena thought, as everyone knew they would, to rescue their comrade.

From somewhere in the distance came a steady thump, thump that vibrated the ground and made the basement’s bare cinderblock walls chuff dust into the air. Each explosion seemed louder and closer. Between the explosions, slaybot auto-cannons whined and chattered.

Someone said, “Everybody just remain calm—”

The floor seemed to jump beneath their feet. Elena lost her balance and smacked into the cement on her side. At the same moment she was deafened by a noise louder than her ears could process.

The lights had gone out. Elena rolled over, eyes straining, but she couldn’t make out Grandmother or Matti or anyone. She shouted but barely heard her own voice above the ringing in her ears.

Someone behind her switched on an electric torch and flicked it around the room. Most of the basement seemed to have filled with rubble.

Elena crawled toward where she thought Grandmother’s chair had been and was stopped by a pile of cement and splintered wood. She called Matti’s name and began to push the debris out of the way.

Someone grabbed her foot, and then Matti fell into her, hugged her fiercely. Somehow he’d been thrown behind her, over her. She called for a light, but the torch was aimed now at a pair of men attempting to clear the stairway. Elena took Matti’s hand and led him cautiously toward the light. Pebbles fell on them; the building seemed to shift and groan. Somewhere a woman cried out, her voice muffled.

“Grandmother Zita,” Matti said.

Elena was grateful that she could hear him. “I’ll come back for Grandmother,” she said, though she didn’t know for sure if it had been Zita’s voice. “First you.”

The two men had cleared a passage to the outside. One of them boosted the other to where he could crawl out. The freed man then reached back and Elena lifted Matti to him. The boy’s jacket snagged on a length of rebar, and the boy yelped. After what seemed like minutes of tugging and shouting the coat finally ripped free.

“Stay there, Mattias!” Elena called. “Don’t move!” She turned to assist the next person in line to climb out, an old woman from the sixth floor. She carried an enormous wicker basket which she refused to relinquish. Elena promised repeatedly that the basket would be the first thing to come out after her. The others in the basement began to shout at the old woman, which only made her grip the handle more fiercely. Elena was considering prying her fingers from it when a yellow flash illuminated the passage. People outside screamed.

Elena scrambled up and out without being conscious of how she managed it. The street lights had gone out but the gray sky flickered with strange lights. A small crowd of dazed citizens sat or lay sprawled across the rubble-strewn street, as if a bomb had gone off. The man who’d pulled Matti out of the basement sat on the ground, holding his hands to his face and moaning.

The sky was full of flying men.

Searchlights panned from a dozen points around the city, and clouds pulsed with exotic energies. In that spasmodic light dozens of tiny figures darted: caped invaders, squadrons of Royal Air Dragoons riding pinpricks of fire, winged zoomandos, glowing U-Men leaving iridescent fairy trails. Beams of energy flicked from horizon to horizon; soldiers ignited and dropped like dollops of burning wax.

Elena looked around wildly for her brother. Rubble was everywhere. The front of her apartment building had been sheared off, exposing bedrooms and bathrooms. Protruding girders bent toward the ground like tongues.

Finally she saw the boy. He sat on the ground, staring at the sky. Elena ran to him, calling his name. He looked in her direction. His eyes were wide, unseeing.

She knelt down in front of him.

“I looked at straight at him,” Matti said. “He flew right over our heads. He was so bright. So bright.”

There was something wrong with Matti’s face. In the inconstant light she could only tell that his skin was darker than it should have been.

“Take my hand,” Elena said. “Can you stand up? Good. Good. How do you feel?”

“My face feels hot,” he said. Then, “Is Grandmother out yet?”

Elena didn’t answer. She led him around the piles of debris. Once she had to yank him sideways and he yelped. “Something in our way,” she said. A half-buried figure lay with one arm and one leg jutting into the street. The body would have been unrecognizable if not for the blue-striped pajamas and the webbing between the toes of the bare foot.

Matti wrenched his hand from her grip. “Where are we going? You have to tell me where we’re going.”

She had no idea. She’d thought they’d be safe in the basement. She’d thought it would be like the invasions everyone talked about, a handful of U-Men—a super team—storming the castle. No one told her there could be an army of them. The entire city had become the battleground.

“Out of the city,” she said. “Into the country.”

“But Grandmother—”

“I promise I’ll come back for Grandmother Zita,” she said.

“And my book,” he said. “It’s still in the basement.”

All along Infinite Progress Avenue, families spilled out of buildings carrying bundles of clothes and plastic jugs, pushing wheelchairs and shopping carts loaded with canned food, TV sets, photo albums. Elena grabbed tight to Matti’s arm and joined the exodus north.

After an hour they’d covered only ten blocks. The street had narrowed as they left the residential district, condensing the stream of people into a herd, then a single shuffling animal. Explosions and gunfire continued to sound from behind them and the sky still flashed with parti-colored lightning, but hardly anyone glanced back.

The surrounding bodies provided Elena and Matti with some protection against the cold, though frigid channels of night air randomly opened through the crowd. Matti’s vision still hadn’t returned; he saw nothing but the yellow light of the U-Man. He told her his skin still felt hot, but he trembled as if he were cold. Once he stopped suddenly and threw up into the street. The crowd behind bumped into them, forcing them to keep moving.

One of their fellow refugees gave Matti a blanket. He pulled it onto his shoulders like a cape but it kept slipping as he walked, tripping him up. The boy hadn’t cried since they’d started walking, hadn’t complained—he’d even stopped asking about Grandmother Zita—but Elena still couldn’t stop herself from being annoyed at him. He stumbled again and she yanked the blanket from him. “For God’s sake, Mattias,” she said. “If you can’t hold onto it—” She drew up short. The black-coated women in front of them had suddenly stopped.

Shouts went up from somewhere ahead, and then the crowd surged backward. Elena recognized the escalating whine of an auto-cannon coming up to speed.

Elena pulled Matti up onto her chest and he yelped in surprise or pain. The boy was heavy and awkward; she locked her hands under his butt and shoved toward the crowd’s edge, aiming for the mouth of an alley. The crowd buffeted her, knocked her off course. She came up hard against the plate glass window of a shop.

A Slaybot 3000 lumbered through the crowd, knocking people aside. Its gun arm, a huge thing like a barrel of steel pipes, jerked from figure to figure, targeting automatically. A uniformed technician sat in the jumpseat on the robot’s back, gesturing frantically and shouting, “Out of the way! Out of the way!” It was impossible to tell whether he’d lost control or was deliberately marching through the crowd.

The mass of figures had almost certainly overwhelmed the robot’s vision and recognition processors. The 3000 model, like its predecessors, had difficulty telling friend from foe even in the spare environment of the factory QA room.

The gun arm pivoted toward her: six black mouths. Then the carousel began to spin and the six barrels blurred, became one vast maw.

Elena felt her gut go cold. She would have sunk to the ground—she wanted desperately to disappear—but the mob held her upright, pinned. She twisted to place at least part of her body between the robot and Matti. The glass at her shoulder trembled, began to bow.

For a moment she saw both sides of the glass. Inside the dimly lit shop were two rows of blank white faces, a choir of eyeless women regarding her. And in the window’s reflection she saw her own face, and above that, a streak of light like a falling star. The UM flew toward them from the west, moving incredibly fast.

The robot’s gun fired even as it flicked upward to acquire the new target.

The glass shattered. The mass of people on the street beside her seemed to disintegrate into blood and cloth tatters. A moment later she registered the sound of the gun, a thunderous ba-rap! The crowd pulsed away from her, releasing its pressure, and she collapsed to the ground.

The slaybot broke into a clumsy stomping run, its gun ripping at the air.

Matti had rolled away from her. Elena touched his shoulder, turned him over. His eyes were open, but unmoving, glassy.

The air seemed to freeze. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move her hand from him.

He blinked. Then he began to scream.

Elena got to her knees. Her left hand was bloody and freckled with glass; her fingers glistened. Each movement triggered the prick of a thousand tiny needles. Matti screamed and screamed.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” she said. “I’m right here.”

She talked to him for almost a minute before he calmed down enough to hear her and stop screaming.

The window was gone, the shop door blown open. The window case was filled with foam heads on posts, some with wigs askew, others tipped over and bald. She got Matti to take her hand—her good hand—and led him through the doorway. She was thankful that he could not see the things they stepped over.

Inside the scene was remarkably similar. Arms and legs of all sizes hung from straps on the walls. Trays of dentures sat out on the countertops. A score of heads sported hairstyles old-fashioned even by Trovenian standards. There were several such shops across the city. Decent business in a land of amputees.

Elena’s face had begun to burn. She walked Matti through the dark, kicking aside prosthetic limbs, and found a tiny bathroom at the back of the shop. She pulled on the chain to the fluorescent light and was surprised when it flickered to life.

This was her first good look at Matti’s face. The skin was bright red, puffy and raw looking—a second-degree burn at least.

She guided the boy to the sink and helped him drink from the tap. It was the only thing she could think of to do for him. Then she helped him sit on the floor just outside the bathroom door.

She could no longer avoid looking in the mirror.

The shattering glass had turned half of her face into a speckled red mask. She ran her hands under the water, not daring to scrub, and then splashed water on her face. She dabbed at her cheek and jaw with the tail of her shirt but the blood continued to weep through a peppering of cuts. She looked like a cartoon in Matti’s Lord Grimm book, the coloring accomplished by tiny dots.

She reached into jacket and took out the leather work gloves she’d stuffed there when she emptied her locker. She pulled one onto her wounded hand, stifling the urge to shout.

“Hello?” Matti said.

She turned, alarmed. Matti wasn’t talking to her. His face was turned toward the hallway.

Elena stepped out. A few feet away were the base of a set of stairs that led up into the back of the building. A man stood at the first landing, pointing an ancient rifle at the boy. His jaw was flesh-toned plastic, held in place by an arrangement of leather straps and mechanical springs. A woman with outrageously golden hair stood higher on the stairs, leaning around the corner to look over the man’s shoulder.

The man’s jaw clacked and he gestured with the gun. “Go. Get along,” he said. The syllables were distorted.

“They’re hurt,” the wigged woman said.

The man did not quite shake his head. Of course they’re hurt, he seemed to say. Everyone’s hurt. It’s the national condition.

“We didn’t mean to break in,” Elena said. She held up her hands. “We’re going.” She glanced back into the showroom. Outside the smashed window, the street was still packed, and no one seemed to be moving.

“The bridge is out,” the man said. He meant the Prince’s Bridge, the only paved bridge that crossed the river. No wonder then that the crowd was moving so slowly.

“They’re taking the wounded to the mill,” the woman said. “Then trying to get them out of the city by the foot bridges.”

“What mill?” Elena asked.

The wigged woman wouldn’t take them herself, but she gave directions. “Go out the back,” she said.

The millrace had dried out and the mill had been abandoned fifty years ago, but its musty, barn-like interior still smelled of grain. Its rooms were already crowded with injured soldiers and citizens.

Elena found a spot for Matti on a bench inside the building and told him not to move. She went from room to room asking if anyone had aspirin, antibiotic cream, anything to help the boy. She soon stopped asking. There didn’t seem to be any doctors or nurses at the mill, only wounded people helping the more severely wounded, and no medicines to be found. This wasn’t a medical clinic, or even a triage center. It was a way station.

She came back to find that Matti had fallen asleep on the gray-furred shoulder of a veteran zoomando. She told the man that if the boy woke up she would be outside helping unload the wounded. Every few minutes another farm truck pulled up and bleeding men and women stepped out or were passed down on litters. The emptied trucks rumbled south back into the heart city.

The conversation in the mill traded in rumor and wild speculation. But what report could be disbelieved when it came to the U-Men? Fifty of them were attacking, or a hundred. Lord Grimm was both dead and still fighting on the battlements. The MoGs had escaped from the mines in the confusion.

Like everyone else Elena quickly grew deaf to gunfire, explosions, crackling energy beams. Only when something erupted particularly close—a nearby building bursting into flame, or a terrordactyl careening out of control overhead—did the workers look up or pause in their conversation.

At some point a woman in the red smock of the Gene Corps noticed that Elena’s cheek had started bleeding again. “It’s a wonder you didn’t lose an eye,” the scientist said, and gave her a wad of torn-up cloth to press to her face. “You need to get that cleaned up or it will scar.”

Elena thanked her curtly and walked outside. The air was cold but felt good on her skin.

She was still dabbing at her face when she heard the sputter of engines. An old mechaneer cavalryman, painted head to wheels in mud, rolled into the north end of the yard, followed by two of his wheeled brethren. Each of them was towing a narrow cart padded with blankets.

The lead mechaneer didn’t notice Elena at first, or perhaps noticed her but didn’t recognize her. He suddenly said, “My beautiful Elena!” and puttered forward, dragging the squeaking cart after him. He put on a smile but couldn’t hold it.

“Not so beautiful, Mr. Bojars.”

The old man surveyed her face with alarm. “But you are all right?” he asked. “Is Mattias—?”

“I’m fine. Matti is inside. He’s sick. I think he . . . .” She shook her head. “I see you’ve lost your sausage oven.”

“A temporary substitution only, my dear.” The surviving members of his old unit had reunited, he told her matter-of-factly, to do what they could. In the hours since the Prince’s Bridge had been knocked out they’d been ferrying wounded across the river. A field hospital had been set up at the northern barracks of the city guard. The only ways across the river were the foot bridges and a few muddy low spots in the river. “We have no weapons,” Mr. Bojars said, “but we can still drive like demons.”

Volunteers were already carrying out the people chosen to evacuate next, four men and two women who seemed barely alive. Each cart could carry only two persons at a time, laid head to foot. Elena helped secure them.

“Mr. Bojars, does the hospital have anything for radiation poisoning?”

“Radiation?” He looked shocked. “I don’t know, I suppose . . .

One of the mechaneers waved to Mr. Bojars, and the two wheeled men began to roll out.

Elena said, “Mr. Bojars—”

“Get him,” he replied.

Elena ran into mill, dodging pallets and bodies. She scooped up the sleeping boy, ignoring the pain in her hand, and carried him back outside. She could feel his body trembling in her arms.

“I can’t find my book,” Matti said. He sounded feverish. “I think I lost it.”

“Matti, you’re going with Mr. Bojars,” Elena said. “He’s going to take you someplace safe.”

He seemed to wake up. He looked around, but it was obvious he still couldn’t see. “Elena, no! We have to get Grandmother!”

“Matti, listen to me. You’re going across the river to the hospital. They have medicine. In the morning I’ll come get you.”

“She’s still in the basement. She’s still there. You promised you would—”

“Yes, I promise!” Elena said. “Now go with Mr. Bojars.”

“Matti, my boy, we shall have such a ride!” the mechaneer said with forced good humor. He opened his big green parka and held out his arms.

Matti released his grip on Elena. Mr. Bojars set the boy on the broad gas tank in front of him, then zipped up the jacket so that only Matti’s head was visible. “Now we look like a cybernetic kangaroo, hey Mattias?”

“I’ll be there in the morning,” Elena said. She kissed Matti’s forehead, then kissed the old man’s cheek. He smelled of grilled onions and diesel. “I can’t thank you enough,” she said.

Mr. Bojars circled an arm around Matti and revved his engine. “A kiss from you, my dear, is payment enough.”

She watched them go. A few minutes later another truck arrived in the yard and she fell in line to help carry in the wounded. When the new arrivals were all inside and the stained litters had all been returned to the truck, Elena stayed out in the yard. The truck drivers, a pair of women in coveralls, leaned against the hood. The truck’s two-way radio played ocean noise: whooshing static mixed with high, panicked pleas like the cries of seagulls. The larger of the women took a last drag on her cigarette, tossed it into the yard, and then both of them climbed into the cab. A minute later the vehicle started and began to move.

“Shit,” Elena said. She jogged after the truck for a few steps, then broke into a full run. She caught up to it as it reached the road. With her good hand she hauled herself up into the open bed.

The driver slowed and leaned out her window. “We’re leaving now!” she shouted. “Going back in!”

“So go!” Elena said.

The driver shook her head. The truck lurched into second gear and rumbled south.

As they rolled into the city proper it was impossible for Elena to tell where they would find the front line of the battle, or if there was a front line at all. Damage seemed to be distributed randomly. The truck would roll through a sleepy side street that was completely untouched, and twenty yards away the buildings would be cracked open, their contents shaken into the street.

The drivers seemed to possess some sixth sense for knowing where the injured were waiting. The truck would slow and men and women would emerge from the dark and hobble toward the headlights of the truck, or call for a litter. Some people stood at street corners and waved them down as if flagging a bus. Elena helped the drivers lift the wounded into the back, and sometimes had to force them to leave their belongings.

“Small boats,” the largest driver said over and over. A Trovenian saying: In a storm, all boats are too small.

Eventually she found herself crouched next to a burned dragoon who was half-welded to his jet pack. She held his hand, thinking that might give him something to feel besides the pain, but he only moaned and muttered to himself, seemingly oblivious to her presence.

The truck slammed a stop, sending everyone sliding and crashing into each other. Through the slats Elena glimpsed a great slab of blue, some huge, organic shape. A leg. A giant’s leg. The U-Man had to be bigger than an apartment building. Gunfire clattered, and a voice like a fog horn shouted something in English.

The truck lurched into reverse, engine whining, and Elena fell forward onto her hands. Someone in the truck bed cried, “Does he see us? Does he see us?”

The truck backed to the intersection and turned hard. The occupants shouted as they collapsed into each other yet again. Half a block more the truck braked to a more gradual stop and the drivers hopped out. “Is everyone okay?” they asked.

The dragoon beside Elena laughed.

She stood up and looked around. They were in the residential district, only a few blocks from her apartment. She made her way to the gate of the truck and hopped down. She said to the driver, “I’m not going back with you.”

The woman nodded, not needing or wanting an explanation.

Elena walked slowly between the hulking buildings. The pain in her hand, her face, all seemed to be returning.

She emerged into a large open space. She realized she’d been mistaken about where the truck had stopped—this park was nowhere she recognized. The ground in front of her had been turned to glass.

The sky to the east glowed. For a moment she thought it was another super-powered UM. But no, only the dawn. Below the dark bulk of Mount Kriegstahl stood the familiar silhouette of the Slaybot Prime bolted to its gantry. The air battle had moved there, above the factories and docks. Or maybe no battle at all. There seemed to be only a few flyers in the air now. The planes and TDs had disappeared. Perhaps the only ones left were U-Men.

Power bolts zipped through the air. They were firing at the Prime.

A great metal arm dropped away from its shoulder socket and dangled by thick cables. Another flash of energy severed them. The arm fell away in seeming slow motion, and the sound of the impact reached her a moment later. The übermenschen were carving the damn thing up.

She almost laughed. The Slaybot Prime was as mobile and dangerous as the Statue of Liberty. Were they actually afraid of the thing? Was that why an army of them had shown up for an ordinary hostage rescue?

My God, she thought, the morons had actually believed Lord Grimm’s boasting.

She walked west, and the rising sun turned the glazed surface in front of her into a mirror. She knew now that she wasn’t lost. The scorched buildings surrounding the open space were too familiar. But she kept walking. After a while she noticed that the ground was strangely warm beneath her feet. Hot even.

She looked back the way she’d come, then decided the distance was shorter ahead. She was too tired to run outright but managed a shuffling trot. Reckoning by rough triangulation from the nearest buildings she decided she was passing over Mr. Bojars favorite spot, the corner of Glorious Victory Street and Infinite Progress Avenue. Her own apartment building should have loomed directly in front of her.

After all she’d seen tonight she couldn’t doubt that there were beings with the power to melt a city block to slag. But she didn’t know what strange ability, or even stranger whim, allowed them to casually trowel it into a quartz skating rink.

She heard another boom behind her. The Slaybot Prime was headless now. The southern gantry peeled away, and then the body itself began to lean. Elena had been inside the thing; the chest assembly alone was as big as a cathedral.

The Slaybot Prime slowly bowed, deeper, deeper, until it tumbled off the pillars of its legs. Dust leaped into the sky where it fell. The tremor moved under Elena, sending cracks snaking across the glass.

The collapse of the prime seemed to signal the end of the fighting. The sounds of the energy blasts ceased. Figures flew in from all points of the city and coalesced above the industrial sector. In less than a minute there were dozens and dozens of them, small and dark as blackcap geese. Then she realized that the flock of übermenschen was flying toward her.

Elena glanced to her left, then right. She was as exposed as a pea on a plate. The glass plain ended fifty or sixty meters away at a line of rubble. She turned and ran.

She listened to the hiss of breath in her throat and the smack of her heavy boots against the crystalline surface. She was surprised at every moment that she did not crash through.

Elongated shadows shuddered onto the mirrored ground ahead of her. She ran faster, arms swinging. The glass abruptly ended in a jagged lip. She leaped, landed on broken ground, and stumbled onto hands and knees. Finally she looked up.

Racing toward her with the sun behind them, the U-Men were nothing but silhouettes—shapes that suggested capes and helmets; swords, hammers, and staffs; bows and shields. Even the energy beings, clothed in shimmering auras, seemed strangely desaturated by the morning light.

Without looking away from the sky she found a chunk of masonry on the ground in front of her. Then she stood and climbed onto a tilting slab of concrete.

When the mass of U-Men was directly above her she heaved with all her might.

Useless. At its peak the gray chunk fell laughably short of the nearest figure. It clattered to the ground somewhere out of sight.

Elena screamed, tensed for—longing for—a searing blast of light, a thunderbolt. Nothing came. The U-Men vanished over the roof of the next apartment building, heading out to sea.

Weeks after the invasion, the factory remained closed. Workers began to congregate there anyway. Some mornings they pushed around brooms or cleared debris, but mostly they played cards, exchanged stories of the invasion, and speculated on rumors. Lord Grimm had not been seen since the attack. Everyone agreed that the Savior of Trovenia had been dead too many times to doubt his eventual resurrection.

When Elena finally returned, eighteen days after the invasion, she found Verner and Guntis playing chess beside the left boot of the Slaybot Prime. The other huge components of the robot’s body were scattered across two miles of the industrial sector like the buildings of a new city.

The men greeted her warmly. Verner, the ancient mechaneer, frankly noted the still-red cuts that cross-hatched the side of her face, but didn’t ask how she’d acquired them. If Trovenians told the story of every scar there’d be no end to the talking.

Elena asked about Jürgo and both men frowned. Guntis said that the birdman had taken to the air during the fight. As for the other two members of the heavy plate welding unit, no news.

“I was sorry to hear about your brother,” Verner said.

“Yes,” Elena said. “Well.”

She walked back to the women’s changing rooms, and when she didn’t find what she was looking for, visited the men’s. One cinderblock wall had caved in, but the lockers still stood in orderly rows. She found the locker bearing Jürgo’s name on a duct tape label. The door was padlocked shut. It took her a half hour to find a cutting rig with oxygen and acetylene cylinders that weren’t empty, but only minutes to wheel the rig to the changing rooms and burn off the lock.

She pulled open the door. Jürgo’s old-fashioned, rectangle-eyed welding helmet hung from a hook, staring at her. She thought of Grandmother Zita. What possesses a person to put a bucket on their head?

The inside of the locker door was decorated with a column of faded photographs. In one of them a young Jürgo, naked from the waist up, stared into the camera with a concerned squint. His new wings were unfurled behind him. Elena’s mother and father, dressed in their red Gene Corps jackets, stood on either side of him. Elena unpeeled the yellowed tape and put the picture in her breast pocket, then unhooked the helmet and closed the door.

She walked back to the old men, pulling the cart behind her. “Are we working today or what?” she asked.

Guntis looked up from the chess board with amusement in his huge wet eyes. “So you are the boss now, eh, Elena?”

Verner, however, said nothing. He seemed to recognize that she was not quite the person she had been. Damaged components had been stripped away, replaced by cruder, yet sturdier approximations. He was old enough to have seen the process repeated many times.

Elena reached into the pockets of her coat and pulled on her leather work gloves. Then she wheeled the cart over to the toe of the boot and straightened the hoses with a flick of her arm.

“Tell us your orders, Your Highness,” Guntis said.

“First we tear apart the weapons,” she said. She thumbed the blast trigger and blue flame roared from the nozzle of the cutting torch. “Then we build better ones.”

She slid the helmet onto her head, flipped down the mask, and bent to work.

First published in Eclipse 2, edited by Jonathan Strahan.

About the Author

Daryl Gregory is the author of the novels Pandemonium, The Devil’s Alphabet, and Raising Stony Mayhall, and his short fiction has been collected in Unpossible: And Other Stories. His most recent book is a new novel, Secret Battles of Ghengis Kahn. He lives in State College, Pennsylvania.

The Dust Assassin

Ian McDonald

When I was a small a steel monkey would come into my room. My ayah put me to bed early, because a growing girl needed sleep, big sleep. I hated sleep. The world I heard beyond the carved stone jali screens of my verandah was too full of things for sleep. My ayah would set the wards, but the steel monkey was one of my own security robots and invisible to them. As I lay on my side in the warmth and perfume of dusk, I would see first its little head, then one hand, then two appear over the lip of my balcony, then all of it. It would crouch there for a whole minute, then slip down into the night shadows filling up my room. As my eyes grew accustomed to the dark I would see it watching me, turning its head from one side to the other. It was a handsome thing; metal shell burnished as soft as skin (for in time it came close enough for me to slip a hand through my mosquito nets to stroke it) and adorned with the symbol of my family and make and serial number. It was not very intelligent, less smart than the real monkeys that squabbled and fought on the rooftops, but clever enough to climb and hunt the assassin robots of the Azads along the ledges and turrets and carvings of the Jodhra Palace. And in the morning I would see them lining the ledges and rooftops with their solar cowls raised and then they did not seem to me like monkeys at all, but cousins of the sculpted gods and demons among which they sheltered, giving salutation to the sun.

You never think your life is special. Your life is just your life, your world is just your world, even lived in a Rajput Palace defended by machine monkeys against an implacable rival family. Even when you are a weapon.

Those four words are my memory of my father: his face filling my sight like the Marwar moon, his lips, full as pomegranates, saying down to me, you are a weapon, Padmini, our revenge against the Azads. I never see my mother’s face there: I never knew her. She lived in seclusion in the zenana, the women’s quarters. The only woman I ever saw was my ayah, mad Harpal, who every morning drank a steaming glass of her own piss. Otherwise, only men. And Heer, the khidmutgar, our steward. Not man, not woman: other. A nute. As I said, you always think your life is normal.

Every night, the monkey-robot watched me, turning its head this way, that way. Then one night it slipped away on its little plastic paws and I slid out of my nets in my silk pajamas after it. It jumped up on the balcony, then in two leaps it was up the vine that climbed around my window. Its eyes glittered in the full moon. I seized two handfuls of tough, twisted vine, thick as my thigh, and was up after it. Why did I follow that steel monkey? Maybe because of that moon on its titanium shell. Maybe because that was the moon of the great kite festival, which we always observed by flying a huge kite in the shape of man with a bird’s tail and outstretched wings for arms. My father kept all the festivals and rituals, the feasts of the gods. It was what made us different from, better than, the Azads. That man with wings for arms, flying up out of the courtyard in front of my apartment with the sun in his face, could see higher and further than I, the only daughter of the Jodhras, ever could. By the moonlight in the palace courtyard I climbed the vine, like something from one of ayah’s fairytales of gods and demons. The steel monkey led on, over balconies, along ledges, over carvings of heroes from legends and full-breasted apsara women. I never thought how high I was: I was as light and luminous as the bird-man. Now the steel monkey beckoned me, squatting on the parapet with only the stars above it. I dragged myself up on to the roof. Instantly an army of machine monkeys reared up before me like Hanuman’s host. Metal gleamed, they bared their antipersonnel weapons: needle throwers tipped with lethal neurotoxins. My family has always favoured poison. I raised my hand and they melted away at the taste of my body chemistry, all but my guide. It skipped and bounded before me. I walked barefoot through a moonlit world of domes and turrets, with every step drawn closer to the amber sky-glow of the city outside. Our palace presented a false front of bays and windows and jharokas to the rude people in the street: I climbed the steps behind the façade until I stood on the very top, the highest balcony. A gasp went out of me. Great Jaipur lay before me, a hive of streetlights and pulsing neons, the reds and white and blinking yellows of vehicles swarming along the Johan Bazaar, the trees hung with thousands of fairylights, like stars fallen from the night, the hard fluorescent shine of the open shop fronts, the glowing waver of the tivi screens, the floodlight pools all along the walls of the old city: all, all reflected in the black water of the moat my father had build around his palace. A moat, in the middle of a drought.

The noise swirled up from the street: traffic, a hundred musics, a thousand voices. I swayed on my high perch but I was not afraid. Softness brushed against my leg, my steel monkey pressed close, clinging to the warm pink stone with plastic fingers. I searched the web of light for the sharp edges of the Jantar Mantar, the observatory my ancestors had built three hundred years before. I made out the great wedge of the Samrat Yantra, seven stories tall, the sundial accurate to two seconds; the floodlit bowls of the Jai Prakash Yantra, mapping out the heavens on strips of white marble. The hot night wind tugged at my pajamas; I smelled biodiesel, dust, hot fat, spices carried up from the thronged bazaar. The steel monkey fretted against my leg, making a strange keening sound and I saw out on the edge of the city: a slash of light down the night, curved like a sail filled with darkness. A tower, higher than any of the others of the new industrial city on the western edges of Jaipur. The glass tower of the Azads, our enemies, as different as could be from our old-fashioned, Rajput-style palace: glowing from within with blue light. And I thought, I am to bring that tower to the ground.

Then, voices. Shouts. Hey, you. Up there. Where? There. See that? What is it? Is it a man? I don’t know. Hey, you, show yourself. I leaned forward, peered carefully down. Light blinded me. At the end of the flashlight beams were two Palace guards in combat armour, weapons trained on me. It’s all right, it’s all right, don’t shoot, for gods’ sake, it’s the girl.

“Memsahb,” a solider called up. “Memsahb, stay exactly where you are, don’t move a muscle, we’re coming to get you.”

I was still staring at the glowing scimitar of the Azad tower when the roof door opened and the squad of guards came to bring me down.

Next morning I was taken to my father in his audience Diwan. Climate-mod fields held back the heat and the pollution; the open, stone-pillared hall was cool and still. My father sat on his throne of cushions between the two huge silver jars, taller than two of me, that were always filled with water from the holy river Ganga. My father drank a glass at every dawn every morning. He was a very traditional Rajput. I saw the plastic coil of his lighthoek behind his ear. To him his Diwan was full of attendants; his virtual aeai staff, beamed through his skull into his visual centres, busy busy busy on the affairs of Jodhra Water.

My brothers had been summoned and sat uncomfortably on the floor, pulling at their unfamiliar, chafing old-fashioned costumes. This was to be a formal occasion. Heer knelt behind him, hands folded in yts sleeves. I could not read yts eyes behind yts polarized black lenses. I could never read anything about Heer. Not man, not woman—yt—, yts muscles lay in unfamiliar patterns under yts peach-smooth skin. I always felt that yt did not like me.

The robot lay on its back, deactivated, limbs curled like the dry dead spiders I found in the corners of my room where ayah Harpal was too lazy to dust.

“That was a stupid, dangerous thing to do,” my father said. “What would have happened if our jawans had not found you?”

I set my jaw and flared my nostrils and rocked on my cushions.

“I just wanted to see. That’s my right, isn’t it? It’s what you’re educating me for, that world out there, so it’s my right to see it.”

“When you are older. When you are a . . . woman. The world is not safe, for you, for any of us.”

“I saw no danger.”

“You don’t need to. All danger has to do is see you. The Azad assassins . . . ”

“But I’m a weapon. That’s what you always tell me, I’m a weapon, so how can the Azads harm me? How can I be a weapon if I’m not allowed to see what I’m to be used against?”

But the truth was I didn’t know what that meant, what I was meant to do to bring that tower of blue glass collapsing down into the pink streets of Jaipur.

“Enough. This unit is defective.”

My father made a gesture with his fingers and the steel monkey sprang up, released. It turned its head in its this-way, that-way gesture I knew so well, confused. In the same instant, the walls glittered with light reflecting from moving metal as the machines streamed down the carved stonework and across the pink marble courtyard. The steel monkey gave a strange, robot cry and made to flee but the reaching plastic paws seized it and pulled it down and turned it on its back and circuit by circuit, chip by chip, wire by wire, took it to pieces. When they had finished there was no part of my steel monkey left big enough to see. I felt the tightness in my chest, my throat, my head of about-to-cry but I would not, I would never, not in front of these men. I glanced again at Heer. Yts black lenses gave nothing, as ever. But the way the sun glinted from those insect eyes told me yt was looking at me.

My life changed that day. My father knew that something between us had been taken apart like the artificial life of the steel monkey. But I had seen saw beyond the walls of my life so I was allowed out from the palace a little way into the world. With Heer, and guards, in armoured German cars to bazaars and malls; by tilt-jet to family relatives in Jaisalmer and Delhi; to festivals and melas and pujas in the Govind temple. I was still schooled in the Palace by tutors and aeai artificial intelligences, but I was presented with my new friends, all the daughters of high-ranking, high-caste company executives, carefully vetted and groomed. They wore all the latest fashions and make-up and jewellery and shoes and tech. They dressed me and styled me and wove brass and ambers beads into my hair; they took me to shops and pool parties—in the heart of a drought—and cool summer houses up the mountains but they were never comfortable like friends, never free, never friends at all. They were afraid of me. But there were clothes and trips and Star Asia tunes and celebrity gupshup and so I forgot about the steel monkey that I once pretended was my friend and was taken to pieces by its brothers.

Others had not forgotten

They remembered the night after my fourteenth birthday. There had been a puja by the Govind priest in the Diwan. It was a special age, fourteen, the age I became a woman. I was blessed with fire and ash and light and water and given a sari, the dress of a woman. My friends wound it around me and decorated my hands with mehndi, intricate patterns in dark henna. They set the red bindi of the kshatriya caste over my third eye and led me out through the rows of applauding company executives and then to a great party. There were gifts and kisses, the food was laid out the length of the courtyard and there were press reporters and proper French champagne that I was allowed to drink because I was now a woman. My father had arranged a music set by MTV-star Anila—real, not artificial intelligence—and in my new woman’s finery I jumped and down and screamed like any other of my teenage girlfriends. At the very end of the night, when the staff took the empty silver plates away and Anila’s roadies folded up the sound system, my father’s jawans brought out the great kite of the Jodhras, the winged man-bird the colour of fire, and sent him up, shining, into the night above Jaipur, up towards the hazy stars. Then I went to my new room, in the zenana, the women’s quarter, and old disgusting ayah Harpal locked the carved wooden door to my nursery.

It was that that saved me, when the Azads struck.

I woke an instant before Heer burst through the door but in that split-second was all the confusion of waking in an unfamiliar bed, in a strange room, in an alien house, in a body you do not fully know as your own.

Heer. Here. Not Heer. Dressed in street clothes. Men’s clothes. Heer, with a gun in yts hand. The big gun with the two barrels, the one that killed people and the one that killed machines.

“Memsahb, get up and come with me. You must come with me.”

“Heer . . . ”

“Now, memsahb.”

Mouth working for words, I reached for clothes, bag, shoes, things. Heer threw me across the room to crash painfully against the Rajput chest.

“How dare . . . ” I started and, as if in slow motion, I saw the gun fly up. A flash, like lightning in the room A metallic squeal, a stench of burning and the smoking steel shell of a defence robot went spinning across the marble floor like a burning spider. Its tail was raised, its stinger erect. Not knowing if this was some mad reality or I was still in a dream, I reached my hand toward the dead machine. Heer snatched me away.

“Do you want to die? It may still be operational.”

Yt pushed me roughly into the corridor, then turned to fire a final e-m charge into the room. I heard a long keening wail like a cork being turned in a bottle that faded into silence. In that silence I heard for the first time the sounds. Gun-fire, men shouting, men roaring, engines revving, aircraft overhead, women crying. Women wailing. And everywhere, above and below, the clicking scamper of small plastic feet.

“What’s going on?” Suddenly I was chilled and trembling with dread. “What’s happened?”

“The House of Jodhra is under attack,” Heer said.

I pulled away from yts soft grip.

“Then I have to go, I have to fight, I have to defend us. I am a weapon.”

Heer shook yts head in exasperation and with yts gun hand struck me a ringing blow on the side of my side.

“Stupid stupid! Understand! The Azads, they are killing everything! Your father, your brothers, they are killing everyone. They would have killed you, but they forgot you moved to a new room.”

“Dadaji? Arvind, Kiran?”

Heer tugged me along, still reeling, still dizzy from the blow but more dazed, more stunned by what the nute had told me. My father, my brothers . . .

“Mamaji?” My voice was three years old.

“Only the gene-line.”

We rounded a corner. Two things happened at the same time. Heer shouted “Down!” and as I dived for the smooth marble I glimpsed a swarm of monkey-machines bounding towards me, clinging to walls and ceiling. I covered my head and cried out with every shot as Heer fired and fired and fired until the gas-cell canister clanged to the floor.

“They hacked into them and reprogrammed them. Faithless, betraying things. Come on.” The smooth, manicured hand reached for and I remember only shards of noise and light and dark and bodies until I found myself in the back seat of a fast German car, Heer beside me, gun cradled like a baby. I could smell hot electricity from the warm weapon. Doors slammed. Locks sealed. Engine roared.

“Where to?”

“The Hijra Mahal.”

As we accelerated through the gate more monkey-robots dropped from the naqqar khana. I heard their steel lives crack and burst beneath our wheels. One clung to the door, clawing at the window frame until the driver veered and scraped it off on a streetlight.

“Heer . . . ”

Inside it was all starting to burst, to disintegrate into the colours and visions and sounds and glances of the night. My father my head my brothers my head my mother my family my head my head my head.

“It’s all right,” the nute said, taking my hand in yts. “You’re safe. You’re with us now.”

The house of Jodhra, which had endured for a thousand years, fell, and I came to the house of the nutes. It was pink, as all the great buildings of Jaipur were pink, and very discreet. In my life before, as I now thought of it, I must have driven past its alleyway a hundred times without ever knowing the secret it concealed; cool marble rooms and corridors behind a façade of orioles and turrets and intricately carved windows, courts and tanks and water-gardens open only to the sky and the birds. But then the Hijra Mahal had always been a building apart. In another age it had been the palace of the hijras, the eunuchs. The un-men, shunned yet essential to the ritual life of Rajput Jaipur, living in the very heart of the old city, yet apart.

There were six of them: Sul the janampatri seer, astrologer to celebs as far away as the movie boulevards of Mumbai; Dahin the plastic surgeon, who worked on faces on the far side of the planet through remote machines accurate to the width of an atom; Leel the ritual dancer, who performed the ancient Nautch traditions and festival dances; Janda the writer, whom half of India knew as Queen Bitch of gupshup columnists; Suleyra whose parties and events were the talk of society from Srinagar to Madurai; and Heer, once khidmutgar to the House of Jodhra. My six guardians bundled me from the car wrapped in a heavy chador like a Muslim woman and took me to a domed room of a hundred thousand mirror fragments. Their warm, dry hands gently held me on the divan—I was thrashing, raving as the shock hit me—and Dahin the face surgeon deftly pressed an efuser to my arm.

“Hush. Sleep now.”

I woke among the stars. For an instant I wondered if I was dead, stabbed in my sleep by the poison needle of an Azad assassin robot that had scaled the hundred windows of the Jodhra Mahal. Then I saw that they were the mirror shards of the roof, shattering the light of a single candle into a hundred thousand pieces. Heer sat cross-legged on a dhuri by my low bedside.

“How long . . . ”

“Two days, child.”

“Are they . . . ”

“Dead. Yes. I cannot lie. Every one.”

But even as the House of Jodhra fell, it struck back like a cobra, its back broken by a stick. Homing missiles, concealed for years, clinging like bats under shop eaves and bus shelters, unfolded their wings and lit their engines and sought out the pheromone profiles of Azad vehicles. Armoured Lexuses went up in fireballs in the middle of Jaipur’s insane traffic as they hooted their ways towards the safety of the airport. No safety even there, a Jodhra missile locked on to the company tilt jet as it lifted off, hooked into the engine intake with its titanium claws until the aircraft reached an altitude at which no one could survive. The blast cast momentary shadows across the sundials of the Jantar Mantar, marking the moment of Jodhra revenge. Burning debris set fires all across the basti slums.

“Are they . . . ”

“Jahangir and the Begum Azad died in the tiltjet attack and our missiles took out much of their board, but their countermeasures held off our attack on their headquarters.”

“Who survived?”

“Their youngest son Salim. The line is intact.”

I sat up in my low bed that smelled of sandalwood. The stars were jewels around my head.

“It’s up to me then.”

“Memsahb . . . ”

“Don’t you remember what he said, Heer? My father? You are a weapon, never forget that. Now I know what I am a weapon for.”

“Memsahb . . . Padmini.” The first time yt had ever spoken my name. “You are still shocked, you don’t know what you’re saying. Rest. You need rest. We’ll talk in the morning.” Yt touched yts forefinger to yts full lips, then left. When I could no longer hear soft footfalls on cool marble, I went to the door. Righteousness, rage and revenge were one song inside me. Locked. I heaved, I beat, I screamed. The Hijra Mahal did not listen. I went to the balcony that hung over the alley. Even if I could have shattered the intricate stone jali, it was a ten-metre drop to street level where the late night hum of phatphat autorickshaws and taxis was giving way to the delivery drays and cycle-vans of the spice merchants. Light slowly filled up the alley and crept across the floor of my bedroom: by its gathering strength I could read the headlines of the morning editions. WATER WARS: DOZENS DEAD IN CLASH OF THE RAJAS. JAIPUR REELS AS JODHRAS ANNIHILATED. POLICE POWERLESS AGAINST BLOODY VENDETTA.

In Rajputana, now as always, water is life, water is power. The police, the judges, the courts: we owned them. Us, and the Azads. In that we were alike. When gods fight, what mortal would presume to judge?

“A ride in triumph, a fall through a window into love, a marriage and a mourning?” I asked. “That’s it?”

Sul the astrologer nodded slowly. I sat on the floor of yts observatory. Incense rose on all sides of me from perforated brass censors. At first glance room was so simple and bare that even a sadhu would have been uncomfortable, but as my eyes grew accustomed to the shadow in which it must be kept to work as a prediction machine, I saw that every centimetre of the bare pink marble was covered in curving lines and Hindi inscriptions, so small and precise they might be the work of tiny gods. The only light came from a star-shaped hole in the domed ceiling: Sul’s star chamber was in the topmost turret of the Hijra Mahal, closest to heaven. As yt worked with its palmer and made the gestures in the air of the janampatri calculations, I watched a star of dazzling sunlight crawl along an arc etched in the floor, measuring out the phases of the House of Meena. Sul caught me staring at it, but I had only been curious to see what another nute looked like, close up. I had only ever known Heer. I had not known there could be as many as six nutes in the whole of India, let alone Jaipur. Sul was fat and had unhealthy yellow skin and eyes and shivered a lot as it pulled yts shawl around it, though the turret room directly under the sun was stifling hot. I looked for clues to what yt had been before: woman, man. Woman I thought. I had always thought of Heer as a man—an ex-man, though yt never mentioned the subject. I had always known it was taboo. When you Stepped Away, you never looked back.

“No revenge, no justice?”

“If you don’t believe me, see for yourself.”

Fingers slipped the lighthoek behind my ear and the curving lines on the floor leaped up into mythical creatures studded with stars. Makara the crocodile, Vrishaba the Bull, the twin fishes of Meena: the twelve rashi. Kanya the dutiful daughter. Between them the twenty-seven nakshatars looped and arced, each of them subdivided into four padas; wheels within wheels within wheels, spinning around my head like blades as I sat on Sul’s marble floor.

“You know I can’t make any sense out of this” I said, defeated by the whirling numbers. Sul leaned forward and gently touched my hand.

“A ride in triumph, a fall through a window into love, a marriage and a mourning. Window to widow. Trust me.”

“Young girls are truly beautiful on the inside.” Dahin the dream doctor’s voice came from beyond the bank of glaring surgical lights as the bed on which I lay tilted back. “No pollution, no nasty dirty hormones. Everything clean and fresh and lovely. Most of the women who come here, I never see any deeper than their skin. It is a rare privilege to be allowed to look inside someone.”

It was midnight in the chrome and plastic surgery in the basement of the Hijra Mahal, a snatched half-hour between the last of the consultations (society ladies swathed in veils and chadors to hide their identities) and Dahin hooking into the global web, settling the lighthoek over the visual centre in yts brain and pulling on the manipulator gloves connected to surgical robots in theatres half a world away. So gentle, so deft; too agile for any man’s. Dahin of the dancing hands.

“Have you found it yet?” I asked. My eyes were watering from the lights. Something in them, something beyond them, was looking into my body and displaying it section by section, organ by organ, on Dahin’s inner vision. Traditionally, the hijras—were the only ones allowed to examine the bodies of the zenana women and reported their findings to the doctors outside.

“Found what? Finger lasers? Retractable steel claws? A table-top nuke wired into your tummy?”

“My father said over and over, I’m a weapon, I’m special . . . I will destroy the house of Azad.”

“Cho chweet, if there’s anything there, this would have shown it to me.”

My eyes were watering. I pretended it was the brightness of the light.

“Maybe there’s something . . .smaller, something you can’t see, like . . . bugs. Like a disease.”

I heard Dahin sigh and imagined the waggle of yts head.

“It’ll take a day or two but I can run a diagnostic.” Tippy-tapping by the side of my head. I turned my head and froze as I saw a spider robot no bigger than my thumb towards my throat. It was a month since the night, but still I was distrustful of robots. I imagined I always would be. I felt a little flicking needle pain in the side of my neck, then the robot moved over my belly. I cringed at the soft spiking of its sharp, precise feet. I said, “Dahin, do you mind me asking; did you do this?”

A short jab of pain in my belly.

“Oh yes, baba. All this, and more. Much much more. I only work on the outside, the externals. To be like me—to become one of us—you have to go deep, right down into the cells.”

Now the robot was creeping over my face. I battled the urge to sweep it away and crush it on the floor. I was a weapon, I was special. This machine would show me how.

“Woman, man, that’s not a thing easily undone. They take you apart, baba. Everything, hanging there in a tank of fluid. Then they put you back together again. Different. Neither. Better.”

Why, I wanted to ask, why do this thing to yourself? But then I felt a tiny scratch in the corner of my eye as the robot took a scrape from my optic nerve.

“Three days for the test results, baba.”

Three days, and Dahin brought the results to me as I sat in the Peacock Pavilion overlooking the bazaar. The wind was warm and smelled of ashes of roses as it blew through the jali and turned the delicately hand-written sheets. No implants. No special powers or abilities. No abnormal neural structures, no tailored combat viruses. I was a completely normal thirteen year-old Kshatriya girl.

I leaped over the swinging stick. While still in the air, I brought my own staff up in a low, catching the Azad’s weapon between his hands. It flew from his grasp, clattered across the wooden floor of the hall. He threw a kick at me, rolled to pick up his pole, but my swinging tip caught him hard against the temple, send him down to the floor like dropped laundry. I vaulted over him, swung my staff high to punch its brass-shod tip into the nerve cluster under the ear. Instant death.

“And finish.”

I held the staff millimetres away from my enemy’s brain. Then I slipped the lighthoek from behind my ear and the Azad vanished like a djinn. Across the practice floor, Leel set down yts staff and unhooked yts hoek. In yts inner vision its representation me—enemy, sparring partner, pupil—likewise vanished. As ever at these practice session, I wondered what shape Leel’s avatar took. Yt never said. Perhaps yt saw me.

“All fighting is dance, all dance is fighting.” That was Leel’s first lesson to me on the day yt agreed to train me in Silambam. For weeks I had watched yt from a high balcony practice the stampings and head movements and delicate hand gestures of the ritual dances. Then one night after yt had dismissed yts last class something told me, stay on, and I saw yt strip down to a simple dhoti and take out the bamboo staff from the cupboard and leap and whirl and stamp across the floor the attacks and defences of the ancient Keralan martial art.

“Since it seems I was not born a weapon, then I must become a weapon.”

Leel had the dark skin of a southerner and I always felt that yt was very much older than yt appeared. I also felt—again with no evidence—that yt was the oldest inhabitant of the Hijra Mahal, that yt had been there long before any of the others came. I felt that yt might once have been a hijra and that the dance moves it practised and taught were from the days when no festival or wedding was complete without the outrageous, outcast eunuchs.

“Weapon, so? Cut anyone tries to get close you, then when you’ve cut everyone, you cut yourself. Better things for you to be than a weapon.”

I asked Leel that same question every day until one evening thick with smog and incense from the great Govind festival yt came to me as I sat in my window reading the chati channels on my lighthoek.

“So. The stick fighting.”

That first day, as I stood barefoot on the practice floor in my Adidas baggies and stretchy sports top trying to feel the weight and heft of the fighting staff in my hands, I had been surprised when Leel fitted the lighthoek behind my ear. I had assumed I would spar against the guru ytself.

“Vain child. With what I teach you, you can kill. With one blow. Much safer to fight your image, in here.” Yt tapped yts forehead. “As you fight mine. Or whatever you make me.”

All that season I learned the dance and ritual of Silambam; the leaps and the timings and the sweeps and the stabs. The sharp blows and the cries. I blazed across the practice floor yelling Kerala battle hymns, my staff a blur of thrusts and parries and killing strokes.

“Heavy child, heavy. Gravity has no hold on you, you must fly. Beauty is everything. See?” And Leel would vault on yts staff and time seemed to freeze around yt, leaving yt suspended there, like breath, in midair. And I began to understand about Leel, about all the nutes in this house of hijras. Beauty was everything, a beauty not male, not female; something else. A third beauty.

The hard, dry winter ended and so did my training. I went down in my Adidas gear and Leel was in yts dance costume, bells ringing at yts ankles. The staffs were locked away.

“This is so unfair.”

“You can fight with the stick, you can kill with a single blow, how much more do you need to become this weapon you so want to be?”

“But it takes years to become a master.”

“You don’t need to become a master. And that is why I have finished your training today, because you should have learned enough to understand the perfect uselessness of what you want to do. If you can get close, if you ever learn to fly, perhaps you might kill Salim Azad, but his soldiers will cut you apart. Realise this, Padmini Jodhra. It’s over. They’ve won.”

In the morning when the sun cast pools of light in the shapes of birds on to the floor of the little balcony, Janda would drink coffee laced with paan and, lazily lifting a finger to twirl away another page in yts inner vision, survey the papers the length and breadth of India, from the Rann of Kutch to the Sundarbans of Bengal.

“Darling, how can you be a bitch if you don’t read?”

In the afternoon over tiffin, Janda would compose yts scandalous gossip columns: who was doing what with whom where and why, how often and how much and what all good people should think. Yt never did interviews. Reality got in the way creativity.

“They love it, sweetie. Gives them an excuse to get excited and run to their lawyers. First real emotion some of them have felt in years.”

At first I had been scared of tiny, monkey-like Janda, always looking, checking analysing from yts heavily kohled eyes, seeking weaknesses for yts acid tongue. Then I saw the power that lay in yts cuttings and clippings and entries, taking a rumour here, a whisper there, a suspicion yonder and putting them together into a picture of the world. I began to see how I could use it as a weapon. Knowledge was power. So dry winter gave way to thirsty spring and the headlines in the streets clamoured MONSOON SOON? and RAJPUTANA DEHYDRATES, Janda helped me build a picture of Salim Azad and his company. Looking beyond those sensationalist headlines to the business sections I grew to recognise his face beneath the headlines: AZAD PLUNDERS CORPSE OF RIVALS. SALIM AZAD: REBUILDER OF A DYNASTY. AZAD WATER IN FIVE RIVERS PROJECT. In the society section I saw him at weddings and parties and premiers. I saw him ski-ing in Nepal and shopping in New York and at the races in Paris. In the stock-market feeds I watched the value of Azad Water climb as deals were struck, new investments announced, take-overs and buy-outs made public. I learned Salim Azad’s taste in pop music, restaurants, tailors, designers, filmi stars, fast fast cars. I could tell you the names of the people who hand-sewed his shoes, who wrote the novel on his bedside table, who massaged his head and lit cones of incense along his spine, who flew his private tilt-jets and programmed his bodyguard robots.

One smoggy, stifling evening as Janda cleared away the thalis of sweetmeats it gave me while I worked (“Eat, darling, eat and act”) I noticed the lowlight illuminate two ridges of shallow bumps along the inside of yts forearm. I remembered them on Heer all my life and had always known they were as much part of a nute as the absence of any sexual organs, as the delicate bones and the long hands and the bare skull. In the low, late light they startled me because I had never asked, what are they for?

“For? Dear girl.” Janda clapped yts soft hands together. “For love. For making love. Why else would we bear these nasty, ugly little goose-bumps? Each one generates a different chemical response in our brains. We touch darling. We play each other like instruments. We feel . . .things you cannot. Emotions for which you have no name, for which the only name is to experience them. We step away to somewhere not woman, not man; to the nute place.”

Yt turned yts arm wrist-upward to me so that yts wide sleeve fell away. The two rows of mosquito-bite mounds were clear and sharp in the yellow light. I thought of the harmonium the musicians would play in the old Jodhra Palace, fingers running up and down the buttons, the other hand squeezing the bellows. Play any tune on it. I shuddered. Janda saw the look on my face and snatched yts arm back into yts sleeve. And then, laid on in the newspaper in front of me, was an emotion for which I had no name, which I could only know my experiencing it. I thought no one knew more that I about Salim Azad, but here was a double spread of him pushing open the brass-studded gates of the Jodhra Mahal, my old home, where his family annihilated mine, under the screaming headline: AZAD BURIES PAST, BUYS PALACE OF RIVALS. Below that, Salim Azad standing by the pillars of the Diwan, shading his eyes against the sun, as his staff ran our burning sun-man-bird kite up above the turrets and battlements into the hot yellow sky.

In the costume and make-up of Radha, divine wife of Krishna, I rode the painted elephant through the pink streets of Jaipur. Before me the band swung and swayed, its clarinets and horns rebounding from the buildings. Around and through the players danced Leel and the male dancer in red, swords flashing and clashing, skirts whirling, bells ringing. Behind me came another twenty elephants, foreheads patterned with the colours of Holi, howdahs streaming pennons and gold umbrellas. Above me robot aircraft trailed vast, gossamer-light banners bearing portraits of the Holy Pair and divine blessings. Youths and children in red wove crimson patterns with smoke-sticks and threw handfuls of coloured powder into the crowd. Holi Hai! Holi Hai! Reclining beside me on the golden howdah, Suleyra waved yts flute to the crowd. Jaipur was an endless tunnel of sound; people cheering, holiday shouts, the hooting of phatphat horns.

“Didn’t I tell you you needed to get out of that place, cho chweet?”

In the blur of days inside the Hijra Mahal, I had not known that a year had passed without me setting foot outside its walls. Then Suleyra, the fixer, the jester, the party-maker, had come skipping into my room, pointed yts flute at me and said, “Darling, you simply must be my wife,” and I had realised that it was Holi, the Elephant Festival. I had always loved Holi, the brightest, maddest of festivals.

“But someone might see me . . . ”

“Baba, you’ll be blue all over. And anyway, no-one can touch the bride of a god on her wedding day.”

And so, blue from head to toe, I reclined on gilded cushions beside Suleyra, who had been planning this public festival for six months, equally blue and not remotely recognisable as anything human, man woman or nute. The city was clogged with people, the streets stifling hot, the air was so thick with hydrocarbon fumes the elephants wore smog goggles and I loved every bit of it. I was set free from the Hijra Mahal.

A wave of Suleyra/Krishna’s blue hand activated the chips in the elephant’s skull and turned it left through the arched gateway to the Old City, behind the boogieing band and the leaping, sword-wielding dancers. The crowds spilled off the arcades on to the street, ten, twenty deep. Every balcony was lined; women and children threw handfuls of colour down on us. Ahead I could see a platform and a canopy. The band was already marching in place while Leel and yts partner traded mock blows.

“Who is up there?” I asked, suddenly apprehensive.

“A most important dignitary,” said Suleyra, taking the praise of the spectators. “A very rich and powerful man.”

“Who is he, Suleyra?” I asked. Suddenly, I was cold in the stinking heat of Jaipur. “Who is he?”

But the dancers and the band had moved on and now our elephant took their place in front of the podium. A tap from Suleyra’s Krishna- flute: the elephant wheeled to face the dais and bent its front knees in a curtsey. A tall, young man in a Rajput costume with a flame red turban stood up to applaud, face bright with delight.

I knew that man’s shoe size and star sign. I knew the tailor who had cut his suit and the servant who wound his turban. I knew everything about him, except that he would be here, reviewing the Holi parade. I tensed myself to leap. One blow; Suleyra’s Krishna-flute would suffice as a weapon. But I did nothing, for I saw a thing more incredible. Behind Salim Azad, bending forward, whispering in his ear, eyes black as obsidian behind polarising lenses, was Heer.

Salim Azad clapped his hands in delight.

“Yes, yes, this is the one! Bring her to me. Bring her to my palace.”

So I returned from the Palace of the Hijras to the Palace of the Jodhras, that was now the Palace of the Azads. I came through the brass gates under the high tower from which I had first looked out across Jaipur on the night of the steel monkey, across the great courtyard. The silvers jars of holy Ganga water still stood on either side of the Diwan where my father had managed his water empire. Beneath the gaze of the gods and the monkeys on the walls, I was dragged out of the car by Azad jawans and carried me, screaming and kicking up the stairs to the zenana. “My brother lay there, so and so died there, my father died there,” I shouted at them as they dragged me along that same corridor down which I had fled a year before. The marble floors were pristine, polished. I could not remember where the blood had been. Women retainers waited for me at the entrance to the zenana, for men could not enter the women’s palace, but I flew and kicked and punched at them with all the skills Leel had taught me. They fled shrieking but all that happened was the soldiers held me at gunpoint until house robots arrived. I could kick and punch all I liked and never lay a scratch on their spun-diamond carapaces.

In the evening I was brought to the Hall of Conversations, an old and lovely room where women could talk and gossip with men across the delicate stone jali that ran the length of the hall. Salim Azad walked the foot-polished marble. He was dressed as a Rajput, in the traditional costume. I thought he looked like a joke. Behind him was Heer. Salim Azad paced up and down for five minutes, studying me. I pressed myself to the jali and tried to stare him down. Finally he said,

“Do you have everything you want? Is there anything you need?”

“Your heart on a thali,” I shouted. Salim Azad took a step back.

“I’m sorry about the necessity of this . . . But please understand, you’re not my prisoner. Both of us are the last. There has been enough death. The only way I can see to finish this feud is to unite our two houses. But I won’t force you, that would be . . . impolite. Meaningless. I have to ask and you have to answer me.” He came as close to the stonework as was safe to avoid my Silambam punch. “Padmini Jodhra, will you marry me?”

It was so ridiculous, so stupid and vain and so impossible; that in my shock, I felt the word yes in the back of my throat. I swallowed it down, drew back my head and spat long and full at him. The spit struck a moulding and ran down the carved sandstone.

“Understand I have nothing but death for you, murderer.”

“’Even so, I shall ask every day, until you say yes,” Salim Azad said. With a whisk of robes, he turned and walked away. Heer, hands folded in yts sleeves, eyes pebbles of black, followed.

“And you, hijra,” I yelled, reaching a clawing hand through the stone jali to seize, to rip. “You’re next, traitor.”

That night I thought about starving myself to death, like the great Gandhiji when he battled the British to make India free and their Empire had stepped aside for one old, frail, thin, starving man. I forced my fingers down my throat and puked up the small amount of food I had forced myself to eat that evening. Then I realised that starved and dead I was no weapon. The House of Azad would sail undisturbed into the future. It was the one thing kept me alive, kept me sane in those first days in the zenana; my father’s words: you are a weapon. All I had to discover was what kind.

In the night small a sweeper came and cleaned away my puke.

It was as he said. Every evening as the sun touched the battlements of the Nahargarh Fort on the hill above Jaipur, Salim Azad came to the Hall of the Conversations. He would talk to me about the history of his family; back twenty generations to central Asia, from where they had swept down into the great river plains of Hindustan to build an empire of unparalleled wealth and elegance and beauty. They had not been warriors or rulers. They had been craftsmen and poets, makers of exquisite fine miniatures and jewel-like verses in Urdu, the language of poets. As the great Mughals erected their forts and palaces and fought their bloody civil wars, they had advanced from court painters and poets to court advisors, then to viziers and khidmutgars, not just to the Mughals, but to the Rajputs, the Marathas and later to the East India Company and the British Raj. He told me tales of illustrious ancestors and stirring deeds; of Aslam who rode out between the armies of rival father and son Emperors and saved the Panjab; of Farhan who carried love notes between the English Resident of Hyderabad and the daughter of the Nizam and almost destroyed three kingdoms; of Shah Hussain who had struggled with Gandhi against the British for India, who had approached by Jinnah to support partition and the creation of Pakistan but who had refused, though his family had all but been annihilated in the ethnic holocaust following Independence. He told me of Elder Salim, his Grandfather, founder of the dynasty, who had come to Jaipur when the monsoon failed the first terrible time in 2008 and set up village water reclamation schemes that over the decades became the great water empire of the Azads. Strong men, testing times, thrilling stories. And every night he said as the sun dipped behind Nahargarh fort, “will you marry me?” Every night I turned away from him without a word. But night by night, story by story, ancestor by ancestor, he chipped away at my silence. These were people as real, as vital as my own family. Now their stories had all ended. We were both the last.

I tried to call Janda at the Hijra Mahal, to seek wisdom and comfort from my sister/brothers, to find out if they knew why Heer had turned and betrayed me but mostly to hear another voice than the sat channels or Salim Azad. My calls bounced. White noise: Salim had my apartments shielded with a jamming field. I flung the useless palmer against the painted wall and ground it under the heel of my jewelled slipper. I saw endless evenings reaching out before me. Salim would keep coming, night after night, until he had his answer. He had all the time in the world. Did he mean to drive me mad to marry him?

Marry him. This time I did not push the thought away. I turned it this way, that studied it, felt out its implications. Marry him. It was the way out of this marble cage.

In the heat of the mid-day, a figure in voluminous robes came hurrying down the cool corridor to the zenana. Heer. I had summoned yt. Because yt was not a man yt could enter the zenana, like the eunuchs of the Rajput days. Yt did not fear the skills Leel had taught me. Yt knew. Yt namasted.

“Why have you done this to me?”

“Memsahb, I have always been, and remain, a loyal servant of the House of Jodhra.”

“You’ve given me into the hands of my enemies.”

“I have saved you from the hands of your enemies, Padmini. It would not just be the end of this stupid, pointless bloody vendetta. He would make you a partner. Padmini, listen to what I am saying; you would me more than just a wife. Azad Jodhra. A name all India would learn.”

“Jodhra Azad.”

Heer pursed yts rosebud lips.

“Padmini Padmini, always, this pride.”

And yt left without my dismissal.

That night in the blue of the magic hour Salim Azad came again to the zenana, a pattern of shadows beyond the jali. I saw him open his lips. I put a finger up to mine.

“Ssh. Don’t speak. Now it’s time for to tell you a story, my story, the story of the House of Jodhra.”

So I did, for one hundred and one nights, like an old Muslim fairytale, seated on cushions leaning up against the jali, whispering to Salim Azad in his Rajput finery wonderful tales of dashing Kshatriya cavalry charges and thousand cannon sieges of great fortress, of handsome princes with bold moustaches and daring escapes with princesses in disguise in baskets over battlements, of princedoms lost over the fall of a chessman and Sandhurst-trained sowar officers more British than the British themselves and air-cav raids against Kashmiri insurgents and bold anti-terrorist strikes; of great polo matches and spectacular durbars with a hundred elephants and the man-bird sun-kite of the Jodhras sailing up into the sky over Jaipur; for a thousand years our city. For one hundred nights I bound him with spells taught to me by the nutes of the Hijra Mahal, then on the one hundred and first night I said, “One thing you’ve forgotten.”

“What?”

“To ask me to marry you.”

He gave a little start, then waggled his head in disbelief and smiled. He had very good teeth.

“So, will you marry me?”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes.”

The day was set three weeks hence. Sul had judged it the most propitious for a wedding of dynasties. Suleyra had been commissioned to stage the ceremony: Muslim first, then Hindu. Janda had been ask to draw on yts celebrity inside knowledge to invite all India to the union of the houses of Azad and Jodhra. This is the wedding of the decade, yt cried in yts gupshup columns, come or I will bad-mouth you. Schedules of the great and glorious were rearranged, aeai soapi stars prepared avatars to attend, as did those human celebs who were unavoidably out of the subcontinent. From the shuttered jharokas of the zenana I watched Salim order his staff and machines around the great court, sending architects here, fabric designers there, pyrotechnicians yonder. Marquees and pavilions went up, seating was laid out, row upon row, carpet laid, patterns drawn in sand to be obliterated by the feet of the processional elephants. Security robots circled among the carrion-eating black kites over the palace, camera drones flitted like bats around the great court, seeking angles. Feeling my eyes on him, Salim would glance up at me, smile, lift his hand in the smallest greeting. I glanced away, suddenly shy, a girl-bride. This was to be a traditional, Rajputana wedding. I would emerge from purdah only to meet my husband. For those three weeks, the zenana was not a marble cage but an egg from which I would hatch. Into what? Power, unimaginable wealth, marriage to man who had been my enemy. I still did not know if I loved him or not. I still saw the ghost shadows on the marble where his family had destroyed mine. He still came every night to read me Urdu poetry I could not understand. I smiled and laughed but I still did not know if what I felt was love, or just my desperation to be free. I still doubted it on the morning of my wedding.

Women came at dawn to bathe and dress me in wedding yellow and make up my hair and face and anoint me with turmeric paste. They decked me with jewels and necklaces, rings and bangles. They dabbed me with expensive perfume from France and gave me good luck charms and advice. Then they threw open the brass-studded doors of the zenana and with the Palace guard of robots, escorted me along the corridors and down the stairs to the great court. Leel danced and somersaulted before me; no wedding could be lucky without a hijra, a nute.

All of India had been invited and all of India had come, in flesh and in avatar. People rose, applauding. Cameras swooped on ducted fans. My nutes, my family from the Hijra Mahal, had been given seats at row ends.

“How could I improve on perfection?” said Dahin the face doctor as my bare feet trod rose petals towards the dais.

“The window, the wedding!” said Sul. “And, pray the gods, many many decades from now, a very old and wise widow.”

“The setting is nothing without the jewel,” exclaimed Suleyra Party Arranger, throwing pink petals into the air.

I waited with my attendants under the awning as Salim’s retainers crossed the courtyard from the men’s quarters. Behind them came the groom on his pure white horse, kicking up the rose petals from its hooves. A low, broad ooh went up from the guests then more applause. The maulvi welcomed Salim onto the platform. Cameras flocked for angles. I noticed that every parapet and carving was crowded with monkeys—flesh and machine—watching. The maulvi asked me most solemnly if I wished to be Salim Azad’s bride.

“Yes,” I said, as I had said the night when I first accepted his offer. “I do, yes.”

He asked Salim the same question, then read from the Holy Quran. We exchanged contracts, our assistants witnessed. The maulvi brough the silver plate of sweetmeats. Salim took one, lifted my gauze veil and placed it on my tongue. Then the maulvi placed the rings upon our fingers and proclaimed us husband and wife. And so were our two warring houses united, as the guests rose from their seats cheering and festival crackers and fireworks burst over Jaipur and the city returned a roaring wall of vehicle horns. Peace in the streets at least. As we moved towards the long, cool pavilions for the wedding feast, I tried to catch Heer’s eye as yt paced behind Salim. Yts hands were folded in the sleeves of yts robes, yts head thrust forward, lips pursed. I thought of a perching vulture.

We sat side by side on golden cushions at the head of the long, low table. Guests great and good took their places, slipping off their Italian shoes, folding their legs and tucking up their expensive Delhi frocks as waiters brought vast thalis of festival food. In their balcony overlooking the Diwan, musicians struck up, a Rajput piece older than Jaipur itself. I clapped my hands. I had grown up to this tune. Salim leaned back on his bolster.

“And look.”

Where he pointed, men were running up the great sun-bird-man kite of the Jodhras. As I watched it skipped and dipped on the erratic winds in the court, then a stronger draught took it soaring up into the blue sky. The guests went oooh again.

“You have made me the happiest men in the world,” Salim said.

I lifted my veil, bent to him and kissed his lips. Every eye down the long table turned to me. Everyone smiled. Some clapped.

Salim’s eyes went wide. Tears suddenly streamed from them. He rubbed them away and when he put his hands down, his eyelids were two puffy, blistered boils of flesh, swollen shut. He tried to speak but his lips were bloated, cracked, seeping blood and pus. Salim tried to stand, push himself away from me. He could not see, could not speak, could not breath. His hands fluttered at the collar of his gold-embroidered sherwani.

“Salim!” I cried. Leel was already on yts feet, ahead of all the guest doctors and surgeons as they rose around the table. Salim let out a thin, high-pitched wail, the only scream that would form in his swollen throat. Then he went down onto the feast table.

The pavilion was full of screaming guests and doctors shouting into palmers and security staff locking the area down. I stood useless as a butterfly in my make-up and wedding jewels and finery as doctors crowded around Salim. His face was like a cracked melon, a tight bulb of red flesh. I swatted away an intrusive hovercam. It was the best I could do. Then I remember Leel and the other nutes taking me out into the courtyard where a tilt-jet was settling, engines sending the rose petals up in a perfumed blizzard. Paramedics carried Salim out from the pavilion on a gurney. He wore an oxygen rebreather. There were tubes in his arms. Security guards in light-scatter armour pushed the great and the celebrated aside. I struggled with Leel as the medics slid Salim into the tilt-jet but yt held me with strange, withered strength.

“Let me go, let me go, that’s my husband . . . ”

“Padmini, Padmini, there is nothing you can do.”

“What do you mean?”

“Padmini, he is dead. Salim your husband is dead.”

Yt might have said that the moon was a great mouse in the sky.

“Anaphylactic shock. Do you know what that is?”

“Dead?” I said simply, quietly. Then I was flying across the court toward the tilt-jet as it powered up. I wanted to dive under its engines. I wanted to be scattered like the rose petals. Security guards ran to cut me off but Leel caught me first and brought me down. I felt the nip of an efuser on my arm and everything went soft as the tranquilizer took me.

After three weeks I called Heer to me. For the first week the security robots had kept me locked back in the zenana while the lawyers argued. I spent much of that time out of my head, part grief-stricken, part insane at what had happened. Just one kiss. A widow no sooner than I was wed. Leel tended to me, the lawyers and judges reached their legal conclusions. I was the sole and lawful heir of Azad-Jodhra Water. The second week I came to terms with my inheritance: the biggest water company in Rajputana, the third largest in the whole of India. There were contracts to be signed, managers and executives to meet, deals to be set up. I waved them away, for the third week was my week, the week in which I understood what I had lost. And I understood what I had done, and how, and what I was. Then I was ready to talk to Heer.

We met in the Diwan, between the great silver jars that Salim, dedicated to his new tradition, had kept topped up with holy Ganga water. Guard-monkeys kept watch from the rooftops. My monkeys. My Diwan. My palace. My company, now. Heer’s hands were folded in yts sleeves. Yts eyes were black marble. I wore widow’s white—a widow, at age fifteen.

“How long had you planned it?”

“From before you born. From before you were even conceived.”

“I was always to marry Salim Azad.”

“Yes.”

“And kill him.”

“You could not do anything but. You were designed that way.”

Always remember, my father had said, here among these cool, shady pillars, you are a weapon. A weapon deeper, subtler than I had ever imagined, deeper even than Leel’s medical machines could look. A weapon down in the DNA: designed from conception to cause a fatal allergic reaction in any member of the Azad family. An assassin in my every cell, in every pore and hair, in every fleck of dust shed from my deadly skin.

I killed my beloved with a kiss.

I felt a huge, shuddering sigh inside me, a sigh I could never, must never utter.

“I called you a traitor when you said you had always been a loyal servant of the House of Jodhra.”

“I was, am and will remain so, please God.” Heer dipped yts hairless head in a shallow bow. Then yt said, “When you become one of us, when you step away, you step away from so much; from your own family, from the hope of ever having children . . . You are my family, my children. All of you, but most of all you, Padmini. I did what I had to for my family, and now you survive, now you have all that is yours by right. We don’t live long, Padmini. Ours lives are too intense, too bright, too brilliant. There’s been too much done to us. We burn out early. I had to see my family safe, my daughter triumph.”

“Heer . . . ”

Yt held up a hand, glanced away, I though I saw silver in the corners of those black eyes.

“Take your palace, your company, it is all yours.”

That evening I slipped away from my staff and guards. I went up the marble stairs to the long corridor where my room had been before I became a woman, and a wife, and a widow, and the owner of a great company. The door opened to my thumbprint, I swung it open into dust-hazy golden sunlight. The bed was still made, mosquito nets neatly knotted up. I crossed to the balcony. I expected the vines and creepers to have grown to a jungle; with a start I realized it was just over a year since I had slept here. I could still pick out the hand-holds and foot-holds where I had followed the steel monkey up onto the roof. I had an easier way to that now. A door at the end of the corridor, previously locked to me, now opened onto a staircase. Sentry robots immediately bounced up as I stepped out onto the roof, crests raised, dart-throwers armed. A mudra from my hand sent them back into watching mode.

Once again I walked between the domes and turrets to the balcony at the very top of the palace façade. Again, Great Jaipur at my bare feet took my breath away. The pink city kindled and burned in the low evening light. The streets still roared with traffic, I could smell the hot oil and spices of the bazaar. I now knew how to find the domes of the Hijra Mahal among the confusion of streets and apartment buildings. The dials and half-domes and buttresses of the Jantar Mantar threw huge shadows over each other, a confusion of clocks. Then I turned towards the glass scimitar of the Azad Headquarters—my headquarters now, my palace as much as this dead old Rajput pile. I had brought that house crashing down, but not in any way I had imagined. I wanted to apologise to Salim as he had apologised to me, every night when he came to me in the zenana, for what his family had done. They made me into a weapon and I did not even know.

How easy to step out over the traffic, step away from it all. Let it all end, Azad and Jodhra. Cheat Heer of yts victory. Then I saw my toes with their rings curl over the edge and I knew I could not, must not. I looked up and there, at the edge of vision, along the bottom of the red horizon, was a line of dark. The monsoon, coming at last. My family had made me one kind of weapon, but my other family, the kind, mad, sad, talented family of the nutes had taught me, in their various ways, to be another weapon. The streets were dry but the rains were coming. I had reservoirs and canals and pumps and pipes in my power. I was Maharani of the Monsoon. Soon the people would need me. I took a deep breath and imagined I could smell the rain. Then I turned and walked back through the waiting robots to my kingdom.

First published in The Starry Rift, edited by Jonathan Strahan.

About the Author

British author Ian McDonald won the Locus “Best First Novel” Award for his novel Desolation Road in 1989. He won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1992 for his novel King of Morning, Queen of Day. His other books include the novels Out On Blue Six, Hearts, Hands and Voices, Terminal Cafe, Sacrifice of Fools, Evolution’s Shore, Kirinya, Ares Express, Cyberabad, and Brasyl, as well as three collections of his short fiction, Empire Dreams, Speaking In Tongues, and Cyberabad Days. His novel, River of Gods, was a finalist for both the Hugo Award and the Arthur C. Clarke award in 2005, and a novella drawn from it, “The Little Goddess,” was a finalist for the Hugo and the Nebula. He won a Hugo Award in 2007 for his novelette “The Djinn’s Wife,” won the Theodore Sturgeon Award for his story “Tendeleo’s Story,” and in 2011 won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for his novel The Dervish House. His most recent books are The Dervish House, and the first two volumes in a YA series, Planesrunner and Be My Enemy.

Spock's Pops: How Operational Research became Wartime Magic!

Jason S. Ridler

During the Second World War, a new form of applied science emerged called Operational Research (OR). OR scientists came from nuclear physics, engineering, advanced mathematics, physiology and other disciplines and applied their knowledge to a myriad of military problems, from lethality of weapons studies to battle investigations.

In many ways, these talented and unmilitary people are the real-life forefathers of the great literary creation of 1960s science fiction, Mr. Spock from Star Trek. Most were highly logical and strange. Some were hired to become living computers for complex firing tables and bombing strategy. Others used biological and medical knowledge to diagnose the problems of complex systems like fighter production and loss rates. All used highly developed and innovative scientific methods to improve the work and life of soldiers. Here’s Sir Patrick Blackett, the modern father of OR, describing its reason to be:

The object of having scientists in close touch with operations is to enable operational staffs to obtain scientific advice on those matters which are not handled by the service technical establishments. Operational staffs provide the scientists with the operational outlook and data. The scientists apply scientific methods of analysis to these data, and are thus able to give useful advice. The main field of their activity is clearly the analysis of actual operations, using as data the material to be found in an operations room, e.g. all signals, track, charts, combat reports, meteorological information, etc. it will be noted that these data are not, and on secrecy grounds cannot, be made available to the technical establishments. Thus such scientific analysis, if done at all, must be done in or near operations rooms. The work of an Operational Research Section should be carried out at Command, Group, Station or Squadron as circumstances dictate.

Can’t you hear Leonard Nimoy reciting this? As if he’s trying to tell Bones what is the role of a science officer on an away mission? Many OR scientists were, in fact, given the new title of “scientific advisor” to describe their new role in command HQs. Some even served in conflict zones, gathering data and offering advice like a “science officer” on an Away team! And, like Spock, OR scientists were often disdained for their quirks and attitudes by the career soldiers who needed their skills but often bristled at their deportment. SAs were given nicknames like “Boffin” or “long hair” or “egghead,” and they were often as hard to herd as a yard full of cats. But when OR sections worked toward a common purpose in the right environment, they made a distinct and valuable contribution to defeating the Axis. It’s a credit to the flexibility and open mindedness of the Allies that OR scientists could succeed as much as they did. The Axis had a much less encouraging environment for the exchange of ideas and collaboration, a much more rigid, hierarchical and brutal working space. They never produced the same caliber of OR scientists as the Allies.

Here we look at how scientists became entrenched in military affairs in Britain, the birthplace of OR, from radars to tank design to the movement of armadas, and became the Spocks of their age!

ORIGINS OF OR

Operational research had distinct historical antecedents. Archimedes, Leonardo De Vinci, and Galileo Galilee all applied scientific methods to military affairs. But scientists by their nature preferred to stay out of military affairs until the industrial scale and demands of the First World War put them to work for their governments. In Britain, early precedents of OR were started in the air war. This included the statistical analysis by physiologist Captain A. V. Hill and his team of scientists-soldiers at the Experimental Section of Munitions Invention Development department (“Hill’s Brigands”). Hill’s team produced some pre-“OR” statistical analysis of the war against the German zeppelin raids of 1916-1917. In his only collected work, Hill lamented that their work had made it into a few textbooks in the 1920s, but the ideas were largely forgotten.

During the 1930s, fear of long range bomber attacks on the UK grew. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin’s quip that “the bomber will always get through” did not sit well with those charged with air defense. Rumors arose about a German “death ray” that could destroy ships in the sky. The Tizard Committee (named after the Chair, eminent chemist Sir Henry Tizard) was set up in 1934 to assess whether or not an effective air defense solution was possible. Physicist Robert Watson Watt dismissed the feasibility of a “death ray” but radio waves might be used to detect aircraft. The embryonic technology we know as radar soon emerged out of these discussions, and in its wake the British began to support the use of scientists in ever closer relations with the military.

While Watson Watt was the father of radar, physicist Patrick Blackett claims the title of father of OR. Blackett had served in the Royal Navy before the war and witnessed the Battle of Jutland. He deplored warfare but knew Nazi victory could not be stopped with pacifism. Initially he worked on bomb sites for the RAF, but as the Battle of Britain raged he was moved to Anti-Aircraft (Ack Ack) Command to work on gunnery efficiency. While radar had been invented, the best doctrine for the new technology had yet to be discovered.

Blackett and his “circus” of engineers, physiologist and other scientific folks worked hard alongside serving officers to find the best way to make the AA command efficient in the cash strapped service. But what started out as a simple job turned into not just the calculation of predicting future enemy positions to use the guns, but also the creation of plotting machines that could be made quickly, modifying the existing ones to be fixed manually, and creating a school to teach all these specifics.

While some soldiers bristled at being pushed around and told their job by scientists, General Sir Frederick Pile, Commander in Chief of Ack Ack, was glad to have Blackett. “He spoke his mind clearly, and was always ready to admit the fact that the most desirable thing may be inadvisable.” The hard truth was “radar was too tricky for the ordinary man,” and the need for scientists grew, including civilian American scientists. “Their enthusiasm and help had to be seen to be believed.” Accuracy increased dramatically. Before the circus, 20, 000 shells were expended for each German “bird” shot. By the time they left, the number had been reduced to 4,000. Blackett was soon transferred to the Admiralty, and when Pile heard the news he exclaimed, “They have stolen my magician!”

Next, Blackett used his scientific magic on the troubled convoys in the Atlantic. After intensive research, he discovered that large convoys generated less causalities and “calculated that convoys with nine escorts had experienced 25 per cent less sinking than those with six. This led him to the conclusion that for each extra escort vessel, between two and three merchant ships could be saved annually.” Blackett soon bumped against naval tradition. His research from 1941-42 revealed that the “small convoys with an average size of 32 ships had suffered a loss of 2.5 percent; whereas the large convoys with an average of 54 ships had suffered a loss of 1.1 percent. Large convoys appeared to be in fact more than twice as safe as large convoys.” Naval doctrine and experience in the Great War argued the opposite: smaller convoys of less than 40 ships were safer, but ones of 60 ships or more were ripe for attacking.

So Blackett pushed back with intensive analysis, including from prisoners of war from sunken U-boat “wolf packs.” Three facts emerged a) the chance that the convoy in which it sailed would be sighted; b) the chance that a U boat would penetrate the screen depended only on the linear density of the escorts, that is, on the number of escort vessels for each mile of perimeter to be defended; and c) that when a U-boat did penetrate the screen the number of merchant ships sunk was the same for both large and small convoys—“simply because there were always more than enough targets.”

Blackett pushed hard and his idea of reducing the number of convoys, but increasing the number of ships per convoy. By spring of 1943 onward, the convoy numbers increased. Sadly, the first “large” convoys lost a lot of ships, but by the summer of 1944 the Admiralty proclaimed many successes of this approach including a successful crossing of the Atlantic by a record 187 ships in a convoy.

WIZARDS OF FIGHTER COMMAND

Another dynamic use of OR scientists also took place during the Battle of Britain. The ORS at Fighter Command challenged not just operations, but strategy. The most critical case concerned a French request for ten squadrons of RAF fighters to assist against the German invasion of May 1940: an invasion that was headed toward conquest. General Hugh Dowdings, CinC of Fighter Command, warned Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill that agreeing to this request would cripple Fighter Command’s ability to defend Britain. Churchill ignored him, hoping to give the French as much aid as possible. On 15 May 1940 Dowding asked Canadian engineer and OR innovator Harold Larnder and his team for assistance in making their analysis clear.

With less than two hours before the next Cabinet meeting, the team produced documents to bolster Dowding’s case. Larnder credits physicist E. C. Williams with initiating the research, which showed that with the current loss rate of three squadrons every two days, a depletion of ten squadrons would essentially leave Britain defenseless against the Luftwaffe. Larnder, though, realized they needed to make the data have impact.

Feeling that the findings relating losses, time, and force level were not easily comprehended when expressed in tabular form, I transferred the findings to graph form, and attached these to William’s report. The next morning, when asked if our findings had been of any help, Dowding replied “They did the trick.”

Churchill, seeing the visual data of his country rendered defenseless, denied the request. Britain could not save the French, but they could save themselves to fight the Axis another day. Larnder did not want OR scientists taking sole credit for victory in the Battle of Britain, but they were decisive in avoiding defeat at this desperate hinge point of the war. If those ten squadrons had been sent, the final victory in the skies would have been nearly impossible.

THE DARK HORIZON OF BOMBER COMMAND

Not all OR sections were championed by their commanders, however. In Bomber Command, Commander Sir Arthur Harris agreed to include an OR section led by physicist B. G. Dickins. The section itself included many brilliant minds, including a young Freeman Dyson. But Harris had detested scientists since the First World War, and with some reason. “While I was on anti-Zeppelin defense at Northolt I had a good deal of trouble, as I have said from time to time throughout my life,” he recalled, “with lunatic inventors of weapons who too often obtain the ear of the authorities.” These included a harpoon, cable and grenade contraption for destroying zeppelins created by a mad scientists who was “but one of a legion.”

The major controversy in Harris’s OR unit concerned analysis of the effects of strategic bombing of civilian targets, one of the most heated debates of the war. Basically, the Allies had to decide what was more safe, effective, and efficient: hitting industrial targets to cripple the German war machine, or area bombing cities to kill civilians and defeat the national will. Harris believed area bombing would win the war without need for an allied invasion of France. His staff collected the data on their bombing runs, and Harris argued that their calculations proved Bomber Command could break the enemy’s will by virtually destroying whole cities. Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill’s science advisor, Lord Cherwell, himself a physicist and power broker in the War Cabinet, supported Harris and his calculations.

Blackett disagreed. He and a cadre of other scientists examined the impact of bombing on the British population as well as in Germany. They contradicted Harris OR team’s assessment. If England had only stiffened their resolve when bombed, why would the Germans be any different? Freeman Dyson, who was responsible for collecting data and analyzing Bomber command’s losses, recalled “[i]t was my judgment at the time, and remains so today, that the cost of Bomber Command in men and resources was far greater than its military effectiveness,” costing about one quarter of the British war effort. It cost Britain more in lives and material lost than to what was gained against Germany. He also had no patience for the theories of area bombing. “The notion that bombing would cause a breakdown of civilian morale turned out to be a fantasy. And the notion that bombing would cause the breakdown of weapons production was also a fantasy.” While damaging such technical infrastructure slowed and impeded the German war effort, it was never as “wiped out” as Harris assessed. Bomber Command’s OR section was lambasted for telling their commander what he wanted to hear, instead of collecting the data to find the results first.

When the war ended, many of these scientists were celebrated. Some returned to academia to pursue their original career. Others saw the potential for OR in civilian life, and formed organizations dedicated to using its practices in industry and business. Some stayed on in government service, where their skills were becoming integral to the growing technological tapestry of war and science in the Cold War. Blackett, the father of OR, retreated from military work and became involved in peace and disarmament work dealing with nuclear weaponry.

OR has grown into many forms and variants, especially statistical analysis, but lost the limelight of its wartime efforts. But those scientific advisors made a distinct contribution to allied victory in the Second World War. These magicians of math, sorcerers of science, and boffins of medicine proved to the senior officers their value in solving complex problems by observing how things were done, assessing how they could be done better, and proving it to a tough audience. Charles Goodeve, whose work on naval weapons systems made him an OR pioneer, once reflected that OR was really just “scientific common sense.” A very Vulcan sentiment, even if it came from a human.

About the Author

Jason S. Ridler is the author of the Spar Battersea thrillers (Death Match and Con Job) and the short story collection Knockouts. He has also published over 50 stories in such magazines and anthologies as Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Brain Harvest, Not One of Us, Chilling Tales, Tesseracts Thirteen, and more. His nonfiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Dark Scribe, and the Internet Review of Science Fiction. A former punk rock musician and cemetery groundskeeper, Mr. Ridler holds a Ph.D. in War Studies from the Royal Military College of Canada. His doctoral thesis on Dr. Solandt will be published under the title Maestro of Science: Omond McKillop Solandt and Government Science in War and Hostile Peace by the University of Toronto Press.

Giving Birth to the Dark Monster: A Conversation with J. M. McDermott

Jeremy L. C. Jones

Never Knew Another, the first novel in J. M. McDermott’s Dogsland Trilogy, opens with a husband and wife placing a head on a rock face high on a hill so that the half-demon blood won’t poison the earth. The novel and its sequel, When We Were Executioners, get progressively and deliciously weirder from there.

Both novels take off with dark exuberance and follow a dream-like logic in such a way that the richly textured prose seems to slip and slither on one level while soaking in slowly on another. The Dogsland novels track the lives of Corporal Jona and the fugitive Senta Rachel Nolander through a world of hatred and violence.

Due to the sale and asset transfer of Night Shade Books, these titles faced an uphill battle before publication. The second book was not included in the company catalog and was ultimately sacrificed to a distribution crossover. With the sale of Night Shade, a new opportunity arose to breathe life into the series. The third part of the trilogy, We Leave Together, published by Word Horde will be available later this year.

As McDermott discusses below, the Dogsland Trilogy is rooted in childhood loss and speaks to the basic human need for empathy and understanding.

McDermott is also the author of such novels as Last Dragon and Nirvana Gates (set in Philip Athans’ Fathomless Abyss universe), as well as the collection Women and Monsters and Disintegration Visions. His first novel was shortlisted for a Crawford Prize, on Locus Magazine’s Recommended Reading List for Debuts, and on Amazon.com’s Year’s Best SF/F of 2008 list. Subsequent work has appeared on numerous year’s best lists, as well.

Below, McDermott and I talk about the joys of writing, his process, and giving birth to the dark monster.

The last time we spoke, you had all the elaborate ways of using technology in your writing process. Its been a few years, what sort of gadgets are you using these days? Has your process changed much?

These days, I still use Excel a lot. I also use my Gmail account for most of my early writing. I can leave drafts up for a long time, and scribble into them from any device I happen to have handy at the time. I haven’t attempted to write a whole novel this way, just pieces of a novel. It brings me back in time to when I was writing the novels Never Knew Another and When We Were Executioners while temping.

I had a depressing permatemp position that required internet use. I cheated and e-mailed early versions of scenes and sketches to myself while I was supposed to be working. This time, I’m not hiding out on the job, though. I’m keeping everything auto-saved as a “draft” and letting the whole story run long and long and long. When it’s ready, I’ll hit send, to myself, and have a nice, saved version of the story ready to be sent to on-line magazines that require them in the e-mail. I can also cut-and-paste straightaway into Google Drive, with ease.

What do you enjoy about writing fiction?

I don’t know if enjoyment is the right word. Writing is what I do. I communicate better with a keyboard than I do with my own voice. I communicate better when I’m putting on the mask of style and voice than when I speak plain. I guess most writers strive for honesty with what they do, and I get that and do it in my way, but I feel like there’s a depth that happens when what we say is not spoken with sentences, but with programmatic language of fiction that runs in people’s imaginations.

I could just tell you, “Hey, be a good person, and try not to hurt other people, and be a good steward of the planet,” but that’s hardly a message you’ll believe. It’s too intellectual to become part of your identity. Writing Dogsland, though, I can spin the weave of fiction, and you’ll feel the empathy for Rachel, who tries so hard to be good despite her own demonic heritage betraying her every step, and feel the loneliness of Jona as he drifts through the violent streets, and this will mark you and make you see others in a new light, Jona’s and Rachel’s hiding in plain sight not just on the page, but in your city streets, where biology betrays them beneath the facade of a normal life.

Did you have as much fun in Phil Athan’s Fathomless Abyss as it seemed like you did? How was it working in someone else’s world instead of your own?

Oh, that world is a blast! When I was writing Nirvana Gates, I was thinking about the monster from Gene Wolf’s Book of the New Sun, the Alzabo, and how I could take that idea and do something interesting with it. I came up with Nirvana Gates. You see, to me, when most people say the word “My soul” they are not referring to the part of them that will be immortal after death, but are instead referring to memory and identity. In this case, when memory and identity can be preserved, it would be no great stretch to interpret it as immortality, or even a kind of heaven. But, it is a heaven that only comes when you walk into the mouth to be eaten. Working alongside some of the most imaginative minds in speculative fiction challenges me to really bring my “A” game and get creative. It’s a fun challenge, and I can’t wait to see what the rest of the group comes up with, next!

If you had to pick one scene, one moment from your body of work that best captures you as a writer, which scene (or scenes) would it be?

In my forthcoming novel, Maze, slated for release in early 2014 from Apex, I’m actually one of the characters in the novel. The whole novel began as a dream I had, after coming home a little tipsy from my ten year high school reunion. I transcribed the dream as best I could in the daylight. Fort Worth was (and remains) a post-industrial ruin.

A light floated through the air and whispered to me. It said . . . She said, “My name is Jenny. Put me in your lung. Breathe deep.” I did. As a writer, I am that person who will follow the muse, even when it makes demands that seem insane. I will breathe deep, and give birth to the dark monster that will hide in my apartment until it devours whomever I bring home. I will follow down the pipes into the new landscape of the maze, where whatever I encounter on the side of that portal will test me, and—honestly—I will fail. Every book is a failure, to me. Every book never matches the amazing dream I wish it could be. I just try to get better, and get closer next time.

I’ll live my life, just as Joseph in the novel did, lost in the maze, writing and writing.

What’s at the heart of The Dogsland Trilogy? And did that change over the course of over writing of the book?

I think the heart of Dogsland is homosexuality and HIV. We lost one of my uncles back when I was in the 8th grade. At the time, I had never met him. It’s a long story, and full of personal details I try to avoid in the immortal record of the internet, but needless to say it is a thing that marked me. Living as I did in the ultra-religious, ultra-right-wing suburban wasteland between Dallas and Fort Worth, it occurred to me that if I were gay, it would be very hard to go out to the store and buy bread, because I would never know who would be waiting to spew hatred upon me, if they suspected I wasn’t what I appeared.

It’s a horrible way to live. I get to live on the easiest difficulty setting, so to speak, but I have met enough people and loved enough people that I can appreciate how hard it is for others, and how wrong that difficulty is. I’m glad times are changing, but . . . When I was writing this world, I knew that if I wrote gay characters, the people who most needed these stories wouldn’t read them. People who have that twinge of homophobia, whether they admit to it or not, will see a story about a gay person, and just assume it’s not for them. They’re people who need to experience empathy for the hidden.

The power of fantasy gives us a way of speaking that remains locked in step with the rigid, bad, old days, here. I can write about the partially-human children of demons, instead, and make the presumed reality of some sort of evil in the blood a visceral reality, and show you—you who most needs this message and would not listen to it any other way, without even announcing that this is what we’re talking about—and demonstrate how hiding changes people, and how awful and lonely it must have been for so much of human history, to be different inside but to have to put on this other face that is not you . . . People who learn who you are can hurt you, blackmail you, or even love you.

Go ahead and let them be half-demons, with blood that burns the living, and spreads terrible disease. It doesn’t change that we’re talking human being.

It is no mystery, though, that in the case of the Lord of Joni, and his beloved Senta, that this love affair is doomed. The final chapter in the trilogy is slated for release later this year, and I’ve already seen some amazing, amazing art from Julian Alday for the cover!

What are some of the cool things that got left out of the novels–places or ideas or scenes that didn’t make it into the book?

My novel-in-progress is a mosaic text set in the near future, and dealing with issues of aging in a world where technology is tumbling forward. I’m fascinated with mosaic texts, as the article I wrote for the Interstitial Arts Foundation might suggest. This particular novel has already had some fiction sold, but I don’t think it’s out, yet. Asimov’s picked up a large chunk of one character’s story, and some are making the rounds now.

One piece wasn’t working. When I peeled out one piece that was not working as part of the whole, because the characters involved are too distant from the events of the novel, I did what I generally do, but because it was a longer piece, I didn’t just blog about it. I actually put it up on the Kindle store as a cheap sample of my writing. The story is complete, after all. Look for Rocket, on the Kindle store, and see if you don’t see a little bit of the novel I’m working on, about life and death in the near future, and aging, and how hard aging is, even there.

Writing for a living is not really about writing, but about being an amazing editor of your own writing. My first drafts are terrible, barely legible. It takes time to polish them into shape. Doing so means lots of flotsam and jetsam cast aside, that generally ends up washing ashore at my blog as an easy blog-entry for the day. Sometimes the blog feeds the work, and sometimes the work feeds the blog. Frankly, I’d be happy if any of it made enough that I could say, with certainty, that I was fed from it.

Any parting words?

You will spend 1/3 of your life asleep. In that time, it will be just you and your dreams. Art feeds your dreams. Consume art, then. (Reading Clarkesworld is a great start!)

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.

Faulty Memories of a Time Long Past: A Conversation with Richard Ellis Preston, Jr.

Jeremy L. C. Jones

The main character of Romulus Buckle & the City of the Founders is a gasbag gremlin, a balloon goose, and an air dog. Cap’n Buckle and his crew live in a post-apocalyptic world of devastation, steam power, and snow—constant snow.

Indeed, Richard Ellis Preston’s debut novel is powered by “red hot furnaces and boilers,” sizzling and hissing with swashbuckling adventure and extremely compelling world-building.

“A decision one must make in sci-fi world building is how accurate one is going to make the science,” said Preston. “Are you a Vernian (Jules Verne: hard science only, please) or are you a Wellsian (H. G. Wells: it’s a fancy time machine and it looks like it works—end of explanation—now, shall we go tangle with the Morlocks?) My Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin series lands squarely in the Wellsian camp.”

Why did Preston opt for the Wellsian approach?

“Firstly, I am a decent historian but a weak scientist,” said Preston. “Secondly, the zeppelin I wanted to have, one loaded with steam boilers and cannons and all sorts of fantastical metal contraptions surrounded by bags of flammable hydrogen, could never fly in reality. It would never get off of the ground.”

Preston was deeply engrossed in a WWII novel set in Russia when a friend introduced him to steampunk. He took a break from that weighty project, seeking a bit of fun and a certain degree of creative freedom.

“The steampunk subgenre can embrace elements of fantasy,” said Preston of his technically unrealistic airship, “so this is not a big problem as long as you make your world function within its own set of rules and stick to those rules—steampunk readers are ready and willing to suspend their disbelief in order to experience the story—but you had better damn well deliver the story.”

And deliver, it does.

Below, Preston and I talk about writing in general, The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin in particular, and his work with his development editor at 47North, Jeff VanderMeer.

Where’d you start with Romulus Buckle & the City of the Founders?

I’d have to say I started with the sense that I wanted to do something big and epic and fun. It was a reaction to another project I have slowly been working on for the last eight years; that project is a trilogy set in WW2 Russia, with an expansive canvas and many characters, heavily researched, sunk deep inside a terrible period of human history. I traveled to Russia in 2007 to visit battlefields and interviewed surviving veterans in Moscow. The first book is nearly done, but the whole project was beginning to weigh me down—I love it dearly, but it was becoming my albatross. I decided to take a six month break from the Russia monster and write something different, something full of swashbuckling and empire—an excuse to immerse myself in the realm of the great adventure novels and movies, which I love. I wanted to do a sort of Saturday afternoon movie serial, something akin to Captain Blood, The Adventures of Robin Hood, Indiana Jones, Hornblower, Star Trek and King Solomon’s Mines.

I knew that I wanted the story to focus on a captain and his crew in a time of war, and I knew that I wanted strong female characters. But it was difficult to find a time and place that worked for the nebulous sense of what I wanted. For various reasons, all the periods of history and settings I considered—an 18th century warship, a WW2 submarine, a space ship—failed me. Then a friend of mine introduced me to steampunk and I immediately found the perfect environment for my story—a zeppelin crew in Victorian-inspired garb roaming a post-apocalyptic earth, complete with zebra-striped aliens—and everything took off from there.

Which of the characters is most like you and which is least like you?

That is a difficult question. Initially, I am going to dodge it by saying the obvious, by saying that I believe all of the main characters represent a part of me, as the author, in some way or another. The series rides on the backs of three core characters: Captain Buckle and his two female lieutenants, Sabrina and Max (an alien-human mix). But these characters are larger-than-life and heroic, which I am not. They struggle with titanic obsessions and needs and failures, and mine are smaller and less consuming (although I do have a lot of check marks in the ‘failures’ category).

And while Sabrina and Max are women, I am comfortable climbing into their heads and writing from a female perspective—I quite enjoy it—I simply relate to them as human beings (in Max’s case, a half-human being). Females are certainly capable of surprising and mystifying me but since I have been surrounded by women all of my life I feel like I have a decent appreciation of their way of interpreting the world. Of course, I could be completely deluded about that.

I have no idea which character is the least like me—but I have so much fun writing the bad guys it probably isn’t them.

In the final self-analysis, if forced to choose, I would say Romulus Buckle is the most like me (at least, the most like what I would want to be), because I have always wanted to be Indiana Jones.

What were some of the surprises and changes along the way?

Every new manuscript surprises its author over and over again, and the Romulus Buckle series (I have written the first two books) has been no exception. World-building, once in full swing, applies its own logic on you in reverse, (without pity, I might add) forcing you to abandon story elements which no longer fit in its expanding and ever-more-rigid environment. As characters flesh out and start speaking to you, rather than you speaking for them, they take on their own attitudes and priorities; choices you originally made for them suddenly ring hollow and insincere, and you have to rethink their story-driving motivations because your initial applications no longer fit the person who is emerging before your eyes.

One of the biggest surprises waiting for me was structural. I had never written this kind of episodic series before, and while I have worked out the major character and story arcs for the entire span of the series, it is difficult to predict exactly when and where certain things might happen (and I don’t want to lock myself into a preplanned structure too tightly, because it all balls up and changes anyway) or how many pages it will take to accomplish what I want to do.

When I was 500 pages into book two, Romulus Buckle and the Engines of War (I have to do a lot of editing after my first drafts) I realized that the conclusion of Part II was the end of the that book, and what I had planned for Part III was actually a full book in itself, hence becoming book three. All of a sudden, I had an extra book in the series. It will be interesting to see, as the series progresses, how accurate my original estimation of the number of books will prove to be. I now fully expect to discover that one of my later book ideas shall waffle too thin, story-wise, and I will end up merging two book ideas into one. Whatever works, works.

What should a sentence do? A paragraph? A chapter? A novel?

That is a great question to ask a writer, and one much discussed by brilliant people in endless books on writing and how to write. I’ll give it my best shot here and, with your permission I would like to tackle it from back to front. A fiction novel should entertain. When I, and most people, I think, pick up a work of fiction, they expect to be transported into another world and be engaged, to see and feel what the characters see and feel, whether the character is a Kansas doormouse or the Commodore of the Space Fleet of Orion. Many books have done this for me, and some have failed me. The failures were either bad books or fine books where the author’s method of communication simply did not jive with the way I absorb information. Faulkner is difficult for me to stick with, whereas I honestly feel like Michael Ondaatje dreams exactly the same way I do. Novels are art like painting is art, and who likes every canvas they see in a gallery? I hate the idea of my book not “clicking” for a reader who has selected my novel and wants to enjoy the journey, but I know it will happen.

What should a chapter do? Obviously, if the writer slices his or her book up into chapters, it allows more effective communication of the overall story. Life has breaks in it, and the end of the chapter signals to the reader that the story is coming to a natural break (or cliffhanger, which is a kind of break) and allows them to pause and reflect on what has happened so far. I decided to dice my Romulus Buckle books up into a lot of small chapters (I remembered Kurt Vonnegut using a similar short-chapter method in Cat’s Cradle, to great effect) for several reasons: the spinning revolver cylinder of rotating character perspectives allows me to leap back and forth between points of view in the same situations (helpful in a high-action novel) and these are adventure books—the many chapter headings are integral parts of the lighter, faster-moving story.

The paragraph, to me, is a moment. It can be one word or five hundred, but it tends to encapsulate one action or one string of thought. Paragraphs are easy—it is the sentences that are hard.

Sentences are harder than everything else combined, harder than finding the right word. All writers have done the exercise where you take a famous sentence and rearrange the words and the magic of the whole thing collapses. A sentence has to feel right, and sometimes the success of the sentence escapes explanation, logic and grammar rules. I know when a sentence is working and when it is not, and it can be agony coming back to a sentence again and again and failing to find the perfect construction you know exists, but escapes you. A good sentence is fine, but you want to achieve as many great ones as you can. I am not a great grammarian and that is embarrassing, because it is one of the tools of my trade; grammar is something I must constantly be aware of and work on. My favorite book on the subject of the sentence is How To Write a Sentence (and How To Read One) by Stanley Fish.

Can you talk a little bit about the process of building the world of The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin?

World building is both an incredible and terrifying experience. There are so many ways you can box yourself in, especially with a series. I had done it once before, with a fantasy realm for a book that may never see the light of day, but the Snow World of the Pneumatic Zeppelin series required a much broader scope. I had a good grasp of my steampunk-themed story, main characters and the zeppelin right off the bat, so my world-building began in large strokes across the background canvas. I wanted the backdrop to be a world about to fall into war, a world of clans (nations) competing for resources with their ambassadors scrambling to secure alliances against the impending conflict. I used the political situation in Western Europe just before the outbreak of the Great War as a template (very, very loosely) for the unstable geopolitical environment in my Snow World. Once I had the major political players and their strengths/weaknesses/relationships set, I could weave the lives of my characters through that intricate web and formulate their loyalties, partnerships, hatreds and betrayals. The whole process was nowhere near as clean and crisp as that, but I think this is a good overview.

The events driving the series were largely set into motion by the actions of the previous generation, so I had to know who everyone in that generation was; I had to know those characters as well as the ones who actually appear in the books. I worked out detailed family genealogies and clan histories, largely because I feared that if I did not, I would trip myself up later. I know exactly who the original Founders are and how they and their descendants built the world which my characters are living in.

My earth was destroyed three hundred years ago by the “Martians” (no one knows where the aliens came from, so that name just stuck) and humanity was almost completely wiped out. The survivors rallied in a dangerous, highly-competitive, post-apocalyptic world, and since most historic documents had been lost, the new civilization, the new Victorian-inspired society, was engineered from faulty memories of a time long past. I worked out every aspect of the environment as best I could so I had all the major underpinnings cemented in my head before I got too far into the early drafts of the books. Lots of detail can wait until we meet a clan or a character, but I have to know how they perceive each other from the very beginning, and why. I am actually surprised at how little of this background actually makes a direct appearance in book one, City of the Founders, which is primarily a rescue mission story, but it does fuel a lot of the undercurrents beneath the scenes. Book one is sort of hermetically sealed because we spend most of our time aboard the zeppelin or racing through a prison warren. Book two, Engines of War, involves many clans meeting to form a hasty alliance and it opens up much more of the Snow World.

One thing that caught me off guard as I plunged into my series was how much information I had to keep track of. Crew lists, KIAs, replacements, family relationships, names of zeppelins and who built them, ambassadors, outposts, menus, uniforms, flags, colors, character descriptions, blueprints, cannon types, muzzle velocities, airspeed and on and on. I didn’t realize how quickly one might become uncertain of the eye color of a character after a week away from her. I assembled a huge story bible so I have all of that information in one place rather than spending a lot of time searching through pages of finished work trying to confirm the type of metal on someone’s watch or the mannerisms they possess. I wish I had a better memory.

How did it go working with Jeff VanderMeer?

Well, I am a Jeff VanderMeer fan now, so my answer is not objective. He is a really neat person. He is a great development editor and he helped me measure out the difficult balance of introductory elements in the first book and the pacing of the story in both books, among other things. He is of course an extremely accomplished writer, and I was thrilled when 47North brought him in to work with me on my first two books. He has a great sense of humor and I enjoyed working with him in the development process, which is of course painful for a writer on many levels—and it is a pain Jeff well understands and sympathizes with, so while he did apply the knife where it was needed, he did so gently. We even cooked up something of a friendship between our emails because we are both kind of silly, and I think that helped us be honest with each other during a process where he has to suggest gutting or Rubik’s-cubing my work in various ways (not that it does not need it, mind you) and I have to be tough enough to consider his suggestions with a stiff upper lip. I quickly learned to trust Jeff’s instincts: everything he brought to the table made the book better.

Lastly, what is it about airships that’re just so cool?

Yes, über cool! They are one of those gigantic, mysterious machines that capture the imagination, and like the Titanic, they possess a tragic history. Most people are familiar with the Hindenburg and probably could not name another airship. Like the Titanic, the Hindenburg had a spectacular demise (the Hindenburg’s famously caught on film—“oh, the humanity!”) I think that the airship is akin to a great sailing ship and, in the tradition of the Golden Hind and the Victory, it captures the imagination in the same way—with the exception that the airship is an industrial-era machine, a product of the industrial revolution, and carries with it the conceit of man’s assumed triumph over nature. Very few people have ridden in an airship—I haven’t—and so it remains exotic to the average person, even today, in a way that airplane travel has not. Because of all of these aspects, it is easy to place a zeppelin in a world of air pirates or sky fleets because it simply “fits.”

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:
My Own Private B-Movie

Genevieve Valentine

My first B-movie was The Warriors, an action flick set in a nebulously dystopic future where New York City is ruled by gangs. During a huge meeting, messiah presumptive Cyrus is shot in the middle of a galvanizing speech. The shooter pins the crime on the nearby Warriors, a gang from Coney Island that, hopelessly outnumbered by Manhattan’s finest, have to fight their way home. These days, I know it’s a masterpiece of self-conscious coolness that’s landed firmly in the pantheon of cult classics. When I was ten, all I knew was that I’d discovered something amazing that I couldn’t quite define.

When it comes to B-movies, were still trying to define them; we never will.

Remember the one where John Agar falls through a mountain and finds a civilization of enslaved mole people and pasty locals? Remember when Geena Davis takes alien visitors to a nightclub and it ends in a dance contest? Remember the musical numbers in Paint Your Wagon? Remember Starship Troopers?

To fall in love with B-movies is to search for the sublime. There’s a particular cultural participation inherent in watching a film where all the seams are visible in the post-it plots and the zip-up monster suits or where the sheriff faces the gunfighter in the only clapboard city in the West; there’s a peculiar brand of enjoyment in ninety minutes of unintentional subtext separated from you by a comforting layer of irony. That indefinable cheesiness of being has turned the B-movie, over the last century, from a cinematic afterthought into something of an accidental artistic pursuit.

What makes a B-movie is, however, a nebulous and shifting concept—less a scientific process than an attempt to classify its achievements amidst shortcomings. They’re the second-runs in a double feature, until pop culture makes them an art form of their own; self-awareness goes a long way in a B-movie, unless utter seriousness is better; the budgets are tight, until it’s Waterworld; it’s a B-movie, until it has enough stylistic or narrative momentum to be a cult classic instead.

B-movies occupy the liminal cinema spaces between prescribed formula and personal love letter; they capture, for better or worse, the artistic abandon of questionable decisions. The enduring artistic impact of some unlikely contenders is that they manage to embrace—or subvert—their secondhand tropes, sometimes with a budget barely bigger than community theatre. Ed Wood’s wildly passionate works about the dangers of sweater girls and alien visitors have only grown in appeal since Wood first decided that editing was a suggestion, not a mandate; pulpy heroines hearkened back to the antiheroines of the early talkies, sitting in stark contrast to the marquee darlings who obeyed the Hays Code regulations by being patient and moral.

Some filmmakers have turned the self-conscious B-movie into a career pursuit. Brian De Palma’s been dissecting the genre since Phantom of the Paradise, taking full advantage of the neon-drenched 80s in the service of pulp sensibility. Perhaps his best attempt at it was Body Double, which lifted liberally from film noir, sandwiched in cynical homages to vampire B-movies and even more cynical porn, doused it in Rear Window subtext as a half-serious paean to the faulty and prurient gaze of the camera, and ended up with the movie equivalent of infinite regress.

He’s not the only one; in between more marketable cop-franchise flicks, Walter Hill tried his level best to lovingly craft the ultimate B-movie. The Warriors is his best-known film,  but 1985’s Streets of Fire is perhaps the closest he ever came, a sci-fi rockabilly rescue fable in which every line of dialogue, ground out though the grit teeth of people too hard-boiled to handle, and is interrupted liberally by in-situ musical numbers. Hill himself described the film as  a shopping list of B-movie hallmarks he holds “great affection for: custom cars, kissing in the rain, neon, trains in the night, high-speed pursuit, rumbles, rock stars, motorcycles, jokes in tough situations, leather jackets and questions of honor.”

With this, perhaps, Hill has come the closest possible to My Own Private B-Movie—by making the one he wanted. Until the instant he released it, of course, because then it wasn’t up to him; it was up to the audience.

By their nature, and like any piece of art, films synthesize their forebears and disseminate themselves into the canon, sneaking sidelong into the collective imagination (pop culture is a language of metaphor and reference—we all live in Tanagra now). Movies and television, as easy-access visual mediums, make this process even easier, and create shorter and shorter cycles of vocabulary: Gene Tierney, white-suited, sitting in a boat with sunglasses in hand; a girl with a grimy nightdress and long black hair; a cat sitting solemnly in front of a keyboard. Eventually, it doesn’t even materially matter if you’ve seen the particular film in question; one way or another, you kind of have.

And that’s largely the way a B-movie develops within that particular place in the canon. You can experience a great film in any number of private, introspective ways reflective of its artistic and narrative successes; everyone in a showing of Upstream Color walks away with a film experience of their own. You can watch a B-movie alone in a cave (you shouldn’t, that’s excessive unless you’re camping, but you can), and you’re still participating in the shared experience that categorizes those earnest, imperfect flicks; when Jeff Goldblum shows up in his fly prosthetics, you are watching alongside everyone else who has ever flinched away from the screen, then laughed uncomfortably, then looked for the seams, then cried. B-movies want you to; that’s why they’re there.

And earnest it should be. Not in its content—that would be leaving out too many pulp classics, cynical noirs, and satires. But to manufacture a movie with the intent of making it a camp classic is a dicey proposition; it might well be intentionally camp, because John Waters would be grievously unemployed otherwise, but a movie’s place in the B-movie canon is rarely premeditated. (Where you are on this scale will probably be defined by how you feel about The Rocky Horror Picture Show.)

These days, most traditional studios tend to avoid B-movies (at least intentionally, though someone should talk to Tyler Perry), especially if one discounts the ten-dollar torture-porns carting their carousels of prosthetics to an inexpensive Eastern European locale. The B-movie, in this vacuum, has effectively split into two wildly different mediums. One, interestingly, is the blockbuster, where tropes are ten million dollars a pop, every muscle car is a deadpan homoerotic wonderland, and every Transformers plot hole can be fixed by two huge robots fighting.

The other is television, where the collective experience is less expensive and more flexible, and every episode of The Vampire Diaries is an installment of an endless teens-in-peril serial that would make Flash Gordon proud. (SyFy, our last best hope for the weekly B, gave it a brief go that left us with Mansquito before recycled effects and contract actors who could be forced to be present but not to care meant there was no fun left—a death knell for that elusive thread of joy hiding in every true pulper. Still, even SyFy occasionally strikes; every few years you get Jersey Shore Shark Attack, a spot-on satire wrapped in the comforting cloak of every B-movie trope you’ve been missing, right down to Joey Fatone being eaten by a shark that dives through a window and knocks him away from the mic just before his first note.)

Rare is the art form that can achieve greatness by being simultaneous disasters and masterpieces, appreciated both for what they are and for whatever Quentin Tarantino can make people think they were, and encompasses Westerns, science fiction, crime thrillers, and romances with equal enthusiasm. There are few absolutes for something that’s become such currency in pop culture. Maybe the closest to a golden rule we can come is that every time you watch a true B-movie it is, somehow, all yours, and just like the first time.

About the Author

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

Editor’s Desk:
Taking Back July 12th

Neil Clarke

You never know what life is going to throw in your way. This time last year, I was looking forward to a mid-month trip to Readercon. Little did I know that a few hours after arriving, I would be loaded into an ambulance and told I was having a heart attack. Those of you who have been following my story know that I was very lucky to survive. It’s a fact that isn’t lost on me. It’s with me every day.

Events like this change you.

Professionally, I’ve taken it as an inspiration to pursue my dream of earning a living from editing. In the last year, I’ve put a lot of effort into improving Clarkesworld and expanding our subscriber base, a necessity to take us to the next level. The support I’ve received from my family, team, authors and readers has been nothing short of awesome. I still have a long road ahead of me, but it reassuring to know that I don’t have to take it alone.

After my defibrilator surgery back in January, I took a long and hard look at my options. Encouraged by my friends, I spent a few months working out a plan to launch my first non-Clarkesworld related anthology. Having just become part machine, it seemed timley and cosmically appropriate to launch a cyborg-themed project edited by one.

With promises of stories from Elizabeth Bear, Ken Liu, E. Lily Yu, Genevieve Valentine,Yoon Ha Lee and more, I launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the anthology. UPGRADED will include twenty-four original stories and be graced with cover art from Clarkesworld regular and 2013 Hugo nominee, Julie Dillon. The campaign is fatefully scheduled to end on July 12th, the first anniversary of my heart attack. Hey Universe! I’ll take that day back, thank you.

At this moment, I’ve raised 95% of the funds necessary to make UPGRADED a reality. Kickstarter campaigns typically have stretch goals, just in case you raise more than the minimum amount of money you need. In this case, the stretch goals include adding more stories, paying our authors more and an audio edition narrated by Kate Baker. I don’t know about you, but I’m really pulling for that last one.

You can find the campaign at: tinyurl.com/cyborg-neil and should you decide to back the project there are all sorts of nifty rewards like ebooks, story narrations, having your name in a story and various Clarkesworld anthologies.

As the campaign comes to a close, I’ll be completing the circle by returning to Readercon, the scene of the crime. Most of the time, you’ll be able to find me at my table in the dealer’s room selling issues of Clarkesworld, old bookstore inventory and launching the latest Clarkesworld anthology. Clarkesworld: Year Four is dedicated to all the doctors and staff at Lahey Clinic that worked so hard to keep me alive last year. I think I’ll drop off a copy while I’m in the neighborhood.

I honestly feel like this has been a great year. I’m so glad I didn’t miss it. I particularly appreciate all the support or authors and staff have received in the form of award nominations.

Just before this issue went out, I was informed that Aliette de Bodard had won the Locus Award for Best Short Story for “Immersion.” I’m so glad to see that people are enjoying the work we’ve done here. This year, I was particularly blown away by the strong showing we had in the Hugo Awards:

Best Novelette: “Fade to White” by Catherynne M. Valente

Best Short Story: “Immersion” by Aliette de Bodard

Best Short Story: “Mantis Wives” by Kij Johnson

Best Editor (Short Form): Neil Clarke

Best Semiprozine: Clarkesworld Magazine, edited by Neil Clarke, Sean Wallace, Jason Heller, Podcast directed by Kate Baker

I hope we can continue to enjoy the fruits of our labor with such amazing recognition from both fans and peers within the community.

Thank you.

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.