Cry of the Kharchal

Vandana Singh

She was no more than a breath, a tongue of air, tasting, sensing, divining. She swept through the hotel ramparts like the subtlest of breezes. She had done it: made time stand still. Her people, so scattered now, so weak, had helped her draw the power from the sandstorm, turning its energy against itself so that, for a brief moment, it lassoed time itself. Perhaps the moment would be long enough . . .

Incorporeal though she was, she still thought in physical terms. Thus she thought of the threads of stories that she held in her hands, ready to be woven into something that would change the fabric of reality. She thought of the heavy attire she had worn as queen, and the wings, the yearning for flight over the desert sands, the flight west. All that was gone, but she was still here. Six hundred years against the next few hours—how could mere hours matter against the weight of those years? And yet, if the stories came together . . .

The manager. The foreign poet. The woman. The boy.

It was time.

Avinash, running, crashed into a pillar at the edge of the courtyard. The physical pain brought him to his senses. He leaned against the pillar, panting, and surveyed the scene. Something had happened to the sandstorm. It rose above the hotel ramparts, a tsunami of sand, a hundred-headed cobra, a dark wave against the darkness, absolutely still. A faint susurrus of sand seemed only to amplify the silence. What had happened to the blaring alarm, the roar of the approaching storm? There were only soft sounds, the sigh of sand grains falling against a window, or the dance of a wisp of sand across the floor, borne on a breath of wind. And the bodies. Before him, in the great central courtyard, bodies sat in chairs, or leaned against pillars, or stood frozen in mid-run. Thin skeins of sand still blew about, filling plates and tureens, laps and elaborate hairdos, and the corners of eyes. But none of the eyes even blinked. Were they dead or alive? And why was he alone able to move?

“I am Avinash,” he said shakily into the darkness, as though to remind himself that he was real, that he had to live up to his name. He searched for her again, that comforting, mysterious presence in his mind, but she was turned away from him. “Queen!” he spoke without words, begging for her attention. She did not respond. Sometimes she got like that. He looked around the courtyard. The hotel had been rebuilt on the ruins of a medieval fort to bring to the twenty-first century the lost grandeur of that era. The courtyard had been designed on the same grand scale. Usually its vastness reminded him of his insignificance: he was only the tech person for the hotel’s computer system, a young man with no past and even less of a future. He had come here empty as a gourd, his small, inadequate soul rattling like a seed in the dried shell of his body, so that the scale of the rebuilt fort walls and the lavish excess of the decor always reminded him that he was nothing. Even the long-dead Queen rode his mind as though he was a beast of burden . . . yet what sweet possession! Surely she was the key to his coming glory.

Had time, itself, stopped? Why had he been spared, then?

The queen would know, but she was still turned from him. For months now he had indulged her machinations and schemes, petty though they seemed to him: collecting information, and acting on it to obtain desired results. “If you are to control people’s lives, Avinash,” the Queen had told him, “you must start small, by manipulating the little lives around you. Only then will you be able to touch the power within you.” So he had been doing according to her instructions, developing story-lines in real time, with real people, collecting information, informing, manipulating. He had found out that the manager was a closet alcoholic; the aged movie star, had a thing for young girls; and that the mad Bolivian poet was in love with an elusive woman . . . Then a word here, an act there, and events could be made to unfold according to plan. But the storm was something else. Surely he wasn’t yet powerful enough to conjure up a sandstorm, or to stop time? He asked the queen in the depths of his mind, but she was quiet, preoccupied, as though waiting.

Maybe, he thought, striding into the courtyard as he had never dared to do before—maybe it is I who have wrought this. Even if he hadn’t bargained for a sandstorm, perhaps it was a consequence of some unintended magic, an unleashing of power. He had finally grown large enough in spirit and sheer boldness to fill out and own his name: Avinash, the indestructible. He was somebody. He had power over the guests, frozen as they were—look at that young woman in the white silk, frozen in her chair—he could have his way with her if he wanted. He reached toward her.

But quite abruptly a swift, cold, feeling came over him, a wave of aloneness so sudden and icy that he withdrew his hand, trembling. The vastness that he had felt in himself vanished. He was nothing, nothing but a small child abandoned in a large, noisy, frightening railway station. Come back, he shouted to her in his mind, but there was only silence. The queen was gone right out of his mind. He staggered about, pleading with her, forgetting his moment of triumph, his arrogance, begging her forgiveness seeing nothing, feeling only the terrible emptiness. After a while the queen sighed back into his mind; everything slipped back into place and he was himself again, shaky but sane. She was playing with him; perhaps she was angry, jealous that he had thought of another woman (if only!). Although he had never seen her face, he had imagined it from the old paintings that remained from the original fort. Those almond-shaped eyes, the stern, sorrowful, remote gaze. She had kept herself remote from him also, refusing to reply to his first hopeless adoration of her, until he accepted that she needed only companionship, a tenantship in the spaces of his mind. He could never think of her as a ghost, although the hotel staff did embellish upon the old tragedy when they entertained the foreigners.

Out of habit, he glanced up at the balcony from which she had fallen to her death six hundred years ago. Now it was a place to be pointed to, and talked about, and the room adjoining it was a small museum commemorating the dead queen. Here some of the old paintings still hung, dreadfully marred by time, and on the shelves were the stone statuettes of the birds she had loved, the ones immortalized then and now in the window latticework, the kharchal of the desert—long-necked, with goose-like bodies and long, swift legs. Their eyes were set with semi-precious stones. The old story didn’t mean much to him; not as much as her presence now, with him, a constant companion, someone to talk to, an advisor, guide to his own greatness.

Standing in the courtyard, he heard a sound. Half-lost in the sibilant whisper of sand and wind, there was a distant, unmistakable tapping. Someone was using a computer keyboard.

He followed the sound through the hazy dark until he realized he was going to his own room, and what he heard was someone using his own computer. Angry, fearful, he ran down the employees’ corridor until he reached his door. It was open; a tiny spiral stairway led down to the floor. From the top of it he could see, firstly, that the haze here was considerably thinner than outside, and secondly, his desk lamp was on, the only electric light in the entire hotel as far as he knew. Before his laptop at the desk sat a familiar figure: the odd-jobs boy and itinerant goatherd, Raju.

The boy turned before Avinash could call out. The round, obstinate face, the guarded gaze, the somewhat mocking adolescent smile. Stick-thin, wearing a second-hand pair of blue jeans, and a faded green t-shirt. What was he doing here? He wasn’t supposed to come to Avinash’s room without permission. But before Avinash could scold him the boy got up, sighing with relief, gesturing Avinash to the chair he had vacated.

“Boss, you are alive, thank god. I’ve looked and looked for you. Listen, you have to do something!”

“What are you doing here? How is it you aren’t like . . . like the others? Oh never mind, get away!”

Avinash shoved him lightly and sat down before the computer. The boy had opened the secret window to the Queen’s Game, the tangle of storylines and manipulations, and had been checking status. All right, so no harm done. The story of the Bolivian poet was important, or so she had told him, and he had located the woman whom the poet sought, and he had sent her a message purportedly from a state government minister about funding for a nature preserve. She was on her way. Was she here yet? Hard to tell because she only stopped at the Maharajah, the 4-star hotel restaurant, on her way to Delhi or Jaipur. She’d never checked in as a guest on her earlier visits. He looked at the other stories that were currently in progress. Expose the manager’s drinking so as to ultimately humiliate the man into resigning. Arrange it so that the two gay men could get a room together. Find a way for the movie star to fund a sound-and-light show—a little bribe and threat had proved effective. All of these stories showed progress, and one was complete. The manager had departed in disgrace, and his room, the best in the old wing, (once a royal storeroom) was in the process of being re-done. Avinash checked his online bank information and saw that the money, from whatever unknown source, had already poured in for the successful outcome of the manager’s story.

Nowhere in the tangled web of stories was there any hint of a sandstorm.

He turned to the boy who was his accomplice. Raju had been good at gathering information, and in return Avinash had helped him learn to read and write. The boy claimed to be descended from the old kings, which Avinash had dismissed with a show of hilarity—partly because he suspected it could be true. He’d heard that the descendants of so many of the old rulers now lived in poverty, having lost wealth and prestige. Raju had had neither, only a burning ambition to make something of himself. His dream was to live and work in a big city like Jaipur or Delhi, to have a job with some dignity. He didn’t think running errands for hotel staff or herding goats in the off-season were dignified enough. Avinash found his mixture of precocity and innocence sometimes annoying, sometimes touching.

“There’s nothing I can do . . . now,” he said reluctantly. He didn’t like to appear less than competent before this boy, who seemed to believe quite readily that Avinash had something to do with the storm. “There is a reason why the timelines have stopped.” Yes, that sounded plausible, even to his own ears. “The timelines of all the stories got in a knot, see. All tangled. We have to wait.”

The boy gave him a skeptical look, then grinned.

“You don’t know what’s happening either. But it will come to you, boss! You always come through.”

Avinash had not told him about the queen. The voices, the conversations in his head, the reassuring feeling of companionship, of guidance. But what he said about waiting was true. He had to wait for her to start talking to him again. He felt her presence lightly, as though she was preoccupied. Perhaps she, too, was waiting.

The poet peered out of his balcony. Never had he seen anything like it: the great, rearing heads of the sandstorm held immobile so many hundreds of meters up into the sky. He coughed and wrapped his linen handkerchief more closely about his face. The haze was thick here. When the storm’s roaring had given way to the sudden silence, he had found his way out to the darkened lounge and had seen with horror the silhouettes of figures frozen in various postures. Why had he been spared? Pachamama, he whispered, what have you wrought now? He hadn’t spoken that old name, the name of the earth mother, for years. All he had suspected of the world—that the mundane was only a veneer—he now knew to be true. Some deep power had stirred, and caused everything to stand still, even the storm. He thought about Lalita, and the first time they’d met, and how sure he had been that he would meet her again. The fellow Avinash seemed so certain. But who knew where she was, now, the elusive Lalita? He hoped fervently that she hadn’t been at the steps of the hotel when the storm hit, that she wasn’t among those so grotesquely frozen. A terror came upon him that if he ventured out he would find her among the others, suspended between life and death.

And then upon its heels came a thought that he dismissed immediately: perhaps this was the way his talent would return. His once prodigious talent, honed in La Paz, blossoming in Spain and Italy, driven mysteriously from him one night in Madrid some seven years ago, after which he had been unable to write another word. He could write letters, instructions, but not poetry. He had tried deceit; he’d written a shopping list and edged it toward poetry, without success. He lived off his already famous work for a while, and then he had taken to the road, journeying as far as Siberia, South Africa, and now India, hoping his power over words would return. Nothing had happened so far. The only poetic thoughts in his head were those of other poets, most notably Bolivia’s Jaime Saenz, posthumous mentor, Poet-in-Residence of his mind. Even his meeting with Lalita, when he’d had a thought as close to poetry as he’d come in years, had not yielded anything.

He had met her in the Thar desert a year and a half ago. He had thought that a landscape matching the privation of his soul and his bank account would work some kind of magic on him, but it hadn’t been that kind of magic. He had been captivated by the stark and unpretentious beauty of the scrublands and the sand dunes, the small villages with the sparse, thorny trees, and the people and animals who made their home in this inhospitable place. So different from the arid beauty of the altiplano where he’d grown up—yet the vastness of the sky felt like home.

He was sitting outside a tea stall at a village one afternoon, awaiting his first sandstorm. Most of the people who frequented the tea stall had already left to prepare their belongings and families for the storm. The owner of the stall had packed up too, but Felipe Encina Amaru, child of the Andes, wanted to stay and see the storm approach so he sat outside on a wooden chair after everyone had fled, sipping tea in a thick glass with bubbles, watching the western sky darken. The sandstorm, approaching, was an enormous brown, roaring wave, dwarfing all that lay before it. There was a stillness in the air, and grit, and he felt the great, pregnant pause.

She came out of the storm. So it seemed to him. In fact her rented jeep had broken down before she had reached the village and she had been walking for a while. But when he raised his eyes from the glass she was striding toward him, in a long orange shirt over gray pants, her blue scarf blowing behind her in the sudden, swift wind. Her hands fumbled at her neck adjusting her scarf, but to the poet she was manipulating the reins of the storm, which towered behind her, a beast of impossible proportions. She walked to the tea stall, looked in, seemed disappointed that it was empty. She looked directly at him for the first time.

“Got a car?” her voice was urgent but unhurried. He felt himself drowning and had to gather himself to nod wordlessly toward the blue Zen.

“ . . . I wish to know what wind carries you,” Felipe declaimed silently in the words of Saenz, as he started the car. A wild hope filled him as they rattled toward Jaipur.

She was an ornithologist studying an endangered bird, the Great Indian Bustard. She described it with her voice and hands. A large bird, friendly, inquisitive eyes, swift runner through the desert scrublands. “Think of it like a little ostrich. Or a large goose. ” She laughed easily, but her eyes were sad. She told him she fell in love with the bird at a fair in New Delhi when she was a child. He imagined her face pressed to the glass, the bird coming up to her unafraid, curious. “I actually felt a kind of recognition,” she told him, looking at him directly, as though to see whether he understood. She had questions for him about Bolivia’s new law granting rights to Mother Earth. “You guys got it right,” she said. She wanted to know more about it. He told her he hadn’t been back in a long time, and all he knew was that it was hard to implement the law. “Greed,” he said.

He found himself talking to her without effort. He had spent his childhood tagging along with his mother, hawking herbs in the Mercado de las Brujas. The streets and alleyways, the women with their charms and amulets and dried animal parts, the light of the sky between the narrow, upwinding lanes—had been his world until his uncle took him in. His uncle worked as a janitor in an office building in the modern part of the city. In the two-room tenement that was his home, there were all kinds of strays—a cousin from a remote village, a runaway child, a street dog or two. Always, there would be someone in need, knocking at the door of his uncle’s heart. The uncle would frown and wonder how he would house the next abandoned soul. “Hell, what’s another one?” he’d say at last, resignation mingled with relief, nodding to the boy or animal, finding a place in the already crowded rooms for the newcomer. Some weekends Felipe would spend with his mother, south of the city, gathering herbs. From here he could see the city of La Paz reaching up the mountainsides, higher every year; if he turned around, there was the white peak of the Illimani, a wave flung up into the sky. His poet’s heart had been forged here, in the thin air of the altiplano, in the market’s narrow alleyways, among his uncle’s rescued flotsam, under the clear blue sky of winter, in the spring rain.

“I can see why you are a poet,” she said, smiling, mesmerized by his descriptions.

“No longer,” he sighed.

He told her how his talent with words had vanished on a night in Madrid, seven years ago. Hunched over a drink, listening to an unusually strong sirocco howling outside, he had not known until the morning that the poetry had been taken from him.

“Did you try going home?” she asked him. “Sometimes that works.” 

He said, quietly, remembering: “Two years later, for my mother’s funeral.”

“And your poetry didn’t come back to you then?”

“No.” He had nursed a secret hope that it might, but there was nothing. Only grief, and guilt that he hadn’t been back in time, as he gazed upon his mother’s emaciated body, her hands like claws, as though she had been in the middle of a transmutation that had been arrested by death. He went to the old market and consulted a healer, but there was nothing anyone could do. He remembered arguing with Pedro in Madrid later on, Pedro the friend, later the suicide. Pedro’s memory said to him: “Why do you think the world has magic, then, that things are not just of themselves, but of something ineffable? Why do you persist in believing this childish rubbish?” He shrugged defensively at Pedro’s ghost.

So they drove to Jaipur with the storm following on their heels like a wild beast, and they talked, and she told him stories. The Great Indian Bustard was once seriously considered for the national bird of India, but was defeated by the peacock. “Because those fools were afraid it would get misspelled,” she said. “Can you imagine, the Great Indian Bastard? What kind of name is Bustard, anyway? I like the Indian names better. Kharchal is one of them. Or Hoom . . . because of the male bird’s cry—I’ve heard it a few times, too few times. There’s nothing like it.”

She fell silent for a while. When she spoke her voice was thick with tears. “There are fewer than two hundred left in the wild,” she said. “They are this close to extinction. They used to live around people, near villages without harm, but modern agriculture is their enemy. And modern mega-projects signed on by multinationals. No habitat, no bird. And nobody cares.”

She looked out of the window. Her passionate rage moved him. He sensed a delicate thread of sympathy between them—a kinship beyond the obvious. He wanted to tell her she mattered to him. He wanted to tell her that she could have walked out of one of Jaime Saenz’ poems. The dead poet whispered lines into his mind, as was his wont, but they were not Felipe’s lines.

“I had my first poetic thought in years when I saw you,” he said at last. He told her about his fancy that she was the harbinger of the storm. Her laughter rang out, startling him.

“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard!”

She said, more seriously, with a long sigh as though of despair, “I’m just a human being, Felipe . . . I hate the human race for what we’ve done to the world, but human is all I am.”

“Nobody is just a human being,” he said slowly, keeping his eyes on the road. “We have something else in us, yes, a kind of magic, a connection to the world that can transform us. I am hoping it will transform me.”

His words sounded unconvincing even to him. But she looked at him without mockery, with a half-smile. Jaipur was approaching with distressing rapidity. He wanted to hear her speak. He asked her if there were any more stories, legends, myths about the Bustard . . . the kharchal.

“Not many,” she said. “But people who live close to them have fancies about them. They are very compelling creatures. One old man took care of a small flock of them outside his village. He would guard the eggs they laid, and in return he said they would warn him if a storm was coming. He took to believing that they could call storms. There is one major legend about them, though. Have you heard of the queen of Chattanpur? There’s a hotel they’ve built over her fort. I sometimes stop at the restaurant there on my way to Delhi.”

That was the first time he heard about the hotel. It was not called Chattanpur any more: it was the Hotel Vikram Royal.

There was a woman who lived outside a village in Rajasthan many hundreds of years before now. Nobody knew where she had come from, but she was a healer and a tantric practitioner with great powers. People were afraid of her but those in need would come to her and she would cure them for a small price of cloth or food. She was young and beautiful but nobody dared to touch her.

Then the king of the region happened to pass by, and he was taken by her beauty and her quality of self-possession, and he desired her for one of his queens. She, too, was struck by his noble mien and his kindness to her, and agreed to marry him, on one condition.

“I am not an ordinary woman,” she said. “As a magician I have duties to the great forces from whom I derive my powers. There are times when I will have to go away from you for several days. If you let me do this without question, I will always come back to you.”

The king did not like this but he was much in love, so he agreed, and took her away to his fort on the great hill. His other wives were jealous and took to gossiping about the new queen, and spreading rumors about her. For several nights she stayed with the king, but after that she told him she must leave for some days. She went into her room and closed the door, but he stepped out on a balcony and watched her covertly with the help of a mirror. She threw off her clothes and muttered some words, and a mist surrounded her, and then a bird—a kharchal—flew out of the mist and out of the window. He could hear, far away across the desert, a long, melodious call of such yearning that he, too, was moved by it. The bird flew toward the call and was lost from sight. Then the mist in the room dispersed and there was nothing there but her pile of clothing.

Some days later the bird flew back, again under cover of darkness, and returned to the form of a woman. As the King got to know his new wife, he began to wonder whether she was more bird than woman, but he kept his thoughts to himself, not wanting to tell her that he had spied on her. His other wives were not pleased with the King’s continued devotion and spread rumors that the new queen went off secretly to meet a lover. The King began to half-believe these lies even though he knew the truth. He became jealous of her time away. After all, what was to stop her from turning into a woman again, somewhere far across the desert, and lying with another man? One day he challenged her with the accusation of infidelity. If she wanted to prove her loyalty to him, she would have to stop these excursions.

“I think the time has come for me to leave you,” said the queen, sorrowing. “If you will put bars around me, I cannot stay.”

And she ran to her room, but the King was at her heels, so that when she turned into a kharchal and flew out, he managed to pull a long feather from a wing. When he did that, the bird shimmered in mid-air and turned back into a woman. The queen fell to her death from that balcony and the King was left holding the feather in his hand.

After that terrible day, ill-luck befell the fort city. There was a plague, followed by a storm, and then a fire. It is believed to this day that the queen cursed the place as she fell. It was abandoned not long after, and fell into ruin. For a long time after that the local villagers heard the kharchal call for days upon end, as though in mourning, and they say the cries had such longing in them as to make the hardest-hearted men weep like children. Now the kharchal don’t cry so often, or if they do, it is likely for themselves, for their own coming extinction. But who’s to hear their cry?

Lalita slipped out his car with a wave and goodbye somewhere on Mira Marg in Jaipur, as casually as though she hadn’t completely changed his life, burned away all he had been before. “When . . . uh, where will I see you next?” he yelled after her over the cacophony of traffic, terrified he would lose all contact with her. She turned back, her blue scarf loose about her neck, her hair long and loose about her shoulders. “I’ll come with the next sandstorm,” she told him, mocking him, and then she was gone.

Later he Googled her name, sent emails without much hope (“I don’t do much email, and Facebook, don’t even think about it!”) and went to ornithological meetings when he could, asking about her. She always seemed a step ahead of him—he had just missed her, she had just left. To make ends meet he wrote a book about modern Bolivian poetry and the enduring influence of Saenz. The book was reasonably well received; as soon as he could, Felipe took his earnings and himself to the hotel she had talked about. Here he felt an unreasonable hope, not just because she had told him she sometimes stopped at the restaurant on the way to Delhi, but because reminders of her were everywhere, through the latticework on the balcony windows that showed the kharchal amidst leaves and flowers, and the statuettes of the birds in the queen’s room. It was all very romantic and very expensive, and time and money were running out. In desperation he talked to Avinash. The errand boy Raju had recommended him. Avinash had seemed so sure he could bring Lalita here, the poet had come to believe him, despite his distrust of the man. And now there was this impossible storm. But she had said, hadn’t she, that she would come with the next storm?

She’s a modern young woman, and an ornithologist, his mind told him. And as he was thinking this, leaning on a balcony pillar, staring out into the sand-smudged night, he was startled considerably by footsteps.

“Sar! Sar!” It was the errand boy, Raju, a handkerchief around his face. “Sar, Avinash boss calls you, sar!”

Raju’s explanation in broken English didn’t make sense as Felipe followed him through dark corridors, but this much was clear: some others apart from him had been spared. Felipe found himself being led to an unfamiliar part of the hotel.

“What’s this? Where are you taking me?”

“Employee wing, Sir! King’s royal store-room in old days. New manager’s room is being re-done. Boss is there.”

The manager’s room was small and square. Work had been going on in it apparently for widening—a layer of the thick stone wall had been taken down on one side, and a pile of broken stone pieces lay in the middle of the floor, with tools arranged neatly in one corner. Avinash was standing in the middle of the room. He held a small flashlight in his hand.

There was someone else there, outside the pool of light cast by the flashlight. The person moved suddenly into the light. Felipe’s heart turned over.

“Lalita!”

He saw her smile in the inadequate light. She looked both strange and familiar.

“Hi Felipe. Long time.”

Raju had found her in the restaurant, the only person there who could speak, and move. She had been going from figure to figure, trying to see if there was anything she could do.

“Didn’t expect to meet like this!” she said. And then in Hindi: “Avinash, what is all this about? Why won’t you tell me?”

He was standing in the middle of the room, listening to the queen.

“Don’t disturb him, he’s thinking!” Raju said.

Felipe watched them. The young man with the flashlight, head cocked to one side, as though straining to hear something. The woman who had intrigued him so, standing some distance away, alert, practical, and yet, to him, extraordinary. The boy looking at Avinash—faith in his gaze. The pile of stones, the widened part of the room casting unearthly shadows.

Then he saw that even in the poor light and the dust haze, there was an opening—a gap where a stone should have been in the wall. He moved toward it just as Avinash did. He was startled by the smell of alcohol.

“The manager was a drunkard,” Avinash said. His voice, sudden and loud in the darkness, startled them. “He kept his stock of booze here, in a secret compartment. Must have been a loose stone in the original wall that opened into this little chamber. He smashed one of the bottles in his hurry when he was packing up. Didn’t think to look further in.”

“There’s something further in?” Lalita said. They were all crowding around Avinash now. He trained his flashlight into the small chamber, put his arm in.

“There’s something . . . . At the back.”

He drew it out. It was an ornate box, about a foot long and no more than two inches in depth. The silver had tarnished long ago, but the mother-of-pearl inlay work still glowed. It depicted a kharchal, each feather carved delicately as though with a hair strand, standing in a garden.

“This must have belonged to the queen,” Lalita said reverently.

Avinash opened the box.

In it, on a bed of white silk, lay a single large feather.

“This was the king’s storeroom,” Avinash said. He spoke in a monotone, as though repeating someone else’s words. “The king took the feather from the queen as she was in flight, and he kept it in this secret chamber.”

He paused, frowned.

“Give it to her? You’re sure?”

“Whom are you talking to?” Lalita said. Raju looked at Avinash with wide, scared eyes.

Mechanically Avinash held out the box to Lalita. She took the feather out breathlessly.

“Give me the flashlight for a moment. I want to see . . . ”

But something was happening. Lalita looked up in alarm; a mist was coming up around her. Felipe felt the change in the air, moved instinctively toward her, but he could not part the mist. Within it she was getting less and less visible—her arms, her clothes, made great sweeping motions. The alarm in her eyes changed swiftly to surprise. Then he couldn’t see her any more. He couldn’t move into the mist to reach her. His body appeared to have become heavy and sluggish, his arm going up and toward her with so much effort that it took his breath away. The next thing he knew: a large, heavy bird, awkwardly flapping its wings, was making its way out of the mist . . .out of the doorway, into the courtyard. The three of them ran after it. Silently it flew, with increasing strength and grace, making its way to the queen’s balcony. Felipe was hardly aware of their mad rush up the stairs. He arrived, panting, in the little museum with Avinash and Raju. There was the bird perched on the balcony’s stone railing.

It seemed to Felipe that in the jewel-like eye of the kharchal was the same humor, the same sadness he had known in Lalita’s eyes. Before he could speak there was a terrible cry from Avinash.

“Don’t leave me!”

Avinash looked all around him, like a blind man.

“Where are you? You can’t leave me after all this! Come back!”

The bird prepared to launch itself as Avinash’s tortured gaze finally settled on it. With a terrible shout he lunged toward the bird. But before his hands could close on the bird, Raju had moved, swift and efficient, and pinned Avinash’s arms to his side.

“Boss, boss, let her go!”

Felipe felt it, then, a presence barely tangible, like spider thread brushing across one’s face in the dark. A presence in the room, diminishing swiftly, a wave departing. No, not a departure, a dissipation. There was a feeling of sadness, of completion. The bird flew free. She flew low over the hotel ramparts, a blurry silhouette against the dusty old moon, and then she was gone.

“You stupid boy, what have you done!” Avinash thrashed in the boy’s grip. Felipe grabbed a flailing arm.

“Calm down!” Felipe said, holding his grief and wonder at bay with an enormous effort. “What is the matter with you?”

“She’s gone! The queen!” His sobs ceased. He looked around him, searching, unbelieving. “I thought she would go with the bird, but she . . . she’s dead. The bitch! To die after all this! To leave me empty! All empty!”

He sobbed out his story. I am Avinash, and I am nothing, with a mustard seed for a soul. She said she would unleash the power inside me, so I could fill up. She left me . . . they left me. Five years old on the railways station because they wanted to save my brothers and there wasn’t enough food. Through the sobs and the garbled words, Felipe saw in his mind’s eye the railway station, heard the noise, the terror of strangers, the vastness, the scale of the world. Saw that this had been the boy’s nightmare through all his life. Not the orphanage, not his education, nothing had taken away the pain . . . until she had come, the queen of Chattanpur, and filled the echoing emptiness inside him. Now she, too, was gone, gone to the death she had been awaiting for six hundred years.

With one long cry of agony Avinash flung aside the restraining arms of the others and leapt toward the balcony. Their rush toward him, their shouts, were all too late. In a moment he was over the edge, limbs working wildly, and then he dropped. They heard the impact on the stone floor of the courtyard far below.

There was nothing to be done for him. When they got to the body there was blood pooling under his head, and the stillness of death was on him. Raju muttered something under his breath, and straightening abruptly, began to run. Felipe followed him through the dusty passageways, through a door, half-falling down an unexpected spiral staircase into a room where a laptop screen glowed upon a table. The screen saver showed falling leaves, and birds flying. Raju looked about him wildly. He loosened one of the mosquito net’s support rods, and brought it down on the computer. Sparks flew; there was a burning smell in the air. The boy wouldn’t stop, until Felipe took the rod gently from him. Then Raju began to weep.

“I loved him, the fool!”

Abruptly a great roaring filled their ears: the storm. They were suddenly back in the flow of time. Above them, in the rooms and courtyards, people screamed. The poet and the errand boy looked at each other, ran up the staircase into the open. There was complete confusion: people running, tables turning over. The emergency klaxon was blaring and a booming voice attempting to direct traffic. Some lights went on as the backup generator began to run.

Felipe had never known such a night. The storm broke upon them in a fury. He and Raju worked to bring people to safety, to help close and tape windows, to fill up cracks in doorways. Their hands bled, their eyes stung. At last they huddled in Felipe’s room, wrapped in shawls and blankets, handkerchiefs around their faces, to wait it out. Felipe couldn’t stop coughing. Tears ran down his cheeks as he sipped water. Between coughs, he thought he heard the cries of the kharchal, the cry of the desert itself. His soul called back, again and again, soundlessly.

In the mid-day the storm subsided. They had lost two more people, and there were several injuries. Raju threw himself into the work, running for medical supplies, helping with the dead. But he would not touch Avinash.

Felipe’s throat was so sore by mid-day that he could not speak. He was coughing blood. He packed up and went to the van that was taking the injured to hospital. He whispered goodbye to Raju as the boy stood under the great archway of the entrance. “Be careful, Sar,” Raju said. “Queen’s gone to her death, but Boss . . . that old bastard, he didn’t die right. Came to me in a dream, begging for asylum. Maybe it was just a dream, but maybe when the death’s not right you can’t go away. Like the queen. In the dream I told him I was having none of it. Told him to get lost.” The boy’s eyes filled with tears. He said, inconsequentially, “He taught me how to read and write. On the computer.” Felipe put his arms around the boy, surprising him, and whispered goodbye. From the van he waved. Raju was dirty, disheveled, scraped and bleeding in half a dozen places, but he stood tall. I will remember you, Felipe thought: Raju, errand boy, goatherd, possible descendant of kings.

It was after a few days of tests that the bad news came. The doctors did not think Felipe would get his voice back. There was too much damage to the larynx. When they told him this, he had been doodling on a prescription pad in the waiting room. He stared at their sympathetic faces. All he could do was whisper. He got up, shouldered his bag, and staggered out. He went into the bright sun, the mad traffic of Jaipur, and began to walk swiftly toward nowhere. For a week or more, he lost himself in the city, in its markets and pink palaces, its gardens and residential areas. The days paraded before him like the faces of strangers.

Then one afternoon he found himself outside the railway station. Horns blaring, bells ringing, shouting voices, auto-rickshaws and taxis and cars everywhere, and a surge of humanity going this way and that. A small boy cannoned into him, looked up at the stranger with the long hair and burning eyes, and burst into tears. “Mamma!” he wailed. A terrible, irrational fear that was not his own gripped Felipe. But here was the mother, barreling through the crowds like a battleship, grabbing the child. She gave Felipe a backward look full of suspicion as the two vanished into the crowd.

The spell broke. Felipe rubbed his eyes.

“You’re here, aren’t you?” Felipe said into the air. “Avinash?” There was a sigh in his mind, a plea. Felipe didn’t respond. He walked around the corner of the road, raising dust with every step, weaving his way through the traffic, until he found himself in a small park with a fountain, where he bought an ice-cream cone from a man with a cart. He stood contemplating the water cascading into the pool of the fountain. Small children were throwing pebbles, watching the ripples.

So it is with our lives, Felipe thought. Each life like a ripple, spreading out, changing as it met other ripples, other lives. Some circles die away quickly, others expand into larger circles. A minor character in one story becomes the lead in another. We are all actors on shifting stages. We contain one another.

I should throw you out, like Raju did—you could have killed Lalita.

So what shall I do with you?

The presence in his mind was barely tangible, as though Avinash had cried himself to sleep. Who knew where he would go, what mischief he would cause, if Felipe rejected him? There must be a way to release you, to bring you the peace you need, he said after a while. There was no answer.

I suppose we are all haunted, he thought, with sudden insight. All humans carry with them unacknowledged ghosts. He thought of his mother. His uncle. The poet, Jaime Saenz, whom he had never met. Little Carmelita. Pedro. The crowded two-room tenement where he had grown up. He heard his uncle say: Hell, what’s one more?

Felipe sighed in resignation. Well, stay with me awhile then.

But you’ll have to behave yourself, he added.

There was a long, answering sigh in his mind like a child turning over in sleep.

He pushed his hands into his pockets, ready to leave the park, when he found the prescription pad from the hospital. His doodles were all drawings of kharchal. He thought he heard again that reverberating cry.

At once he knew what he had to do. He began running through the streets toward the bus-station. He had to get on the next bus to Jaisalmer, get out there in the open desert, find Lalita. He would be whisperer, interpreter between the kharchal and the human race. She held the key, the secret, the question for which his life was the answer. As for the boy Avinash, his story was as yet incomplete. Perhaps it was only in the largeness, the emptiness of the desert that the abandoned child would find his courage, his peace. Felipe found his way from the ticket line to the bus. “I’m taking you home,” he said to Avinash in his mind, not realizing he had whispered aloud. He didn’t know why he’d said that, but it felt right. The old man next to him looked at him in surprise. Felipe whispered, “Do you hear it? Do you hear it too? The cry of the kharchal? Cry for the kharchal, my brother.” He remembered abruptly the night in Madrid, the sirocco howling outside, the stirring within him, an animal waking from sleep, stretching, telling him he was not merely human. He remembered his fright at that discovery, his pushing it away into oblivion. Might as well put a lid on a sandstorm. Now he felt as though some barrier within him was dissolving, something was freeing itself. Without warning, words began to swirl in his mind. Sitting in the bus he found himself afraid they would disappear if he didn’t set them down now. He pulled out the prescription pad, found a pen, and began to write.

About the Author

Vandana Singh was born and raised in New Delhi, India. She acquired a passion for inventing her own myths around the age of eleven, and obtained a Ph.D. in theoretical particle physics in her twenties. She now teaches physics at a small state university near Boston, and obsesses over everything from human nature to climate change to creative pedagogies. Her short stories have appeared most recently in The Other Half of the Sky (ed. Athena Andreadis) and Solaris Rising 2 (ed. Ian Whates), and several have been reprinted in best-of-year anthologies. Of this story she states: “I am indebted to the Bolivian writer and critic Miguel Esquirol (Portfolio, http://sffportal.net/author/mesquirol/) for invaluable feedback as well as information about Bolivia. Any errors or omissions are my sole responsibility.”

Shepherds

Greg Kurzawa

The lioness ambushed Abel’s flock as he herded them down from the high pastures. Dropping soundlessly from a rocky ledge along the sheep path, she landed on a lamb not six months old. The flock scattered. Turning to confront Abel, the beast rose to her hind legs and opened her claws. Her ears lie flat, her tail thrashed. From her mouth hung the lamb, scrawny legs kicking.

The first swing of Abel’s heavy crook caught the lioness low on a hind leg. She dropped back down to her forelegs to keep from toppling, her crippled limb drawn tightly up. A growl rose in her throat, but she did not release the lamb. Abel meant his second blow for her skull, but she caught the shaft of his crook with her clawed right hand. Abel pulled, and the lioness pulled back, nearly dragging him off his feet. He shoved the crook toward her, then pulled again as she rebalanced, bringing her stumbling forward. When she dropped the crook to catch herself, Abel thrust, penetrating her low in the gut. She scrabbled for purchase on the rocky path as he drove her back, finally pinning her to the rocks by the meat of her own flank.

At last she bared her fangs to shriek, and the lamb fell in an awkward heap.

With his free hand, Abel slipped the elk-bone cudgel from his belt just as the lioness broke the shaft of the crook with one downswing of her heavy arm. He stepped in to interrupt her lunge, and one blow from the cudgel caved the side of her skull. She faltered, head dragging, but too full of hate to die so suddenly.

She shrieked again when Abel seized a ragged ear and twisted her head to the side, exposing her ruined face. Her slitted yellow eyes bulged at his raised cudgel. She lifted an arm as though to fend him off, and howled, “No!”

Abel’s first blow silenced her; his second finished it.

Discarding the broken crook, Abel stood over the dead lioness and the wreck of her victim. The lamb would die—there was no helping that. He knelt to smooth the bloodied fleece, and to offer what comfort he could. By the time the lamb died, the bravest of his rams had begun a hesitant return. Weary already, Abel drew his knife and pulled the lioness closer to him by her scruff. Where there was one, there were many; rebuke was necessary, lest they think him weak.

The sheep kept their distance while Abel worked. He sliced the tongue from her mouth and the ears from her head. He removed liver, heart, and hands. These things he scattered across the path, a warning to the other abominations on the mountain that this shepherd was not too old yet to defend his flock.

When Abel coughed—which was often, and for exhausting stretches—blood laced his sputum. He coughed more than usual that night by his fire in the cedar grove, and spat more blood than the day before. Between fits, he drank steaming broth from a wooden bowl.

There were days, Abel remembered, when he would not have lost the lamb to the lioness, or to any other aberration. Days when no beast could take his crook from him. In those days, his first blow killed.

These days, he couldn’t still the shaking in his hands.

Abel considered those hands, a text of overlapping scars. Testament to his life on the mountain. He looked to the darkening heavens, where once he had seen infinite stars. Only the brightest shone for him now—no fault of theirs. He thought of the lioness he had killed, and of the other beasts with which he shared the mountains. They were braver than they had once been, and every season more capable.

“You’re an old man,” Abel said to his fire. “You can’t stay here anymore.”

And so it was that Abel decided to quit the mountain, and to go before the snows came. He did not think he would see another spring. He knew his time was on him, and had no illusions of prolonging his life. He only wanted to find a place where he would not have to suffer being devoured by beasts.

Emptying his bowl into the fire, Abel reflected on the fact that he’d not seen another of his kind in a long while. He wondered if there would be anyone left to welcome him back.

Abel took his time fashioning a new crook from a cedar limb. During that time, he decided to descend eastward. It wasn’t that he hoped to find any of the old roads that crossed those lands, or that he thought the cities—unlike those on the western plains—might still be populated. He knew only that he preferred to travel toward the rising sun, rather than away from it. The next morning he rolled his few possessions into a sheepskin blanket, which he secured across his back. Down from the high pastures and into the foothills he herded the flock, where they wandered for days. Every morning he collected rotten wood from rivulets and gullies, and burned it in the evenings. With his pillar of smoke roiling into the blue-black void, he leaned on his crook to watch the desolate plain. As night came, he imagined the clustered towers and sweeping bridges of ancient and abandoned cities far in the distance.

“Hello,” he said to the fire, but his voice felt atrophied. He hawked and spat. “Hello,” he tried again. “My name is Abel. This is my flock.” The words were clumsy on his tongue. “They are everything I own. They can be yours. If only you let me die in your company.”

More practice was needed, he felt, if he was to sound human.

All night he conversed with the fire.

Abel slaughtered a lamb the next morning, and made a stew over his guttering fire.

The next day a bearded stranger came up from the plains, making no effort to conceal himself. Leaning on his crook beside his smoking fire, Abel watched him pick his way barefooted up the rocky slope in plain view. At a respectful distance, the stranger stopped to lean on a branch he’d been using as a walking stick. From there, he squinted up toward Abel and called, “Where from?”

Abel touched his chest. “My name is Abel.” He swept an arm to indicate the three dozen sheep grazing among the boulders of the slope. “This is my flock.”

The stranger contemplated the placid sheep. “And where did you come from, Abel? With your flock.”

“Through the mountains.”

The stranger shifted his squint up the slope—expecting more, Abel knew. But everything he’d planned to say before, now seemed ridiculous.

“We saw your smoke,” the stranger prompted.

“I didn’t want to descend without permission.”

“You plan to stay?”

Abel looked to the pot over his fire, then back. “Are you hungry?”

Not long later, Abel had prepared flatbread on a rock, and was serving stew into shallow wooden bowls. He passed the first to the stranger, who called himself Levi. Accepting the bowl, Levi sniffed the contents before selecting a chunk of meat with finger and thumb. “How long have you been up there?” Levi asked before pushing the meat through his beard.

“There were roads when I last came down,” Abel said.

“There are still roads,” Levi said. He nodded south. “Some of the widest ones near the ruins aren’t overgrown yet.”

Abel took his bowl and a round of flatbread, then crouched where he could watch Levi. They ate in silence for a little while, then Levi asked, “Are there still people on the other side of the range?”

“Hardly.” Abel gestured with his bowl at the emptiness of the plains. “Like this. There are some in the mountains, but they’re not right in the head.”

“Used to be, ten—fifteen years ago, there were settlements all up and down these foothills,” Levi said. “People came out of the plains, and some—” he aimed his chin at Abel, “like you, through the mountains. They called the biggest settlement Bastion. Built it up nice, too.” He snorted, perhaps at the futility of building, or that of naming. “It’s all rubble now.”

Abel drank from his bowl, then wiped a sleeve across his mouth. “How many of you are left?”

“About eighty. Less every year.”

“No one comes out of the city?”

“The ruins? Nothing comes out of the ruins. Not since long before I was made. You still find scavengers ranging about. They like the cities, but they’re as corrupt as the ones up in the mountains. Every one of them named Adam.”

Abel nodded toward the plains. “What about out there?”

“Caravans used to come up the old roads, but we haven’t seen one in a decade. If there’s anyone still out there, they don’t bother with us anymore.”

Abel tore a chunk of flatbread to mop the dregs of his stew. When he looked up, Levi was watching him openly. “Are you human?”

Abel lowered his bowl.

“I’m sorry,” Levi said. “You look it. It’s just . . . ” he shrugged.

“I’m dying,” Abel said, surprising himself with the sudden confession.

As though to hide embarrassment, Levi looked to the plains. “You want the nunnery, then,” he said. “They’ve got an old sister down there. They say she’s over three hundred.”

“Who says?”

“The sisters. Everyone.”

“You’ve seen her?”

“No, but the sisters have taken to calling her Eve. If she lasts another fifty years I might start to believe it.” He dipped bread into bowl and ate. “That’s where all the women are—the nunnery. They come out, some of them—when they’re ready. But mostly they wait for us to come to them.” He looked at Abel with a measuring stare. “I can take you there. Tomorrow, if you want.”

Abel started to reply, but was interrupted by a fit of coughing. His hand was bloodied when it subsided, and he wiped it in the grass. “Today?” he asked. “You can chose any one of my flock to keep: ram, ewe, or lamb.”

Levi emptied his bowl and brushed his hands. “Or today.”

For the remainder of that day they traversed the foothills on winding game trails and crooked paths. It wasn’t until the moon rose swollen and yellow that Levi halted to direct Abel’s attention into the plains. Looking down Levi’s extended arm into the middle distance, Abel saw what at first seemed a single squat building wrapped loosely around a central courtyard. Squinting to clarify his vision, he discovered that it was not one building, but a compound of various irregular structures connected by enclosed breezeways, rough additions, and mismatched roofs.

“The nunnery,” Levi said. He claimed his lamb, and would go no closer.

The convent’s well was set in damp flagstones at the center of the courtyard, and it was there that Abel waited the night. With his back to the well and his crook across his thighs, he sat facing the doors and slept not at all. And when the doors of the convent swung open with the rising sun, Abel pushed to his feet with the help of his crook to be noticed by the austere sister who emerged. Standing at the threshold, feet bare beneath her habit, she seemed unsurprised to observe her courtyard occupied by a flock of milling sheep. Striding across the courtyard, she halted a few paces from Abel, hands deep in her sleeves.

“These animals are yours,” she said, less a question than an accusation.

“It’s a good flock,” Abel said. “They’re all of them pure.”

Her eyes passed over the sheep, and when her blunt gaze returned to Abel, she asked, “What do you want, shepherd?”

“They’re a gift,” Abel said. “For you. For the convent.”

The sister peered at him more intently. “And is the shepherd pure like his flock?”

“I am, Sister.”

“So you say.” She extended an impatient hand.

When Abel offered his own hands to her, palms up, she seized them and pulled them closer to her. Her examination was quick and practiced. After she had studied his palms, she turned his hands over to inspect the nails, then dropped them. “Open your mouth,” she commanded.

Abel obeyed, tilting back his head.

She was a long time counting his teeth.

“Shall I undress, Sister?”

“Not yet,” she answered curtly. Taking his jaw in hand, she turned his face to either side, then peered into his eyes as though something were to be found there. With what seemed a begrudging satisfaction, she released him and started back toward the convent. “Follow me,” she said over a shoulder. “Sister Eve will want to see you.”

Watching the sister walk away, Abel’s resolve faltered, and he found that he wished only to stay with his flock in the courtyard next to the well, where it was safe. As the sister mounted the steps to the convent doors, she turned to see him unmoving.

Turning, she called, “She won’t come to you. Not out here. Not among your animals.”

When Abel still didn’t move, the sister placed one hand on the banister and took one step back down. Some of her abruptness faded, and she seemed more forgiving, or at least kinder. “You came here freely,” she reminded him. “Yes?”

“Yes, Sister.”

“And you may leave freely. Now—or at any time.”

Though uncertain of that, Abel crossed the yard and started up the stairs. Dying among the sisters was better than what would become of him if he went back to the mountains. As he passed the sister, she stopped him with a hand on his arm, and tapped his crook with light fingers. “You may leave this outside.”

The convent was a place of well-swept spaces and dark corridors. Following the sister’s swishing habit, Abel found himself blinded in turn by light and darkness as they passed through bands of sunlight falling through thin windows. He knew there were other women; he heard muted laughter through closed doors, and spotted them clustered at the ends of corridors. He didn’t mean to stare, but he’d seen so few in his life.

The sister abandoned him in a room partitioned by tattered linens draped from the ceiling. Peeking behind them, Abel found only a second door, narrower than the one he had passed through. On his side of the room was one window facing the eastern plains. Through this opening he fit an arm and part of his shoulder, but could go no farther. Should things go wrong, it would offer no egress. When the second door opened, Abel retracted his arm and turned to see the partitions breathing in a draft.

“You are the one who brought animals to my home,” said a tired feminine voice.

“A gift,” Abel said. “All of them are pure.”

“A gift?” Slow currents dragged the sheets as the unseen speaker moved behind them. “You think there is something here to be bargained for, that you bring gifts?”

“No, Sister. I just . . . they’ll need care when I’m gone.”

“Then you should have left them in the settlement. We have our own flocks to tend. And pure or not, we keep our beasts outside the walls.”

“Forgive me,” Abel stammered. “I saw no animals. I thought—” He stopped himself, suddenly sure that nothing he thought would matter to the sisters, certainly not this one. He frowned toward the narrow window.

“Where did you come from, shepherd? Not from the settlement. I know all the men from the settlement.”

“Through the mountains, Sister.”

“Ah,” she breathed. “The mountains. One must be cautious of things which come from the mountains. And where are you going, shepherd, that you would abandon your flock to a convent of sisters?”

Abel hesitated. It might not be too late to leave.

“‘Even the fool seems wise when he shuts his mouth,’” the sister said. “Is that not so, shepherd? You would do well to remember that we already know why you came. I only want to hear you say it.”

“I’m sick,” Abel told her. “Dying.”

The sister’s cruel laughter sent ripples through the sheeting. “A waste of words, to tell me that,” she said. “Sick is the only kind of man there is. And dying the only kind that comes here. Trust me, shepherd, we smell it on you. We smelled you in the hills, and we smelled you last night by our well. Even over the stink of your animals, we smelled you. But sickness is your condition, shepherd. Not your desire. Why are you here?”

Abel remembered the lioness on the mountain, her hands so nearly like his. “There are many abominations in the mountains, Sister. I would not add to their numbers.”

The curtains huffed outward in agitation. “Men,” the sister scoffed. “You only think you know what you want. When your time comes your minds fail you, as well as your bodies. You grow restless.” She drew a sudden, luxurious breath. “You reek. But we women . . . don’t you remember what we become, shepherd, when our time is on us?”

“No, Sister. I—”

“We get hungry.”

A vague, swollen shape pressed to the fabric, rippling upwards, creating an impression entirely wrong for one frail sister. It might only have been a draft. “You don’t know hunger like this,” she said. “You don’t know hunger like mine.”

Too afraid to turn his back on the partition, Abel backed away. For the first time since entering the convent he cursed himself for leaving his crook outside, though he didn’t believe it would be of any use now.

But as rapidly as she had risen up, the sister subsided. “No,” she declared in a voice deeper than it had been before. “I am only human . . . like you. Subject to the desires of the flesh. But I have not yet been tempted enough by any man to stand before me. Is this why you came, shepherd? To tempt me?”

The idea shocked Abel. “No, Sister. Never.”

“How many years have you lived?”

“I don’t remember.”

“No,” she agreed. “You would not be here if you did.”

The sister then pulled a slow, savoring breath. “You’re afraid,” she said.

“Afraid of you, Sister,” Abel admitted. “And afraid to die.”

“All men are afraid to die,” the sister said, not unkindly. “Which is why you all seek us out, we who move our race toward its true home. We whose burden it is to ensure the purity of our generations. We who shape the final two who will stand before the god on the last day, not as a man and woman, but as Man and Woman. As vessels to carry us all to Paradise in the marrow of their bones. As long as they are not found wanting—as long as they are pure.”

“I know the stories of Paradise,” Abel said. “But you must forgive me, Sister—I believe none of them.”

“Yet here you stand. In a convent.”

“I was wrong to come. If you allow it, I’ll go.”

“Allow it?” the sister said. “Tell me, shepherd: when the wolf falls upon your flock, do you not rise up to fight, whatever the cost?”

“I do, Sister,” Abel answered.

“And when a lamb strays, do you not go forth and bring it back?”

“I do, Sister.”

There was silence for a little while, and when the sister spoke next, her voice had turned weary. “Where would you go, if not here?” she asked. “Back to the mountains? To the abominations waiting to devour you?”

Abel looked to the thin window. “My flock—”

“Will be cared for,” the sister told him. “For I, too, am a shepherd.”

Abel heard the thin door on the Sister’s side of the partition open. “You fear needlessly,” she said in parting. “This is not a place of death, but of consummation. Fortunately for you, there is one here who will have you. To her you will cleave, and in her you will be sheltered. She is the one who will show you what you’ve come so far seeking, but are too afraid to ask for.”

Abel was led to another empty room, where the sister to whom he had been given was already waiting. Like the rest of them, she wore a plain brown habit, but on her gaunt frame it hung as though on a rack of bones. Her hood was pushed back to reveal a shaved scalp and sallow complexion. One hand covering her mouth, the famished sister faced him eagerly.

“You’re the shepherd,” she said through skeletal fingers.

But it was the tapestry on the wall that captured Abel’s attention. Looking past her, he marveled at creatures large and small, things he’d never imagined. Here was all of Paradise in faded thread. And at its center, the hub around which all else revolved: a man and a woman. He stepped closer, leaning forward to see such tiny figures and what surrounded them.

Following his eyes, the sister touched the weave. “Children,” she said.

Abel pulled back, startled to realize how near to her he had come. Moving closer, she slipped an arm possessively through his, and Abel felt a terrible heat burning through her habit. Lightly, she touched the two figures at the center of the tapestry, who stood beside a tree from which vines draped to the ground. “Adam was the first father,” she explained. “And Eve the first mother.” Her fingers shifted to the smaller images around them. “They made little ones. Children. And from those children—” she waved her hand in the air, “all of this. From two we came; to two we shall return.”

Abel was conscious of her eyes on him as he glanced down. Now that her hand was away from her mouth, she kept her lips pressed tightly together. Clutching his arm, she pulled his attention to another scene, showing him a child emerging from a bloated and suffering woman. “You see?” she said. “We were once capable of such things. Just like the animals. Just like your sheep.”

Abel averted his eyes, disgusted. “Humans are not animals.”

“No?”

“There are no children,” Abel said. “There never were.”

“Never? Then how did we get here?”

“Not like this.”

The sister smiled at the corners of her mouth. “If you could make a child, what name would you give it?”

“I can’t make a child,” Abel said.

“But if we could?”

“Adam,” Abel answered. “As my father named me.”

“A hopeful name,” the sister said with approval.

“He would change it. As I did.”

Without releasing her hold on his arm, the sister turned toward him, and her hands slid down his arm. Lifting his hand in both of hers, she pressed her cheek into his palm. Her skin felt taut and feverish. Eyes closed, she turned her face into his palm.

Abel jerked his hand back when the sister bit him. Angrily, he shoved her away. He raised a hand to strike her—and would have—but that she cowered, face hidden and fingers once more covering her mouth. Abel looked at his hand. The double row of punctures left by her teeth on the heel of his palm were very small, and perfectly spaced.

Abel found his crook exactly where he had left it beside the door, and seized it with relief. Rushing down the steps, he stumbled at the last and spilled into the courtyard. Even as he pushed up, he was whistling quick and sharp for his flock. The sheep hurried over themselves in their haste to follow their shepherd from the convent.

The poison took hold beside a shallow creekbed in the long light of evening. Struggling for every breath, Abel stopped to stare into the setting sun, unable to go on. His mouth had gone dry, and his lips cracked with fever. His flock milled round him stupidly, bleating as he shivered. When his crook slipped from numb fingers, he hadn’t the strength to retrieve it. Not long later he sat heavily, slumped forward. Because they were there in his lap, he stared at his trembling hands—at the purple bruise from which the sister’s poison spread.

He had enough strength to lift his head when she approached from the west, her habit rustling through the long grass. She knelt in front of him to measure his condition, and he offered no resistance when she took his shoulders and pushed him gently to his back. And there were the brightest of the stars, dim and quivering. He only wished he could see more of them. Leaning over him, the sister felt his forehead and caressed his cheek. She smiled for him, showing many sharp teeth.

“I’m not mad that you ran,” she comforted him. “Men always run.”

He wanted to speak, but she sealed his lips with a hot finger.

She removed his clothes and folded them into a neat pile. She had brought a skin of water with her, and a rag, and used these to wash his body with great care. Her hands were kind, and she left no part of him unclean. This task complete, she produced two soft cords and bound him at the knees and ankles. Then she shrugged out of her habit, revealing a flushed and emaciated frame. She knelt by his feet and clasped them in her hands, head lowered as though to kiss his soles.

“You mustn’t struggle,” she instructed him. “You’ll only hurt us.”

But he did, and his resistance caused them both suffering. At his waist she found it necessary to crack his wrists to keep him from injuring her. Bit by bit, she forced him into herself with a starved determination. It took a long time, and he begged only a little at the last, just before his strength failed him.

When it was done, she slept in the crushed grass there beside the creek.

After two days beneath the open sky her distended skin began to harden. Bones bowed and flexed; organs surrendered their shape. Waking, she dragged herself toward softer ground to dig herself into a shallow pit with hands that no longer felt like her own. She pried rocks from the clay, and stacked them over her swollen body. Their weight pressed her down, and the chill mud sapped her warmth. Her thoughts slowed, and she gave them up readily to dissolve into the bloated shell of her old shape. There, she joined the new life already stirring in the muck.

Naked and alone, Adam shouted into the darkness at the edge of the prairie. At first, he was frightened by the unfamiliarity of his own voice. As a result, his noises were timid. But there was strength in his chest, and in his back and thighs; and when it woke to him he was reassured. Arms thrown open to the vivid stars, he celebrated the fact of himself with triumphant whoops and wordless cries.

When he had shouted his throat raw, he returned to stand over the shallow grave from which he had risen. At the bottom lay the offal of his birthing: the desiccated husk that had been his mother, the partially digested bones of his father. Looking on these things, he remembered consuming, and being consumed. He remembered the digging of the grave, and how hard it had been to breathe under so many rocks.

“I will never forget,” he swore to the grave.

Then he wondered if his father had once sworn the same.

“I am not my father,” young Adam declared.

By moonlight he bathed in the creek, marveling at the unblemished perfection of his skin. His hands were broad and strong, uncalloused from years of wielding the shepherd’s crook. He found the clothing his mother had folded and laid aside: the shepherd’s cassock, as well as her own habit. He made a fire and wondered whether he would keep the name his father had wanted for him—and almost immediately decided he would. It was, he remembered saying, a hopeful name—better for a son than for a father. When that was decided, he wondered where he would go. He would not return to the mountains from which he had come, nor to the convent for his sisters to fawn over. His way lie to the east, into the plains. He wanted the rising sun in his face.

He slept close to the fire that night, his mother’s habit his only covering. In the morning, he kicked dust over the ashes and filled his grave with rocks. Dressed in his father’s cassock, he took up the shepherd’s crook and struck east. He did not know where he would go, or what he would find there, having resolved only to keep the convent forever behind him. He called for his sheep as he went. They were out there somewhere—not terribly far. They would be glad to see him, he suspected. They would know him.

About the Author

Greg Kurzawa studied theology without purpose before being handed a career in information technology. He and his incredible wife are busy building a happy family. Some people mistake him for Gage Kurricke, with whom he co-authored Gideon’s Wall.

Found

Alex Dally MacFarlane

Star Anise

Star anise was the contents of one drawer in my spice cabinet: was worth one good energy cell—or three not-so-good ones, or six bad ones, or eight that provided barely any power at all.

I had never traded for just one energy cell. None remained.

At this last asteroid, I had not traded for any. I had found its interior spaces open and airless, blast-marked, most of its equipment broken or gone, debris—shards of metal, rock, old synth materials, blackened bits of bone—still lodged in some deep crannies. In such a small asteroid, a sudden equipment failure could be unsurvivable. I knew this.

It shook me to see it true, after the changes and losses and accidents we had adapted to.

As I confirmed my trajectory and fired my small thrusters two times, once to get clear from the asteroid and once to push me to the next asteroid—just a bright dot in the distance, lost among the stars like another granule of salt—I couldn’t stop myself thinking: What if Aagot had lived there?

Bay

I placed a bay leaf on my tongue.

I maneuvered my craft carefully into the landing crater: a process as natural, as easy as an asteroid’s spin. Still, I sighed with relief when my craft hooked into place. It wouldn’t survive a crash.

After triple-checking the integrity of my suit, I drifted out onto the asteroid’s surface with my spice cabinet.

Cut into another part of the asteroid was a landing bay built for spacecraft far bigger than mine: craft that would have arrived to collect platinum and iron and enough liquid hydrogen to fuel their onward journeys. A story. A dream of the past. If I could land in the landing bay, I wouldn’t have to go outside for the meters it took to reach the small airlock—outside, where the stars waited like teeth for my suit to fail—but its use required too much energy.

When the people from Cai Nu arrived, would they be welcomed into the asteroids’ landing bays?

I winced. I wanted to think of something else.

I pressed the bay leaf to the roof of my mouth.

The people of this asteroid had barely opened their mouths before the words ‘Cai Nu’ fell out. They gathered around me in the small communal room, wanting my words even more than my spices. “I have cardamom,” I said. “We managed to get it growing again.” And a few people sighed longingly, before one of them asked what people were saying privately, face-to-face—instead of on the inter-asteroid comms—about the impending arrival of the Cai Nu people. Almost everyone who lived in the asteroid was holding onto the poles running along the room’s rock walls. I counted over twenty people. Though I recognized many of the faces, not one was Aagot’s. “I don’t know much more than what’s on the comms,” I said, reluctant to admit that I rarely listened to the messages my craft picked up between the asteroids. I knew that the Cai Nu people would arrive in less than a year. I knew that our lives in the asteroids would end.

The questions continued to come.

Eventually they realized that I could tell them nothing. Disappointed, a few people drifted away. Others spoke: explaining how many energy cells they could give me, asking what spices that was worth.

“What would you like?” I asked, touching the gray drawers of my cabinet. Etched into the iron were the names of the spices: star anise, cardamom pods, cloves, chilies, cinnamon bark, peppercorns, fennel seeds, coriander seeds, dried coriander leaves, dried sage leaves, juniper berries, lemongrass, dried makrut leaves, cumin seeds, dried mint leaves, dried bay leaves, sprigs of thyme and rosemary, flakes of galangal, flakes of turmeric. Flavor. Some people said that word like a plea at a shrine. Spices made our food—synthetic, completely nourishing, completely tasteless—alive, made it something we wanted to share with each other. Chewing a cardamom pod brought tears to people’s eyes. A sage leaf provoked joyous laughter.

Nouf Kassem, who did most of this asteroid’s trade, began to point to drawers. I opened them one by one, withdrawing pouches. The items of our trade hung in the air between us. When I had given ten bad energy cells’ worth, Nouf didn’t release the handle of her box.

“You trade as if you’ll be able to reach all the asteroids before the Cai Nu people arrive,” she said. “As if you’ve got a whole year. I hear that on Cai Nu the strips of cinnamon are as tall as the tallest woman, that they grow parsley and rose and sumac. I hear there are mounds of spices in powders. Are your family saving these spices for then?”

Silence surrounded us, sharp as space.

I wanted to say: What makes you think everyone’s leaving the asteroids?

I wanted to say: Why?

I hadn’t thought of trading all our stock, I hadn’t thought of sending a message to my mothers asking whether I should make more generous offers. I hadn’t—

“Just a few more pouches of cumin and mint,” Nouf said.

I gave them to her.

In past visits, I had spent time with the people of the asteroid. I had invented stories with them. I had kissed a man called Ammar, laughed when he shrieked with joy at the bay leaf on my tongue—I had, years ago, chosen a spice per asteroid and placed that same spice on my tongue at every visit—and then I had kissed him again, shared the flavor between us. I had listened to the elders of the asteroid and played with the children and eaten turmeric-soaked food. How bright! How bitter!

How soon until these memories would not be renewed.

I slipped away, outside, into my craft and the space between the asteroids. The bay leaf’s taste lingered. We would not.

Juniper Berries

The first story Aagot gave me, with juniper berries crushed on our tongues, was one created by Aagot as a child. I couldn’t linger on that asteroid. I met Aagot there—one conversation on my trade visit, three hours of stories more precious than fuel cells.

Aagot told me of a child who needed a name: a new name, not the birth-name that lingered at their ears like the whine of a faulty air processor, as ill-fitting as ‘girl,’ as ‘boy.’

I remembered Aagot’s voice, saying: When the spice trader comes, they bring flavors and news and new people from other asteroids. But there’s one thing they don’t bring: new names. There’s no drawer in the spice trader’s cabinet for that. For one child, this meant never finding one that fit. But the spice trader in the story—like spice traders in many stories—took the child as an apprentice between the asteroids and there the child found their name: in the herb they most loved handling, crushing, coating their fingers with its scent. Thyme.

I remembered Aagot’s voice, full of longing like a drawer of thyme.

I left.

Thyme

I finally realized, two years later, chewing thyme on an outlying asteroid where six people stubbornly survived, that I was like Thyme: ill-suited to ‘boy’ or ‘girl.’

Juniper Berries

When I returned to the juniper berry asteroid—when I realized how much I needed to speak to Aagot again—Aagot had left, bought passage a year after my visit on one of the rare other craft that still functioned. There were only nineteen asteroids—eighteen, now, with the disaster in the star anise asteroid—but I didn’t visit every one annually, I didn’t undertake every one of my family’s trade journeys, I didn’t see Aagot again.

I retold Aagot’s story to myself between the asteroids.

Cinnamon

One of the earliest messages sent to us by the Cai Nu people had explained our abandonment: Two hundred years ago we were too ambitious. We overextended ourselves. We should have focused on our settlements on Cai Nu, but we wanted the asteroids, we wanted the other habitable planets and moons of this solar system. So we established settlements in the Liu Yang asteroid family. Then, almost immediately, a health crisis struck and led to widespread social upheaval, in which much was lost, including knowledge of your continued survival. Now that we have recovered and grown our population, and rediscovered you, we can’t leave you living in such poor conditions.

Cumin

I approached the next asteroid on my trade journey. Plans traveled faster: communications sent between the asteroids. Questions. Debates. My name was mentioned often. “Lo Yiying can help bring people here.” “What’s the maximum amount of passengers and cargo that Lo Yiying’s craft carries?” “Lo Yiying, how long until you reach Iskander? Can you collect us all?” “Aside from Lo Yiying, who can fly a craft to bring people to the Lo family’s asteroid?”

I heard, for the first time, a firm date for the Cai Nu people’s arrival: twenty-two weeks.

I would not have my spacecraft, I would not fly spices between the asteroids, I would not drift through the corridors of asteroids with my cabinet behind me and the taste of bay or cumin or thyme in my mouth.

Everyone would gather at my family’s asteroid. A message was sent to the Cai Nu craft, telling them the asteroid’s current co-ordinates so they could track it and adjust their approach accordingly. They confirmed its convenience for their current trajectory and fuel supplies.

My purpose changed: to reach the next asteroid—Iskander, cumin—and collect its inhabitants and turn, like a crooked stem, back to my family’s asteroid. Sissel Haugli, who lived on the outermost asteroid at this end of the group, had already begun her journey towards the center, gathering the families I would not reach. Two people at other points in the asteroid group were also underway.

Trade was no longer important. My cabinet’s drawers would remain unopened.

Still I journeyed, the next asteroid gradually growing from a mote to a seed—comm-conversations not once suggesting that anyone would remain behind after the Cai Nu people arrived, very few people discussing the difficulties we would face on Cai Nu—and then, the asteroid a spinning, dark rock, I concentrated on landing.

The landing bay door slowly opened. I carefully maneuvered my shuttle into the bay, where multiple lights shone: a brightness I rarely saw in any asteroid. The bay door closed. The unit on one wall restored air.

It was unusual, to arrive like this.

I instinctively went to my spice cabinet and picked up its harness.

I entered the asteroid without it, feeling not myself—though people greeted me, entering the landing bay in family-clusters, towing their possessions, saying “Lo Yiying!” and “Thank you for coming here!” as if I brought spices and news. “Do you think you’ll be able to fit all of these boxes on your shuttle?” asked Inas Kassem, who had done most of the talking for this asteroid. “We’ve packed only important things: all of our fuel cells, the racks of moss so we can help keep your shuttle’s air fresh. We’ve got food and water tanks. And some small things. Qurans, small shrine statues, old family journals, a few personal ornaments.”

No one else came through the small door from the asteroid. Everyone hung in front of me, looking at me, at my shuttle, at the walls—the last part of their home they would see.

No Aagot.

“Shall we begin loading?” asked Inas.

“Yes.”

I had crunched cumin seeds between my teeth before leaving my shuttle. The taste faded as we worked: arranging boxes in the cargo area of my shuttle, setting up the moss racks, deciding how people would sleep. Then we were ready. No one spoke as I closed my shuttle’s door, as Inas showed me what signal to send to open the landing bay door. It creaked, in the moment before sound was lost. Beyond, the stars gleamed—and the ones that were not stars: asteroids, Cai Nu’s planet, Cai Nu itself, smaller than a fragment of peppercorn. I didn’t know what to say. Nor did anyone. So I began our journey.

Several people started to cry. Others talked, others remained silent, others sang: a braid of emotions in three languages, passed from mouth to mouth, lasting hours.

I cooked.

From the spice cabinet, secured beside my chair, I took cumin seeds and sprigs of thyme and peppercorns and cardamom pods and makrut leaves and lemongrass stalks and galangal. I cooked pot after pot, sometimes mixing spices, sometimes using just one, and passed carved chunks of the finished meal around the cargo area of my shuttle, where the people of the cumin asteroid had tethered themselves to the walls and their boxes.

On Cai Nu we would eat food we only knew from stories: rice, noodles, dumplings, bread, meat, vegetables, sweets. Spices wouldn’t be the only flavors.

When people started discussing this, I retreated to my seat.

Two women followed. I knew Ma Wanlu, Inas’ daughter. The other was introduced as her wife, Bilge Yılmaz, who wanted to see Cai Nu.

“It’s nothing,” I said. “A small dot.”

“Our home,” Bilge murmured, rapt at the sight: as if I’d offered her a handful of cumin seeds.

I looked away.

“What troubles you?” Ma Wanlu asked.

“We won’t be able to go outside. We won’t be able to work. We’ll die in that place they’re building for us, forgotten by our children, useless. Who will we be?”

Ma Wanlu frowned. “Well, what are we now?”

“We work—your family works on the fuel cells.”

“Work!” Ma Wanlu almost choked on the word. “Work. Oh, we work. We desperately work to get a little more life from our dwindling resources.”

“We are all trapped in our asteroids,” Bilge said, “working every day to ensure our habitat is still intact, that our oxygen-exchange mosses aren’t dying, that our fuel cells haven’t stopped. When my cousin’s pregnancy went wrong, what could we do? When my father got cancer, what could we do? Who will we be on Cai Nu? Not dying like this.” Bilge’s voice shook; she looked out of my craft, out at the stars and the bright dot of Cai Nu’s planet. “And we try to move between asteroids, to keep from inbreeding, and people like my mother never see their parents and siblings and aunts and uncles and grandparents again, only hear them, just hundreds of thousands of kilometers away but it’s as if they’re on a rock around that star, or that one.”

I thought of Aagot, lost among just eighteen asteroids.

“Here,” Ma Wanlu said, “our children will die, gasping for air.”

“When the Cai Nu people talk about never having to worry about energy supplies,” Bilge said, “or medicine or food, I think of . . . I . . . ”

Silence drifted between us like dust.

“I don’t know if I want to go,” I murmured: an admission I’d made only to my spice cabinet, to the stars.

Ma Wanlu and Bilge stared.

Finally Ma Wanlu said, “Your family’s asteroid really must be better than all the others. I thought that was just a story.” She maneuvered herself back into the cargo area. Bilge followed. I sat alone, staring at that small dot.

Cinnamon

I remembered the Cai Nu people’s first message, sent in ten languages. I remembered shock and wonder. Questions. Possibilities. To know that there were people beyond the asteroids!

I had never believed those stories.

I had joined, as a child, in a ten-year Sending: a message flung towards the bright light we knew to be a planet and the smaller light of its moon. We had eaten cinnamon-flavored food and stayed awake for four hours, eight hours, long past the time when a reply could have come.

We live on the moon Cai Nu, the reply had come, six years after the most recent Sending. We received your messages. Do you truly live in the asteroids?

Somewhere on my latest trade journey, the possibilities had drifted away like carelessly handled cloves.

They had started with questions.

How many people live in each asteroid? How do you ensure a supply of fresh air and water? How do you celebrate New Year? What do you eat? What languages do you speak? Have you built shrines inside the asteroids? Mosques? Temples? What is your life expectancy? Your infant mortality rate? How has your bone density withstood little or no exposure to gravity? How has—

I had tried not to think about the questions, I had tried not to think about what I knew: that our ancestors’ genes had been modified for low-gravity habitats, that it hadn’t been enough, that the people of Cai Nu were far healthier than us.

That we wouldn’t adapt well to the 0.8G of Cai Nu.

We have reviewed the information you’ve given us, one of their messages had said, just sixteen weeks ago. Team Leader Hu Leyi, whose voice we knew the best, had sent it: her speech carefully crafted to convey sorrow and hope. We agree that you cannot survive in the asteroids much longer. We cannot, at this point, invest in improved infrastructure in the asteroids, which means that we must bring you to Cai Nu and from there decide how and where you will live. Reassurances had followed. When you reach Cai Nu, we will ensure that there are doctors who speak all of your languages. We will build a place where you can live comfortably while we find ways for you to adapt to life on Cai Nu. We will also find ways for you to use your current skills and gain new ones. We want your futures to be prosperous.

Reactions had fallen from my craft’s comm panel: loud, tearful, questioning, accepting.

And there were other conversations, a mass of them like a drawer of star anise and fennel seeds.

Team Leader Hu Leyi had asked, before their decision about our futures: Our records indicate that an experiment in agricultural production was established in the asteroid XI-258. Is that experiment on-going?

To that, Jidarat Chanprasert—the family head of one asteroid, where I placed a sliver of galangal on my tongue—had replied: The Lo family inhabit an asteroid where spices are grown.

How interesting! Several people here are very excited to hear this and would very much like to know more about what species have proved successful. Later, Team Leader Hu Leyi had talked of samples to be brought to Cai Nu.

Jidarat had replied: Perhaps one of the Lo family would like to talk to Team Leader Hu Leyi about this.

Later, I had heard Older Mother’s voice take over, giving Team Leader Hu Leyi the full history of our fields, our production methods, our trade with the other asteroids. I imagined Older Mother walking among the fields inside our asteroid with Younger Mother at her side, talking as they worked.

Sometimes individuals—not heads of an asteroid’s family, not important, knowledgeable people—got onto one of the comm units. One child asked: How many classes are there at your schools?

Team Leader Hu Leyi—or one of her colleagues—replied to every question. There are many classes: mathematics, science, agriculture, history, literature, music, many different types of engineering, many languages.

A day later, the girl said: I want to make plants!

A colleague replied: We have a great interest in bioengineering at the moment, as we progress with the terraforming of the still-unnamed third planet in the system. It is a very exciting field.

Can I do that?

Of course! We will provide an education for all of the children and any adults who want it. We want you to do work that fulfils you, whether it is in bioengineering or finance or poetic composition.

The Cai Nu person sounded delighted by the girl’s interest, but the conversation did not turn to our adaptation. Perhaps it would be easier for children. Perhaps the Cai Nu people didn’t know how much could be achieved with their technology.

In my comm’s chiming I had heard excitement. I had heard joy: to listen to stories of millions of people, stories of great temples and mosques, stories of New Year celebrations that filled thousands of streets with food and color and people, and religious festivities and Landing, the anniversary of arriving on Cai Nu from a different star system, and birthdays in families of over a hundred relations—to listen to this was to marvel, to disbelieve, to hope.

Two days before my arrival at the cumin asteroid, Team Leader Hu Leyi had finally admitted what I had feared: It will be very difficult for you. Your bodies have adapted to the absence of gravity. You will not be able to step from the landing craft onto the surface of our world, but we are building you a zero-gravity habitat, we are already researching the possibilities of technologically-assisted adaptation. However you are able to live here, we will strive to ensure comfort. You will never hunger, never lack medicine, never lack people to talk to. And your children will have every possibility laid out before them.

I had replayed this message until I knew it as well as Aagot’s story.

Thyme

I feared many things, but this was what stuck in me like a blockage in an air supply pipe, like a star anise’s point in a throat: what if people didn’t understand me. I imagined people like Thyme being so rare that they laughed. I imagined the people whose languages used gendered pronouns insisting that I choose male or female. I imagined every one of these one million people needing to be told that I was un-gendered, a different gender—if I didn’t even know what to call myself, how could I expect to be taken seriously?—the way I had needed to tell everyone I knew in the asteroids when I was younger. I imagined giving up.

I told myself to stop being foolish. How could one million people have only two fixed genders?

But the only other person like me in all the asteroids was Aagot, who I couldn’t find.

Fields

It was not quite the last time I would approach my family’s asteroid: that pitted, dark peppercorn-shape, orbited by a moon only three kilometers in diameter, that landscape at the heart of my personal stories. Home. No, it was not quite the last time I would approach it, but I hurt enough to believe it was.

“Big Cousin!” my youngest cousin’s voice came in over the comm. “We’re opening the smaller landing bay for you. Bring everyone in!”

A hole slowly opened in the asteroid’s side.

I wordlessly landed my craft, waited for the bay doors to close and the air to return, waited for the signal to unlock my craft’s door. Unloading began. My family emerged from the corridors to help: to organize the storage of possessions, to lead people to places they could sleep and spend time until the Cai Nu people arrived.

I slipped away to the fields.

They filled four vast rooms: stacked shelves holding soil and spice-plants. I drifted above them, perpendicular to their ends, looking along each shelf at sage bushes, carefully stunted cinnamon trees, red-fruited chilies, long fennel stalks fronded with white flowers, clusters of bay and berry-heavy juniper and green-leafed plants hung with the star-seeds of anise. So many smells: green and sharp and sweet. Home-smells.

Many plants had been recently harvested: leaves thinned out—taken for drying—and seeds picked. Others soon would be. Our last harvest.

I went to a cluster of star anise plants.

The light gravity generator in the shelf pulled me to the soil. Clods between my toes. Glossy leaves against my legs. The weight of my body startled me, pulled me to my knees. I steadied myself. It was always uncomfortable, returning to the fields after a long journey. Soon—no. I sat. I placed an unripe seed—green, eight-pointed—on my tongue, I dug my fingers into the soil. My skin already smelled of the fields: green, earthy. Home.

Would I ever work in a field on Cai Nu? Would I ever adjust to that much gravity?

I wanted to think of nothing but star anise against my tongue, against my skin.

Younger Mother’s voice cut through the air. “Oldest Child? Is that you?”

“Yes.”

Boots clanged on metal: she climbed down from far above me, shelf to shelf, until she appeared at the end of mine and swung herself onto the soil with an ease I lacked. A bag of cinnamon hung from her shoulder. She walked towards me with bark-stained fingers and bare feet—and the way she walked, straight-backed and sturdy, reminded me suddenly of the pictures of the Cai Nu people.

“I didn’t hear you working,” I said.

“I was thinking about, well, a lot of things.” She crouched at my side, smiling. “Why are you in here?”

“I wanted to sit in the fields, as we’ll be abandoning them soon.”

My voice was as brittle as a dried cardamom pod.

Younger Mother’s smile faded.

I looked away, at the soil, at the star anise, as my mother quietly said, “It will be better. For everyone. Just—just imagine the fields there! Real fields, laid flat across the ground not stacked like this, like shelves because we don’t have to room to do it any other way—and sunshine!”

“I see the sun regularly,” I murmured.

Above our heads, the underside of the next shelf held UV lights that replicated the sun for the plants: a constellation of hundreds across the fields.

“I’ve read about rain and snow in a thousand poems,” Younger Mother said, “but to see them! To feel them on my skin!”

We—I—wouldn’t. I had grown up in the fields, gravity on my bones, but I had spent so much of the past ten years among the asteroids. I loved it: the cumin or clove or galangal on my tongue, the spice cabinet doors sliding open, the happiness I brought, the stories shared. But I doubted my body was much healthier than those of the people I traded with.

Would my field-working family adapt quickly? Would they work in real fields?

“And they will have new spices there,” Younger Mother said, running her fingers over the star anise’s leaves. “New flavors. New—so much.”

New spices.

“It will be better.”

“And difficult,” I said. “No one seems to want to talk about that.”

“What else can we do? You know this, you see the other asteroids and everything that’s broken and old in them.”

I remembered the star anise asteroid, broken open like a seed casing, all its contents—its people, who I had once known—spilled out.

“I need to get back to harvesting,” Younger Mother said. “I know there won’t be much need for all this on Cai Nu, but it would be a shame for it to go to waste.”

“I’ll eat it.”

She smiled, then left me among the star anise plants, their seeds hanging around me like the view from an asteroid’s surface. I couldn’t imagine any other view.

I returned to my craft, to my journey—not a trade journey, any more.

Cinnamon, Turmeric, Rosemary, Cloves, Galangal, Sage

I started to forget to place spices on my tongue as I arrived at each asteroid, collecting its people—bringing them closer to the Cai Nu people’s arrival. I started—slowly, reluctantly—to think of the ways life on Cai Nu would be better for them, for me.

Found

Everyone gathered. Everyone. Who had ever imagined such a sight? So many people holding onto the walls or drifting carefully, so many bags and boxes tethered with them, so many voices all at once—people who had never seen each other, only spoken over the comms, suddenly able to talk unending, to shyly smile and embrace and unhesitatingly kiss. A wonder. A hundred people, another hundred, another. A community, not stretched out like sparse flowers on an ill chili plant but here, together, one. Everyone.

I couldn’t deny my excitement. I couldn’t subdue my fear.

I looked and looked for Aagot.

Older Mother had set up comm units throughout the large loading bay, so that her voice could be heard everywhere in that vast space, among so many people. Periodically she said, “The Cai Nu craft is now two hours away!” and, “The Cai Nu craft is continuing its steady course, only an hour away!” until, suddenly, too soon, “The Cai Nu craft will enter the landing bay in ten minutes.” I drifted through the loading bay. Around me, people drew in breath together, a long silence before new conversations streamed out like air into space.

Then—so soon—we heard the grinding as the landing bay doors opened for the first time in over a hundred years. We heard nothing, nothing, noise lost in vacuum—then a gentle set of metal-on-metal sounds. The Cai Nu craft landing. I drifted, unseeing. I only knew sounds. Arrival. The landing bay doors closing again. The first set of airlock doors between the two bays opening. I didn’t breathe, I didn’t speak—no one did. I reached a wall. I held.

The second set of airlock doors opened.

The people—five of them—wore dark blue suits and helmets with clear visors, but I was too far away to see their faces. Into our silence they slowly entered, using the handrails that spread across the wall like roots. They removed their helmets. They looked at us with cautious smiles. One said in Mandarin, “I am Team Leader Hu Leyi. It is a pleasure to finally be here and meeting you all.”

Older Mother drifted forward, saying, “I am Lo Minyu. On behalf of everyone: welcome. You are very welcome here.”

The other four Cai Nu people looked around the loading bay, as if trying to match faces to the voices they had heard over the comms.

“Are you all here?” Hu Leyi asked.

What did they think of us? What did they—

I saw, then, a long, thin braid of hair with a circular metal ornament fixed to its end.

I remembered: etched with a person crouched inside the shape of a bear.

“Aagot!” Then fear reached my tongue and I couldn’t talk. Was this Aagot? Was this some other person, who did not know me, did not want to talk to me—

The person turned.

“Aagot,” I managed.

A slight frown. “Ecralali, now.”

Now. A name-change—a reason I hadn’t been able to find Aagot Fossen, who no longer existed.

“Did we meet when I was younger?” Ecralali asked.

“Yes. Yes. I am Lo Yiying.”

Quietly, Ecralali said, “I know you.”

“Years ago, we talked about—” One or two people were interested in our conversation. I wanted privacy. I wanted no one to judge our words unimportant, irrelevant. Most of all, I wanted Ecralali to remember me. “We talked about Thyme and gender and—” I might as well have bared my skin in the space between the asteroids. “It was the most important conversation I’ve ever had.”

Ecralali’s face changed: astonishment and delight. Unless I interpreted wrongly, unless I imagined—

“I remember,” Ecralali said, “I remember telling you about un-gendered Houyi—”

“I’d only ever known Houyi as a woman before then,” I said, as full of wonder as if I was hearing the tale of Chang E and Houyi for the first time. “That’s how my mothers always tell the story.”

“—and the story of the stars, whose lives are not measured in gender.”

“Thyme,” I said, fennel-foliage soft, “who is like me.”

“Yes.”

Hu Leyi and her colleagues were still talking: moving among us, taking names, inventorying possessions, dividing us into groups.

“I know more stories now,” Ecralali said.

“I—I would like to hear them.”

“I know about Cai Nu—the founder, not the moon—I’ve read everything in our records, listened to every story. A lot of them tell that Cai Nu was fluidly gendered.”

“The founder was . . . ”

Ecralali’s smile was as rich as a whole cabinet of spices.

I half-heard announcements. We would have a room for each family on the Cai Nu people’s spacecraft, as well as several communal spaces, connected by a long corridor. I thought of stems. I thought of floating above the spices still growing on the shelves of my family’s fields. They would shrivel and die and I would never again be Lo Yiying the spice trader. I would be far from my home. Then we would reach Cai Nu. Gleaming. Strange. Skied.

Storied.

“I want to know what stories are told there,” Ecralali said.

“I would listen to every one.”

It hadn’t occurred to me—

I had needed to explain myself to my family, to people among the asteroids. Before that—to myself. That had taken almost twenty years. I had only found myself in the stories that fell from Ecralali’s—once-Aagot’s—mouth like star anise. To even imagine that I might be found in other stories—

I hadn’t.

“My favorite stories,” Ecralali said, “are those that say ‘Cai Nu’ is a chosen name.”

One of Hu Leyi’s colleagues reached us. As Ecralali said, “Ecralali Fos,” and pointed to just one small bag, I thought of my own name: a gift from my mothers. Could I—No. I still wanted it. It had clung to me, all these years, like a grain of soil under a fingernail: a welcome reminder of my family on the long journeys between the asteroids. It fit me.

Below us, the first group passed through the airlock doors to the spacecraft.

“Lo Yiying,” I said, and my voice was almost steady. “My possessions are with my family—Lo Minyu and Xu Weina are my mothers.” I didn’t think I needed to list the rest of my family—brother, cousins, aunts, uncles, a single grandfather. They all waited together, with the spice cabinet—full of the final harvest—between them.

The man made a note on the translucent screen that hovered in front of him, then moved on.

“I should go to my family,” I said, though I couldn’t imagine moving, couldn’t imagine any of what would happen next.

“We have months of journeying ahead of us,” Ecralali said. “Plenty of time for telling stories.”

Thyme

The fourth story Ecralali gave me, with thyme on our tongues, was of Cai Nu: working on a team of scientists identifying planets and moons suitable for human settlement, finding the moon that would eventually bear their name, spending decades preparing the team for the long journey and the tireless tasks at the other end—then, being invited to join the team despite their advanced age.

Cai Nu lived a year on the moon before finally dying. They are remembered forever: their vision of people living on this moon, their hard work making it more than a story.

Their name, chosen in the same year that they first saw a promising moon in their data.

I pressed the thyme to the roof of my mouth.

I was not alone.

About the Author

Alex Dally MacFarlane lives in London, where she is pursuing an MA in Ancient History. When not researching narrative transmission in the Alexander Romance traditions, she writes stories, found in The Other Half of the Sky, Heiresses of Russ 2013: The Year’s Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Shimmer and Zombies: Shambling Through the Ages. Poetry can be found in Stone Telling, The Moment of Change and Here, We Cross. She is the editor of Aliens: Recent Encounters (2013) and The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women (forthcoming in late 2014).

The Lovers

Eleanor Arnason

There was a woman of the Ahara. She came of a good line within the lineage1 and grew up to be tall and broad with thick, glossy fur. Her eyes were pale gray, an unusual color in that part of the world. From childhood on, her nickname was Eyes-of-crystal. If she had a fault, it lay in her personality. She was a bit too fierce and solitary.

Her home was in the town of Ahara Tsal, which stood on top of the Tsal River bluffs. To the west and south lay the farms and pastures of her lineage: a flat, rich land. To the north and east was the river valley, wide and marshy and full of animals. Eyes-of-crystal liked to go down there into the wilderness and ride and hunt. Her mother warned her this was dangerous.

“You’ll get strange ideas and possibly meet things and people you don’t want to meet.”

But Eyes-of-crystal refused to listen.

Don’t think this is a story about how she met ghosts or bandits or some horrible great animal like an ulkuwa and learned that her mother was right and she ought to have stayed at home. That’s another story entirely and maybe a good one. But the pain that Eyes-of-crystal encountered did not come from disobedience, and it not come to her when she was away from home.

As mentioned before, she grew up to be large and strong. When she was twenty-five, her relatives decided to breed her.

At this time, the Ahara were the second most powerful lineage in the world, and this young woman came from a line that produced really fine children. The Ahara wanted to breed her with someone important. They looked around, and who did they see? Eh Manhata, who was the greatest warrior of the age. His lineage, the Eh, stood in front of everyone else. They had no equals. Only the Ahara came close.

So the young woman’s relatives entered into negotiations with the senior women of Eh.

Eyes-of-crystal knew about this, but paid as little attention as possible. She had never wanted to be a mother, but she had always known that she had no choice. At times, she wished that she had come from a less excellent line. If only there had been something wrong or unhealthy about her immediate family! Maybe then she would have been left alone.

But her brothers and male first cousins were sturdy fighters. Her sisters and female first cousins were producing babies like furry butterballs. Every relative was co-operative, moral, intelligent and well-put-together.

What a curse, thought Eyes-of-crystal and went back down to the river to hunt. There, in the dark forest of the flood plain, she found a kind of peace. Often, she found animals as well and brought them home, dead and bloody, across the back of her well-trained tsin. Imagine her as a kind of Diana, a gray-furred virgin huntress, about to lose everything she valued.

After a while, her mother called her in for a conference. One of her uncles was there as well, her mother’s full brother, a soldier of middle age with a great scar across his face and one eye missing.

“You know that we have been speaking with the Eh,” her mother said. “We wanted Eh Manhata as the father of your child.”

“Yes,” said Eyes-of-crystal. “I know this.”

“He is not available,” her mother said. “According to the Eh, they can’t afford to take him out of the current war and send him here.”

“There may be more going on than we can see,” her uncle added. “I have never heard of Eh Manhata fathering any children, even in those periods when the war has slowed down.”

Her mother’s head tilted in the gesture that can mean either agreement or consideration. “There are men, even great men, who are not able to father children for one reason or another.”

Eyes-of-crystal knew the reasons, of course. The People do not enjoy thinking about the unpleasant aspects of life, any more than humans do. But if a thing is unavoidable, then it must be looked at, and they have never misled their children about what was involved in producing the next generation.

Some men were infertile, and others were impotent. These were physical problems and comparatively rare. The most common problem was one that humans would call psychological, and the People would say was moral or spiritual. There were men who simply could not overcome their natural aversion to sex with women. They were fine with other men, but put them in breeding situation and nothing happened.2

“They have offered us Manhata’s full brother,” her mother said. “He has fathered a number of children, and most of them look good. Your uncle has met him, which is why I asked him to be present in this conference.”

“They are twins,” her uncle said. “When they came out into the world, Manhata was already bigger and stronger. He has always been quicker and more forceful than his brother. There are people who say he took something from his brother in the womb. I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“This doesn’t sound promising,” Eyes-of-crystal said.

“There’s nothing wrong with Eh Shawin. He looks very much like Eh Manhata, though he isn’t as tall or broad, and something is missing, as I said before. Manhata is like a man in sunlight. No one can overlook him. Shawin is a man at the edge of a forest, in shadow and not entirely visible. But he’s a good soldier, and no one has ever questioned his courage or intelligence. And he is Eh Manhata’s only full brother.”

“No mating can tie us closed to Eh than this one,” her mother said. “And no lineage is more important to us. If we’re lucky, some of Manhata’s qualities will show up in your child or children.”

“You want me to do this,” Eyes-of-crystal said.

Her mother said, “Yes.”

She agreed. A message was sent to Eh. Eyes-of-crystal took her bow and went down along the river to shoot birds.

This happened in the late spring. Eh Shawin did not arrive until mid-summer. He came alone, which was not surprising. The road from Eh to Ahara was usually safe, and his brother was leading a campaign in the north against the Alliance of Five Less One. All his male relatives would be there. In peaceful times, of course, they would have ridden with him and made rude jokes about heterosexuality. It is always the job of one’s male relatives to demoralize, while the men of the other lineage are required to be friendly and encouraging.

In any case, Shawin appeared alone at the gate of Ahara Tsal. The guards asked him to wait and sent a messenger ahead. There was time for her family to gather in the courtyard of their great house: her mother, her aunts, the older female cousins and the two old men who were not at war.

Eyes-of-crystal was on a balcony. There were rules and courtesies in a proper mating. One does not meet the man right off. But there was nothing wrong in watching, as she did.

He rode in. His animal was dusty and tired, but had a good shape with powerful haunches and shoulders and a wide head that might indicate intelligence. It was solid brown, a rare and expensive color.

The man was as dusty as the tsin and dressed like an ordinary soldier. But he swung down gracefully, and once he was on the ground she could see he was tall, standing eye to eye with her mother and looming over the two old men, as they came forward to welcome him.

All the rituals of greeting were performed. It seemed to her that Shawin moved through them with unusual precision, like the traveling actors she had seen now and then. They came to Ahara Tsal and set up their stage in the main square. There they danced and told the stories of heroes. It occurred to her as a child that she wanted to be two things: a soldier or an actor. Both were impossible.

One of her sisters was on the balcony with Eyes-of-crystal. She looked down at the man in the courtyard and said, “He isn’t much to look at, is he?”

Eyes-of-crystal held her tongue, though there was plenty she could have said. The sister had mated for the first time with a son of Merin, a beautiful man who liked fine clothing and jewelry. His eyes had been blue-green, the color of malachite. His manners had been good enough, especially at first. But it had taken her sister a long time to get pregnant, and the man became obviously restless. He was anxious to get back to the war and to his lover, the men of Ahara said.

When he learned that the sister was finally pregnant, he let out a shout of joy, and he left as soon as he decently could.

Eyes-of-crystal mentioned none of this. For one thing, the sister was still pregnant and with twins, if her size was any indication. Discomfort had ruined the woman’s usually good disposition, and it was never a good idea to criticize the father of an unborn child.

Eyes-of-crystal kept her lips firmly closed over the hwarhath proverb which means, “Handsome is as handsome does.”

The next day she was introduced to the man. He’d taken a bath and put on a new kilt covered with embroidery. The grip of his sword was white bone bound with rings of gold. His fur was brushed and glossy.

That was as much as she learned about him. Their meeting was formal and brief. The words they spoke to each other were set by tradition. When they had finished, her great-uncles led Eh Shawin off to meet with other men. She went off with her female relatives.

For the most part, the hwarhath would prefer not to think about what their ancestors had to go through before the development of artificial insemination. But the information is there if you want to look for it, and the author of this story clearly did her research.

Remember that heterosexuality was—and is—frightening to the People. In it lies the power of generation and destruction. They know—and have always known—that the survival of their society depends on keeping men and women apart. But, through most of their history, the survival of their society depended on mating.

They did what humans also do, when faced with something frightening and unavoidable: death, for example, birth or marriage. They use ritual to protect the act and limit it and direct its power. They used humor and drugs to diminish their fear.

Eh Shawin spent the day with the men of Ahara, talking and getting a little drunk. Eyes-of-crystal spent the day getting ready for the night, and the author of the story describes every detail: the ritual bath, the ceremonies of protection, the comic skits performed by female cousins, the elaborate mating robe.

Most likely, there is an element of malice in all this description. “Look, look,” the author is saying to her readers. “This is what you are trying to forget. This is where we come from. It’s as inescapable as shit.”

Finally, at nightfall, Eyes-of-crystal was led up to the mating chamber: a large circular room high in a tower. Most of the space was filled by a bed, its wooden frame elaborately carved. Two chairs stood by a window. A lamp burned on the table between them. Eyes-of-crystal sat down. Her robe was stiff with embroidery. There was no way to relax. She had been given a potion, so the bed did not frighten her. Her relatives fussed around, straightening the cover on the bed, trimming the wick on the lamp, offering good advice.

Finally, there was the sound of male voices, mostly drunk, at the bottom of the tower. The women grew silent. Eyes-of-crystal heard footsteps on the stairs: one person only, climbing steadily. The others had stayed behind, as was proper. One fellow kept shouting, “Good luck!”

A couple of the women whispered angrily. This was a serious—a sacred— business, and it ought to be carried forward with gravity. A little bit of something to drink did no harm. But  men never knew when to stop. Any excuse for a drinking party!

The door opened, and there Eh Shawin was. A torch shone in back of him, so he was edged with red and yellow light. A moment later, he was in the room and standing in the shadows along the curving wall.

The women left. Several of them touched Eyes-of-crystal as they passed her, but no one spoke. There was only the rustle of clothing, the slap of sandals on the bare stone floor and the breathing of an especially large and solid aunt as she went down the winding stairs. Last to go was Eyes-of-crystal’s mother.

Eh Shawin closed the door, came over and sat down in the chair across from Eyes-of-crystal. Now she was frightened, in spite of the potion. He leaned forward and looked at her, frowning. “They have drugged you.”

“Yes.”

He sighed. “The first night is always like this. I’m going to tell you something, Ahara Pai, though I don’t know if you’ll be able to understand it at the moment. Still, I believe in acting directly3 and in saying what’s in my mind.

“There are many families who want to interbreed with Eh, and all of them are interested in having my brother as a father. But, as you probably know, our lineage cannot let him leave the field of battle.

“Because I’m Eh Manhata’s twin, I’ve been sent on trips like this—“ He paused. “More times that I can remember. I know far more about this situation than is usual for a man, and I have formed my own opinions about how to go about producing children.”

Eyes-of-crystal would have been shocked, if she had been sober. Thanks to the potion, she remained calm.

“These drugs and rituals do nothing good! The woman is frightened, and the man would be, if he wasn’t drunk, as he usually is. It’s surprising he remembers what it is he has to do. In my opinion, everything goes best if the two people are sober and comfortable with one another. The woman seems to get pregnant more quickly, and it’s my impression that the child turns out better. And so I have developed my own way of doing this. I try to make it as ordinary as possible.”

“Do your female relatives let you have these opinions?” asked Eyes-of-crystal. “It seems odd.”

He glanced up and smiled briefly. “Remember that they’ve known me from childhood. Eh Manhata is fierce. I am stubborn.”

He changed the topic then and asked her about hunting. The man of Ahara had told him she liked to hunt. It was an unusual trait in a woman, but not wrong or shameful. His home was on the plain. What was the great river like for hunting?

She tried to answer him, but she was frightened, and the drug made it hard for her to think and speak. Her mind kept coming back to the present situation, though with decreasing fear.  For one thing, his questions were so ordinary. For another, the drug was making her sleepy. Her thoughts moved more and more slowly, like people wading through a heavy fall of snow.

“Maybe we should have this conversation another time,” Eh Shawin said finally. He paused, then continued, his voice quiet and gentle. “There is one thing I have never been able to change. Your relatives and mine have expectations about what will happen tonight. We must meet those expectations.

“I can do the thing slowly and try to find some way to make it pleasant for you, or I can do it quickly and get it over.”

“Quickly,” said Eyes-of-crystal.

Eh Shawin inclined his head in the motion of agreement, then asked if she wanted light or darkness.

“Darkness,” said Eyes-of-crystal.

He licked his fingers and put out the lamp.

The home world of the People has no moon, but the stars are brilliant, and the People have better night vision than humans. Most likely, the man and woman could see each other as they undressed. Maybe their eyes gleamed occasionally, reflecting starlight. Their dark, solid bodies must certainly have been visible, as they moved past the star-filled windows or settled on the bed, which was covered with a mating blanket of bleached fabric as white as snow or bone.

The author of the story does not tell us any of this, though she describes their mating with clinical detail. Most likely, she was working from the old mating manuals, which are still available in libraries, though not (of course) in sections that children can access. There is no reason to believe that she is writing from personal experience.

After they finished, the man went to sleep. Eyes-of-crystal lay next to him, looking out a window at the sky. She could see the Banner of the Goddess, the Milky Way.

What had the Goddess been thinking of, when she devised this method for making people? It was like a great, ugly knot in the net of kinship and cooperation and love that held all of them—women and men, adults and children—together. Impossible to understand!

She woke in the morning and found Eh Shawin gone, though she could see the place where he’d lain. Her body hurt. She got up groaning and went down to the women’s bathroom. There was hot water ready and a cousin to help her.

Hah! It was good to wash and then soak in a tub of clean water scented with herbs. The cousin was middle aged, but had never been bred. One of her feet was twisted. It had been that way from birth, and this was not a trait the Ahara wanted continued. She barely spoke to Eyes-of-crystal, either out of envy or embarrassment.

At last, Eyes-of-crystal got out of the tub and rubbed herself dry. The cousin brought a fresh new tunic. She put it on. Her female relatives would be waiting for her in the eating room and the kitchen. She had no wish to see them. Eyes-of-crystal thanked her cousin and went out to the stables.

Light slanted in the little, high windows. The air smelled of hay and tsina. Most of the stalls were empty, the animals gone to war. But a few remained: the mares and geldings that children rode and her own hunters. She went to look at her favorite, a blue-gray stallion. His legs and hindquarters had white stripes, and his horns were as black as obsidian.

Eh Shawan stood at the end of the stall. “A fine animal," he said. What do you call him?”

“Direct Action.”

“A good name. I talked to your mother this morning and explained that I don’t want to inconvenience your male relatives. There are so few home at present, and most are so old! They don’t have the energy to be entertaining a guest. And I do best in these situations if I keep regular hours and maintain my ordinary habits. So—“ He glanced up briefly and smiled. “Your mother has agreed that it makes better sense for me to go out riding with you. I get the exercise I need, and the old men of Ahara get their rest.”

It wasn’t like her mother to agree to anything unusual, but Shawin was clever and plausible. There are men who know how to charm women, just as there are men who know how to charm men. These two qualities don’t usually come together in one person. Eyes-of-crystal had the impression that Eh Shawin was no exception to this rule. Her male relatives did not dislike the man, but it wasn’t likely they’d go out of the way for him.

“My  tsin hasn’t recovered from our journey yet, but one of your cousins has offered me this animal.” He led her to another stall.

She knew the animal there: a large gelding. Its color was solid purple-brown.

“He told me its name is Consistent Behavior, which sounds promising, though I’m curious why an animal this color was gelded.”

She knew and told him. The animal had a sullen disposition. This wasn’t a problem for

riding. “Unless you want to go quickly.” But Consistent Behavior was no good for hunting, and the animal would have been dangerous in a war.

Eh Shawin laughed.

“My cousin meant no discourtesy. You see how little we have available.” She gestured around at the empty stalls.

“I don’t take offense easily. That’s my brother.”

They saddled and rode out. The author of this story is anonymous, but she almost certainly came from one of the lineages along the river, maybe from Ahara. Her description of the country is detailed, and it reads like real experience, not something she got out of a book.

They went east along a narrow trail that led past fields of hwal and antim. The sky was clear except for a handful of high clouds, and the air smelled of dust and dry vegetation. Small bugs filled the weeds along the trail. The names of the bugs are given: sunfly, hopper, pirig, heln and scarlet warrior.

Eh Shawin asked about hunting a second time.

Eyes-of-crystal hold him about the many fine animals and birds to be found in the marshes along the River Tsal and in the flood plain forest.

It was obvious that he knew about hunting. The questions he asked were intelligent. But he had never spent much time around water. She told him about the giant fish that lived in the river. They were longer than a man and had teeth like knives. Their dispositions were nasty. Her people hunted them with nets and spears.

“That must be something,” Eh Shawin said and then exhaled loudly. They had come to the top of the bluffs. In front of them was the river valley, wide and deep, full of many channels that wound through the forest and marshland, so the entire valley was like a belt made of strips of colored leather woven together: green, blue-green, brown and pale red.

The two of them dismounted and let their animals graze. They spoke more about hunting.  He reached over and stroked her shoulder the way a female lover might. Eyes-of-crystal frowned. After a moment he took his hand away and leaned back till he was lying full-length on the stony ground, his hands forming a resting place for his head.

Now she was made uneasy by his silence. “What is your brother like?” she asked.

He glanced at her. In the bright sunlight, his pupils had contracted into lines she could not see. His eyes were like windows onto an empty, blue sky. 

“That’s a question I’ve heard before. ‘Tell us about Eh Manhata, Eh Shawin.’”

“Does it make your angry to be asked?”

“No. It’s always been obvious that he was something special, even when we were children. Everyone knew if he lived to be a man, he would be either a hero or a monster.

“He is fierce and without fear, commanding, strong, clever about war. No one can match him as a leader in battle. So long as he’s alive, our lineage will always win.

“He loves our mother and our female relatives, and he never acts without consulting them—except on the battlefield, of course. He is loyal to Eh. He respects the Goddess.”

He stopped talking. There was no noise except bugs singing in the vegetation.

“I know all this,” said Eyes-of-crystal.

“Then you know Eh Manhata.” The man sat up. “Let’s ride more.”

That day they stayed on the plain above the river. In the afternoon, they returned to Ahara Tsal. At night, they mated again in the tower room. It was as unpleasant as the first time, but she didn’t lie awake for as long afterward.

The weather remained hot and dry: good late summer weather. They got in the habit of going out almost every day. Eyes-of-crystal showed the man of Eh her country: the cultivated fields, the marshes and forest. They hunted the animals available in that season, before the fall migrations began. The man was a good companion: patient, observant, respectful of her skill and knowledge, unmoved by violence and death.

She liked him, though she had never expected to like a man who was not a close relative and thought he did things that made her uneasy.

One afternoon Eyes-of-crystal shot a ral4 in the marshes along the river. The animal went down, but it wasn’t dead. It struggled to rise, making a bleating noise. Eh Shawin was the one who dismounted and cut its throat. As he stuck the knife in, the ral jerked and twisted its neck. Blood spurted onto his clothing, and he made the hissing sound that indicates anger or disgust. He finished killing the ral, then pulled off his tunic and sank it in a pool of water. Naked, he eviscerated the animal. She had never seen an adult man without clothing. It made her uncomfortable.

She kept herself busy with the tsina. Her Direct Action was not troubled by the scent of blood, but the animal Shawin was riding—a young stallion that she had not finished training—was fidgety. He might try to run.

When Shawin had finished, he waded into the water and washed himself, then the tunic.

“Put that on,” she said when he came back to shore.

“Wet? No.”

“I don’t like this.”

For a moment he said nothing, but concentrated on wringing out the tunic. Then he glanced up briefly. “There’s no one here except the two of us, and we have been spending every night in the same bed, neither of us wearing anything. Do you really think we need to be formal?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe you ought to go on ahead,” Eh Shawin said. “You’ll have to take the ral. My tsin isn’t going to be willing to carry it.”

She did as he suggested and rode home alone, troubled by the memory of him, his fur slicked down by water and his body evident. He was rangy with large bones and long muscles, narrow everywhere except through the shoulders. Made for speed rather than endurance, Eyes-of-crystal thought. In a way beautiful, though not with the sleek beauty of a woman.5

He ought to be more modest. He had not seemed especially bothered by the fact that he was naked. Maybe he had spent too much time fulfilling mating contracts. It had become ordinary for him to be around women who were not relatives and to do things with them that most men did only once or twice in their lives.

That evening, in the tower room, she asked about his behavior.

“If I hadn’t washed the tunic right away, the stain would have sunk in, and I like that tunic. It’s almost new, and I don’t know if you noticed, but the embroidery over the shoulders is really fine. I shouldn’t have worn it for hunting. I wasn’t expecting to make quite so big a mess.”

“Are you this way in battle?” she asked. “Fastidious?”

“No. Of course not. Though I never like it when something good is ruined: a piece of clothing, a weapon. But I don’t think about that till later. In battle, there are only two things on my mind: staying alive and following my brother’s orders.”

There was something in his voice when he spoke about his brother that troubled her. “Do you like him?”

Eh Shawin glanced up. The room was dark except for a single lantern, flickering on the table between them, and his pupils had expanded to wide, black bars. “Manhata? What a question to ask.” He licked his fingers and put out the light.

One of her cousins was home from the war while an injury to his leg healed. By this time, he was starting to hobble around, and he asked Eh Shawin to practice fighting with him. This was something women were not supposed to watch, but Eyes-of-crystal climbed onto a roof that overlooked the fighting ground. The two men used swords, the long heavy kind that had only one purpose. No man ever carried a weapon like that, unless he was going to war. Eh Shawin handled his sword with ease. He was obviously a better fighter than her cousin, and this was not due simply to her cousin’s injury. He was as quick as she had expected and strong as well. Lovely to watch, the woman thought as she crouched on the roof tiles. If she had a son, this quickness and strength would be useful. If she had a daughter, maybe the child would get Eh Shawin’s discipline. With luck, his oddness would not be transmitted.

Her time for bleeding came. So did the blood. She wasn’t pregnant. She stayed away from him for several nights, as was customary.

“That tells me I have another 40 days here,” Eh Shawin said. “I’m not sorry, though I have to say your male relatives are boring. But I like you, and my lineage does not have another breeding contract that requires me. Once you are pregnant, I will have to rejoin the army.”

“You don’t like the war.”

“It’s been going on a long time. After a while, everything seems as if it’s happened before. There are only so many ways to kill and die. Even my brother has not managed to find much that is new in those areas.”

“You are very peculiar,” said Eyes-of-crystal. “I hope it doesn’t come out in your children.”

He laughed. “No one has complained to my female relatives.”

This conversation took place atop a river bluff. They ended in this place often. He shared her love of the wide river valley. The foliage was getting its autumn colors. The river was dark brown like weathered bronze, except where it reflected the forest or the sky. Everything seemed to be shifting and changing. She looked out and thought of traveling like a tree floating in the water or a bird rising on the wind.

Maybe when this was over and she was pregnant, she would go to visit another town. There were several lineages nearby that were closely tied to Ahara. She had relatives, women who had been fathered by men of her lineage. She even had a former lover, a woman of Shulnowa. They had met at a festival and visited back and forth, and then the war grew dangerous for a time, and they exchanged tokens and messages. That ended finally. But maybe she could go to Shulnowa and visit one of her minor cousins. Maybe she would meet the lover. How could she avoid it in a town that size?

Eh Shawin ran a hand down her arm, stroking the fur. “I think I’d like to have sex right now.”

“Here? In the sunlight?”

“We aren’t getting anywhere by having sex in the dark.”

Her bleeding had stopped the day before, so it was possible, though it seemed wrong. She tried to remember some rule that forbade sex outdoors while the sun was up. Nothing came to mind, and she had done such things with her lover. But that had been at festivals and with a woman. Surely sex for procreation ought to be done in a less carefree manner.

He leaned over and kissed the rim of her ear, then touched his tongue to the bare skin inside.

They had sex on the river bluff in a meadow of dry plants. A group of hunting birds soared overhead. At one point, early on, she looked up and saw them rising in a wide circle. Later, she found she had become preoccupied. The bright open world seemed to darken and turn in upon itself, and she was not aware of much except her body and Eh Shawin’s body.

When they had finished, they lay a while together, listening to bugs sing around them. The birds had gone. Finally, Eh Shawin yawned and sat up. “That’s something I haven’t done before.” He grinned at her. “There’s more variety in sex than war, in my opinion, anyway.”

They got up and brushed each other off, then put on their clothing and went to find their tsina.

After that, they got in the habit of having sex beyond the town walls. It was the right time of year. The ground was dry, and the biting and burrowing bugs had mostly vanished. Now and then, there was some kind of distraction: a tsin would come close while grazing. Once, a fat little tli came up to see what they were doing. It stopped just outside reach and reared up on its hind legs, folding its paws against the white fur of its chest.

“Fill your eyes, little trickster,” said Eh Shawin.

The animal seemed to listen. It tilted its head and watched them until they were done. Then, as they moved apart, it moved away.

They still slept in the tower room. By now, she had gotten used to sharing a bed with him. His scent was familiar, and it was comforting to lie against his broad back. Every few days her mother would ask how everything was going.

“Fine,” she would answer. Finally she said, “I think I’m like my sister.”

Her mother frowned. “In that case, we’ll have the man with us all winter. I suppose I shouldn’t complain. It gives your cousin someone to practice fighting with.”

One morning she woke early and heard the cries of birds as they flew over Ahara Tsal. The fall migrations were beginning. There would be good hunting in the marshes along the river. She prodded Eh Shawin. Half awake, he agreed to go into the valley with her. After breakfast, they saddled their tsina.

The morning air was cool, and thin banners of mist floated over the surface of the river. The mist would be gone in less than an ikun, and the day would be hot by noon. But at the moment she could feel the sharp edge of autumn. She carried her strung bow. Her quiver hung from her saddle. Eh Shawin had brought a pair of throwing spears. He wasn’t really in the mood to kill anything, he told her. “But a ride is fine. I can watch you shoot down birds. And if we encounter anything large, I’ll be ready.”

There were plenty of animals in the valley, but she didn’t see the birds she wanted: the ones she had heard as they flew over. She and Eh Shawin kept going, following a road that wasn’t much used. Midway through the morning, two men appeared ahead of them, riding tsina. They came out of the underbrush and reined their animals, blocking the road. One had a shield on his arm.

Eh Shawin had been riding in back of her. Now he came up alongside. There was a spear in his hand. “Let me take care of this.” She reined Direct Action, and he moved past her. He was riding her young stallion, Hope-for-the-Future.

The two men turned their animals so they were facing Shawin, and one drew a sword, a long weapon of war.

Something made a noise in back of her. She glanced around: two more men came riding toward her. They looked like soldiers who had gone to hell, ragged and dirty. One man wore a metal helmet. The other wore a leather cap. Both held battle-swords.

She glanced back at Shawin. He’d thrown his spear, and one of the men in front was falling, shouting as he slid onto the ground. The spear was in his chest.

Shawin pulled the second spear from its holder.

The two ragged soldiers came up on either side of her. One glanced over. “We’re sorry that this has to happen in front of you, but—as you can see—we’re desperate. It will be over quickly.” Then they rode on. Direct Action shook his head. She tightened the reins. There was nothing she could see.  

Among the hwarhath, warfare is entirely a male activity. The hwarhath men direct their violence exclusively toward each other. They do no physical harm to women and children, strange as this may sound to humans. But there is a quid pro quo. The hwarhath teach their women that they must never fight. Eyes-of-crystal knew that she was almost certainly safe. Unless these men were crazy, they would not touch her. But Eh Shawin was going to die, and all the rules of right behavior told her that she had to look on. This was the way it had always been done.

The man of Eh glanced back. He must have seen the two new soldiers. A moment later, he was charging at the man in front of him, spear in hand. Their tsina met. Her young stallion screamed, and a man shouted, she didn’t know which one. They were tangled together, their animals turning in a circle. The other bandits reined, as if they were trying to see a good way to attack.

There was no way for Eh Shawin to win. His animal was untried. He didn’t have the right kind of weapons. A hunting spear and a sword that was little more than a dagger! As ignorant as she was, she knew this was a bad situation. Finally, he was outnumbered. Her male relatives did not speak much about war, but she had heard them say, “As a general rule, big wins over little, and many over few.”

Eyes-of-crystal pulled an arrow from her quiver. She fit it into her bow and pulled back the string. Hah! This was easy! They were much larger than a bird and hardly moving. She let the arrow go. It went into the neck of the man in the leather cap. He screamed, a noise almost like the one made by her young stallion.

The man in the helmet twisted around, a look of horror on his face. “No!” he shouted.

Her second arrow went into his chest. Her third went into his throat, and he fell. One foot stayed in its stirrup. He ended on the ground with one leg up. His tsin was thin and needed a grooming, but evidently it had been well trained. The moment its rider fell, it stopped moving, except to shake its head. Not that it made any difference. The rider was dead. His tsin could have dragged him across the valley and done no further harm.

The man she had shot first, the one in the leather cap, was still on his animal, bent over and holding onto the animal’s neck. Blood poured down his back.

Beyond these two, Shawin still struggled with the third man. They were on the ground now, though she hadn’t seen how this had happened. Their tsina danced around them. The men were entangled. Eyes-of-crystal could not risk a shot.

She waited, bow in hand. The struggle ended, and Eh Shawin stood up. His tunic was torn and dirty. He held his little sword. The blade was covered with blood.

“That seems to be it,” Eh Shawin said.

Eyes-of-crystal leaned to one side and vomited.

After she finished, Eh Shawin helped her dismount. He was unharmed, except for a few small cuts. “Though I’ve been beaten like iron on the anvil, and I’ll feel it tomorrow. If your relatives think I am going to be good for much of anything in the next few days—“

“I killed them,” she said.

“Two of the four.”

She went on, speaking disjointedly. How could she tell her relatives? What would they do? No woman of the Ahara had ever gotten involved in a battle.

“None that you have been told about,” Eh Shawin said. He turned and watched the one man still alive. His tsin had become nervous finally and begun to step sideways like a harvest dancer. Then it shook its body, and the man slid off and lay motionless on the dusty road.   

“I’ll pull out the arrow and drive in my second spear. It’s broken, but no one will know when that happened, and you will have killed only one man then.”

That was more than enough, said Eyes-of-crystal.

He tiled his head in agreement, then walked over to the man he had killed with his short sword. “I killed his fellow, then captured his sword.” He bent and picked it up. “And used it to kill the last man with two blows, one to the neck and one to the chest. If I make cuts that are big enough, no one will notice the arrow wounds. So two men died from my spears, one from my short sword and one from this.” He lifted the battle sword. “What a hero I am! They’ll make up poetry about me in Ahara.” He looked at her, meeting her gaze. “And you behaved like a decent woman and watched the fight, never moving a hand.”

She spoke again. The story was unlikely. She wasn’t a good liar. It would be better to tell the truth.

“If you admit to behavior this unusual, your relatives may decide it wasn’t a good idea to breed you,” Eh Shawin said in answer. “And if you are pregnant already, they might decide to kill the child. Then all my hard work will have been wasted. I’d prefer that my children live, unless they are damaged in some way.

“And I’d prefer that your life be happy. It isn’t likely to be, if you admit to violence. Lie to the best of your ability. That ought to be sufficient. Remember what you have just seen. If you’re upset and don’t make a lot of sense, your family will understand.

“And while it’s unlikely that I could kill four men, my brother has done as much and more. Maybe I had—for once—his determination and power.”

She agreed finally, and he did as he had planned, like a manager setting up the opening of a play. Bloodflies had begun to gather, their bodies shining like sparks of fire in the hazy sunlight. He ignored them, cutting the arrow from the one man with his hunting knife. He worked deftly, making the wound only a little larger, then drove in the broken spear, grunting with the effort. Then he moved to his second victim and used the borrowed battle sword to slash new wounds. The bloodflies hummed around him and crawled on the dead men.

A play would begin with the corpses lying on the stage, looking far more splendid than these fellows. One by one, the corpses would rise, turning into handsome warriors, who would explain to the audience how they came to their present situation, acting out the quarrels and moral dilemmas that led to death.

Let nothing like that happen here, said Eyes-of-crystal to the Goddess.

At last, Eh Shawin was done preparing the stage, He gathered the men’s weapons and loaded them on their tsina, then tied the animals to a lead and gave the lead to her. They mounted and rode back toward Ahara Tsal.

They stopped once by a stream. Eh Shawin washed her arrows, which he had kept, then handed them to her.

“I don’t want these.”

“I don’t want them found anywhere close to the place where these fellows died. Someone might wonder. And I can’t think of a better place to hide arrows than in a quiver. Get rid of them later.”

She put them in her quiver, and they went on.

Hah! It was an event when they arrived at the town, leading four animals, Eh Shawin covered with blood. He did most of the talking, while her relatives comforted her.

Male relatives saddled their tsina and rode to find the bodies, led by Shawin. He was fine, he said. A little tired and sore. But he would have no trouble riding back into the valley. The men of Ahara gave him sideways glances that indicated respect.

Her female relatives gave her a bath and put her to bed. After a while, she went to sleep, waking in the middle of the night.

Shawin was settling into bed next to her. She spoke his name.

He said, “We followed their trail back for a distance. There were only four of them. Bandits, your kinfolk say. Men without a lineage. The world is full of people like that these days. They must have wanted to rob me. The Goddess knows their animals are in bad condition, and they had nothing of value except their battle swords. Hah! To end like that!” Then he went to sleep.

She stayed awake. He had bathed, and he smelled of clean fur and aromatic soap. She found the odor comforting. All at once, she was unwilling to have him leave.

What lay in front of her, after he was gone? Being pregnant and then nursing a child. Then, maybe, if she could convince her relatives that she had no interest in children, she would be free for a while. That happened sometimes. There were women who could not manage to get interested in motherhood. Other women raised the children they bore.

But if the child turned out well, they would breed her again, maybe to someone like the son of Merin who had fathered her sister’s just-born child.

And all the while, she would have the secret of her violence in her mind. What if her child was a girl? The trait might be transmitted. She might begin a line of female monsters.

As might be expected, she did not sleep any more that night. In the morning she was queasy and threw up. Not a good sign, the woman thought.

But the next day she was fine, and the day after she and Eh Shawin went riding, though not down into the river valley. Instead, they wandered among the fields, now mostly harvested, and went up onto the bluff to their favorite place. They dismounted and sat a while, watching the hunting birds that soared over the valley, circling and chasing one another, not out of anger or from a need to mate, but only (the old women said) for pleasure, from joy in their skill.

Finally Eyes-of-crystal began to speak. She had not been able to shake off her feeling of horror at what she had done, and she did not like to think of living her life with a secret like this one.

“You are not the only person with a secret,” Eh Shawin told her gently.

“Not like this,” she answered. “And it isn’t my secret alone. You know it also.”

“I’m not going to tell, dear one.”

She glanced at him, surprised. He had used a term that belonged to a lover.

He was lying comfortably full-length on the ground, his eyes half closed, his hands folded over his belly. “You are young enough to think that people are the way they appear from the front and that they ought to be so. -- What am I? A loyal son of Eh, who carries out an embarrassing obligation as I am told to by the senior women of my lineage?”

“I don’t know what to think of you,” said Eyes-of-crystal.

“I have never been much interested in sex with men. That is one thing I have in common with my brother, though we differ in our attitude toward sex with women. The idea repels him so much that he has always refused to carry out any breeding contract. I like what I do, though my attitude toward the individual women varies. Still, none of them has ever been stupid, and all of them are in good physical condition.”

He smiled at her. “Our lineage has been lucky. They have one son who wants to spend his entire life fighting and killing, which has been very useful, and another son—the twin of Eh Manhata—who is willing to put the same kind of effort into mating.

“And I have been lucky. If my brother had been ordinary, I would have spent my life having no sex or sex with men, or I would have become a pervert, sneaking after women. Such men exist, though they are not common, even in this age where everything seems to be unraveling.

“Instead, I am here with you, for which I think the Goddess and Manhata.”

She couldn’t think of what to say. They were both monsters, though in different ways. She had acted in a way that no woman ever should, though she had been unwilling and was now remorseful. His actions were proper. He had done as his female relatives told him. But his thoughts and feelings were perverse.

“What kind of child is going to come from this mating?” she asked finally.

“I don’t know,” said Eh Shawin. “But the passing of traits is not a simple process, as we know from breeding animals as well as people, and we both have many good traits. I think it’s likely that the child will be fine.”

She looked out at the river valley, then up at the birds, still soaring over the bluffs. A crazy idea came into her mind, and she told it to Eh Shawin.

Why couldn’t they go off together? The world was full of people who wandered, having lost their homes in the long war. She could disguise herself like a man. Such things were possible. The actors who came to Ahara Tsal played women convincingly. Or else they could claim to be relatives, a brother and sister. She would not have to hide the person she was from the rest of her family. If the child turned out badly, at least it would not be one of the Ahara. He would not have to go back to the war.

He listened to her patiently. When she finished, he said, “How would we earn a living? I have only two skills, fighting and making women pregnant. The second one would be useless, if I didn’t belong to a powerful lineage. As for the first skill, I don’t want to become a bandit like those men in the valley.”

They could hunt, said Eyes-of-crystal.

“And live like animals in the wilderness?”

They could sell whatever they didn’t need, meat and fur.

“Most land is held by some lineage or other. Do you think they’ll give us permission to hunt? Do you think people will refrain from asking questions, if we bring the hides of animals into a town? I’d be executed as a thief, and you would be sent off to survive as best you could. Most likely, someone would take you in. Even in this age of unraveling, there are people who will not let a woman come to harm. But you would not be the daughter of a famous lineage, and you would not be loved as you are here.

“And if there were more children, what would happen to them? I don’t want my children to be beggars.”

“Is there nothing we can do?” asked Eyes-of-crystal.

“What we are doing,” said Eh Shawin.

After that she was silent, watching the birds.

It was midwinter before her relatives were certain that she was pregnant. The snow was deep by then and the winter unusually cold. Eh Shawin stayed on till spring, though she no longer spent time with him. She saw him, now and then, at a distance.

When the thaw was over and the roads comparatively dry, he rode off with a group of her male relatives who were returning to the war. She was sick that day and did not see him go.

The children were born at harvest time: two boys, large and sturdy. The older became Tsu, which was an old name among the Ahara. The younger became Ehrit, which means ‘deriving from Eh.’

She nursed them for a year, as was customary in those days, then turned them over to one of her sisters and went back to her old habits. But hunting interested her less than it had. She missed having company, and she felt less safe than before. What if other bandits came into the river valley? Would she become violent again? Would they become violent?

Gradually, she became more like other women, though she never became entirely ordinary. She remained more solitary than was usual, and she did not lose her fondness for riding. Now she followed the trails that went through cultivated land, and she kept her eye on the fields and pastures. When she took out a weapon, it was usually to deal with some wild animal that was doing harm to her family’s herds and crops.

And though she wasn’t especially maternal, she wasn’t able to leave her twins entirely in the hands of her female relatives. Maybe if they had been ordinary, she would have been able to ignore them. But they were clever and active and clearly in front of most other children.

When they were two years old, her family bred her again. This time the man came from one of the small lineages that existed at the edges of Ahara.6 He was solid and handsome with a fine glossy coat, and he did what he was asked to do with determination and competence. But he was obviously embarrassed, and it was clear that he preferred to spend his time with male relatives. Eyes-of-crystal felt disappointed, though this didn’t make any sense. The man behaved exactly as he was expected to, and he was never discourteous. She got pregnant almost at once. The child was a girl who inherited her father’s solidity and lovely fur. What about this mating could cause dissatisfaction?

In time, another gift came from this mating: the man’s sister, who was a solid and handsome as her brother and who (unlike him) was comfortable around women. Eyes-of-crystal met her at a festival, and they fell in love. This was (the author tells us) no ordinary casual bed-friendship.

It’s important, at this point, to realize that the hwarhath tend to see women as less romantic and more promiscuous than men. Living on the perimeter, men have time and opportunity for love. But the women live at the center of the family, surrounded by relatives, and their strongest ties are usually with kin. For women sexual love tends to be a matter of brief couplings at festivals or long-term, long-distance romances where the two lovers visit back and forth, but are more often apart than together.

Occasionally, female lovers will move in together, and this has happened more often in modern times. Conservatives see it as yet another example of how society is going to hell in a hand basket. What is going to become of the People, if women and languish and hold onto one another like men? Who is going to look out for the family and children?

In the age of Eh Manhata, this kind of female affection-beyond-the-family was unusual, but it did occasionally happen, and the author of this story, who is determined apparently to break all the ordinary rules of romantic fiction, gives her heroine a lover who is willing to move away from home. The woman was maternal and had no children of her own, the author tells us, and she found Ahara Pai’s children more interesting than her nephews and nieces.

It’s possible that the lover was added to the story to give it a happy ending. The hwarhrath insist on happy endings in their romances, though their idea of a happy ending is not always the same as ours. Or maybe the author put the lover in to shock and perturb.

Eyes-of-crystal was bred three more times. Each time the man was different and came from a different lineage. The author gives the names of lineages, but they would mean nothing to a human reader. Two were important. One was another clinger. The children—two more girls and a boy—were healthy enough to keep, and all of them grew up to be promising. though none equaled the twins. They really were exceptional boys: quick, well-coordinated, intelligent, forceful, good-humored and charming.

“This is the spirit of Eh Manhata showing,” said her family relatives.

No, she thought. The intelligence and good humor came from Eh Shawin. So did the charm, though the boys were able to get what they wanted from both women and men.

Occasionally she heard news about Shawin. Her kinfolk took an interest in him now. His life continued the way he had described it. He was often away from the army, fulfilling contracts his relatives had made. It seemed as if he almost never failed. The children he fathered were strong and healthy. They made it through the dangerous years of childhood with little trouble. His kinsmen began to call him The Progenitor, and this became the nickname that everyone used.

He was less impressive in the war. Not a bad soldier, her male relatives said, but not what they would have expected from Eh Manhata’s twin. “Or from the man who killed those four bandits in our valley. Hah! That was an achievement! We still tell people about it! But he has never done anything comparable.”

When the twins were fourteen, there was a festival at Taihanin. Eyes-of-crystal went, along with other women and enough men to provide protection, though the war had moved to the east by now, and all of Ahara and Eh lay between them and the nearest enemy. Her younger children stayed at home, as did her lover, but the twins were old enough for traveling, and they joined the party.

One evening they came to a caravanserai. There were people there already: a small group of soldiers form Eh. One of her male cousins went to speak with the soldiers. When he returned, he said, “Eh Shawin is there. I asked him over. He’s never met his sons.”

Soon the man himself appeared, walking out of the shadows into the light of Ahara’s fire. No question that he had gotten older. He was still tall and rangy, but he moved stiffly now. The fur on his shoulders and upper arms had turned pale silver-gray. But when he saw her, he smiled, and his smile was unchanged: brief, but affectionate in a way that was not common among men of the people.

She was right, thought Eyes-of-crystal. The boys got their charm from him.

Her cousin stepped forward and introduced the boys. Eh Shawin looked at them. They had shot up in the last year, and it seemed likely that they would be as tall as he was. At the moment, they were thin and as leggy as tsina colts. Like colts, they were nervous and shy. They hung back and ducked their heads, unwilling to meet Eh Shawin’s gaze, though they gave him many sideways glances. But there is nothing wrong with shyness in young men and boys, and their manners were good. They answered his questions promptly and clearly, Ehrit doing most of the talking, as he always did.

Finally, Shawin ran out of questions. The boys were given leave to go, and he came over to Eyes-of-crystal. It wasn’t required that the two of them talk, but it was permissible.

“You’ve done a good job,” he said.

“My sisters more than I,” she said. “And my lover, though I taught the boys to hunt, and that was enjoyable.”

He asked if she had other children. She named them and their fathers.

“Your relatives have been keeping you busy,” he said.

“Not as busy as the Eh have been keeping you, from what I hear.”

He laughed and inclined his head.

They spoke some more about the twins. She praised their qualities, while he looked across the fire. The boys were sprawled on the far side. They had gathered stones and drawn lines in the dirt and were playing a game of strategy. Now and then one of the other would glance up and see Shawin watching, then glance back down.

“So everything has turned out well,” Shawin said finally. “You have a lover and six fine children, and I have my life, which has turned out better than I expected. Hah! I was frightened when I first realized where my sexual interests were likely to lead me.

“I thought our relatives had been wrong. They worried about Manhata becoming a monster.  He was always so relentless, and he cared for so few people and none of them male. But I was the one who was the monster. I thought, they will find out and kill me, or I will kill myself. But none of that has happened.”

“Have you never wanted a lover?” asked Eyes-of-crystal.

He glanced at her sideways and smiled. “How could I have one?—I’ll do what I can for your boys when they join the war, though they aren’t going to need much help, being Ahara and having the qualities you describe. But I find it pleasant to do what I can.”

They said goodbye, and he walked back to his campfire, pausing on the way to speak again with his sons.

Eh Shawin lived to be almost eighty, and Eyes-of-crystal reached a hundred, but they never met again, at least so far as the author tells us.

The last part of her story is devoted to the twins, who grew up to be fine soldiers and famous men. When Eh Manhata died at the age of eighty-five, betrayed and murdered by men he trusted, it seemed as if the alliance he had created would be destroyed. It was Ahara Ehrit who held everything together, not through violence, but through negotiation. He was helped (he said) by the fact that the world was full of the children of Eh Shawin. Often, when he met with other lineages, he found that he was talking to a half-brother. And there were certain traits that appeared over and over in Shawin’s children. They were reasonable, flexible, good-humored and willing to make the best of the situation. If they had to, they could fight, but it wasn’t their preferred way to solve problems.

Ehrit is known to history as The Negotiator or The Weaver. Eh Manhata began the alliance that finally became the world government, but Ahara Ehrit saved it.

His brother Tsu was better at warfare, and this also was useful to the alliance. He was among the best generals of his generation, though no one in that generation could equal Eh Manhata. Still, Ahara Tsu won most of the battles he fought. His nickname was The Sword of Ahara. In the opinion of Ehrit, his qualities came from their mother. He was more courageous than was typical of the children of Eh Shawin, more relentless, more disciplined, more bloody-minded and more bent on going his own way, though he always listened to Ehrit, and discipline and loyalty kept him from doing anything seriously off to the side.

Neither of them inherited Eh Manhata’s great force of character. But the new age did not need this quality. They both had lovers, men who stayed with them for years, and though both of them fathered children, so far as is known they did so without pleasure.

Footnotes:

1 Literally “of a good thread within the woven cord.”

2 Literally “nothing came forward.”  The double entendre is in the original.

3 Literally “with katiad.” This is the most important male virtue. If a man has it, he is steadfast, forthright, honest and sincere. He travels like an arrow that is well made and well shot, straight to the target.

4 This is a marsh-dwelling quadruped herbivore. Its body is like a small antelope or deer, except for the broad three-toed feet. Its head is surprisingly large and looks as if it might belong to a refined wart hog. The males have tusks. Both sexes have little piggy eyes and large mobile ears, which are striped lavender and pale yellow inside. Their backs are dull red, almost the same color as the dominant vegetation of the marshes. Their rumps are yellow, except around the anus, where there is a circular area that is entirely hairless. The bare skin is bright pink.

5 The build described here is not typical of male hwahath, who tend to be solid with torsos that go straight up and down. The author is giving us a male protagonist who is a bit odd and humanish in appearance.

6 The old term for families like this was ‘side-clingers,’ though the word can also be translated as ‘shelf fungus’ or even ‘barnacle.’ They were too small to survive on their own, so became allies of some large and powerful lineage, which chose not to absorb them for various reasons. Most powerful was the need to have a nearby source for breeding and sexual partners. In the area where this story takes place, the incest taboo forbade—and still forbids—sex of any kind within a lineage. As the lineages grew larger and larger, this began to be a problem, which was solved—at least in part—by the accumulation of clingers.

First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, July 1994.

About the Author

Eleanor Arnason published her first novel, The Sword Smith, in 1978, and followed it with novels such as Daughter of the Bear King and To The Resurrection Station. In 1991, she published her best-known novel, one of the strongest novels of the ’90s, the critically-acclaimed A Woman of the Iron People, a complex and substantial novel which won the prestigious James Tipree Jr. Memorial Award. Her most recent books are Ring of Swords, Tomb of the Fathers, Mammoths of the Great Plains, and a collection, Big Mama Stories. Her story “Stellar Harvest” was a Hugo Finalist in 2000. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Cilia-of-Gold

Stephen Baxter

AD 3948

The people—though exhausted by the tunnel’s cold—had rested long enough, Cilia-of-Gold decided.

Now it was time to fight.

She climbed up through the water, her flukes pulsing, and prepared to lead the group further along the Ice-tunnel to the new Chimney cavern.

But, even as the people rose from their browsing and crowded through the cold, stale water behind her, Cilia-of-Gold’s resolve wavered. The Seeker was a heavy presence inside her. She could feel its tendrils wrapped around her stomach, and—she knew—its probes must already have penetrated her brain, her mind, her self.

With a beat of her flukes, she thrust her body along the tunnel. She couldn’t afford to show weakness. Not now.

“Cilia-of-Gold.”

A broad body, warm through the turbulent water, came pushing out of the crowd to bump against hers: it was Strong-Flukes, one of Cilia-of-Gold’s Three-mates. Strong-Flukes” presence was immediately comforting. “Cilia-of-Gold. I know something’s wrong.”

Cilia-of-Gold thought of denying it; but she turned away, her depression deepening. “I couldn’t expect to keep secrets from you. Do you think the others are aware?”

The hairlike cilia lining Strong-Flukes” belly barely vibrated as she spoke. “Only Ice-Born suspects something is wrong. And if she didn’t, we’d have to tell her.” Ice-Born was the third of Cilia-of-Gold’s mates.

“I can’t afford to be weak, Strong-Flukes. Not now.”

As they swam together, Strong-Flukes flipped onto her back. Tunnel water filtered between Strong-Flukes” carapace and her body; her cilia flickered as they plucked particles of food from the stream and popped them into the multiple mouths along her belly. “Cilia-of-Gold,” she said. “I know what’s wrong. You’re carrying a Seeker, aren’t you?”

“ . . . Yes. How could you tell?”

“I love you,” Strong-Flukes said. “That’s how I could tell.”

The pain of Strong-Flukes’ perception was as sharp, and unexpected, as the moment when Cilia-of-Gold had first detected the signs of the infestation in herself . . . and had realised, with horror, that her life must inevitably end in madness, in a purposeless scrabble into the Ice over the world. “It’s still in its early stages, I think. It’s like a huge heat, inside me. And I can feel it reaching into my mind. Oh, Strong-Flukes . . . ”

“Fight it.”

“I can’t. I—”

“You can. You must.”

The end of the tunnel was an encroaching disk of darkness; already Cilia-of-Gold already feel the inviting warmth of the Chimney-heated water on the cavern beyond.

This should have been the climax, the supreme moment of Cilia-of-Gold’s life.

The group’s old Chimney, with its fount of warm, rich water, was failing; and so they had to flee, and fight for a place in a new cavern.

That, or die.

It was Cilia-of-Gold who had found the new Chimney, as she had explored the endless network of tunnels between the Chimney caverns. Thus, it was she who must lead this war—Seeker or no Seeker.

She gathered up the fragments of her melting courage.

“You’re the best of us, Cilia-of-Gold,” Strong-Flukes said, slowing. “don’t ever forget that.”

Cilia-of-Gold pressed her carapace against Strong-Flukes” in silent gratitude.

Cilia-of-Gold turned and clacked her mandibles, signalling the rest of the people to halt. They did so, the adults sweeping the smaller children inside their strong carapaces.

Strong-Flukes lay flat against the floor and pushed a single eyestalk towards the mouth of the tunnel. Her caution was wise; there were species who could home in on even a single sound-pulse from an unwary eye.

After some moments of silent inspection, Strong-Flukes wriggled back along the Ice surface to Cilia-of-Gold.

She hesitated. “We’ve got problems, I think,” she said at last.

The Seeker seemed to pulse inside Cilia-of-Gold, tightening around her gut. “What problems?”

“This Chimney’s inhabited already. By Heads.”

Kevan Scholes stopped the rover a hundred yards short of the wall-mountain’s crest.

Irina Larionova, wrapped in a borrowed environment suit, could tell from the tilt of the cabin that the surface here was inclined upwards at around forty degrees—shallower than a flight of stairs. This “mountain”, heavily eroded, was really little more than a dust-clad hill, she thought.

“The wall of Chao Meng-Fu Crater,” Scholes said briskly, his radio-distorted voice tinny. “Come on. We’ll walk to the summit from here.”

“Walk?” She studied him, irritated. ‘scholes, I’ve had one hour’s sleep in the last thirty-six; I’ve travelled across ninety million miles to get here, via flitters and wormhole transit links—and you’re telling me I have to walk up this damn hill?”

Scholes grinned through his faceplate. He was AS-preserved at around physical-twenty-five, Larionova guessed, and he had a boyishness that grated on her. Damn it, she reminded herself, this “boy” is probably older than me.

“Trust me,” he said. “You’ll love the view. And we have to change transports anyway.”    

“Why?”

“You’ll see.”

He twisted gracefully to his feet. He reached out a gloved hand to help Larionova pull herself, awkwardly, out of her seat. When she stood on the cabin’s tilted deck, her heavy boots hurt her ankles.

Scholes threw open the rover’s lock. Residual air puffed out of the cabin, crystallizing. The glow from the cabin interior was dazzling; beyond the lock, Larionova she saw only darkness.

Scholes climbed out of the lock and down to the planet’s invisible surface. Larionova followed him awkwardly; it seemed a long way to the lock’s single step.

Her boots settled to the surface, crunching softly. The lock was situated between the rover’s rear wheels: the wheels were constructs of metal strips and webbing, wide and light, each wheel taller than she was.

Scholes pushed the lock closed, and Larionova was plunged into sudden darkness.

Scholes loomed before her. He was a shape cut out of blackness. “Are you okay? Your pulse is rapid.”

She could hear the rattle of her own breath, loud and immediate. “Just a little disoriented.”

“We’ve got all of a third of a gee down here, you know. You’ll get used to it. Let your eyes dark-adapt. We don’t have to hurry this.”

She looked up.

In her peripheral vision, the stars were already coming out. She looked for a bright double star, blue and white. There it was: Earth, with Luna.

And now, with a slow grandeur, the landscape revealed itself to her adjusting eyes. The plain from which the rover had climbed spread out from the foot of the crater wall-mountain. It was a complex patchwork of crowding craters, ridges and scarps—some of which must have been miles high—all revealed as a glimmering tracery in the starlight. The face of the planet seemed wrinkled, she thought, as if shrunk with age.

“These wall-mountains are over a mile high,” Scholes said. “Up here, the surface is firm enough to walk on; the regolith dust layer is only a couple of inches thick. But down on the plain the dust can be ten or fifteen yards deep. Hence the big wheels on the rover. I guess that’s what five billion years of a thousand-degree temperature range does for a landscape . . . ”

Just twenty-four hours ago, she reflected, Larionova had been stuck in a boardroom in New York, buried in one of Paradoxa’s endless funding battles. And now this . . . Wormhole travel was bewildering. “Lethe’s waters,” she said. “It’s so—desolate.”

Scholes gave an ironic bow. “Welcome to Mercury,” he said.

Cilia-of-Gold and Strong-Flukes peered down into the Chimney cavern.

Cilia-of-Gold had chosen the cavern well. The Chimney here was a fine young vent, a glowing crater much wider than their old, dying home. The water above the Chimney was turbulent, and richly cloudy; the cavern itself was wide and smooth-walled. Cilia-plants grew in mats around the Chimney’s base. Cutters browsed in turn on the cilia-plants, great chains of them, their tough little arms slicing steadily through the plants. Sliding through the plant mats Cilia-of-Gold could make out the supple form of a Crawler, its mindless, tube-like body wider than Cilia-of-Gold’s and more than three times as long . . .

And, stalking around their little forest, here came the Heads themselves, the rulers of the cavern. Cilia-of-Gold counted four, five, six of the Heads, and no doubt there were many more in the dark recesses of the cavern.

One Head—close to the tunnel mouth—swivelled its huge, swollen helmet-skull towards her.

She ducked back into the tunnel, aware that all her cilia were quivering.

Strong-Flukes drifted to the tunnel floor, landing in a little cloud of food particles. “Heads,” she said, her voice soft with despair. “We can’t fight Heads.”

The Heads” huge helmet-skulls were sensitive to heat—fantastically so, enabling the Heads to track and kill with almost perfect accuracy. Heads were deadly opponents, Cilia-of-Gold reflected. But the people had nowhere else to go.

“We’ve come a long way, to reach this place, Strong-Flukes. If we had to undergo another journey—”  through more cold, stagnant tunnels “—many of us couldn’t survive. And those who did would be too weakened to fight.

“No. We have to stay here—to fight here.”

Strong-Flukes groaned, wrapping her carapace close around her. “Then we’ll all be killed.”

Cilia-of-Gold tried to ignore the heavy presence of the Seeker within her—and its prompting, growing more insistent now, that she get away from all this, from the crowding presence of people—and she forced herself to think.

Larionova followed Kevan Scholes up the slope of the wall-mountain. Silicate surface dust compressed under her boots, like fine sand. The climbing was easy—it was no more than a steep walk, really—but she stumbled frequently, clumsy in this reduced gee.

They reached the crest of the mountain. It wasn’t a sharp summit: more a wide, smooth platform, fractured to dust by Mercury’s wild temperature range.

“Chao Meng-Fu Crater,” Scholes said. “A hundred miles wide, stretching right across Mercury’s South Pole.”

The crater was so large that even from this height its full breadth was hidden by the tight curve of the planet. The wall-mountain was one of a series that swept across the landscape from left to right, like a row of eroded teeth, separated by broad, rubble-strewn valleys. On the far side of the summit, the flanks of the wall-mountain swept down to the plain of the crater, a full mile below.

Mercury’s angry Sun was hidden beyond the curve of the world, but its corona extended delicate, structured tendrils above the far horizon. 

The plain itself was immersed in darkness. But by the milky, diffuse light of the corona, Larionova could see a peak at the centre of the plain, shouldering its way above the horizon. There was a spark of light at the base of the central peak, incongruously bright in the crater’s shadows: that must be the Thoth team’s camp.

“This reminds me of the Moon,” she said.

Scholes considered this. “Forgive me, Dr Larionova. Have you been down to Mercury before?”

“No,” she said, his easy, informed arrogance grating on her. “I’m here to oversee the construction of Thoth, not to sightsee.”  

“Well, there’s obviously a superficial similarity. After the formation of the main System objects five billion years ago, all the inner planets suffered bombardment by residual planetesimals. That’s when Mercury took its biggest strike: the one which created the Caloris feature. But after that, Mercury was massive enough to retain a molten core—unlike the Moon. Later planetesimal strikes punched holes in the crust, so there were lava outflows that drowned some of the older cratering.

“Thus, on Mercury, you have a mixture of terrains. There’s the most ancient landscape, heavily cratered, and the planitia: smooth lava plains, punctured by small, young craters.

“Later, as the core cooled, the surface actually shrunk inwards. The planet lost a mile or so of radius.”

Like a dried-out tomato. “So the surface is wrinkled.”

“Yes. There are rupes and dorsa: ridges and lobate scarps, cliffs a couple of miles tall and extending for hundreds of miles. Great climbing country. And in some places there are gas vents, chimneys of residual thermal activity.” He turned to her, corona light misty in his faceplate. “So Mercury isn’t really so much like the Moon at all . . . Look. You can see Thoth.”

She looked up, following his pointing arm. There, just above the far horizon, was a small blue star.

She had her faceplate magnify the image. The star exploded into a compact sculpture of electric blue threads, surrounded by firefly lights: the Thoth construction site.

Thoth was a habitat to be placed in orbit close to Sol. Irina Larionova was the consulting engineer contracted by Paradoxa to oversee the construction of the habitat.

At Thoth, a Solar-interior probe would be constructed. The probe would be one Interface of a wormhole, loaded with sensors. The Interface would be dropped into the Sun. The other Interface would remain in orbit, at the centre of the habitat.

Thoth’s purpose was to find out what was wrong with the Sun.

Irina Larionova wasn’t much interested in the purpose of Thoth, or any of Paradoxa’s semi-mystical philosophizing. It was the work that was important, for her: and the engineering problems posed by Thoth were fascinating.

The electric-blue bars she could see now were struts of exotic matter, which would eventually frame the wormhole termini. The sparks of light moving around the struts were GUTships and short-haul flitters. She stared at the image, wishing she could get back to some real work.

Irina Larionova had had no intention of visiting Mercury herself. Mercury was a detail, for Thoth. Why would anyone come to Mercury, unless they had to? Mercury was a piece of junk, a desolate ball of iron and rock too close to the Sun to be interesting, or remotely habitable. The two Thoth exploratory teams had come here only to exploit: to see if it was possible to dig raw materials out of Mercury’s shallow—and close-at-hand—gravity well, for use in the construction of the habitat. The teams had landed at the South Pole, where traces of water-ice had been detected, and at the Caloris Basin, the huge equatorial crater where—it was hoped—that ancient impact might have brought iron-rich compounds to the surface.

The flitters from Thoth actually comprised the largest expedition ever to land on Mercury.

But, within days of landing, both investigative teams had reported anomalies.

Larionova tapped at her suit’s sleeve-controls. After a couple of minutes an image of Dolores Wu appeared in one corner of Larionova’s faceplate. Hi, Irina, she said, her voice buzzing like an insect in Larionova’s helmet’s enclosed space.

Dolores Wu was the leader of the Thoth exploratory team in Caloris. Wu was Mars-born, with small features and hair greyed despite AntiSenescence treatments. She looked weary.

“How’s Caloris?” Larionova asked.

Well, we don’t have much to report yet. We decided to start with a detailed gravimetric survey . . .

“And?”

We found the impact object. We think. It’s as massive as we thought, but much—much—too small, Irina. It’s barely a mile across, way too dense to be a planetesimal fragment.

“A black hole?”

No. Not dense enough for that.

“Then what?”

Wu looked exasperated. We don’t know yet, Irina. We don’t have any answers. I’ll keep you informed.

Wu closed off the link.

Standing on the corona-lit wall of Chao Meng-Fu Crater, Larionova asked Kevan Scholes about Caloris.   

“Caloris is big,” he said. “Luna has no impact feature on the scale of Caloris. And Luna has nothing like the Weird Country in the other hemisphere . . . ”

“The what?”

A huge planetesimal—or something—had struck the equator of Mercury, five billion years ago, Scholes said. The Caloris Basin—an immense, ridged crater system—formed around the primary impact site. Whatever caused the impact was still buried in the planet, somewhere under the crust, dense and massive; the object was a gravitational anomaly which had helped lock Mercury’s rotation into synchronisation with its orbit.

“Away from Caloris itself, shock waves spread around the planet’s young crust,” Scholes said. “The waves focused at Caloris” antipode—the point on the equator diametrically opposite Caloris itself. And the land there was shattered, into a jumble of bizarre hill and valley formations. The Weird Country . . . Hey. Dr Larionova.” 

She could hear that damnable grin of Scholes’s. “What now?” she snapped.

He walked across the summit towards her. “Look up,” he said.

“Damn it, Scholes—”

There was a pattering against her faceplate.

She tilted up her head. Needle-shaped particles swirled over the wall-mountain from the planet’s dark side and bounced off her faceplate, sparkling in corona light.

“What in Lethe is that?”

“Snow,” he said.

Snow . . . On Mercury?

In the cool darkness of the tunnel, the people clambered over each other; they bumped against the Ice walls, and their muttering filled the water with criss-crossing voice-ripples. Cilia-of-Gold swam through and around the crowd, coaxing the people to follow her will.

She felt immensely weary. Her concentration and resolve threatened continually to shatter under the Seeker’s assault. And the end of the tunnel, with the deadly Heads beyond, was a looming, threatening mouth, utterly intimidating.

At last the group was ready. She surveyed them. All of the people—expect the very oldest and the very youngest—were arranged in an array which filled the tunnel from wall to wall; she could hear flukes and carapaces scraping softly against Ice.

The people looked weak, foolish, eager, she thought with dismay; now that she was actually implementing it her scheme seemed simple-minded. Was she about to lead them all to their deaths?

But it was too late for the luxury of doubt, she told herself. Now, there was no other option to follow.

She lifted herself to the axis of the tunnel, and clacked her mandibles sharply.

“Now,” she said, “it is time. The most important moment of your lives. And you must swim! Swim as hard as you can; swim for your lives!”

And the people responded.

There was a surge of movement, of almost exhilarating intent. The people beat their flukes as one, and a jostling mass of flesh and carapaces scraped down the tunnel.

Cilia-of-Gold hurried ahead of them, leading the way towards the tunnel mouth. As she swam she could feel the current the people were creating, the plug of cold tunnel water they pushed ahead of themselves.

Within moments the tunnel mouth was upon her.

She burst from the tunnel, shooting out into the open water of the cavern, her carapace clenched firm around her. She was plunged immediately into a clammy heat, so great was the temperature difference between tunnel and cavern.

Above her the Ice of the cavern roof arched over the warm Chimney mouth. And from all around the cavern, the helmet-skulls of Heads snapped around towards her.

Now the people erupted out of the tunnel, a shield of flesh and chitin behind her. The rush of tunnel water they pushed ahead of themselves washed over Cilia-of-Gold, chilling her anew.

She tried to imagine this from the Heads’ point of view. This explosion of cold water into the cavern would bring about a much greater temperature difference than the Heads’ heat-sensor skulls were accustomed to; the Heads would be dazzled, at least for a time: long enough—she hoped—to give her people a fighting chance against the more powerful Heads.

She swivelled in the water. She screamed at her people, so loud she could feel her cilia strain at the turbulent water. “Now! Hit them now!”

The people, with a roar, descended towards the Heads.

Kevan Scholes led Larionova down the wall-mountain slope into Chao Meng-Fu Crater.

After a hundred yards they came to another rover. This car was similar to the one they’d abandoned on the other side of the summit, but it had an additional fitting, obviously improvised: two wide, flat rails of metal, suspended between the wheels on hydraulic legs.

Scholes helped Larionova into the rover and pressurised it. Larionova removed her helmet with relief. The rover smelled, oppressively, of metal and plastic.

While Scholes settled behind his controls, Larionova checked the rover’s data desk. An update from Dolores Wu was waiting for her. Wu wanted Larionova to come to Caloris, to see for herself what had been found there. Larionova sent a sharp message back, ordering Wu to summarise her findings and transmit them to the data desks at the Chao site.

Wu acknowledged immediately, but replied: I’m going to find this hard to summarise, Irina.

Larionova tapped out: Why?

We think we’ve found an artifact.

Larionova stared at the blunt words on the screen.

She massaged the bridge of her nose; she felt an ache spreading out from her temples and around her eye sockets. She wished she had time to sleep.

Scholes started the vehicle up. The rover bounced down the slope, descending into shadow. “It’s genuine water-ice snow,” Scholes said as he drove. “You know that a day on Mercury lasts a hundred and seventy-six Earth days. It’s a combination of the eighty-eight-day year and the tidally locked rotation, which—”

“I know.”

“during the day, the Sun drives water vapour out of the rocks and into the atmosphere.”

“What atmosphere?”

“You really don’t know much about Mercury, do you? It’s mostly helium and hydrogen—only a billionth of Earth’s sea-level pressure.”

“How come those gases don’t escape from the gravity well?”

“They do,” Scholes said. “But the atmosphere is replenished by the Solar wind. Particles from the Sun are trapped by Mercury’s magnetosphere. Mercury has quite a respectable magnetic field: the planet has a solid iron core, which . . . ”

She let Scholes” words run on through her head, unregistered. Air from the Solar wind, and snow at the South Pole . . .

Maybe Mercury was a more interesting place than she’d imagined.

“Anyway,” Scholes was saying, “the water vapour disperses across the planet’s sunlit hemisphere. But at the South Pole we have this crater: Chao Meng-Fu, straddling the Pole itself. Mercury has no axial tilt—there are no seasons here—and so Chao’s floor is in permanent shadow.”

“And snow falls.”

“And snow falls.”

Scholes stopped the rover and tapped telltales on his control panel. There was a whir of hydraulics, and she heard a soft crunch, transmitted into the cabin through the rover’s structure.

Then the rover lifted upwards through a foot.

The rover lurched forward again. The motion was much smoother than before, and there was an easy, hissing sound.

“You’ve just lowered those rails,” Larionova said. “I knew it. This damn rover is a sled, isn’t it?”

“It was easy enough to improvise,” Scholes said, sounding smug. “Just a couple of metal rails on hydraulics, and Vernier rockets from a cannibalised flitter to give us some push . . . ”

“It’s astonishing that there’s enough ice here to sustain this.”

“Well, that snow may have seemed sparse, but it’s been falling steadily—for five billion years . . . Dr Larionova, there’s a whole frozen ocean here, in Chao Meng-Fu Crater: enough ice to be detectable even from Earth.”

Larionova twisted to look out through a viewport at the back of the cabin. The rover’s rear lights picked out twin sled tracks, leading back to the summit of the wall-mountain; ice, exposed in the tracks, gleamed brightly in starlight.

Lethe, she thought. Now I’m skiing. Skiing, on Mercury. What a day.

The wall-mountain shallowed out, merging seamlessly with the crater plain. Scholes retracted the sled rails; on the flat, the regolith dust gave the ice sufficient traction for the rover’s wide wheels. The rover made fast progress through the fifty miles to the heart of the plain.

Larionova drank coffee and watched the landscape through the viewports. The corona light was silvery and quite bright here, like Moonlight. The central peak loomed up over the horizon, like some approaching ship on a sea of dust. The ice-surface of Chao’s floor—though pocked with craters and covered with the ubiquitous regolith dust—was visibly smoother and more level than the plain outside the crater.

The rover drew to a halt on the outskirts of the Thoth team’s sprawling camp, close to the foothills of the central peak. The dust here was churned up by rover tracks and flitter exhaust splashes, and semi-transparent bubble-shelters were hemispheres of yellow, homely light, illuminating the darkened ice surface. There were drilling rigs, and several large pits dug into the ice.

Scholes helped Larionova out onto the surface. “I’ll take you to a shelter,” he said. “Or a flitter. Maybe you want to freshen up before—”

“Where’s Dixon?”

Scholes pointed to one of the rigs. “When I left, over there.”

“Then that’s where we’re going. Come on.”

Frank Dixon was the team leader. He met Larionova on the surface, and invited her into a small opaqued bubble-shelter nestling at the foot of the rig.

Scholes wandered off into the camp, in search of food.

The shelter contained a couple of chairs, a data desk, and a basic toilet. Dixon was a morose, burly American; when he took off his helmet there was a band of dirt at the base of his wide neck, and Larionova noticed a sharp, acrid stink from his suit. Dixon had evidently been out on the surface for long hours.

He pulled a hip flask from an environment suit pocket. “You want a drink?” he asked. “Scotch?”

“Sure.”

Dixon poured a measure for Larionova into the flask’s cap, and took a draught himself from the flask’s small mouth.

Larionova drank; the liquor burned her mouth and throat, but it immediately took an edge off her tiredness. “It’s good. But it needs ice.”

He smiled. “Ice we got. Actually, we have tried it; Mercury ice is good, as clean as you like. We’re not going to die of thirst out here, Irina.”

“Tell me what you’ve found, Frank.”

Dixon sat on the edge of the desk, his fat haunches bulging inside the leggings of his environment suit. “Trouble, Irina. We’ve found trouble.”

“I know that much.”

“I think we’re going to have to get off the planet. The System authorities—and the scientists and conservation groups—are going to climb all over us, if we try to mine here. I wanted to tell you about it, before—”

Larionova struggled to contain her irritation and tiredness. “That’s not a problem for Thoth,” she said. “Therefore it’s not a problem for me. We can tell Paradoxa to bring in a water-ice asteroid from the Belt, for our supplies. You know that. Come on, Frank. Tell me why you’re wasting my time down here.”

Dixon took another long pull on his flask, and eyed her.

“There’s life here, Irina,” he said. “Life, inside this frozen ocean. Drink up; I’ll show you.”

The sample was in a case on the surface, beside a data desk.

The thing in the case looked like a strip of multicolored meat: perhaps three feet long, crushed and obviously dead; shards of some transparent shell material were embedded in flesh that sparkled with ice crystals.

“We found this inside a two-thousand-yard-deep core,” Dixon said.

Larionova tried to imagine how this would have looked, intact and mobile. “This means nothing to me, Frank. I’m no biologist.”

He grunted, self-deprecating. “Nor me. Nor any of us. Who expected to find life, on Mercury?” Dixon tapped at the data desk with gloved fingers. “We used our desks” medico-diagnostic facilities to come up with this reconstruction,” he said. “We call it a mercuric, Irina.”

A Virtual projected into space a foot above the desk’s surface; the image rotated, sleek and menacing.

The body was a thin cone, tapering to a tail from a wide, flat head. Three parabolic cups—eyes?—were embedded in the smooth “face”, symmetrically placed around a lipless mouth . . . No, not eyes, Larionova corrected herself. Maybe some kind of sonar sensor? That would explain the parabolic profile.

Mandibles, like pincers, protruded from the mouth. From the tail, three fins were splayed out around what looked like an anus. A transparent carapace surrounded the main body, like a cylindrical cloak; inside the carapace, rows of small, hairlike cilia lined the body, supple and vibratile.

There were regular markings, faintly visible, in the surface of the carapace.

“Is this accurate?”

“Who knows? It’s the best we can do. When we have your clearance, we can transmit our data to Earth, and let the experts get at it.”

“Lethe, Frank,” Larionova said. “This looks like a fish. It looks like it could swim. The streamlining, the tail—”

Dixon scratched the short hairs at the back of his neck and said nothing.

“But we’re on Mercury, damn it, not in Hawaii,” Larionova said.

Dixon pointed down, past the dusty floor. “Irina. It’s not all frozen. There are cavities down there, inside the Chao ice-cap. According to our sonar probes—”

“Cavities?”

“Water. At the base of the crater, under a couple of miles of ice. Kept liquid by thermal vents, in crust-collapse scarps and ridges. Plenty of room for swimming . . . We speculate that our friend here swims on his back—“ he tapped the desk surface, and the image swivelled “—and the water passes down, between his body and this carapace, and he uses all those tiny hairs to filter out particles of food. The trunk seems to be lined with little mouths. See?” He flicked the image to another representation; the skin became transparent, and Larionova could see blocky reconstructions of internal organs. Dixon said, “There’s no true stomach, but there is what looks like a continuous digestive tube passing down the axis of the body, to the anus at the tail.”

Larionova noticed a thread-like structure wrapped around some of the organs, as well as around the axial digestive tract.

“Look,” Dixon said, pointing to one area. “Look at the surface structure of these lengths of tubing, here near the digestive tract.”

Larionova looked. The tubes, clustering around the digestive axis, had complex, rippled surfaces. “So?”

“You don’t get it, do you? It’s convoluted—like the surface of a brain. Irina, we think that stuff must be some equivalent of nervous tissue.”

Larionova frowned. Damn it, I wish I knew more biology. “What about this thread material, wrapped around the organs?”

Dixon sighed. “We don’t know, Irina. It doesn’t seem to fit with the rest of the structure, does it?” He pointed. “Follow the threads back. There’s a broader main body, just here. We think maybe this is some kind of parasite, which has infested the main organism. Like a tapeworm. It’s as if the threads are extended, vestigial limbs . . . ”

Leaning closer, Larionova saw that tendrils from the worm-thing had even infiltrated the brain-tubes. She shuddered; if this was a parasite, it was a particularly vile infestation. Maybe the parasite even modified the mercuric’s behaviour, she wondered.

Dixon restored the solid-aspect Virtual.

Uneasily, Larionova pointed to the markings on the carapace. They were small triangles, clustered into elaborate patterns. “And what’s this stuff?”

Dixon hesitated. “I was afraid you might ask that.”

“Well?”

“ . . . We think the markings are artificial, Irina. A deliberate tattoo, carved into the carapace, probably with the mandibles. Writing, maybe: those look like symbolic markings, with information content.”

“Lethe,” she said.

“I know. This fish was smart,” Dixon said.

The people, victorious, clustered around the warmth of their new Chimney. Recovering from their journey and from their battle-wounds, they cruised easily over the gardens of Cilia-plants, and browsed on floating fragments of food.

It had been a great triumph. The Heads were dead, or driven off into the labyrinth of tunnels through the Ice. Strong-Flukes had even found the Heads” principal nest here, under the silty floor of the cavern. With sharp stabs of her mandibles, Strong-Flukes had destroyed a dozen or more Head young.

Cilia-of-Gold took herself off, away from the Chimney. She prowled the edge of the Ice cavern, feeding fitfully.

She was a hero. But she couldn’t bear the attention of others: their praise, the warmth of their bodies. All she seemed to desire now was the uncomplicated, silent coolness of Ice.

She brooded on the infestation that was spreading through her.

Seekers were a mystery. Nobody knew why Seekers compelled their hosts to isolate themselves, to bury themselves in the Ice. What was the point? When the hosts were destroyed, so were the Seekers.

Perhaps it wasn’t the Ice itself the Seekers desired, she wondered. Perhaps they sought, in their blind way, something beyond the Ice . . .

But there was nothing above the Ice. The caverns were hollows in an infinite, eternal Universe of Ice. Cilia-of-Gold, with a shudder, imagined herself burrowing, chewing her way into the endless Ice, upwards without limit . . . Was that, finally, how her life would end?

She hated the Seeker within her. She hated her body, for betraying her in this way; and she hated herself.

“Cilia-of-Gold.”

She turned, startled, and closed her carapace around herself reflexively.

It was Strong-Flukes and Ice-Born, together. Seeing their warm, familiar bodies, here in this desolate corner of the cavern, Cilia-of-Gold’s loneliness welled up inside her, like a Chimney of emotion.

But she swam away from her Three-mates, backwards, her carapace scraping on the cavern’s Ice wall.

Ice-Born came towards her, hesitantly. “We’re concerned about you.”

“Then don’t be,” she snapped. “Go back to the Chimney, and leave me here.”

“No,” Strong-Flukes said quietly.

Cilia-of-Gold felt desperate, angry, confined. “You know what’s wrong with me, Strong-Flukes. I have a Seeker. It’s going to kill me. And there’s nothing any of us can do about it.”

Their bodies pressed close around her now; she longed to open up her carapace to them and bury herself in their warmth.

“We know we’re going to lose you, Cilia-of-Gold,” Ice-Born said. It sounded as if she could barely speak. Ice-Born had always been the softest, the most loving, of the Three, Cilia-of-Gold thought, the warm heart of their relationship. “And—”

“Yes?”

Strong-Flukes opened her carapace wide. “We want to be Three again,” she said.

Already, Cilia-of-Gold saw with a surge of love and excitement, Strong-Flukes’s ovipositor was distended: swollen with one of the three isogametes which would fuse to form a new child, their fourth . . .

A child Cilia-of-Gold could never see growing to consciousness.

“No!” Her cilia pulsed with the single, agonized word.

Suddenly the warmth of her Three-mates was confining, claustrophobic. She had to get away from this prison of flesh; her mind was filled with visions of the coolness and purity of Ice: of clean, high Ice.

“Cilia-of-Gold. Wait. Please—”

She flung herself away, along the wall. She came to a tunnel mouth, and she plunged into it, relishing the tunnel’s cold, stagnant water.

“Cilia-of-Gold! Cilia-of-Gold!”

She hurled her body through the web of tunnels, carelessly colliding with walls of Ice so hard that she could feel her carapace splinter. On and on she swam, until the voices of her Three-mates were lost forever.

We’ve dug out a large part of the artifact, Irina, Dolores Wu reported. It’s a mash of what looks like hull material.

“Did you get a sample?”

No. We don’t have anything that could cut through material so dense . . . Irina, we’re looking at something beyond our understanding.

Larionova sighed. “Just tell me, Dolores,” she told Wu’s data desk image.

Irina, we think we’re dealing with the Pauli Principle.

Pauli’s Exclusion Principle stated that no two fermions—electrons or quarks—could exist in the same quantum state. Only a certain number of electrons, for example, could share a given energy level in an atom. Adding more electrons caused complex shells of charge to build up around the atom’s nucleus. It was the electron shells—this consequence of Pauli—that gave the atom its chemical properties.

But the Pauli principle didn’t apply to photons; it was possible for many photons to share the same quantum state. That was the essence of the laser: billions of photons, coherent, sharing the same quantum properties.

Irina, Wu said slowly, what would happen if you could turn off the Exclusion Principle, for a piece of fermionic matter?

“You can’t,” Larionova said immediately.

Of course not. Try to imagine anyway.

Larionova frowned. What if one could lase mass? “The atomic electron shells would implode, of course.”

Yes.

“All electrons would fall into their ground state. Chemistry would be impossible.”

Yes. But you may not care . . .

“Molecules would collapse. Atoms would fall into each other, releasing immense quantities of binding energy.”

You’d end up with a superdense substance, wouldn’t you? Completely non-reactive, chemically. And almost unbreachable, given the huge energies required to detach non-Pauli atoms.

Ideal hull material, Irina . . .

“But it’s all impossible,” Larionova said weakly. “You can’t violate Pauli.”

Of course you can’t, Dolores Wu replied.

Inside an opaqued bubble-shelter, Larionova, Dixon and Scholes sat on fold-out chairs, cradling coffees.

“If your mercuric was so smart,” Larionova said to Dixon, “how come he got himself stuck in the ice?”

Dixon shrugged. “In fact it goes deeper than that. It looked to us as if the mercuric burrowed his way up into the ice, deliberately. What kind of evolutionary advantage could there be in behaviour like that? The mercuric was certain to be killed.”

“Yes,” Larionova said. She massaged her temples, thinking about the mercuric’s infection. “But maybe that thread-parasite had something to do with it. I mean, some parasites change the way their hosts behave.”

Scholes tapped at a data desk; text and images, reflected from the desk, flickered over his face. “That’s true. There are parasites which transfer themselves from one host to another—by forcing a primary host to get itself eaten by the second.”

Dixon’s wide face crumpled. “Lethe. That’s disgusting.”

“The lancet fluke,” Scholes read slowly, “is a parasite of some species of ant. The fluke can make its host climb to the top of a grass stem and then lock onto the stem with its mandibles—and wait until it’s swallowed by a grazing sheep. Then the fluke can go on to infest the sheep in turn.”

“Okay,” Dixon said. “But why would a parasite force its mercuric host to burrow up into the ice of a frozen ocean? When the host dies, the parasite dies too. It doesn’t make sense.”

“There’s a lot about this that doesn’t make sense,” Larionova said. “Like, the whole question of the existence of life in the cavities in the first place. There’s no light down there. How do the mercurics survive, under two miles of ice?”

Scholes folded one leg on top of the other and scratched his ankle. “I’ve been going through the data desks.” He grimaced, self-deprecating. “A crash course in exotic biology. You want my theory?”

“Go ahead.”

“The thermal vents—which cause the cavities in the first place. The vents are the key. I think the bottom of the Chao ice-cap is like the mid-Atlantic ridge, back on Earth.

“The deep sea, a mile down, is a desert; by the time any particle of food has drifted down from the richer waters above it’s passed through so many guts that its energy content is exhausted.

“But along the Ridge, where tectonic plates are colliding, you have hydrothermal vents—just as at the bottom of Chao. And the heat from the Atlantic vents supports life: in little colonies, strung out along the mid-Atlantic Ridge. The vents form superheated fountains, smoking with deep-crust minerals which life can exploit: sulphides of copper, zinc, lead and iron, for instance. And there are very steep temperature differences, and so there are high energy gradients—another prerequisite for life.”

“Hmm.” Larionova closed her eyes and tried to picture it. Pockets of warm water, deep in the ice of Mercury; luxuriant mats of life surrounding mineral-rich hydrothermal vents, browsed by Dixon’s mercuric animals . . . Was it possible?

Dixon asked, “How long do the vents persist?”

“On Earth, in the Ridge, a couple of decades. Here we don’t know.”

“What happens when a vent dies?” Larionova asked. “That’s the end of your pocket world, isn’t it? The ice chamber would simply freeze up.”

“Maybe,” Scholes said. “But the vents would occur in rows, along the scarps. Maybe there are corridors of liquid water, within the ice, along which mercurics could migrate.”

Larionova thought about that for a while.

“I don’t believe it,” she said.

“Why not?”

“I don’t see how it’s possible for life to have evolved here in the first place.” In the primeval oceans of Earth, there had been complex chemicals, and electrical storms, and . . .

“Oh, I don’t think that’s a problem,” Scholes said.

She looked at him sharply. Maddeningly, he was grinning again. “Well?” she snapped.

“Look,” Scholes said with grating patience, “we’ve two anomalies on Mercury: the life forms here at the South Pole, and Dolores Wu’s artifact under Caloris. The simplest assumption is that the two anomalies are connected. Let’s put the pieces together,” he said. “Let’s construct a hypothesis . . . ”

Her mandibles ached as she crushed the gritty Ice, carving out her tunnel upwards. The rough walls of the tunnel scraped against her carapace, and she pushed Ice rubble down between her body and her carapace, sacrificing fragile cilia designed to extract soft food particles from warm streams.

The higher she climbed, the harder the Ice became. The Ice was now so cold she was beyond cold; she couldn’t even feel the Ice fragments that scraped along her belly and flukes. And, she suspected, the tunnel behind her was no longer open but had refrozen, sealing her here, in this shifting cage, forever.

The world she had left—of caverns, and Chimneys, and children, and her Three-mates—were remote bubbles of warmth, a distant dream. The only reality was the hard Ice in her mandibles, and the Seeker heavy and questing inside her.

She could feel her strength seeping out with the last of her warmth into the Ice’s infinite extent. And yet still the Seeker wasn’t satisfied; still she had to climb, on and up, into the endless darkness of the Ice.

. . . But now—impossibly—there was something above her, breaking through the Ice . . .

She cowered inside her Ice-prison.

Kevan Scholes said, “Five billion years ago—when the Solar System was very young, and the crusts of Earth and other inner planets were still subject to bombardment from stray planetesimals—a ship came here. An interstellar craft, maybe with FTL technology.”

“Why? Where from?” Larionova asked.

“I don’t know. How could I know that? But the ship must have been massive—with the bulk of a planetesimal, to more. Certainly highly advanced, with a hull composed of Dolores” superdense Pauli construction material.”

“Hmm. Go on.”

“Then the ship hit trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“I don’t know. Come on, Dr Larionova. Maybe it got hit by a planetesimal itself. Anyway, the ship crashed here, on Mercury—”

“Right.” Dixon nodded, gazing at Scholes hungrily; the American reminded Larionova of a child enthralled by a story. “It was a disastrous impact. It caused the Caloris feature . . . ”

“Oh, be serious,” Larionova said.

Dixon looked at her. “Caloris was a pretty unique impact, Irina. Extraordinarily violent, even by the standards of the System’s early bombardment phase . . . Caloris Basin is eight hundred miles across; on Earth, its walls would stretch from New York to Chicago.”

“So how did anything survive?”

Scholes shrugged. “Maybe the starfarers had some kind of inertial shielding. How can we know? Anyway the ship was wrecked; and the density of the smashed-up hull material caused it to sink into the bulk of the planet, through the Caloris puncture.

“The crew were stranded. So they sought a place to survive. Here, on Mercury.”

“I get it,” Dixon said. “The only viable environment, long term, was the Chao Meng-Fu ice cap.”

Scholes spread his hands. “Maybe the starfarers had to engineer descendants, quite unlike the original crew, to survive in such conditions. And perhaps they had to do a little planetary engineering too; they may have had to initiate some of the hydrothermal vents which created the enclosed liquid-water world down there. And so—”

“Yes?”

“And so the creature we’ve dug out of the ice is a degenerate descendant of those ancient star travellers, still swimming around the Chao sea.”

Scholes fell silent, his eyes on Larionova.

Larionova stared into her coffee. “A degenerate descendant”. After five billion years? Look, Scholes, on Earth it’s only three and a half billion years since the first prokaryotic cells. And on Earth, whole phyla—groups of species—have emerged or declined over periods less than a tenth of the time since the Caloris Basin event. Over time intervals like that, the morphology of species flows like hot plastic. So how is it possible for these mercurics to have persisted?”

Scholes looked uncertain. “Maybe they’ve suffered massive evolutionary changes,” he said. “But we’re just not recognising them. For example, maybe the worm parasite is the malevolent descendant of some harmless creature the starfarers brought with them.”

Dixon scratched his neck, where the suit-collar ring of dirt was prominent. “Anyway, we’ve still got the puzzle of the mercuric’s burrowing into the ice.”

“Hmm.” Scholes sipped his cooling coffee. “I’ve got a theory about that too.”

“I thought you might,” Larionova said sourly.

Scholes said, “I wonder if the impulse to climb up to the surface is some kind of residual yearning for the stars.”

“What?”

Scholes looked embarrassed, but he pressed on: “A racial memory buried deep, prompting the mercurics to seek their lost home world . . . Why not?”

Larionova snorted. “You’re a romantic, Kevan Scholes.”

A telltale flashed on the surface of the data desk. Dixon leaned over, tapped the telltale and took the call.

He looked up at Larionova, his moon-like face animated. “Irina. They’ve found another mercuric,” he said.

“Is it intact?”

“More than that.” Dixon stood and reached for his helmet. “This one isn’t dead yet . . . ”

The mercuric lay on Chao’s dust-coated ice. Humans stood around it, suited, their faceplates anonymously blank.

The mercuric, dying, was a cone of bruised-purple meat a yard long. Shards of shattered transparent carapace had been crushed into its crystallising flesh. Some of the cilia, within the carapace, stretched and twitched. The cilia looked differently coloured to Dixon’s reconstruction, as far as Larionova could remember: these were yellowish threads, almost golden.

Dixon spoke quickly to his team, then joined Larionova and Scholes. “We couldn’t have saved it. It was in distress as soon as our core broke through into its tunnel. I guess it couldn’t take the pressure and temperature differentials. Its internal organs seem to be massively disrupted . . . ”

“Just think.” Kevan Scholes stood beside Dixon, his hands clasped behind his back. “There must be millions of these animals in the ice under our feet, embedded in their pointless little chambers. Surely none of them could dig more than a hundred yards or so up from the liquid layer.”

Larionova switched their voices out of her consciousness. She knelt down, on the ice; under her knees she could feel the criss-cross heating elements in her suit’s fabric.

She peered into the dulling sonar-eyes of the mercuric. The creature’s mandibles—prominent and sharp—opened and closed, in vacuum silence.

She felt an impulse to reach out her gloved hand to the battered flank of the creature: to touch this animal, this person, whose species had, perhaps, travelled across light years—and five billion years—to reach her . . .

But still, she had the nagging feeling that something was wrong with Scholes’ neat hypothesis. The mercuric’s physical design seemed crude. Could this really have been a starfaring species? The builders of the ship in Caloris must have had some form of major tool-wielding capability. And Dixon’s earlier study had shown that the creature had no trace of any limbs, even vestigially . . .

Vestigial limbs, she remembered. Lethe.

Abruptly her perception of this animal—and its host parasite—began to shift; she could feel a paradigm dissolving inside her, melting like a Mercury snowflake in the Sun.

“Dr Larionova? Are you all right?”

Larionova looked up at Scholes. “Kevan, I called you a romantic. But I think you were almost correct, after all. But not quite. Remember we’ve suggested that the parasite—the infestation—changes the mercuric’s behaviour, causing it to make its climb.”

“What are you saying?”

Suddenly, Larionova saw it all. “I don’t believe this mercuric is descended from the starfarers—the builders of the ship in Caloris. I think the rise of the mercurics” intelligence was a later development; the mercurics grew to consciousness here, on Mercury. I do think the mercurics are descended from something that came to Mercury on that ship, though. A pet, or a food animal—Lethe, even some equivalent of a stomach bacteria. Five billion years is time enough for anything. And, given the competition for space near the short-lived vents, there’s plenty of encouragement for the development of intelligence, down inside this frozen sea.”

“And the starfarers themselves?” Scholes asked. “What became of them? Did they die?”

“No,” she said. “No, I don’t think so. But they, too, suffered huge evolutionary changes. I think they did devolve, Scholes; in fact, I think they lost their awareness.

“But one thing persisted within them, across all this desert of time. And that was the starfarers’ vestigial will to return—to the surface, one day, and at last to the stars . . . ”

It was a will which had survived even the loss of consciousness itself, somewhere in the long, stranded aeons: a relic of awareness long since transmuted to a deeper biochemical urge—a will to return home, still embedded within a once-intelligent species reduced by time to a mere parasitic infection.

But it was a home which, surely, could no longer exist.

The mercuric’s golden cilia twitched once more, in a great wave of motion which shuddered down its ice-flecked body.

Then it was still.

Larionova stood up; her knees and calves were stiff and cold, despite the suit’s heater. “Come on,” she said to Scholes and Dixon. “You’d better get your team off the ice as soon as possible; I’ll bet the universities have their first exploratory teams down here half a day after we pass Earth the news.”

Dixon nodded. “And Thoth?”

“Thoth? I’ll call Paradoxa. I guess I’ve an asteroid to order . . . ”

And then, she thought, at last I can sleep. Sleep and get back to work.

With Scholes and Dixon, she trudged across the dust-strewn ice to the bubble shelters.

She could feel the Ice under her belly . . . but above her there was no Ice, no water even, an infinite nothing into which the desperate pulses of her blinded eyes disappeared without echo.

Astonishingly—impossibly—she was, after all, above the Ice. How could this be? Was she in some immense upper cavern, its Ice roof too remote to see? Was this the nature of the Universe, a hierarchy of caverns within caverns?

She knew she would never understand. But it didn’t seem to matter. And, as her awareness faded, she felt the Seeker inside her subside to peace.

A final warmth spread out within her. Consciousness splintered like melting ice, flowing away through the closing tunnels of her memory.

First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, August 1994.

About the Author

Stephen Baxter made his first sale in 1987, and since then has become one of the most prolific writers in science fiction, one who works on the Cutting Edge of science, whose fiction bristles with weird new ideas, and often takes place against vistas of almost outrageously cosmic scope. Baxter’s first novel, Raft, was released in 1991, and was rapidly followed by other well-received novels such as Timelike Infinity, Anti-Ice, Flux, and the H.G. Wells pastiche—a sequel to The Time Machine—The Time Ships, which won both the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the Philip K. Dick Award. His many other books include the novels, Voyage, Titan, Moonseed, Mammoth, Book One: Silverhair, Long Tusk, Ice Bone, Manifold: Time, Manifold: Space, Evolution, Coalescent, Exultant, Transcendent, Emperor, Resplendent, Conqueror, Navagator, Firstborn, The H-Bomb Girl, Weaver, Flood, Ark, Stone Spring, Bronze Summer, and Iron Winter, as well as two novels in collaboration with Arthur C. Clarke), The Light of Other Days and Time’s Eye, a Time Odyssey. His short fiction has been collected in Vacuum Diagrams: Stories of the Xeelee Sequence, Traces, and Hunters of Pangaea. His most recent books include two novels in collaboration with Terry Pratchett, The Long Earth and The Long War. Coming up is a new novel, Proxima.

The Candlelit World:
The Dark Roots of Myth and Fantasy

Christopher Mahon

Folklore and legends are part of a legacy of primal fear that begins at the dawn of humanity, when the world seemed to be dominated by the supernatural: the woods, the hills, the mountains, and the rivers were the domains of old, unseen things, and living meant living in their shadow. Candles illustrated man’s deepest fear: that humans lived in tiny circles of light in a vast, dark world.

This motif is a constant throughout almost all of myth, and nowhere is it shown more clearly than Beowulf. Hrothgar, king of the Danes, builds a great feasting hall in the untamed moors of Denmark and brings the light and laughter of humans to the dark landscape. Grendel, a creature of the old world, pays back the incursion into his territory by slipping into the hall at night and murdering the humans inside. The golden tapestries are torn down, the lights of the hall are extinguished, and the moors are once again dark and silent.

One of the most celebrated scholars of this tale of candlelight was a British man named J.R.R. Tolkien. In his famous essay “The Monster and the Critics,” Tolkien argued that Beowulf had value beyond being an artifact of ancient Germanic culture, and claimed that the story of a man fighting against powerful primeval forces had literary merit.

Mythology has always influenced fantasy authors, and looking closer at Tolkien, the founder of modern high fantasy, and the writers of Weird Tales magazine, the progenitors of sword and sorcery, a whole web of connections and influences appears, tracing back to the mythic vision of a candlelit world. It’s an influence that continues to this day: two of the most popular and highly respected authors of the genre, Ursula LeGuin and now George R.R. Martin, are still playing out the struggle between humanity and the dark in their novels.

But to understand the struggle, readers must look to myth. Three concepts appear over and over: the wilderness, the thresholds between man and the world, and the dark. These are the elements that define the candlelit world, which now permeates fantasy so deeply that it has become inseparable from the genre.

The most tangible aspect of the candlelit world is wilderness. According to James Frazer, one of the seminal scholars on magical and religious traditions, “ . . . at the dawn of history, Europe was covered with immense primeval forests, in which the scattered clearings must have appeared like islets in an ocean of green.” Forests and other wildernesses were uncharted territory, outside the control and knowledge of humans. Naturally, untamed places became surrounded by stories of dread: the Russian forest spirits, leshyis, moaned and cried in the wind blowing through the trees, the ghostly will-o’-the-wisps drowned people in bogs, and Scottish redcaps snatched people up from deserted fields.

Even after Christianity came to Europe, forests were still an object of deep-seated fear. Predators and other wild animals were a constant threat to livestock and hunters, and according to Barry Lopez, wolves in particular became iconic of the danger of the wilderness:

“In the Bible, wilderness is defined as the place without God - a sere and barren desert. As civilized man matured and came to measure his own progress by his subjugation of the wilderness - both clearing trees for farms and clearing pagan minds for Christian ideas- the act of killing wolves became a symbolic act, a way to lash out at that enormous, inchoate obstacle: wilderness.”

With the idea of a vast, hostile wilderness surrounding humanity on all sides, walls and boundaries became necessary to hold back the real and supernatural dangers of the outside world. This is the second feature of the candlelit world: the need for boundaries and thresholds.

This concept makes an appearance in Joseph Campbell’s model of the Hero’s Journey, which features “the crossing of the first threshold,” in which the hero passes outside of the boundaries of the human world, into “[t]he regions of the unknown” such as the “desert, jungle, deep sea, alien land”. Campbell’s delineation between the realm of humans and “the unknown” is a built upon the idea of a candlelit world, with safety within the borders of light and danger outside.

Boundaries play a prominent role in Irish mythology, where “in-between” times like twilight and Samhain were thought to blur barriers between night and day, summer and winter. Where boundaries were weak, the chaos of the world could slip in. One of the most commonly known examples of supernatural boundaries has to do with vampires: many iterations of the vampire could not enter through a house’s front door without an invitation. This was because the house was the domain of humans, and was divided from the outside world by the boundaries of its walls.

The most primal threshold is sunset, in which the third element, darkness, overtakes the world. Darkness is the defining concept of the candlelit world, and runs throughout myth as the source of all-pervasive dread: night is when Grendel attacks Hrothgar’s hall, night is when the Irish sidhe elves come for children, when vampires of all cultures wake up, when werewolves transform and ghosts can rise from the grave. When the sun rises and light comes again, it washes away the dark and its creatures, who retreat to dark places—caves, forests, mountain valleys, or underground. But a key aspect of the dark is its association with the unknown: in folklore, the greatest fears are often nameless, taking the forms of taboos and superstitions.

Some of the oldest and most basic myths begin with a world besieged by perpetual night, then introduce a figure, like the Native American Raven, that ignites the sun. But often, the gift given to humanity is fire, as with Prometheus from Greek myth. Fire, the source of light, plays a tremendous role in folklore of all kinds, especially in rural Ireland, where the central hearth-fire was connected to the safety and wellbeing of the family, and was kept constantly burning for years. Fire, besides cooking and heating, holds its position in part because it was the first defense against the dark.

Because these ideas about the wilderness, thresholds, and the dark permeated mythology so deeply, they had a profound influence on the authors that came to define modern fantasy, namely J.R.R. Tolkien, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clarke Ashton Smith. All of them have a long history with folklore and legends, and from their work, we respectively derive the genres of high fantasy and sword and sorcery, which continue to be some of the most popular and enduring forms.

J.R.R Tolkien’s experiences with mythology extend from Homer’s Iliad to the Norse sagas, and throughout his work, the reader is brought back to a primal feeling of dread, especially for the woods. One of the most vivid examples from The Fellowship of the Ring is the Old Forest: Fatty Bolger, one of Frodo’s friends, is immediately seized with terror at Merry’s plan to enter it, claiming that the place is the stuff of “nightmares” and that no one dares enter it. In fact, a barrier has been built between the Old Forest and the rest of the Shire—the Hedge. The trees have actually attacked this barrier in the past, forcing the Hobbits to repel them by chopping and burning them, reenacting civilization’s struggle against the wilderness.

Inside the Forest, the Hobbits are distinctly trespassers: Merry has to calm the trees and explain that he and his friends are not here to do harm. But quietly, the Hobbits are misdirected and lured deeper into the woods, where they are attacked by the Willow, who tries to swallow Merry and Pippin alive. Both the Old Forest and the earlier Mirkwood are reflections of the hostility and danger that was attributed to wilderness: in The Hobbit, the forest of Mirkwood lies in perpetual darkness under its boughs, and simply stepping off the path brings the danger of being forever lost in the woods.

In 1923, over a decade before The Hobbit, the magazine Weird Tales entered the market. It published “weird fiction,” which ranged from adventure tales to horror stories, but at the center of it all was the Lovecraft Circle. The Circle was a group of writers guided by the author H.P. Lovecraft, who described his view of weird fiction in this way:

“A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint . . . of that most terrible conception of the human brain–a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.”

His classic story At the Mountains of Madness begins with a group of scientists travelling to the unknown wilderness of Antarctica on an expedition, and as with other wildernesses, it is the domain of older, hostile beings: the scientists find several specimens of an ancient race who once ruled primeval earth, which reanimate and murder the crew before trying to return to their ruined city beyond the mountains. The protagonists, Danforth and Dyer, follow them into the city and discover that the Earth exists at the mercy of powerful, tenebrous beings, which now lurk in the depths of the ocean or the vast darkness of space.

Inspired by Arthur Machen, who was himself fascinated with the medieval age’s sense of the “unknown,” Lovecraft had a tremendous influence on his contemporaries, especially inside his Circle, which included Howard E. Smith, the creator of Conan the Barbarian, and Clark Ashton Smith, creator of the world of Zothique. Both of these men, whose stories featured necromancers, thieves, warriors, and adventures into forgotten temples, conversed with Lovecraft throughout their writing careers, drawing inspiration and guidance from him and his works, especially the terror-filled Cthulhu mythos.

Despite a decided preference for Howard E. Smith’s style, modern sword and sorcery still retains strong roots in its candlelit heritage: The Chronicles of Drizz’t, one of the Forgotten Realms series’ most popular titles, features the drow, a subterranean race of dark elves that conduct raids on human settlements during the night. The setting of Drizz’t represents an alternate perspective on the candlelit world: by showing the reader Menzoberranzan and drow society, the story gives them a glimpse into the creatures that threaten humanity from the dark.

The legacy of candlelight continues to run deep, even in the most celebrated authors of fantasy. In 1971, Ursula LeGuin, the acclaimed creator of the Earthsea Cycle, wrote The Tombs of Atuan, a story that focuses on the life of Tenar, a young girl who has been appointed as the high priestess of the Tombs of the Nameless Ones, an underground labyrinth kept in perpetual dark.

Throughout the book, “the dark” is invoked by name as the devourer of Tenar’s self and as a byword for the Nameless Ones. Their vast Undertomb is the seat of primal darkness: it has never been touched by light since the creation of the world. When Tenar and the wizard Ged try to escape through the Tombs, the dark begins to panic Tenar so much that she pleads again and again for Ged to make his magical werelight. But Ged reveals that all his power is being spent holding back the Dark, which is trying to “quench them, devour them.” What Tenar is desperate for is a candle to separate her from the darkness, and Ged’s revelation confirms the deepest and oldest fear of humanity: the dark is trying to swallow them alive.

In the earlier Wizard of Earthsea, Ged’s pride caused him to allow darkness into the world: after being continually mocked and belittled by another mage, Ged attempts to prove his superiority by weaving a spell that allows the dead to come back to life. He summons up the shade of the woman Elfarran, but then—

“ . . . the sallow oval between Ged’s arms . . . widened and spread, a rent in the darkness of the earth and night, a ripping open of the fabric of the world. And through that bright misshapen breach clambered something like a clot of black shadow . . . ”

Ged, in his arrogance, has actually broken the threshold between the world and the dark, “ripping open the fabric of the world” and letting a piece of darkness inside. The rest of the book is spent in pursuit of this darkness, which takes the form of a shapeless, whispering shadow.

George R.R. Martin’s works, the Game of Thrones series, also bear the distinct mark of the candlelit world: the first chapter of A Song of Ice and Fire brings the reader to Eddard Starks’s kingdom of Winterfell, a wilderness realm out on the edge of the civilized world. Stark’s duty is to maintain the Wall, the threshold between the wild, dangerous lands to the North and the rest of the Seven Kingdoms. But the prologue takes the reader beyond this threshold and brings them face to face with the darkness outside: in the opening pages, the reader is introduced to a doomed group of the Wall’s Watch, whose dialogue is centered on fear of the dark and what lies in it. Their fears eventually come to fruition when they meet the Others, the ancient residents of the woods who gleefully murder the trespassers and fade back into the trees.

Then there is the direwolf: in Chapter 1, the Stark family is returning from an execution and finds a huge, dead wolf in the snow, with four living pups still suckling on it. Despite the visible fear on the part of the rest of the party, the children adopt these pups, in part because the family’s crest bears a direwolf. As Barry Lopez argued before, the wolf is a symbol of the untamed wilderness, and therefore the adoption of the pups strengthens the Starks’ connection to their symbolic duty: to tame the chaotic forces on the other side of the Wall.

So the candlelit world carries on, from the ages of myth to the modern day. But no survey of fantasy would be complete without Terry Pratchett. As always, it’s his Discworld novels that get to the heart of the matter simply and eloquently: in Wee Free Men, when the young Tiffany Aching asks the witch Granny Weatherwax what she “does,” Granny replies with:

“We look to . . . the edges. There’s a lot of edges, more than people know. Between life and death, this world and the next, night and day, right and wrong . . . an’ they need watchin’. We watch ‘em, we guard the sum of things.”

This is the heart of fantasy: the warriors, rangers, and mages that populate our pages are archetypes that began with the watchers of the borders, the thresholds between humans and the dark. Whatever direction the genre goes, that legacy is held in its bones.

About the Author

Christopher Mahon is a fantasy writer and critic from Washington State. He is a Regent’s Scholar at Pacific Lutheran University, where he is pursuing an English Major and a Printing and Publishing Minor. He has worked as an editor for Lower Columbia College’s literary magazine The Salal Review, and stands as the current editor of PLU’s literary magazine Saxifrage.

Decadence & Buckets of Blood:
A Conversation with Holly Black

Jeremy L. C. Jones

Holly Black wrote a vampire novel, The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, and she had a whole lot of fun doing it.

It’s hard to pinpoint what Black is best known for or what she does best. Her first novel, Tithe, is a modern fairy tale. Her Spiderwick books tell the story of three children, a magic book, and fairies, and that series propelled her into international fame. The Curse Workers series wove urban fantasy, touch magic, and organized crime with a noir-ish tone and the dark secrets of the con.

With her most recent book, Doll Bones, this highly imaginative and ever playful fantasist, asks what happens when we stop engaging in imaginative play.

“Holly is one of the more dynamic and interesting writers out there in terms of the variety of things she’s doing,” said Jeff VanderMeer, the author of the Ambergris Cycle. “I love her dark sensibilities.”  

Black and I talked in a hotel restaurant in Spartanburg, SC, the morning after she arrived to speak about creating magic systems at Shared Worlds, a world-building and creative writing camp I co-direct with Jeff VanderMeer.

Fresh off a pre-pub dinner tour with booksellers and the chaotic carnival of Comic Con, Black claimed to be off her game. However, she was animated and quick to laugh as we talked about plotting novels, zombies, and the decadent joy of reading and writing vampire books.

Back in 2009, you gave a presentation on plot here at Shared Worlds. You’ve covered a lot of ground since then. Has the way you plot a novel changed much?

Definitely, I’ve been thinking about plot differently. The reason there are so many systems of plotting is that you need to hear different parts of them at different times. For a long time I would write chapter one then write chapter two then re-write chapter one then re-write chapter two then write chapter three then re-write chapter one then re-write chapter two, and I had a really hard time planning forward. Then I wrote the Curse Worker series of novels which have cons at their center, which meant I had to plan the books in greater detail. The cons had to stay the way they were and they gave a spine to each book. I thought, “This is great! I’ve figured out plotting!” Then I sat down to write Coldtown and it doesn’t have a con at the center of it and I was back to sort of feeling my way in the dark.

I understand the three arc—or sometimes four arc—structure that people talk about. At least I think I understand it. But it’s not always the thing that will help me puzzle through the thing I am puzzling through.

Is that part of the thrill of potting—that puzzling, that feeling your way in the dark?

I would not say so! [Laughter.] I would say just the opposite. It’s the thing that’s the most painful. I feel like writing a book is a magic trick. Each time I am fairly sure one day I will not pull off. The book I am working now is called The Darkest Part of the Forest. It’s a Faerie book. And I was really having a rough, rough time with it. On the plane ride out to do the pre-pub tour, I finally got the idea that made me understand what the book was, but until then I thought, this is one. This is the one where I’m going to have to call up my editor and be like, “Can I write you a different book, because I don’t know how to write this book? I thought I did, but now I don’t.” [Laughter.]

Until that draft is turned in, I often feel a great deal of anxiety and dread that I will be unable to pull it off. I think that’s why I like re-writing so much.

Because you have something in front of you?

At that point, it’s cleaning it up. It’s making it better. It’s enhancing it. I know what it is then.

How do you balance the need for time to figure out the puzzle and an increasing number of shorter and shorter deadlines?

I do a lot of talking about stuff with writer friends. Like, “I’m stuck on this thing. What am I missing?” That can be really helpful because you use a different part of your brain to talk about story than you do to write. I think that when you’re talking about your book you can get a greater sense of the whole book at once, whereas when you’re down in it you’re often looking at it through the protagonist’s eyes and you can only look a little bit ahead. Or, at least, I have difficulty seeing more than a little bit ahead, so talking about it is really helpful. Sometimes you just know that there’s something wrong and you don’t know how to make it right until . . . until you do. That’s the part that I’m not sure there’s any other way through.

Also, I suppose when you’re talking with someone you can gauge by their response, their facial expressions.

And they can call you out. They can be like, “That doesn’t make any sense. What do you mean? How do they get from here to there?” Stephen King, in On Writing, talks about plot as being something that you have to discover like you’re in an archaeological dig. If you take a jackhammer to it, you’ll destroy it. I remember reading that when I was working with friends to try to figure out how to make a plot. We’d sit down and they try to help me figure out the plot and I thought, “That can’t be true! We’re getting a plot and this is great.”

But more and more I’ve come to understand what King was saying and I don’t think it was what I originally took it to mean. But, rather, that you can create a plot but you still have to find your way to the story that it is. When your perfectly laid plan falls apart, it is only for a good reason and it’s because you need to find the story still.

Has the plot of any of your books changed drastically from talking with friends?

Absolutely! You hear yourself and you’re like, “Oh! That’s what it is!” Stuff floats in your head and you don’t realized quite what it means until you’re really talking about it. A lot of times I have floaty ideas about what happens, and it helps to actually say, “This then this then this then this . . . Or the consequences of that is this . . . Or what I really mean by that is this . . . ” Taking it from the general to the specific is really, really helpful and, a lot of times, it really pushes your forward.

Speaking of pushing forward, where does a book usually start for you?

They usually start with an image or a little bit of a premise and a mood—very much a mood. I want to feel this. I want the reader to feel this. With Doll Bones, I knew that the doll was going to be made out of bone China that was made out of human bones. I knew that, and I knew that it was going to be a story about what it mean to stop playing, to stop telling stories together.

How do you—

[Laughter.] I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.

As your career grows, it seems like it’d be harder for you to take risks, but here are you are taking greater risks.

Doll Bones is a story I wanted to tell for a long time. When I was first talking about it with people at my publisher, everybody had a story about how they stopped, when they stopped, why they stopped playing, and a lot of times it wasn’t that they wanted to stop. Someone mocked them for playing a game they’d always played. Something went wrong and there was some reason why they stopped.

The obvious way to tell Doll Bones was from the girl who is visited by the ghost and who sends him on the quest and who doesn’t want to give up playing with dolls. Her name is Poppy. Originally, I thought this was Poppy’s story. And I don’t think I could’ve written it until I realized, no, it’s Zach’s story, because you are asking the same questions Zach is asking.

Do you know whose story it is before pen hits paper?

Ideally, you know but that’s not always how it happens. In the case of Doll Bones I’d only written a very little bit before I realized it.

In reading the “How I wrote . . . ” posts on your blog, it seems like you throw out a lot of what you write.

I threw out the first three chapters of Coldtown and then I threw out thirty thousand words in the middle. It was really painful.

Why?

“The Coldest Girl in Coldtown” was originally a short story. And I had some idea that what I was going to do in the novel was take the characters from the short story plus new characters and take them on an adventure. Great! I had a different idea for a different beginning where a girl woke up after a party where everyone was dead. But I thought I probably shouldn’t do that because it’s probably a noir-ish leftover from my Curse Worker days. I wrote three chapters with a different beginning, and then I realized, no, that the other beginning is the beginning and when I started writing it I really, really liked it.

You feel it in your body. It’s like you have a limb that is out of place and you get it snapped back in. You can just tell when it’s the right thing.

Do you labor over cutting 30,000 words? Try to save them?

What happened is the kids in Coldtown are on a sort of road trip to Coldtown, which is a desperate move. Once you go inside the gates you can’t go unless you have this particular kind of marker which means you bounty hunted a vampire. It’s pretty scary. It’s been built up throughout most of the book and I was so excited to be in Coldtown that I wrote a lot of things in Coldtown, had a lot of fun in Coldtown at first, and that was just wrong. You don’t have fun in the vampire city. It’s terrifying! [Laughter] Well, maybe you can have a little fun. But not then. Not when you just go in. So I had all this really fun stuff that I had to take out because it wasn’t pacing right.

I had so much I wanted to show the characters! From a pacing point of view it was meant to be a misdirect. Look, I’m going to lull you. But it didn’t work that way. You guys can’t not hang out in Coldtown! It didn’t feel right. My friends were supportive but slightly horrified when I cut it. There were like, “Do you really need to? It was fine! Don’t! Don’t!” But they’re used to it by now.

It was complicated. I had to take two kids out of the group. I had to change the dynamic of who met who when.

To take out the middle do you have to go back to the beginning?

Sometimes you do. I’ve re-thought the book I am writing now, and I’m back in the beginning, retyping every word, because there’re too many changes. Re-typing the whole thing, then I have to write the rest. I really envy people who have a better process! [Laughter.] Someday I’m going to have a better process. That’s my goal. That’s why I love reading these books about how write a book in like thirty days. I just feel someday someone is going to say the thing that’s going to fix my process.

What has been your most efficient book?

I think Red Glove. That book was fast. I wrote the beginning of it in Mexico on a writing retreat. I’d come right off the last Spiderwick tour and I knew the characters from writing White Cat. It was a direct sequel and I had thought a lot about the beginning. I was really excited to work on it. It went the most smoothly of any book I’ve ever written. Pretty fast. Pretty painless. Not entirely painless. Coldtown, for all I had to gut it twice, it was a lot of fun to write.

What was fun about Coldtown?

I took every single thing about vampires that I liked in my misspent youth and jammed them into this book. It’s full of decadence and buckets of blood. All the things I like.

Vampires have gone through a lot of changes since you and I were teenagers.

Whenever you write a book, you are in dialogue with what came before it and certainly there’s no way to write a vampire book now and not have people think of Twilight. It’s just not possible, because Twilight has loomed so large in the public consciousness.

You know, I thought, “Really? Am I really going to do this? Am I really going to write a vampire book now?” Part way through, I turned to my friends and said, “Who let me do this?” In all the time I’ve been around, vampires have only ever been “so over” that someone would be crazy to write one or so popular that someone would be crazy to write one. I figured that there’s no time that they’re not going to fall into one of those two categories so I might just as well write it now.

But I had to ask myself, “Do I have anything to bring to the genre? Do I have anything to add?” In Coldtown, there are these quarantined areas, but people are able to broadcast out of them with live feeds. They’re able to update their Tumbler pages from the inside.

When I was writing Coldtown, I was thinking a lot about reality television. I watch some truly crappy reality television, by the way, so I’m not writing a book judging reality television. But I was interested in the way that real reality is inevitable in reality television. A few years ago on VH-1 there was a show called “Megan Wants a Millionaire,” which was an off-shoot of Brett Michael’s “Rock of Love,” you may recall which in itself was an off-shoot of Flavor Flav’s show. They had to pull the plug on “Megan Wants a Millionaire” because one of the contestants had allegedly killed his girlfriend. I say “allegedly” because he never went to trial. He killed himself. They cancelled the show halfway through the season. Like, “Let’s pretend this show never happened.” Several years later on “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,” one of the husbands killed himself. Who knows why anyone does anything, but . . . Some of his sketchy financial dealings had come to light. And they didn’t cancel the show. They broadcast it. They re-cut it to pull that into the storyline. At the re-union show, someone said, “Well, maybe we shouldn’t have shown this?” And I thought, “That’s true!” But I watched all of it and didn’t feel culpable.

So, what would it be like if you could watch kids in this quarantined area, going to vampire parties, wanting to become vampires, killing and dying? How far away would it seem like it was happening?

How do your long-time readers feel about a vampire novel from you?

I think that they’re “in.” I was asked by fans if I’d ever write a vampire novel. People like vampires.

Why, though?

Why? [Laughter.] Vampires are an endlessly flexible metaphor. We go through a cycle with vampires. We have vampire as as villain force that we fight, then we have vampire as anti-hero, then we have vampire as romantic obsession, then we have vampire as hero. And we cycle right back around.

Yeah, but—

Everybody’s got their thing. For years, I’ve been having people telling me they don’t like fairy books. So now I go and write a vampire book.

When I was a kid, the first vampire book I read may have been Interview with a Vampire [by Anne Rice], which I bought for 25 cents at a garage and it had this old cover of the characters on the back with their faces painted white. They looked ridiculous—a really amazing cover. I read that book over and over again. I loved it so much. Then I read Les Daniels who had that series about a vampire who traveled through time, I believe, by going back into his silver skull. He was some kind of alchemist or magician in addition to being a vampire. Each time he traveled he romanced a different lady. One was [set in] the Dark Ages; one was set during the French Revolution, called Citizen Vampire, and then one was Aztec. Then I read Tanith Lee’s Sabella, or the Blood Star, which is one of my favorite books ever.

What was it about vampire books that appealed to the teenage and twenty-something you?

Certainly, being in the monster’s head the way you were with Interview felt real fresh at the time; it felt very shocking. The book was scary but I wasn’t scared. And . . . it was very decadent! It’s this fabulously decadent, debauched story—that’s what appealed to me! [Laughter.] Descriptions of wine and blood co-mingling, you know? I was into it. I was all for it.

The thing about vampires is that they create an idealized version of us and they create a debased version of us in one being. They’re us, staying as young as we are. We’ll never get older. We’ll never get less beautiful. We’ll probably be able to manage our money situation because, let’s face it, we can invest now. Vampires are the aristocrats if the undead, but they are also us in our most uncontrolled, debased state.

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:
Circles Rise Again

Daniel Abraham

I was in Seattle a few weeks ago for the Locus Awards, and I had the very real pleasure of meeting a few of the students who were attending the Clarion West workshop this summer. I attended the workshop back in 1998, and it was a watershed both in my artistic and commercial careers. The opportunity to talk with some of the people who were basically where I’d been fifteen years before was cool and weird and a little dizzying.

We were at the bar even though I don’t drink, and a few of them asked me if I had any advice about how to approach the workshop. I rattled some things off the top of my head. Most were of the very mundane, very basic sort. Don’t be afraid to try new things. Don’t assume that your career is going to take off immediately after the workshop. Genre fiction is a small industry; try not to sleep with anyone you wouldn’t want to hang out with at a convention in twenty years. The usual. But I’ve been thinking about it more since, and there was, I think, one genuinely useful thing I said that night. I hope it didn’t get lost amid the clutter.

I have never been invited to teach at any of the big workshops, and it’s perfectly possible I never will be. It’s a prestigious position, a position of real trust, and requires skills well beyond being able to put together a good sentence, a good story, or even a useful critique. But I fantasize for a living, and sometimes I fantasize about what I would say to those imaginary students. That’s pretty much the same as imagining what I would say to myself, if I could reach that earlier version of me.

I imagine it’s the Sunday night before the first week. That the students are all there, just meeting each other in person for the first time, taking stock of each other, getting ready for a six-week bootcamp. It’s a class, and like all classes, people have roles they’re comfortable with—teacher’s pet, class clown, bad kid in the back row—all complicated by having the fragile narcissism that comes with doing something with no objective standard of success. I remember that night from the last time I was there, and apart from shifting valence, my daydream’s pretty much the same.

I imagine having everyone sit down at a single, long table. I stand at the head, of course, because I’m the teacher and all fantasies of teaching are power fantasies. I smile, and I look at each of them, make eye contact, get their attention, and I say:

“All right. Before we start, take a minute. Look around. Look at all the other faces in this room. This is your team. You should write that down, because it’s probably the smartest thing I’m going to say in the whole time I’m here, and you’re going to forget it.

“It’s not that your dumb or that you’re not paying attention. It’s just that we all forget sometimes. Someone says something that sits wrong about something we did, and we start thinking they’re our enemy. Or someone does something really freaking great and we get jealous and start thinking of them as the one we should try to beat. We want to be the star of the class, and we look at everyone and start seeing them as competition. No one here is your competition. This is your team. These are the people who are going to push you to be better, and who you’re going to push. These are the people you’re going to be talking with when you have the conversations that help you define your ambitions. These are the people you’re going to know when you break in, and when you’re on top, and when your career tanks and you have to reinvent yourself.

“The truth of the matter is that nothing you do at a workshop like this matters. Workshops aren’t about making great stories, they’re about making great writers. If you turn out a perfect polished work here and sell it the minute it comes off the printer, that’ll be cool, but it won’t matter. If you can do that three times a year for the next decade, you’ll have a small but respectable career. If you don’t, you can always be the one who people say Oh yeah, you remember X? She had that one really good story. What ever happened to her?

“You’re going to spend your time here, and it’s going to kick your ass. You’ll get better, you’ll burn out for a while. You’ll get out, and you’ll start doing the work that matters, and you’re going to forget. You’re going to tell yourselves stories about how there are only so many slots in the magazines, so many book contracts, so many slots on the Hugo short list. Hell, only so many Hugo Awards or Nebulas or whatever floats your boat. And you’ll start thinking that you’re in competition. You aren’t. These people aren’t your competition, and they never will be. Not in any way that matters.

“Between 1965 and 2007, Frank Herbert’s Dune sold about 12 million copies—more than any other science fiction book—and that was across 14 languages and I don’t know how many countries. There are 300 million people in the United States alone. Right now, with A Dance With Dragons glued to the top of the bestseller’s list for months and the HBO program getting awards and accolades and spoofs on Saturday Night Live, I still meet people on a regular basis who don’t know who George RR Martin is. None of us—even the best—come close to saturating the market. Commercially, our competition isn’t each other, it’s Netflix and beer. Artistically, it’s always and only ourselves.

“Paula Vogel is a playwright and teacher. She said circles rise together. Look around the table. This is your circle, or at least the start of it. If we do this right, these are the people who are going to rise along with you. This is spring training, and this is your team, and what we do here is prepare for the real work, which is what we do out there, together, once this is over. Everyone cool with that? All right, then. Let’s get to work.”

And then I congratulate myself about how wise I am and how everyone who hears me will be ennobled and enlightened and generally speaking have a better time of it. It’s a daydream. If it doesn’t gratify the ego, what’s the point, right?

But what I’m coming to realize is that circle isn’t something that stops. I’ve had a writing career long enough that I’ve accrued a few petty enmities. I’ve had fellow writers who have said deeply cruel things about me, and I’m sure there are some about whom I have been less that charitable. I’ve been up for a few awards, and I’ve hoped defeat for my fellow short-listers, and they have sometimes spoken ill of me.

But I have also, at one time and another, through accident or intention or some combination of the two, forged friendships with people who I admire, who have helped me—commercially and artistically—and who I hope I’ve been able to lift up too, if only a little bit.

I want to say that my generation of writers is a team too, that we’re all part of a great big circle that can inspire and encourage and push and challenge itself to new and glorious heights, but the fact is we’re humans. We’re a small industry, but we can’t all fit around a table. We’re fractious and mean and often very impressed with ourselves for exactly the reasons we should be a little embarrassed. I don’t think we’re unlike the rest of the world that way, at least.

I do believe that the opportunity is there, though. Even if it’s only in making a small circle, or keeping it for a short time, there is a virtue in finding and maintaining a team. A circle. The rest of the Paula Vogel quote goes like this: Find the people you want to work with, and work with them. It’s something I forget, especially in the apparent isolation of writing, but it’s the advice I would have given myself fifteen years ago. And I’d still be wise to take it now.

And that’s not just writing. That’s the world.

About the Author

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

Editor’s Desk:
Returning to the Scene of the Crime

Neil Clarke

It’s time to be honest—I was very nervous about heading back to Readercon last month. I know the convention had nothing to do with last year’s heart attack, but it was the scene of the crime. Still I persevered and was welcomed back by many friends, old and new. In the end I’m glad my family and I went. A small weight has been lifted from my shoulders.

Fandom is an interesting place. Last year I noted how much support my family received from the Readercon community and this year, I’ve been thinking about how many of those positive stories are left unspoken. To that end I’d like to highlight the efforts of a group of people that I think deserve more attention: Operation Hammond (operationhammond.com). In their own words:

Operation Hammond is a non-profit organization of like-minded individuals within the anime, sci-fi, fantasy and pop culture convention community dedicated to bringing awareness of first aid, emergency preparedness and training to people who attend and staff anime, sci-fi, fantasy and pop culture conventions. The diversity and social dimensions of this social scene are unique. We are nerds helping nerds in times of need.

Our members and senior staff have the equipment, experience and know-how to effectively deal with medical emergencies, social needs and the unique requirements of those who attend pop culture events and conventions. We are a social medical organization. This means that we are able to carry out first aid, public safety and first responder duties at pop culture or fan events and conventions at the American Heart Association First Aid level.

Our members are trained and able to provide medical care and arrange transport for situations and injuries that require ambulance transfer to a hospital. Most of our members are EMTs, work in health care, veteran staffers of conventions and work in public service.

As someone who experienced a major medical event at a convention, I have to say that I found their presence at Readercon very reassuring. Yes, we should expect hotel staff to have basic emergency training, but response time from a trained professional can be critical. It is hard to beat having an EMT on-site and ready to act. Even if never called upon, these volunteers provide an extremely valuable service to our community and we should be proud to have people like this among our numbers. If you see them at a local convention, make sure you thank them for their service, and if you can, donate to their cause. We need more people like this.

Speaking of supporters, I was very pleased by the final results for my Kickstarter campaign for an original anthology of cyborg stories. I watched the final moments of the campaign from the Readercon dealer’s room and even met a few our backers in person. UPGRADED was fully-funded and then some. In the end, I had enough extra to add a few extra stories and pay our authors a bit more. I now have story commitments from Elizabeth Bear, Helena Bell, Tobias S. Buckell, Pat Cadigan, Greg Egan, Xia Jia, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Yoon Ha Lee, Ken Liu, Chen Qiufan, Robert Reed, E. Catherine Tobler, Genevieve Valentine, Peter Watts and E. Lily Yu. Julie Dillon (this month’s cover artist) will provide the cover. I’m looking forward to filling the rest of the table of contents and working with such a fine set of authors.

I also used Readercon as an opportunity to launch our fourth Clarkesworld anthology: CLARKESWORLD: YEAR FOUR. It sold very well and is now available in ebook and trade paperback formats. Here’s what’s included in this volume:

CONTENTS

Introduction by Neil Clarke

Between Two Dragons by Yoon Ha Lee

The Cull by Robert Reed

The Mermaids Singing Each to Each by Cat Rambo

Of Melei, of Ulthar by Gord Sellar

Night, in Dark Perfection by Richard Parks

The Grandmother-Granddaughter Conspiracy by Marissa Lingen

Brief Candle by Jason K. Chapman

All the King’s Monsters by Megan Arkenberg

Torquing Vacuum by Jay Lake

The Language of the Whirlwind by Lavie Tidhar

A Sweet Calling by Tony Pi

Alone with Gandhari by Gord Sellar

The History Within Us by Matthew Kressel

January by Becca De La Rosa

Messenger by J.M. Sidorova

A Jar of Goodwill by Tobias S. Buckell

Futures in the Memories Market by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

My Father’s Singularity by Brenda Cooper

Beach Blanket Spaceship by Sandra McDonald

The Association of the Dead by Rahul Kanakia

Spar by Kij Johnson

Paper Cradle by Stephen Gaskell

Thirteen Ways of Looking at Space/Time by Catherynne M. Valente

The Things by Peter Watts

Clarkesworld Citizens—Official Census

About Clarkesworld

More details can be found at: neil-clarke.com/books/clarkesworld-year-four/

That’s all for this month. Most of the Clarkesworld team are heading off to Worldcon in San Antonio at the end of the August. Here’s hoping to see some of you there!

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.