The Symphony of Ice and Dust

Julie Novakova

“It’s going to be the greatest symphony anyone has ever composed,” said Jurriaan. “Our best work. Something we’ll be remembered for in the next millennia. A frail melody comprised of ice and dust, of distance and cold. It will be our masterpiece.”

Chiara listened absently and closed her eyes. Jurriaan had never touched ice, seen dust, been able to imagine real-world distances or experienced cold. Everything he had was his music. And he was one of the best; at least among organic minds.

Sometimes she felt sorry for him.

And sometimes she envied him.

She imagined the world waiting for them, strange, freezing, lonely and beautiful, and a moment came when she could not envy Jurriaan his gift—or his curse—at all. She checked with Orpheus how long the rest of the journey would last. The answer was prompt.

In three days, we will approach Sedna.

Chiara decided to dream for the rest of the voyage.

Her dreams were filled with images, sounds, tastes, smells and emotions. Especially emotions. She felt the inner Oort cloud before she had even stepped outside the ship. Orpheus slowly fed her with some of the gathered data and her unique brain made a fantastical dream of nearly all of it.

When Chiara woke up, she knew that they were orbiting Sedna and sending down probes. Orpheus had taken care of it, partly from the ship’s own initiative, partly because of Manuel. The Thinker of their mission was still unconscious, but actively communicating with Orpheus through his interface.

She connected to the data stream from the first probe which had already landed and recorded everything. Sedna . . . We are the first here at least since the last perihelion more than eleven thousand years ago. It feels like an overwhelming gap—and yet so close!

It almost filled her eyes with tears. Chiara was the Aesthete of their group by the Jovian Consortium standards. Feeling, sensing and imagining things was her job—as well as it was Manuel’s job to primarily go through hard data, connect the dots, think everything through, even the compositions, the results of their combined effort—and Jurriaan’s job to focus on nothing but the music.

She sent a mental note to Manuel. When can we go to the surface?

The response was immediate. When I conclude it’s safe.

Safe is bad. It’s stripped of fear, awe, even of most of the curiosity! I need them to work properly, they’re essential. Let me go there first.

All right, he replied.

Chiara smiled a little. She learned to use logic to persuade Manuel long ago—and most of the times she was successful.

As she was dressing in the protective suit, a memory of a similar moment some years ago came to her and sent a shiver through her body. It was on Io and she stayed on the surface far too long even for her highly augmented body to withstand. When it became clear that she’d need a new one because of the amount of received radiation, she decided to give that one at least an interesting death—and she let it boil and melt near one of the volcanoes. Although her new brain was a slightly inadequate copy of the last one, thanks to the implants she remembered the pain—and then nothing, just a curious observation of the suit and her body slowly disintegrating—as if it happened to this very body.

She didn’t intend to do anything like that here. No; here she perceived a cold and fragile beauty. There should be no pain associated to it, no horror. Fear, maybe. Awe, definitely yes. Standing there on the icy surface, the Sun a mere bright star, darkness everywhere—she ought to feel awe.

Chiara felt she had a good chance of being the first human being who ever stood on Sedna. The dwarf planet was nearing its perihelion now, still almost a hundred astronomical units from the Sun, and there were no reports of any expeditions before them during the recent period.

When the lander touched the surface of Sedna, she stayed inside for a little while, getting used to the alien landscape around her. It had a strange sense of tranquility to it. Chiara was used to the icy moons of the Jovian system which she called home, but this landscape was far smoother than what she knew from there. It was also darker—and an odd shade of brown-red.

She turned off the lander’s lights and stepped outside through the airlock, into the darkness.

It wasn’t a complete darkness. But the Sun was not currently visible from this side of the dwarf planet and it felt like being lonelier, further away than ever before. She was able to see the disc of the galaxy clearer than from anywhere else she had been to.

She knelt and slowly touched the surface with one of her suit’s haptic gloves.

We’ve found something, Chiara, suddenly Manuel’s voice resonated in her head. See for yourself.

He sent her a mental image of a couple of objects not deep beneath the icy surface found by one of the numerous little probes. The biggest one resembled a ship. A small, stumpy, ancient-looking ship, unmistakably of a human origin. They were not the first.

But these must have come here a very long time ago.

And a few miles further and far beneath it, another shape was discovered by their sensors. A bigger, stranger shape.

Probably from much, much longer ago than the first one . . .

It took less than an hour to drill through the ice to the first ship. Getting inside it then was a matter of minutes.

Chiara saw the two bodies as the probes approached them. Both dead—but almost intact. One male, one female. The probes suggested the small chambers they found them inside were probably designed for cryosleep. They must have been prepared for the procedure or already frozen when they died.

The ship was long dead too but that didn’t constitute much of a problem for the probes. They quickly repaired the computers and what was left of the data.

They found the ship’s logs and sent it to the crew of Orpheus even before others had time to drill deep enough to reach the other object.

Chiara was back aboard at the time they opened the file and heard the voice of the long gone woman.

I think I don’t have much time left. I have no means of getting from here in time. But I know that there will be others who come here to explore. I hope you find this. I’m telling our story for you.

Ten days ago, I discovered something . . . —wait, let me start from the beginning.

“How is it going, love?”

Theodora smiled while unscrewing another panel on the probe. “Good. Suppose we could use this one tomorrow on the last picked site. I’ve got just one more bug to repair.”

She was wearing a thin suit, protecting her in the vacuum and cold of the storage chamber, very flexible and quite comfortable compared to EVA suits. Despite that, she’d prefer to be outside the ship, walking on the surface of Triton which Kittiwake was orbiting for more than two years now.

Kittiwake was a small ship, but sufficient for sustaining two people aboard even for a couple of decades if necessary. Provided enough hydrogen, easily extractable practically everywhere, its bimodal MITEE could function for half a century without any serious problems. If one element failed, it still had many others and could push the ship forward with a good specific impulse and a decent thrust while also providing the electrical energy needed by the ship.

Now the mission on Triton was nearing its end. Theodora didn’t know whether to be happy and relieved that she and her husband would finally return to Earth, after so many years of isolation, or sad that she wouldn’t ever see this remarkable place again.

When she was done with the ice-drilling probe, she went through several airlocks to the habitation deck. It was tiny, but sufficient enough for hers and Dimitri’s needs.

“It seems we have a word from the outside world,” her husband smiled as she entered the cabin. “Kittiwake just picked it up.”

After checking the signal for malware, the ship automatically showed them the recording. The face of their superior, OSS Mission Supervisor Ronald Blythe, appeared on the screen. He congratulated them for their results on Triton and mentioned that a window for another long-term scientific expedition was opening. Theodora’s stomach rocked. She was eager to find out. But still . . . a new expedition would mean yet more years away from the rest of humanity. The company picked her and Dimitri because they were a stable, non-conflict couple with steady personalities and a lot of technical and scientific experience. They were supposed to be able to spend years without any other human contact in a tiny space of their ship, exploring the outer solar system, without a chance for a vacation, without feeling the Earth’s gravity, smells, wind . . . However, we had a contract for eight years. The time’s almost up. Are they proposing to prolong it? And what for? thought Theodora.

“Last week, we received a signal from Nerivik 2.”

“Isn’t it the probe sent to Sedna in the eighties that stopped transmitting before it reached an orbit?” murmured Theodora.

It was. Blythe went on explaining how they lost contact with the probe for more than ten years and suddenly, out of thin air, it sent out a signal five days ago. Scientists at the FAST observatory who picked up the signal by accident were a bit surprised, to put it mildly. They began analyzing it immediately—and fortunately didn’t keep intercepting the transmission for themselves.

“And the findings were . . . weird. It became clear that the probe lost its orbit, crashed, but probably regained control of its thrusters shortly before the crash and tried to change the collision into a landing. It was just damaged. It’s possible that it kept transmitting most of the time, but without aiming the signal, the probability of reaching any receivers in the system was very low. However, it probably had time to send down its two landers before the crash. They kept measuring all they were supposed to record—and among other tasks, they tried mapping the ice layer. That’s where it became really strange.”

Theodora listened avidly as Blythe started explaining. Her interest grew every second.

The ultrasonic pulses showed an intriguing structure some two hundred meters below surface. It could not be told how large it was, but it had at least one hundred meters in diameter; maybe a lot more. The signature seemed like metal.

Blythe included the data in the transmission so that Theodora was able to look at it while he was speaking. It really was strange. It could have been a part of a metal-rich rock layer. But what would it be doing on Sedna? The dwarf planet was supposed to have a thick largely icy layer composed mostly of methane, nitrogen, ethane, methanol, tholins and water ice. Nothing even remotely like this. Maybe a big metal-rich meteorite buried in the ice crust after an impact then?

“We don’t know what it is, or even if the measurement was correct. But it surely is interesting. It would be desirable to send a manned mission there. This looks like a situation that needs more resourcefulness and improvisations than robots can do,” continued Blythe.

And for this, they needed someone with an expertise of frozen bodies of the outer solar system; someone stable, resourceful and determined; and of course, preferably someone whom the journey would take around five instead of ten years. Sedna was still quite near its perihelion, but growing away slowly every year. In short: They needed someone like two experienced workers closing their successful mission on Neptune’s icy moon Triton.

“ . . . of course, I cannot force you into this. But with prolonging the contract, you’ll receive extra money for such a long stay on your own and all the associated risks. I attach the new version of your contract to this message. I expect your answer in three days.”

Theodora didn’t have to look at the document to know the bonuses would be large; almost unimaginably large. There were medical risks associated with long-term radiation exposure, dangerous activities, immense psychical pressure, stay in microgravitation and above all, the cryosleep necessary to travel so far away without losing many years just by the voyage itself.

But it wasn’t the money that primarily tempted her to accept the contract.

Theodora and Dimitri looked at each other expectantly. “Well,” she broke the silence first, “looks like we’re gonna take a rather long nap; do you agree?”

Theodora shivered. At the first moment, she felt exposed and frightened without any obvious reason, which was even worse. Then she remembered; she was in the cryosleep chamber and slowly awakening. They must be near Sedna now.

“Dimi?” she croaked. There was no reply, although the ship was supposed to transmit every conversation to the other chamber—which meant that Dimitri hadn’t achieved consciousness yet.

It took Theodora another hour before she could gather her thoughts well enough to start going through the data. When she was in the middle of checking their velocity and trajectory, the speaker in the chamber came alive: “Darling? Are you awake?”

“Yes, how are you?”

“Well, nothing’s better than a good long sleep!”

Theodora laughed. Her throat burned and she still felt a bit stiff, but she couldn’t stop. They actually were there; further than any human beings ever before!

In the next couple of days, Dimitri and Theodora had little time to rest although they didn’t do anything physically demanding and were still recovering from the cryosleep. First they searched for and found the Nerivik 2 crash site and the two nearby stationed landers. The ice in the area seemed different from other sites, as if it had been gradually modified by inner volcanic activity. That explained why Nerivik 2 sent both its landers there in the first place. Kittiwake sent down a probe, continued mapping the surface and after that sent a few other probes on different locations. It was a standard procedure, but it needed a lot of time.

When the first results from the probe near Nerivik 2 arrived, Dimitri sat still for a moment and then found his voice and called: “Dora! You must come see this.”

The readings were peculiar. The object buried almost two hundred meters below the surface seemed a bit like an asteroid now, more than a hundred meters in diameter in one direction and over five hundred in the other. According to the ultrasonic pulses data, its shape seemed conical and the layer reflecting the pulses quite smooth. A very unusual asteroid indeed.

“What do you think it is?”

Theodora shrugged. “Don’t know—and can’t very well imagine, to be precise. Until it’s proven otherwise, I’m betting on an asteroid, albeit a weird one. But let’s find out soon.”

“I’ll send down the drilling machinery, shall I? Or do you propose to wait for even more readings?”

“Send it.”

Kittiwake had two major drilling devices—three before Triton—and one backup machine. Theodora and Dimitri decided to send two at once. It was riskier, but they wanted to compare the data from an area with the anomaly and from another place chosen because of its similar surface structures. The equipment was old but reliable and lived through many more or less improvisational repairs.

At the end of the first day of drilling, they reached almost thirty meters below surface. On day three, they were about one hundred meters deep. On day four, the probe got through almost one hundred and fifty meters of ice and stopped.

Theodora had the uncomfortable feeling of vertigo as every time she performed telemetric control. She guided the repair drone carefully to the drilling probe’s main panel. She felt strangely dissociated with her body when the robot picked the cover and she felt as if it were her arms raising it and putting it aside. There she was. “Oh, not this,” she sighed.

No wonder Dimitri had no success trying to get the probe running again from here. It was no software bug, temporary failure or anything the self-repair systems could handle. Most of the processors were fried and needed replacing. The repair drone didn’t have all of the components. They could send them down during some of the next orbit. But—

She lost her connection to the drone, as Kittiwake disappeared over the horizon from the drone’s perspective, before she could end it herself. She gasped. It felt as if her limb had been cut off. She gulped and tried to concentrate again.

Yes, they could send the parts down. But Theodora feared that although the drone itself had more than sufficient AI for common repairs and had all the blueprints in its memory, it might overlook something else, something an AI would not notice and that might cause future trouble. She’d not be happy if they had to replace the processors again, like it happened once on Triton. She could control the drone from distance again, but there was no chance she could achieve that much precision and look everywhere through telemetry.

Well, they wanted to initiate manned exploration anyway. It would just have to be sooner than expected.

Dimitri watched Theodora’s descent. He knew that she performed similar procedures many times before—but that never prevented him from worrying.

The view distorted as Kittiwake started losing connection. In another thirty minutes or so, it would rise up the horizon again. But Dimitri had considered changing their orbit to stationary and decided to do so. They didn’t need to monitor so much of the surface anymore with the ship. He finally got two satellites to work and deployed them on an equatorial and a polar orbit. He could make them relay stations so that Kittiwake wouldn’t need to change its orbit, but he liked the possibility to communicate directly with Theodora, her landing module, her rover and the drilling probe. Less things could go wrong. And after years spent so far from Earth, they knew that things often went wrong.

He gave the engine command for more thrust and checked on the planned stationary transfer orbit. Everything seemed fine for a while.

Until a red light flashed next to the screen and a warning presented itself.

Theodora was descending through the tunnel in the ice. It was dark except the light from LEDs on her suit and the reflectors from the top of the shaft. Her rope was winding down gradually. She could see the drilling device below now.

The light above seemed faint when she reached the probe. It took her only an hour to get it operational again. She smiled and let the winch pull her up again.

Just as she neared the surface, she heard a noise in the speakers of her suit. “Dimitri?” she spoke. “What is it?”

“Have to . . . come down . . . ”

She barely understood him through the static.

“Dimitri!”

For a while, she heard nothing. Then the static returned—and after that, Dimitri’s distorted voice. “ . . . have to land.” Cracking and humming. Theodora tried to amplify the sound frantically. “ . . . send you the coordinates . . . hope it works out . . . ”

A file found its way through the transmission. It was a technical report generated by Kittiwake. Theodora opened it and glimpsed through it quickly.

“Oh no,” she whispered.

Dimitri was doing his best to lead the remains of the ship on a trajectory ending with something that would approximate a landing more than a crash.

It was less than twenty minutes from the moment he accelerated Kittiwake to reach the transfer orbit but it seemed like an eternity. During that time, a warning indicated that the main turbine in the ship’s power station was not working properly. He ran a more detailed scan and a moment later, everything was flashing with error reports.

The turbine in the power cycle broke down. It was tested for signs of wearing down regularly, but a hairline crack might have been overlooked in the control. The ship was moving with inertia most of the journey, the crack could have expanded during the deceleration phase and ruptured now, when the engine was working a little more again.

Things could go wrong. And they went wrong. Worse even, one of the blades pierced the coating of the reactor and the heated helium-xenon gas started leaking rapidly. The damage was too much for the automated repair systems. It was still leaking into the space between the coatings.

And the reactor itself was overheating quickly. Once the turbine stopped working, the gas still trapped in the cycle kept getting more and more heat from the MITEE—but couldn’t continue through the cycle and cool down.

It was not critical yet, but would be in another couple of minutes. Dimitri sent all the repair drones to help the built-in repair and emergency systems but could see that it was not enough. He had also shut down the MITEE and all the rods were now safely turned to stop the reaction. It still wasn’t enough. The overheating continued and could lead to an explosion. It could happen in a few minutes if not cooled down quickly.

It was just a way life went. Nothing serious happened in years and suddenly he’s got minutes.

He knew there was only one thing to do. So he gave a command for the valves in the outer reactor coating to open. Then all the gas would leak outside. The ship would be useless without it, but it was the better one of two bad scenarios.

So far, only a minute had elapsed from the breakdown.

In the next few seconds, things went from bad to worse.

“Shit,” exhaled Dimitri as he felt how the Kittiwake started spinning. One of the valves must have been stuck, so that the gas started leaking outside in just one direction it quickly sent the ship into rotation.

Dimitri tried to compensate it with thrusters on both RCSs, but then Kittiwake shook hideously and then many of the screens went down. He realized what happened.

The rotation was too much. The ship was never constructed for this. There was too much tension in wrong direction . . . She tore apart.

Still coping with the rotation, he checked the systems. He was right. The engine section was gone. He was lucky that the habitation section was still operating almost normally. There was his chance.

This section’s reaction control system was apparently still working. The RCS’s thrusters were small, but it was all he had.

He tested them with a short blast. Actually working; good. He used them to provide a little more distance from the other remains of the ship and then reviewed his situation calmer. He had to land if he wanted to live; and he needed to do it quickly, otherwise he’d drift into space with no means of correcting his trajectory.

He smiled rather sadly.

About twenty minutes after the turbine breakdown, Dimitri was now leading the rest of the ship down on Sedna and praying he could actually land instead of crashing.

“Dora?” he called. He hoped she’d pick up the transmission. “Dora, can you hear me? The reactor had a breakdown and the ship tore apart! I’m left with our section’s remains. I have to come down . . . ”

Theodora was driving her rover frantically to the landing site. She could not contact Dimitri, but that didn’t mean anything; the antenna could have been damaged, while most of the ship could be perfectly fine. It’s all right. He is fine.

She wished she could go faster, but as on most ice-rocky bodies, Sedna’s surface could be treacherous. It had far less cracks or ridges than Europa or Ganymede and was actually very smooth compared to them, but it was still an alien landscape, not resembling anything on Earth at all. Himalaya’s glaciers were children’s toys compared to Sedna. The perspective was wrong, the measures were wrong, the shadows were wrong; it wasn’t a land fit for human eyes and spatial recognition.

Finally, she approached the site. Her heart skipped a beat when she saw the habitation section in the lights of the rover. It seemed almost intact.

She ran to the nearest reachable airlock. It was still functioning; she could get inside.

It didn’t look as if the ship had been through a bad accident. The corridor looked nearly normal. Everything was strapped or permanently fixed anyway, so a sight of total chaos wasn’t to be expected. However, most of the systems were disabled, as she found out by logging into the network.

The door of the control room opened in front of her, a little damaged, but working.

“Dimitri!”

He found time to get in an emergency suit and was safely strapped in his chair. Good. Theodora leaned to him. He looked unconscious. She logged into his suit and read the data quickly.

Time of death . . . Suit’s healthcare mechanisms could not help . . .

“Oh, Dimitri,” she croaked. Her throat was dry and she felt tears coming to her eyes. She forced them down. No time for this. Not now. She must do what he’d do in her place.

She moved his body in the suit to the cryosleep chamber. Once she managed it there, she ran a similar procedure as they had gone through many times before. Only this time it was slightly different, designed to keep a dead brain as little damaged as possible, in a state usable for later scanning of the neural network. Theodora knew that her Dimitri was gone; but they could use this data, complete it by every tiny bit of information available about his life, and create a virtual personality approximating Dimitri. He wouldn’t be gone so . . . completely.

After that, she checked on the ship’s systems again. No change whatsoever. Nothing needed her immediate attention now, at least for a short while.

She leaned on a wall and finally let the tears come.

This is a part of an older log, but I don’t want to repeat all that happened to me . . . I must go to sleep soon.

Kittiwake is dead now, as is Dimitri. I could do nothing in either case. I’ve got only one option, a quite desperate one. I have to equip my landing module in a way that it could carry me home. We went through this possibility in several emergency scenarios; I know what to do and that I can do it.

Of course, I’ll have to spend the journey awake. The module hasn’t got any cryosleep chamber and the one from the ship cannot be moved. But if the recycling systems work well, I can do it. I’ve got enough rations for about five years if I save the food a little. It doesn’t get me anywhere near Earth, but I looked through the possible trajectories into the inner solar system and it could get me near Saturn if I leave here in three weeks, before this window closes. If I don’t make it in this time, I’m as well as dead. But let’s suppose I make it, I must . . . During the journey, I can contact Earth and another ship, even if only an automatic one with more supplies and equipment, could meet me on the way. I’ll get home eventually.

If I succeed in rebuilding the landing module for an interplanetary journey. No one actually expected this to happen, but here I am. I must try.

The next few days were busy. Theodora kept salvaging things from Kittiwake and carefully enhancing the module’s systems. In most cases, enhancement was all she needed. Then she had to get rid of some parts needed only for the purposes of landing and surface operations—and finally attach the emergency fuel tanks and generate the fuel.

The module had a classical internal combustion engine. High thrust, but despairingly high need of fuel.

Fortunately, she was surrounded by methane and water ice—and purified liquid methane and oxygen were just the two things she needed. Once she got the separation and purification cycle running, the tanks were slowly being refilled. At least this was working as it should.

She’d very much like to let Earth know about the accident, but she couldn’t. Most of the relay stations were behind the Sun from her perspective now and the rest was unreachable by a weak antenna on the module; the one on the ship was too badly damaged. The Earth would know nothing about this until she’s on her way back.

The plan seemed more and more feasible each day. She clung to it like to what it really was—her only chance of surviving.

When a message that the drilling probe had reached its target depth and stopped drilling appeared on the screen of her helmet, Theodora was confused for a couple of seconds before she realized what it was about. It seemed like a whole different world—mapping the surface from above, sending probes . . . In the last three days, she had little sleep and focused on her works on the module only. She had completely forgotten about the probe.

Well, after she checks the fuel generators again, she should have some time to look at it, she was well ahead of the schedule. After all, true explorers didn’t abandon their aims even in times of great distress.

I’m glad I decided to have a look at it. Otherwise I’d die desperate and hopeless. Now, I’m strangely calm. It’s just what a discovery like this does with you. It makes you feel small. The amazement and awe . . .

Theodora couldn’t believe the results until she personally got down the shaft into a small space the probe had made around a part of the thing.

She stood in the small ice cave, looking at it full of wonder. She dared not touch it yet.

The surface was dark and smooth. Just about two square meters of it were uncovered; the rest was still surrounded by ice. According to the measurements, the thing was at least five hundred meters long and had a conic shape. There was no doubt that she discovered . . . a ship.

You cannot possibly imagine the feeling until you’re right there. And I wasn’t even expecting it. It was . . . I cannot really describe it. Unearthly. Wonderful. Amazing. Terrifying. All that and much more, mixed together.

I gave the alien ship every single moment I could spare. My module needed less and less tending to and I had almost two weeks until the flight window would close.

I named her Peregrine. It seemed appropriate to me. This wasn’t a small interplanetary ship like Kittiwake; this bird could fly a lot faster. But still . . . she seemed too small to be an interstellar vessel, even if this was only a habitation section and the engines were gone.

It was probably the greatest discovery in all human history yet. Just too bad I didn’t have a chance to tell anyone. I really hope someone’s listening.

Theodora directed all resources she didn’t vitally need for her module to Peregrine. Only a day after her initial discovery, the probes picked up another strange shape buried in the ice not far from the ship.

When they also reached it, Theodora was struck with wonder. It was clearly an engine section!

While she worked on her module, she kept receiving new data about it and everything suggested that Peregrine used some kind of fusion drive; at this first glance not far more advanced than human engine systems. It seemed to her even more intriguing than if she had found something completely unknown.

I was eventually able to run a radiometric dating of ice surrounding the ship. The results suggest that she landed here some two-hundred and fifty million years ago. The ice preserved it well. But I must wonder . . . what were they doing here? Why have they come to our solar system—and why just this once? Although I don’t understand a lot of what I see, the ship doesn’t seem that much sophisticated to me. Maybe it’s even something we could manage to make. But why use something like this to interstellar travel? With too little velocity, they’d never make it here in fewer than hundreds of years even if they came from the Alpha Centauri system!

Unless . . . the distance was smaller. We still don’t know the history of the solar system in much detail. It’s supposed that Sedna’s orbit was disturbed by passing of another star from an open cluster, where the Sun probably originated, about eight hundred astronomical units away not long after the formation of our system.

But what if an event like this occurred more times? Could it possibly have been also a quarter of a billion years ago? Just about any star on an adequate trajectory could have interfered with the solar system. In some million and half years, Gliese 710 should pass through the Oort cloud. We wouldn’t have much evidence if an event like this happened in a distant past—only some perturbed orbits and more comet and asteroid bombardment of the planets later.

Hundreds AU is still a great distance, but surely not impossible. Hell, I’m almost one hundred AU from the Sun now, although I haven’t traveled the whole distance at one time. If we used a gravity assist from the Sun, we could overcome even distance of a thousand AU within a decade only! They could have done it too, maybe hoping to reach the inner part of the system, but something had prevented them. And possibly the very first object they encountered, quite near their own star at the time, was a frozen dwarf planet from about a hundred to almost a thousand AU far from the Sun, sent on its eccentric orbit by an earlier passing star and now disturbed again. They must have been lucky that Sedna wasn’t captured by their star at the time. Or could it have been that theirs was the original star that deviated Sedna’s orbit that much? Anyway, they’d have had to cross hundreds AU, but that’s doable. If we had a sufficient motivation, we could manage a lot more.

Let’s assume for a moment that my crazy hypothesis is right . . .

Then, I wonder what kind of motivation they had.

It happened three days before her planned departure.

She was at the surface at the time, which might have saved her life—or rather prolonged it.

The quakes came without any warning. She was getting a little sleep in her rover when it woke her up. Four, maybe five points on the Richter scale, Theodora guessed. Her throat was suddenly very, very dry.

The fuel generators . . .

After the quake stopped, she went to check on them. Overcoming the little distance between her and them seemed to take an eternity; new cracks formed in the ice.

When she saw them, Theodora knew she ought to feel anger, panic or desperation. But she just felt impossibly tired.

Two of the tanks were completely destroyed and the generators were damaged. She performed a more detailed control anyway but the result did not surprise her.

They couldn’t be repaired; not in time. Maybe in months . . . but she’d be too late in less than a week.

She sat back in the rover, exhausted but suddenly very, very calm. What was a threat a while ago was a certainty now. She wasn’t going to make it and she knew it.

The best what she could do was to use her remaining time as effectively as she was able to.

When I’m done here, I’ll freeze myself. But this time I’ll set the . . . final cryogenic procedure.

If you found us and it’s not too late . . . Well, we might talk again.

The original shaft was destroyed by the quake, but she used the remaining probe, continued drilling with a maximum achievable speed and kept measuring the ice layer via the ultrasonics. While these processes were running, Theodora tried to find out more about Peregrine. She was able to get spectroscopic readings which suggested that its surface consisted mainly of titanium, however, she couldn’t read all the spectral characteristics; the alloy seemed to have many components.

She also obtained more results on the thickness of the ice crust. The probe got almost two kilometers deep. Its results suggested that a liquid ocean beneath the layer might be possible—maybe fifteen, maybe twenty kilometers deeper than she was now. Theodora knew she’d never live to see a definitive answer; but these measurements might still be useful for someone else. If they could intercept her message.

She tried several times to send the data back to Earth, but she knew the chances too well to be even a little optimistic, although she salvaged a bigger antenna from Nerivik 2. But the transmitter was still rather weak and the aim far too inadequate. Without reaching relay stations, her message would become a cosmic noise, nothing more. The most reliable way to let the humanity see the data someday was to store them here in as many copies as she could and hope it would suffice. She didn’t have much of an option.

She kept thinking about the alien ship. If her dating was correct and it landed here a quarter of a billion years ago, it would vaguely coincide with the Great Permian-Triassic Extinction Event. It was usually attributed mostly to geological factors, but there was a possibility of a contribution of other effects—a disturbance of the Oort cloud and more comets sent to the inner solar system afterward would do. She was recently able to measure how long had Peregrine been exposed to cosmic radiation and it seemed to be just several hundred years unless there was a mistake or some factor she didn’t know about. There was no chance any ship like this could have come here from another star system in such extremely short time—unless the star was really close at the time. It started to make more and more sense to Theodora, although all she had was still just a speculation.

“And it will remain a speculation until someone else finds us,” she said aloud, glancing at Peregrine. “But they will. You’ll see.”

However, she wasn’t so sure. Would the company send a new expedition after they realize that Theodora and Dimitri were not going to ever call back? It depended mostly on the budget; she was rather pessimistic. And about other companies or countries, she couldn’t even guess. But Sedna’s distance would grow each year. Before another mission could be sufficiently prepared and launched, years would probably pass. And other years during its voyage. Then even more years on the way back.

She had to admit to herself the possibility that no one was going to discover them soon—maybe until the next perihelion. So far away in the future she couldn’t even imagine it.

She looked at the other ship and touched the dark metal surface. But still closer than how long you had to wait . . .

“You were shipwrecked here too, am I right?” Theodora managed a little smile. “Pity that we cannot talk about what happened to us. I’d really like to hear your story. And it looks like we’re gonna be stuck here together for a while.” Her smile grew wider yet more sorrowful at the same time. “Probably for a long while.”

I hope you found us and heard our story, whoever you are. I really wish you did.

“Very interesting,” said Manuel. “We must report these findings to the Consortium immediately.”

Without waiting for an approval from Chiara or Jurriaan, he started mentally assembling a compact data transmission with the help of Orpheus. In a few minutes, they were prepared to send it.

Nor Chiara, nor Jurriaan objected.

When he was done, Manuel sent them a mental note of what he intended to do next.

“No!” Chiara burst out. “You cannot! They don’t deserve this kind of treatment. They died far too long ago for this procedure to be a success. You won’t revive them; you’ll get pathetic fragments if anything at all! They were heroes. They died heroes. You cannot do this to them.”

“It has a considerable scientific value. These bodies were preserved in an almost intact ice, sufficiently deep for shielding most of the radiation. We have never tried to revive bodies this old—and in such a good condition. We must do it.”

“He’s right,” interjected Jurriaan. Chiara looked at him in surprise. It was probably the first thing he had said on this voyage that didn’t involve his music.

She was outvoted. Even Orpheus expressed a support for Manuel’s proposal, although the Consortium didn’t give AIs full voting rights.

She left the cabin silently.

It took Manuel several days of an unceasing effort just to prepare the bodies. He filled them with nanobots and went through the results. He kept them under constant temperature and atmosphere. He retrieved what he could from the long dead ship about their medical records.

And then he began performing the procedure. He carefully opened the skulls, exposed the brains, and started repairing them. There wasn’t much useful left after eleven thousand years. But with the help of cutting edge designed bacteria and the nans, there was still a chance of doing a decent scan.

After another week, he started with that.

Chiara finally felt at peace. Since their rendezvous with Sedna, she felt filled with various emotions every day and finally she thought she couldn’t bear it anymore. As she stepped inside Orpheus after the last scheduled visit of the surface of Sedna, she knew it was the time.

Inside her cabin, she lay down calmly and let Orpheus pump a precisely mixed cocktail of modulators into her brain. Then Chiara entered her Dreamland.

She designed this environment herself some decades ago in order to facilitate the process of creating new musical themes and ideas from her emotions and memories as effectively as she could. And Chiara felt that the story of the ancient alien ship, Theodora, Dimitri and Sedna would make wonderful musical variations. Then it will be primarily Jurriaan’s task to assemble hers and Manuel’s pieces, often dramatically different, into a symphony such as the world has never heard. Such that will make them famous even beyond the Jovian Consortium, possibly both among the Traditionalists and the Transitioned. They will all remember them.

Chiara smiled and drifted away from a normal consciousness.

During her stay in the Dreamland, Orpheus slowly abandoned the orbit of Sedna and set on a trajectory leading back to the territory of the Jovian Consortium. Another expedition, triggered by their reports back, was already on their way to Sedna, eager to find out more especially about the alien ship and to drill through the ice crust into the possible inner ocean.

Chiara, Manuel, and Jurriaan had little equipment to explore the ship safely—but they didn’t regret it. They had everything they needed. Now was the time to start assembling it all together carefully, piece by piece, like putting back a shattered antique vase.

Even Manuel didn’t regret going away from this discovery. He had the bodies—and trying to revive their personalities now kept most of his attention. A few days after their departure from Sedna, he finished the procedure.

Chiara was awake again at the time, the burden of new feelings longing to be transformed into music gone. She didn’t mind now what Manuel had done; it would be pointless to feel anything about it after she had already created her part of the masterpiece.

Manuel first activated the simulation of Dimitri’s personality.

“Where am I? Dora . . . Dora . . . Dora,” it repeated like a stuck gramophone record.

“His brain suffered more damage than hers after he died,” Manuel admitted. “She had time to go through a fairly common cryopreservation procedure. However . . . ”

“I’m stuck here. Our reactor broke down and the ship tore apart. There is too much damage. My husband is dead . . . But we found something, I have to pass this message on . . . But I feel disoriented, what have I finished? Where am I? What’s happening?” After a while, the female voice started again: “Have I said this already? I don’t know. I’m stuck here. Our reactor broke down . . . ”

“They are both mere fragments, a little memories from before death, a few emotions and almost no useful cognitive capacity. I couldn’t have retrieved more. Nevertheless, this is still a giant leap forward. Theoretically, we shouldn’t have been able to retrieve this much after more than eleven thousand years.”

Chiara listened to the feeble voices of the dead and was suddenly overwhelmed with sorrow. It chimed every piece of her body and her mind was full of it. It was almost unbearable. And it was also beautiful.

“It is great indeed,” she whispered.

She didn’t have to say more. Jurriaan learned her thoughts through the open channel. She knew he was thinking the same. He listened all the time. In his mind and with help of Orpheus, he kept listening to the recordings obtained by Manuel, shifting them, changing frequencies, changing them . . . making them into a melody.

“Keep a few of their words in it, will you?” Chiara spoke softly. “Please.”

I will. They’ll make a great introduction. They will give the listeners a sense of the ages long gone and of personalities of former humans. And he immersed into his composition once again. She knew better than to interrupt him now. In a few days or weeks, he will be done; he’ll have gone through all her and Manuel’s musical suggestions and come up with a draft of the symphony. Then it will take feedback from her and Manuel to complete it. But Jurriaan will have the final say in it. He is, after all, the Composer.

And after that, they should come up with a proper name. A Symphony of Ice and Dust, perhaps? And maybe they should add a subtitle. Ghosts of Theodora and Dimitri Live On Forever? No, certainly not; far too pompous and unsuitable for a largely classical piece. Voices of the Dead? A Song of the Shipwrecked?

Or simply: A Tribute.

About the Author

Julie Novakova was born in 1991 in Prague, the Czech Republic. She works as a writer and an evolutionary biologist. So far, she has published three novels, some twenty short stories in Czech and one other story in English (The Brass City in Penny Dread Tales Vol. Three: In Darkness Clockwork Shine). Her novels were The Crime on The Poseidon City (Zlocin na Poseidon City), Never Trust Anything (Nikdy never nicemu) and A Silent Planet (Ticha planeta). Julie’s short stories appeared in Czech speculative fiction magazines (Ikarie, XB-1 and Pevnost) and anthologies. She’s a severe were-workaholic (which means that most of the time she’s quite lazy and she magically transforms the night before deadline).

Bits

Naomi Kritzer

So here is something a lot of people don’t realize: most companies that make sex toys are really small. Even a successful sex-toy manufacturer like Squishies ™ is still run out of a single office attached to a warehouse, and the staff consists of Julia (the owner), Juan (the guy who does all the warehouse stuff), and me (the person who does everything else).

(You are probably wondering right now if that includes product testing. I make it a habit not to talk about my sex life with strangers but Julia requires that everyone she hires take home a Squishie or a Firmie or one of the other IntelliFlesh products and try it out, either solo or with a partner. I pointed out that if she ever hired an alien—sorry, “extraterrestrial immigrant”—the neurology doesn’t match up, and does she want to admit she discriminates in hiring? But I didn’t argue that hard, because hey, free sex toy, why not? Frankly, I found it a kind of freaky experience, having this piece of sensate flesh that didn’t really belong there, and after a little bit of experimentation I stuck it in a drawer and haven’t touched it since.)

Anyway, we outsource the manufacturing and the boxes of Squishies and Firmies get shipped to us on shrink-wrapped pallets and Juan breaks them down to re-ship in more manageable quantities to the companies that resell our products.

The original product were the Squishies, and Julia is not at ALL shy about people knowing about her sex life (we have an instructional video, and she’s IN it) so I don’t mind telling you that she came up with it because her boyfriend at the time had a fetish for really large breasts, we’re not talking “naturally gifted” or even “enhanced with silicon” but “truly impractical for all real-world purposes like breathing and using your arms,” and conveniently at the time she was working at a company making top-of-the-line prosthetics with neural integration. She made herself a really enormous set of breasts and after a lot of futzing with the neural integration she got them to be sensate. Then the boyfriend dumped her and she didn’t really need them anymore, but her friend who’d had a double mastectomy said, “why don’t you make me a smaller set?” and that, supposedly, was when it occurred to her that maybe she could make this product to SELL. She found a manufacturing facility and office space, hired me and Juan, and went into the Fully Sensate Attachable Flesh business.

Depending on your predilections you may already be wondering why she started with boobs. IntelliFlesh is re-shapable, at least up to a point, and since I was the Customer Service department I started getting calls from people who wanted to reshape it into something longer, stiffer, and pointier.

“Julia,” I said one day, taking off my headset, “You need to start making strap-on dicks.”

“I can’t call those Squishies,” she said dismissively.

“So? Roll out a new line. Hardies. Dickies. Cockies. If you go with Cockies you can say ‘like cookies, only better’ in the ads.” Maybe I should note that one of the few things Julia doesn’t let me do is write the ad copy.

The Firmies were an even bigger seller than the Squishies. Between boobs and dicks, we had most users covered, but every now and then I got a call from someone who wanted something a little more customized.

“You’ve reached Afton Enterprises, home of Squishies and Firmies,” I said. “How may I help you?” (In addition to not getting to write the ad copy, I don’t get to decide how to answer the phone, judging from the fact that Julia shot down the greeting, “How may I improve your sex life today?”)

“I’m thinking about buying either a Squishie or a Firmie, and I . . . had some questions,” the woman said, her voice hesitant. “They’re sort of expensive and I’m not sure which will meet my needs.”

“Well, the Squishie is squishier,” I said. “It’s more malleable, but it also doesn’t tend to hold alternate shapes for very long unless you refrigerate it for a while before you get started. The Firmie arrives long and narrow, but if you want it to have a different shape—say, a curve or even a hook—you can gently heat it up and mold it.”

“What I want is a prosthetic vagina,” the woman blurted out. “In a different spot.”

You’re not really supposed to say, “you want what?” to customers when you’re doing customer support for a sex toy shop. We are pro-sex, pro-kink, and anti-shame: there is officially no wrong way to have sex. So: “Which spot?” I asked.

“Well, we’re not exactly sure. Part of the advantage of your products is that we can move them around. What if I bought two Firmies? Could I reshape those into two halves of a vagina, like maybe one could be the top of the, um, tube, and the other could be the bottom . . . are your products compatible with lubricant?”

“There’s a special lube that we sell,” I said. “Other lubricants might void the warranty.”

“That adds to the cost even more,” the woman said, clearly frustrated. “Is there any way to find out before I put down all that money whether it’s going to work for me? If they sold these at REI I would just buy it and figure I’d return it if I needed to, but nobody takes returns on sex toys.”

“We do, under some circumstances,” I said. “Can you give me a little more information about what your goal is with our product?”

“I want to have sex with my husband,” she said, impatiently, “real sex, or as real as it can get. And he’s a K’srillan male. Our God-given parts just don’t match up.”

The K’srillan—our “extraterrestrial immigrants”—made radio contact about a decade ago, and arrived on earth a year and three months ago. Juan periodically mutters about how no matter what they say, they might still be planning invasion and how would we even stop them? But they offered us suspended-animation technology in exchange for asylum (from who? was Juan’s immediate question, but we’ve been assured that they were fleeing the death of their sun, not some second wave of dangerous aliens) and a dozen U.S. cities wound up taking settlements. (They’re spread around. There are a bunch of others in other countries all over the world.) So far in the U.S. it was mostly okay, other than some anti-immigrant rioting in Kansas City. I hadn’t actually met any K’srillan—there was a settlement in Minneapolis but I live in St. Paul and don’t cross the river much—but from what I could tell they were all law-abiding and hard working and in general the sort of people you want to have come and settle in your city.

They also looked kind of like roadkilled giant squid. They don’t have faces, as such. I mean, they have eyes, seven of them, which are on stalks, and they have a mouth, which they use to eat and speak, but they’re not right next to each other the way you would expect in practically every earth species out there, from mammals to reptiles to fish. I mean, okay, we do have squids. But they don’t walk around the shopping mall. On tentacles.

K’srillan do talk, but they aren’t physically capable of making the same sounds as us, so they carry a voice synthesizer for communication.

The thought of sex with, or marriage to, a K’srillan was completely baffling to me.

Even, dare I say it, gross.

But we are pro-sex, pro-kink, and anti-shame, so I said, “Okay!” in as cheerful a voice as I could muster, and didn’t add, “Husband? You sure moved fast.” (I might not judge sex lives but I reserve the right to judge major life decisions.) “I don’t actually know that much about K’srillan sexual anatomy. So, um. He has a penis?”

“Yes, we don’t need a Firmie for him,” the woman said, dismissively. “Your products don’t interface with K’srillan neurology anyway or we’d consider buying him a Firmie and having him use that instead of his own penis. He has a penis, but it’s eighteen inches long, and bifurcated.”

“Bifurcated?”

“Branches into two, basically.”

“You’d need at least four Firmies,” I blurted out. “To make a vagina for eighteen inches of branched penis.”

“That is a lot of money.”

“Yeah, for that much you could practically get a custom order.”

“Oh! You do custom orders?”

“No. We don’t. But surely someone . . . ”

“Do you think I haven’t checked?” the woman asked, exasperated. “There has been a lot of discussion of this in the Full Integration community. I am not the only woman looking.”

“You aren’t?”

“No!”

Well, that changed things, maybe. A custom order was one thing. A prototype was potentially a whole different matter.

“No.”

“No? Just no?”

“Would you rather I went with ‘no, that’s a repulsive idea?’ ”

I stared at Julia. “I thought we were pro-kink and anti-shame?” To be fair, I’d had a similar reaction at first, but I was actively trying to get past my emotional reaction. Everyone involved was a consenting adult—okay, so the K’srillans had a different life span and developmental arc from humans, but I’d checked, and since the K’srillan males didn’t actually develop a penis until sexual maturity, clearly these were adults we were talking about. Anyway. “Did you know that there’s already a sector of the porn industry devoted to sex between human women and K’srillan males? Apparently an eighteen-inch bifurcated—”

“Stop. I don’t want to hear about it.”

“Did I ever say that about your ex-boyfriend’s fetish for massive boobs? No. Your kink is not my kink, and your kink is okay. Their kink is not our kink, but that doesn’t mean we can’t sell them stuff!”

Julia threw down the silicon butt plug she’d been examining. (We’d been thinking about new ways to extend our line anyway. It’s not as if my suggestion had come completely out of the blue.) “Okay. Fine. You want to design something, we’ll test the market. But you are going to have to take the measurements, you are going to have to build the prototype, and you are certainly going to have to do the focus group and interviews because this is a repulsive idea.”

“Fine!” I said. “Fine. I will handle—” I cut myself off. “I will deal with all of it. And we’ll see if enough people want this to make it viable.”

The woman who’d called was named Liz, and her husband’s name was Zmivla, and it turned out that Zmivla was part of the group that had settled in Minneapolis, so they lived less than five miles from my office. I drove to the high-rise apartment where so many of the new arrivals had moved in, and took an elevator to their apartment on the twelveth floor.

“Come in,” Liz said when she answered the door. “I’ve made coffee.” She laughed nervously. “Do you drink coffee?”

Zmivla was lounging in the recliner, tentacles draped over both the arm rests and the foot rest. Two of his eye stalks swiveled to look at me when I came in and his speech synthesizer said, “Hello, Ms. Marshall.”

“Call me Renee,” I said.

Liz handed me a cup of coffee and I studied Zmivla, wondering if I should just whip out the tape measure and ask him to whip out his penis, or if we should have some more preliminaries first. When Julia started making the Firmies, I think rather than measuring actual penises she bought the dozen or so top-selling models of dildo and measured those. But there aren’t currently any K’srillan dildo models on the market, so we were going to have to go with some actual penises. I took a deep breath. “I should ask some sort of basic questions first, I think.”

“Would you like to know how we met?” Liz asked, brightly.

Actually, I mostly wanted to know how K’srillan sex normally worked with another K’srillan but if she wanted to start with something a little less explicit I supposed that was a reasonable lead-in, so I nodded and drank my coffee while they told me their how-we-met story. I think it involved a conversation that started at the Powderhorn Art Fair but it’s possible I’m mis-remembering and actually that’s how my sister met her ex-husband. If you want to know the truth, all the cutesy “how we met” stories blur together for me. If you met your sweetie because he was third in line for the organized gang bang at the local dungeon and you really liked the shape of his dick, that I’ll remember. If he offered to help you carry your pottery in his tentacles while you kept your dog from bolting, I just don’t care enough to keep it in my head for more than fifteen minutes.

Liz worked in a boring office and Zmivla had a boring job that was clearly beneath his talents and after they told me that Liz’s hobby was making still life paintings it was clear they were stalling, and I couldn’t entirely blame them, given that I was there to measure the guy’s penis.

“I know this is a somewhat uncomfortable situation for all of us,” I said. “But we really probably should get down to business, okay?”

“I just want you to . . . ” Liz hesitated.

Zmivla stroked the back of her hand with the tip of one of his tentacles, delicately. With one of the others, he brushed a strand of hair out of her face. “Liz and I appreciate your open-mindedness,” he said. “But it’s important to her that you see us as people first. As a couple who has a right to be together, to share the love that we do.”

“You want me to think that you’re normal,” I said. I tried to keep the edge of sarcasm out of my voice, but I probably didn’t entirely succeed. “Just another Minneapolis family.”

“I know we’re not like everyone else,” Liz said. “But we love each other and take care of each other. And that’s what’s important.”

“Right,” I said. “But you didn’t call me to affirm your relationship. You called me to help you with your sex life. So let’s talk about that.”

So, among actual K’srillans, the female folds herself around the male; she does have a short channel that’s there all the time but a decent amount of her sexual passageway is constructed on-the-fly. I took notes. The actual sex involved friction, but some of it was accomplished by the same muscles that were used to fold the extended vagina into place; I wasn’t entirely sure whether the male K’srillan thrusted, or not.

“You realize,” I said, “there is no way we can build an IntelliFlesh vagina that will do the folding thing. Or the rippling, or whatever. Maybe we could add a vibrator . . . ”

“Older K’srillan females sometimes lose a certain amount of strength,” Zmivla offered. “There is a procedure that allows the female to fasten her channel into place, and when having sex with a female who has had this procedure, the male thrusts. It should work.” The tips of his tentacles turned pink and I wasn’t sure whether he was embarrassed, sexually aroused, or something else entirely. “Though this vibration option you mention . . . ”

I had brought the tape measure but I wound up having Liz do the measurements. I made a sketch and had her call out the measurements as I noted them down. Eighteen inches was a rough estimate, it turned out: one branch ran 18.25 inches stem to stern and the other branch was 17.8 inches. Girth of the trunk portion was comparable to a soda can; the branches were a lot more slender and tapered toward the tip, like extremely long carrots. The K’srillan penis is blue, I noticed, or at least it’s blue when he’s sexually aroused, sort of a dusky violet-blue that would indicate in a human that he’s oxygen-deprived or possibly freezing to death. There are visible veins in the sides.

“I don’t suppose you know how typical you are,” I said. “I mean, for a K’srillan male, are you on the large side or the small side, are you more or less asymmetrical than most, how does your girth compare . . . ”

“I don’t know,” he said. “But I don’t think it would be too hard to find out. There are about a thousand K’srillans living in this apartment complex, after all, and I know two dozen others with human wives.”

I spent two entire days measuring K’srillan penises.

The good news was that K’srillan penises turned out to be reasonably uniform. I mean, they ranged in length from sixteen inches all the way up to twenty, and they ranged in girth from pop can to coffee mug, and there were some penises where one branch was noticeably shorter, even by as much as six inches. But human penises also vary. I mean, the average length for an erect dick is about five inches, but the record holder was 13.5 inches long. (Not to overshare but that just sounds like it would be painful.)

The variety of sizing in human dicks has not prevented the successful marketing of any number of artificial vaginas (or “masturbation sleeves,” to use the technical industry term.) I mean, just like with dildos you can provide a set of different sizes but they are not all THAT customized, and given that IntelliFlesh is a lot more adaptable than silicon, I was pretty sure we’d be able to come up with something that would work.

Anyway, that was the good news. The bad news was that I had to spend two entire days measuring K’srillan penises.

Fortunately, K’srillan men seem to be pretty secure in their masculinity. I mean, imagine the reaction if you came at the average human male with a tape measure. My former brother-in-law actually measured his own dick at some point and it was 4.5 inches long, so a whopping half-inch shorter than the average. My sister told absolutely everyone, after the divorce, but the problem wasn’t really his very-slightly-runty dick, it was the ways in which he compensated and the fact that he was a complete loser in the sack, one of those men who thinks that his penis is magic and if you can’t climax in two minutes just from him sticking it in you, you must be broken. One-half-inch-less than average length: not a problem. Complete boredom in the sack: definite problem.

(Sorry. Very few people in my life seem to embrace my no-overshares policy.)

Anyway. There was one K’srillan who shrank at the sight of the tape measure, but then he laughed (K’srillans actually have a physical response to humor, I found out, but the voice synthesizers are programmed to pick up on it and translate it into a ha-ha-ha sound) and said, “Give me just one moment” and swelled back up to full size within a few seconds. K’srillans all grew up in K’srillan society, which has its own set of gender roles and expectations that are absolutely nothing whatsoever like human gender stereotypes, and then they were plunged into human society and forced to adapt. One of the men noted, as I wrapped the tape measure around the trunk portion at the bottom, that in K’srillan society it is the woman who is expected to make the first move; a man who propositions a woman is shameless and forward, and he thinks human women like that, once we get used to the idea.

“Maybe,” I said, and measured his length on the left-hand side: 17.85. “How’d you meet your wife, anyway?”

“I thought they told you?” he said, a little mournfully. “I have not been so fortunate yet, but I volunteered for this exciting project because it will perhaps raise interest in our kind.”

“Wouldn’t you honestly prefer to marry someone of your own species?” I said.

“Among my own kind I am considered unattractive,” he said.

I stepped back and took a look at him. Over the two days, K’srillans had stopped looking like roadkilled squid to me, but I still wouldn’t call any individual attractive as such. I finished the last measurement, wrote it down, and tossed my gloves into his kitchen trash can. “Thanks for your help,” I said.

I was back in the office, finishing up my prototype design, when my phone rang.

“You do us an injustice,” said a synthesized voice on the other end of the line.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Who’s calling, please?”

“For days you come to our settlement and measure the male organs,” the voice said, distressed. “And now I find out it is so that you can make false female organs for human women.”

I scratched my head, wondering how I’d gotten myself into this. “Look. You do realize that we specialize in false organs of all varieties for humans—both women and men.”

“Yes!” the voice said, furious. “And I am a K’srillan female married to a human male. Why are you not going to make false K’srillan male organs? What is my husband supposed to do to please me?”

So in the end, I’m sure you’ll be shocked to hear, we made both. We made K’srillan vaginas: as I warned Liz, they’re not capable of the K’srillan pre-sex vaginal origami action, but they do simulate the muscle movements with the addition of an adjustable vibrator. We also made K’srillan penises, though due to limited market penetration at this point we have only one size and shape (pop-bottle girth at the bottom, 17.85 on the left-hand size, 18.1 on the right-hand side).

What I find the weirdest these days are not the human/K’srillan couples. It’s the human/human couples that buy one from each set and have sex with the detachable genitals instead of the compatible set they already had. Or maybe it’s the porn of humans having sex with the K’srillan artificial genitalia. Or possibly the gay porn of humans having sex with K’srillan artificial genitalia. Or possibly the absolute weirdest is the porn of K’srillans having sex with artificial human genitalia—they can’t do that with IntelliFlesh (years of research into their neurology remain to be done) but there’s always the good old-fashioned strap-on option on one side, and an artificial vagina on the other.

Because really, there are two immutable laws of nature at work here: number one, love will find a way; and number two, if a sexual act can be conceived of, someone will pay money to watch it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that first rule, lately. Because I told my sister about the “unattractive” K’srillan and jokingly—I swear I was joking!—pointed out that at least she’d never be bored in bed. She jokingly—she claims she was joking—asked me for his number. I told her she could have it if she promised to never tell me the details of their sex life, and she pointed out that I already knew this guy’s penis size down to the quarter-inch . . .

Yeah, they’re dating. They’re not rushing into anything, so this story doesn’t end with, “And the wedding’s next week!” But I have to say—you do get used to the seven eyes looking at you over the after-dinner drinks and I’ve learned to spot the physical cues of the laugh even before the synthesizer goes “ha ha ha.” And Gintika (that’s his name) definitely doesn’t make me think of roadkilled squid anymore. He makes me think about how sometimes we have more in common with people than we realize; he makes me think about all the ways to form a connection. He makes me think about the look on my sister’s face when she talks about him. He makes me think, love finds a way, and hey, sometimes finding a way, finds you love.

About the Author

Naomi Kritzer’s short stories have appeared in Asimov’s, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, and Strange Horizons; this is her first appearance in Clarkesworld. Her novels (Fires of the Faithful, Turning the Storm, Freedom’s Gate, Freedom’s Apprentice, and Freedom’s Sisters) are available from Bantam. Since her last novel came out, she has written an urban fantasy novel about a Minneapolis woman who unexpectedly inherits the Ark of the Covenant; a children’s science fictional shipwreck novel; a children’s portal fantasy; and a YA novel set on a dystopic seastead. She has two e-book short story collections out: Gift of the Winter King and Other Stories, and Comrade Grandmother and Other Stories.

Naomi lives in St. Paul, Minnesota with her husband and two daughters.

The Creature Recants

Dale Bailey

During breaks in shooting, the Creature from the Black Lagoon usually rests in a pond on the studio back lot and dreams of home. The pond isn’t much even as ponds go. It’s maybe four feet deep at its deepest point and a hundred yards or so around, an abandoned set carved out of the scorched southern California earth for some forgotten film or other: cattails and reeds and occasionally a little arrow of ripples when a dry breeze skates across the surface. Not even a fish if he’s feeling peckish. Which he often is. The catering is suspect at the best of times, and it’s even more so when you’re accustomed to a diet of raw fish and turtle flesh prized living from the shell.

This is Hollywood.

“Don’t expect too much,” Karloff had advised him over sushi not long after he’d arrived, full of ambition and optimism, and Lugosi, strung out on morphine and methadone by the time the Creature made the scene, had been even more blunt. “They vill fuck you every time,” he’d said in that thick Hungarian accent. The both of them typecast by their most famous roles. The Creature had assumed he could beat the odds, but on those blazing afternoons in the pond, now and again scooping up handfuls of water to moisten his gills, he’d begun to reconsider. The water was unkind, perpetually casting his reflection back at him: the bald, barnacle-encrusted skull, the eyes sunk beneath shelves of armored bone, the frills of tissue encasing the gills around his neck. Not what you would call leading-man material.

To think, he’d once been the king of his little world—the vast, dark Lagoon, overhung with the boughs of enormous trees, and the mighty Amazon itself, where anacondas slithered through the algae-clotted water, caiman slid into the flood without a splash, their tails lashing, and catfish the size of Chevrolets trolled the mossy bottom. Not to mention the jungle, humid, rank, and festering, clamorous with the chitinous roar of millions of insects. And here he was in southern California instead, spending his days in waist-deep water and sleeping his nights in an oversized bathtub in a crummy apartment.

Such are the Creature’s thoughts when a member of the crew—it’s Bill, a gopher who’s trying to break into the biz as a lighting tech—walks down to the pond to tell him that Jack’s finished setting up the next shot. It’s time for the Creature to come back up to the set and stagger around the deck of the Rita—not even a real boat, just a cheap mock-up in one of the soundstages on the Universal lot—and menace Julie Adams for another hour or so. She’s a real scream queen, Julie, the genuine article, but she’s nice enough in real life; she even walks down to the pond to chat once in a while between set-ups. They’re all nice enough. Even Jack’s okay, though he’s always badgering the Creature to focus on his motivation when the Creature has enough trouble just hitting his marks. To tell the truth, the Creature’s heart isn’t in it anymore, but he’s signed a deal with Universal, and his agent—who rarely returns his calls anyway—tells him there’s no way to break the contract.

So the Creature hauls himself out of the pond, and tramps back up to the soundstage, trying not to think about the fact that he could decapitate Bill with a single stroke of his taloned hand. Trying not to think that at some level he wants to.

It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way.

You never know happiness until it’s gone, that’s the way the Creature figures it. The present always seems like a mess. It was only once he left the Lagoon that he realized how good he’d had it there. In Hollywood, he recalls its dark waters with longing. Sometimes at night, his head pillowed on the bottom of his brimming bathtub and his webbed feet slung over either side to brush the peeling vinyl floor, he even dreams of it. How perfect it seems now, the murky bottom where he’d nested for hours among the drifting fronds of plants he cannot name and the hidden channel that led to his rocky underground lair. Armored with scales and impervious to jaguar and piranha alike, the Creature had hunted both the overgrown shores and the black fathoms, snatching spider monkeys screaming from their roosts and feasting on the great fish that slipped through the Lagoon’s sulfurous depths. He recalls even his isolation with melancholy regret. What had seemed like loneliness—he’d never known another of his kind—now seemed like autonomy, and when the boat that spelled his expulsion from paradise had first steamed into the lagoon he had approached it with a curiosity that now seemed like folly.

He hadn’t planned to leave the Black Lagoon, but life always takes the unexpected turn: caiman poachers in this case, though he hadn’t known that then. It had been the boat, anchored in a sun-dappled inlet, that fascinated him. He’d taken it for some kind of novel creature, and because no denizen of the Amazon posed a threat to him—because he pined for novelty in those days—he hadn’t given a second thought to approaching the thing. He’d been backstroking along, his face turned to the sun, when it came chugging into the Lagoon, stinking of gasoline. When he saw it, the Creature dove into the sun-spangled water, surfaced in the shadow of the boat, and dragged a talon along its rusting keel. He hadn’t seen the net until it was too late. He found himself entangled. Panicked, he began to claw at it. He’d have freed himself had the poachers not reacted so quickly, winching him out of the water even as his talons tore long rents in the ropy mesh.

“My God,” one of the poachers screamed, staggering back.

“Jesus, what the hell is that thing?” his companion cried, reaching for a spear gun. (The Creature reconstructed this dialogue only later.) The Creature was thinking the same thing. What could these soft, distorted reflections of his scaly self be, he wondered—

Then the harpoon punctured his shoulder and he stumbled flailing into the water. He’d never felt such agony. By the time he bobbed to the surface, he was unconscious. When he woke he found himself imprisoned behind steel bars.

The poachers weren’t dumb—grimy, stubbled, and foul mouthed—but not dumb. Three times a day, they tossed a fish, still flopping, between the bars of his cage. When they saw him pour his bucket of drinking water over his head, they realized that he needed to moisten his gills regularly. Using a spare gaff, they poked fresh buckets into his pen on the hour. The rest of the time he spent curled in a corner, whimpering. His terror of the boat at first overwhelmed him: the roar of the engine, the stench of his own waste, the curious faces (if you could call such doughy parodies of his own batrachian features faces) staring at him jaws agape from outside his cage. But you can get used to anything. By the time they anchored in the headwaters of Peru, his terror had dwindled to a dull simmer of anxiety.

What next?

He had no concept of the worst possibilities—not then, anyway. He could have been sold to a marine biology institute, where sooner or later scientists would have gotten around to dissecting him to see what made him tick (the Creature’s rudimentary knowledge of scientists derives mostly from horror movies; scientists were all mad, as far as he is concerned). He could have been sold to a zoo, and spent the rest of his life paddling around in a wading pool, while small children gawped at him and tossed half-eaten ice cream cones through the bars. These would no doubt have been more profitable avenues. But the caiman poachers weren’t anxious to disclose their reasons for cruising the Amazon. So he was sold instead to a carny scout combing the region for freak-show specimens, shipped north, and sold yet again, this time to Southeby & Sons Travelling Carnival, a fly-by-night operation that worked the south-western circuit through the spring and fall, wintering in Gibsonton, Florida, along with most of the other carnies in North America.

And here was happiness again—sort of, anyway—though he didn’t recognize it at the time. By then, he’d pretty well been tamed. After he’d raked the shoulder of one of the poachers with his claws, a cattle prod had been brought into play, and three or four applications of that had been sufficient to cool his heels. So when he came to Southeby & Sons he’d been pliable enough. Besides, he fit right in with the freaks. They too were unique: the Living Skeleton, the Fat Lady (fat hardly did her justice), Daisy and Violet, the Siamese Twins, and half a dozen others, midgets and bearded ladies and the Monkey Boy: a community of sorts, a family that assuaged the loneliness that had been his lot back home in the Black Lagoon.

What’s more, he had a vertical glass aquarium he could call his own, smaller than he might have wished, true, but brimful of water. Southeby billed him as the Gill Man and his sideshow performances were no hardship. He could bob in the green water, or kick to the surface for a breath of rank air (the Monkey Boy wasn’t particular in matters of personal hygiene), or even doze if so inclined. Something of a romance—unconsummated, for the Creature’s sexual organs, if he had any, were incompatible with those of human beings—blossomed between him and Daisy, much to Violet’s dismay, who for unknown reasons took an immediate and abiding dislike of him. It was Daisy who taught him to talk, though his vocal cords, unfit for human speech, rendered his voice guttural and unintelligible to the untutored ear. And there was a kind of freedom during the winters in Gibsonton, this perhaps most precious of all. A simple walk of a mile or so brought him to the beach, and he sometimes lazed for hours in the warm, briny waters of the Gulf.

So he might have passed his life, or at least a longer portion of it, for who could say how long he might yet exist? The Creature had no memory of his birth and growth. He was then as he always had been and might always be. But restlessness possessed him. Violet’s inescapable abhorrence was a constant blight on the affection he shared with Daisy, his tank grew cramped, and even his sojourns in the waters of the Gulf too brief, restricted by nine months on the road, burning the lot in one town to set up the next day in another. The midway—the flashing lights of the rides, the alluring chants of the barkers, the sugary reek of cotton candy and funnel cake—grew oppressive.

So when the chance to escape presented itself, in the person of a low-rent Hollywood agent who paused before his tank, the Creature was quick to take it. The agent took the time to decipher his rasping tones, sensed his discontent, and persuaded him to give the silver screen a try. L.A. was close to the beach year round, after all, and the Creature was already in show biz. If stardom didn’t suit him, he could always return to the carny circuit. So it was the Creature signed up to be a contract player for Universal. He didn’t count on being typecast as, well, the Creature, forever flapping about on his great rubbery feet after one nubile beauty or another, his scaly green arms outstretched. Didn’t count on being mistaken for a stunt man in a rubber suit. Didn’t count on the bathtub or the crummy apartment.

Most of all he didn’t count on Julie Adams.

This is Hollywood.

As Bela Lugosi put it, “They vill fuck you every time.”

The Creature has begun to believe that he might be in love with Julie Adams.

“Are you lonely?” she asks him one day down by the pond.

He floats on his back in a stand of cattails, keeping an eye on her through a screen of gently bending stalks. He understands all too well what it’s like to be stared at. Every time he strolls outside his apartment, people stare. He’s learned to ignore the occasional cries of “Hey, fish man,” and no longer stops to explain that he’s not a fish, but an amphibian. Yet the mockery has had its effect. The Creature has begun to wonder if there’s something cannibalistic about him every time he chomps into a fish taco or spears a sushi roll on a single curved claw—with his webbed fingers, chopsticks and silverware are out of the question. The truth is, that’s another reason the Creature has given up on the set’s catering: he senses that people would just as soon not see him eat. He’s never quite overcome the gastronomic habits of the jungle. He wolfs down his meals, smacks his oversized red lips, chews with his mouth open, gets unsightly gobs of food caught in his fangs. The whole thing is unsightly. The studio has ignored his requests to stock the pond with bluegills and catfish so that he can eat in privacy, and rather than protest—the negligent agent again—the Creature elects to spend his days hungry. He figures it sharpens his hostile motivations in the film; he’s become a student of Stanislavsky.

The Creature has, in short, begun to accept the norms of Hollywood. He no longer sees any beauty in his fellow denizens of the freak show (the mere thought of Daisy now repulses him)—but he has very much come to see the beauty in Julie Adams, a tall busty brunette who spends most of her days in their scenes together wearing a white one-piece bathing suit that accentuates her considerable curves. He’s not sure that what he feels is love—love is a relatively new concept to him—but he knows that he eagerly anticipates her occasional visits to the pond, that the sound of her voice sets his heart racing, that sometimes he has trouble sleeping nights, and not merely because the bathtub provides no comfortable accommodation for his dorsal ridge. No, he has trouble sleeping because he can’t stop thinking of Julie Adams.

Is he lonely? In a word, yes.

But the question begs closer examination. He glides out of the bed of cattails and gives Julie his full attention. Perhaps she’s come to suspect his amorous intentions, for she has taken to wrapping herself in a thick white bathrobe before she walks down to the pond. Perhaps she’s merely cold. It’s hard to know.

“Lonely?” he says, hating his inhuman rasp. He cannot help comparing it to the rich, clear timbre of Richard Carlson, the (let’s face it) star of the movie, despite the Creature’s eponymous billing. With a languid kick he turns to face Julie. She sits at the edge of the shore, with her knees drawn up and her hands clasped around her legs. The Creature can’t help staring at her bare ankles. Lonely? He muses on the question.

“That’s right.”

“I suppose I haven’t really thought about it.”

“Well, there are no other Creatures, are there?”

“None that I know of,” he says, recalling the splendid isolation of the Lagoon.

“It must be very lonely, then. I wouldn’t like to be all alone.”

“I’m not alone anymore.”

Implying that he has become a companion to the human race in general, and perhaps, hopefully, to Julie in particular.

She doesn’t take his meaning. “Sometimes I think we’re all alone, every one of us. Do you ever think that?”

The Creature composes his largely immobile features into an expression of tragic acceptance. “I suppose we are,” he says. “But if you can find someone to love—”

She interrupts him. “I guess that’s true. But it must be especially difficult for you. You’re not human, but you’re not . . . not human, either, if you see what I mean.” She sighs, resting her chin on her knees. “Dick says you’re the Missing Link.” She seems to be blind to the cruelty of this statement, but the Creature has become as accustomed to this appellation as he is to “Fish Man.” If he really thinks about it, he supposes he does stand somewhere between the modern human and his piscine ancestry, but he doesn’t much like what this implies about his place on the evolutionary spectrum.

Annoyed, he backstrokes off in a snit, arcs his body gracefully backward, and dives, dragging his armored belly on the muddy bottom of the shallow pond (oh, how he longs for the fathomless depths of the Black Lagoon!) He surfaces to face Julie across the stretch of sun-shot water—only to find her striding back to the sound stage. Bill is waving him in from the water’s edge. It must be time to resume shooting. Sighing, the Creature breaststrokes toward shore. Once the scourge of the Amazon, he has been reduced to a bit player in his own story.

For it is his story. Or was supposed to be.

History will record it differently—attributing the film’s origins to Maurice Zimm, but Zimm did little more than transcribe the Creature’s narrative during a series of interviews conducted while the Creature lounged in producer William Alland’s swimming pool. That’s how the Creature remembers it anyway. He would have pounded out the screenplay himself if he could have. That task fell instead to two inveterate Hollywood journeymen, Harry Essex and Arthur Ross. When the final draft fell into the Creature’s hands, he recoiled in disbelief. The caiman poachers had been transformed into intrepid paleontologists, the Black Lagoon into an arena of horrors, the Creature himself—an innocent victim!—into a vicious monster. About the only thing the trio of scribes had managed to do right was add a love interest—otherwise, the Creature thinks, he might never have met Julie Adams.

“I won’t do it,” the Creature protested. “I’ll go back to the carnival. Hell, I’ll go back to the Amazon!”

His agent—a balding, mousy little man named Henry Duvall—shook his head dolefully. “You’ve signed a contract.”

“I didn’t sign anything,” the Creature growled. “I can’t even hold a pen.”

“I signed for you in the presence of two witnesses and a notary public,” Duvall replied. “Same difference.”

Cue Bela Lugosi.

So the Creature reported to the set as ordered, climbed aboard the Rita to terrorize Julie as required, shrank before the virile posturings of Richard Carlson (as required)—and fell in love.

“Love,” he tells Karloff, pacing the actor’s capacious study. By this time, Karloff has long since settled into stardom. He lives comfortably in L.A. and has steady work, though he’s still typecast as a horror icon. Smaller than the Creature expected—the Creature towers a good two feet above him—Karloff in his late sixties remains handsome and slim, his dark hair silvering. Five times married, he is perhaps not the best person to approach for romantic advice, but the Creature’s options are limited. His film, the first of a projected trilogy, is not yet completed, much less released, and he is beginning to see that he has been played for a fool. If Boris Karloff can’t escape his defining role—if this charming, gentle man still clumps around in the American zeitgeist wearing elevator boots and bolts in his neck—then what hope has the Creature, who cannot even shuck his costume? There are no Oscars in his future, just endless sequels to this initial pack of lies. Revenge of the Creature. The Creature Walks Among Us. Even Abbot and Costello Meet the Creature, if things go badly enough (or well enough, from Universal’s perspective).

“Love?” Karloff says. He leans back in his armchair and steeples his fingers. “Love is always a delicate matter.”

“Tell me about it,” says the Creature.

“If your love is unrequited”—Karloff retains a trace of his native British accent, a genteel formality—“then there is little you can do.”

This is not the advice the Creature sought. This is not advice at all. This is a statement of fact. The Creature has come to suspect that Julie’s visits to his pond are little more than kindnesses. After all, he sees the way she looks at Richard Carlson, the way she moistens her lips and gazes up at him in adoration. Carlson is nice enough to him, but nice won’t do. While the Creature occasionally daydreams of raking Bill’s head off in annoyance, his fantasies of violence toward Carlson burn icy and pure. He would like to kill him slowly, to spear each eyeball upon a talon and pop them into his mouth like jellybeans, to unseam his belly and feed upon the steaming offal, to wrench off his limbs one by one. For a start. The Creature does what he can to repress these unsavory flights of imagination, but they retain a vividness he cannot deny. He may work in a black-and-white 3D horror flick, but his fantasies are projected in widescreen Technicolor. Perhaps this is his true nature, savage and immutable, antediluvian and, yes, appropriate to the Missing Link. You can take the Creature out of the jungle, but you can’t take the jungle out of the Creature.

He senses that this is not the way to Julie’s heart.

Karloff clears his throat. “You face many obstacles, of course. You are not handsome. You are not human. You have, insofar as you have been able to detect, no potential for procreation. Yet there might be a way.”

A way? The Creature pauses. He takes a seat across from Karloff. He’d like to lean back, but his goddamn dorsal ridge is, as always, in the way. Another reminder of his inhumanity. Yet there might be a way past even that.

He is all attention.

“Beauty comes in many forms,” Karloff says. “It is, as the expression goes, in the eye of the beholder. But that eye is often best attuned when its object is set against its natural environment.”

“What are you saying?”

Now Karloff leans forward. He smiles. “Underwater, my friend. Water is your natural milieu.”

True enough. In his pond on the Universal lot, submerged to the waist and ladling up clear freshets with one spade-like hand, the Creature looks ridiculous. In the Black Lagoon, however, he glides through the water with a grace and beauty no man can hope to match. Human beings are no more suited to thrive underwater than he is suited to a purely land-bound existence. Clumsy and ill equipped for a submarine life, they don wet suits that are but sad reflections of his own glistening hide. They have rubber flippers where he has feet, heavy oxygen tanks and re-breathers where he has gills. If he shambles gasping across the Universal lot, his adversary in love will shamble—or anyway flail—beneath the surface. In the water, Carlson’s beauty will be but a paltry thing. And while a return to the Black Lagoon is cost-prohibitive, the underwater scenes are scheduled to be filmed in Wakulla Springs, Florida, a return to his beloved Gulf and (yes, he has researched the location shoots) the largest freshwater cave system in the world—if not his beloved Lagoon, the next best thing. Flush with renewed optimism, the Creature thanks Karloff and takes his leave.

The same optimism carries him across the continent, canted awkwardly in his seat—his dorsal ridge; again—and staring out at the blur of the propellers. Halfway through the flight, Julie walks down the aisle to take the seat beside him. She leans past him to look out the window, so close that he can smell the faint lavender scent of her perfume. “Isn’t it beautiful?” she says, gazing down at the green hills unscrolling below the streaming scud. “It makes me think of the film.”

“How?” says the Creature, who can see no clear connection.

“Well, it seems so deep, you know, so . . . dimensional . . . looking down from up here like this. I imagine the way the audience will experience it when they see us swimming out of the screen like that.”

Ah. 3D. If he’s been told once he’s been told a thousand times. Alland’s ambitions for the film hinge upon two factors: the realistic creature effects (which certainly should look realistic, the Creature ruminates) and the use of 3D, only the second Universal film to be released in the innovative format. But then he realizes that Julie has dozed off against his shoulder, and he wonders if he too can have a three-dimensioned life.

Wakulla Springs is everything the Creature had hoped it would be. There are shortcomings, to be sure. He could have wished for a more tropical setting—strangler figs, lianas, and buttress-rooted trees—but there is much to be thankful for as well. The alligators slipping into the murky water recall the caiman of the Black Lagoon; the bulky manatees the nine-foot piracuru and catfish that call his native waters home; the boom of insects the constant roar of the jungle. And the springs themselves are everything he hoped they would be, fathoms deep, and riddled with caverns. Against his better judgment—Julie will think him hardly human at all, he fears—the Creature dispenses with the pretense of his trailer and abandons the on-set catering altogether. Halfway abandons the film, in fact. More often than not, when Jack dispatches Bill to summon the Creature to the set, he’s off touring the depths. He explores the cave system in search of a rocky grotto like the one he had in the Amazon. He dozes in deep, cold currents where no human being can follow. He gluts himself on the abundance of prey, devouring fish raw in clouds of ichthyic blood. Life is good, or better anyway, but he is not happy (or if he is, he does not recognize it). Thoughts of Julie torture him like an inflamed scale under a ridge of his armored breast.

Finally, Jack calls him in for a meeting. Like Karloff, Jack is a kind man. Anger is not his natural métier, yet the Creature is forced to stand dripping on the carpet in the director’s trailer, listening to his gentle rebuke. Somehow that makes it worse, Jack’s generosity of spirit. “I have no choice, you see,” the director admonishes him. “We’re on a tight schedule. We’re not making Gone With the Wind, you know.”

“It’s going to be a good picture,” the Creature says.

“I didn’t say it wasn’t going to be a good picture. I said that we have to make our release date or both our careers are on the line.”

“Your career,” the Creature rasps. “What kind of career am I likely to have, Jack?”

“You’re unique. After people see this picture, offers are going to come rolling in.”

“Don’t patronize me, Jack. We both know there’s only one role I can play.”

Jack sighs. “I guess you’re right. But still, this is going to be a good film. You’ll get to play this role again.”

The Creature laughs humorlessly, snared in a dilemma even his human colleagues must share, forever trapped in the prisonhouse of self. That’s the appeal of acting, he supposes: the chance to be someone else, if only for a little while. And isn’t that what he’s doing here, playing at being something he’s not? He’s not a monster. He never has been. If his range of roles is limited—if he is doomed to be the Creature from the Black Lagoon—well, that’s Hollywood. He thinks of Karloff and Lugosi. Who does he want to become? Does he wish to accept his fate with grace or does he wish to rail perpetually against it, strung out on drugs and bitterness? Is being the Creature any different than being a carnival freak? Yet still he longs for his lost home. How he hates the poachers who have done this to him. He’d like to poke their eyeballs out, too. And eat them.

So maybe he’s a monster, after all.

“I need you on the set on time,” Jack is saying while these thoughts run through the Creature’s head. “It’s expensive to shoot underwater, especially with the 3D rig. Every time you don’t show up when you’re supposed to, you cost us money.”

“I’m sorry, Jack,” the Creature says.

“Look, I know this is hard for you. Nobody ever said acting was easy. Look at Brando. Channel your anger into the role. I need you to be the Creature I know you can be.”

The Creature doesn’t know quite what Jack means by this. He doesn’t even know who—or what—he is anymore. Yet he vows to himself that he will try for something more complex than a B-movie monster—to draw not only upon his fury and resentment, but upon his passion for Julie. He vows to do better.

He does, too.

The Creature shows up promptly as requested. He lingers between shots. He tries to make small talk with the crew. But what is there to say, really? He’s an eight-foot amphibian, finned and armored in plates of bone. He could eviscerate any one of them with the twitch of a talon. Monster or not, he is a monster to them.

Not Julie, though, or so he tells himself. Perhaps Karloff is right: set against his natural environment, she seems to recognize his natural grace. Indeed she seems to share it. Unburdened by the clunky scuba tanks the men’s roles demand, she glides through the water. And between shots she dispenses with the bathrobe she’d taken to draping herself in on the Universal lot, as if swimming together has drawn them closer. Of all the actors on the set, she alone seems entirely at ease with him. They spend more and more time talking. As he lolls in the shallows, she tells him about her recent divorce or about growing up in Arkansas; she tells him about her first days in Hollywood, working as a secretary and taking voice lessons on the side. Yet she is still capable of blind cruelty.

“You’re lucky,” she says. “You never had to fight for your dreams.”

The Creature hardly knows how to respond. So what if Universal picked him up the minute William Alland laid eyes on him? Unlike Julie, he’ll never play another role in his life; all the elocution lessons in the world won’t change his inhuman growl. He’s not even sure what he aspires to anymore. Stardom? Freedom? A return to the Black Lagoon? In his dreams, he sweeps Julie into his embrace, carries her off to the Amazon, unveils to her the wonders of his vanished life: the splendid isolation of the Lagoon, the sluggish currents of the great river, the mystery of the crepuscular forest.

Maybe this newfound intimacy accounts for the otherworldly beauty of the Wakulla scenes. In the dailies, Julie cuts the surface, her white bathing suit shining down through the gloom like god light. The Creature stalks her from below, half-hidden among drifting fronds of thalassic flora, rapt by her ethereal beauty. His webbed hands cleave the water. Bubbles erupt skyward with his every kick. As she swims, he glides toward her from below, up, up, up, until he is swimming on his back beneath her and closing fast: a dozen feet, half a dozen, less, his immovable face frozen in an expression of impossible longing. He reaches out a tentative hand to brush her ankle as she treads water—and pulls it away at the last moment, as terrified of her rejection on celluloid as he is terrified of her rejection in life. What one does not risk, one cannot lose; worse yet, he thinks, what one does not risk, one cannot gain. A sense of inconsolable despair seizes him. In the images projected on the screen, he sees now how little their worlds can connect. She is a creature of the daylit skin of the planet, he of the shadowy submarine depths.

Jack praises the silent yearning in the Creature’s performance.

Yet the whole thing drives the director crazy nonetheless. Frustrated by the task of stitching the haunting underwater scenes together with the mundane L.A. footage, he asks the studio for reshoots and is denied. For the first time—the only time—the Creature sees Jack angry, his face a mask of fury. “This could be so much more than another goddamn monster flick,” he says in the dim projection trailer, flinging away the 3D glasses perched on his nose. Even this angry gesture drives home the Creature’s inhumanity. Alone in the back row, he must pinch his glasses between two delicate claws. His flattened nose provides no bridge to support them. He has no external ears to hook them over. Everything about him is streamlined for his underwater existence.

The Creature grinds his cardboard glasses under one webbed foot. He slams out of the trailer, the door crumpling with a screech of tortured metal as he hurtles into the moonlit night. He is halfway to the water when Julie catches up with him. “Wait,” she says. “Wait—”

Her voice hitches in the place where his name ought to be—for of course he has no name, does he? He is the Creature, the Gill Man, nothing more. There has been no one to name him—even the freaks did not name him—and he has never thought to name himself. He would not know how to begin. Fred? John? Earl? Such human names fall leaden on the tongue, inadequate to describe a . . . a creature, a fiend, an inhuman monster. How will they credit him in the film? The Creature as the Creature?

“Wait,” Julie says again. “Creature, wa—”

The Creature whirls to face her, one massive hand drawn back to strike.

“Don’t,” she whispers, and the Creature checks the blow. For an instant, everything hangs balanced on a breath. Then the Creature lowers his hand, turns away, and shambles toward the water, his great feet flapping. Something feels broken inside him. Jack’s words—

—another goddamn monster flick—

—echo inside his head. That’s all he is, isn’t he? A monster. A monster who in a moment of fury, would have with a single swipe of his claws torn from her shoulders the head of the woman he loved. A monster who would in the grip of his rage, feed upon her blood. The Creature would cry, but even that simple human solace is denied him. The dark waters beckon.

“Wait,” Julie says. “Please.”

Almost against his will, the Creature turns to face her. She stands maybe a dozen feet away. In the moonlight, tears glint upon her cheeks. Beyond her, the men—Jack and Dick and Richard Denning, the third lead—stand silhouetted against the beacon of golden light pouring through the trailer’s shattered door.

“Why?” the Creature says, knowing the doom that will come upon him if he stays.

“Because,” Julie says, “because I love you.”

So Karloff was right. For a heartbeat, happiness—a great and abiding contentment that no mere human being can plumb—settles over the Creature like a benediction. But what is the depth of love, he wonders, its strange currents and dimensions? What is its price, and is he willing to pay it? And a line from another monster movie comes to him, one that Jack showed him in pre-production: It was beauty killed the beast.

This is Hollywood.

It vill fuck you every time.

“I love you, too,” he says in his inhuman rasp, and in the same instant, in his heart, he recants that love, refuses and renounces it. For Julie. For himself. He will not be the monster that loves. He will not be the monster that dies. He will not be their freak, their creature. He will not haunt their dreams. They can finish their fucking film with a man in a rubber suit.

The Creature puts his back to Julie and wades into the water, glimmering with moonlight. It welcomes him home, rising to his shins and thighs before the bottom drops away beneath him, and he dives. He has studied the locations, he has explored the Springs’ network of caverns: from here the Wakulla River to the St. Marks and Apalachee Bay, and thence to the Gulf. The Black Lagoon calls out to him across the endless miles, and so the Creature strikes off for home, knowing now how fleeting are the heart’s desires, knowing that Julie too would ebb into memory, this perfect moment lost, this happiness receding forever into the past.

About the Author

Dale Bailey’s short fiction has appeared in Alchemy, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lightspeed, SciFiction, and various original and year’s best anthologies. He has stories forthcoming at Tor.com and in Fantasy & Science Fiction. His work has been collected in The Resurrection Man’s Legacy and Other Stories. The author of three novels—The Fallen, House of Bones, and Sleeping Policemen (with Jack Slay, Jr.)—he has twice been a finalist for the Nebula Award, once for the Shirley Jackson Award, and has won the International Horror Guild Award. He lives in North Carolina with his family.

The Ki-anna

Gwyneth Jones

If he’d been at home, he’d have thought, Dump Plant Injuries. In the socially unbalanced, pioneer cities of the Equatorial Ring, little scavengers tangled with the recycling machinery. They needed premium, Earth-atmosphere-and-pressure nursing or the flesh would not regenerate—which they didn’t get. The gouges and dents would be permanent: skinned over, like the scars on her forearms. Visible through thin clothing, like the depressions in her thighs. But this wasn’t Mars, and she wasn’t human, she was a Ki. He guessed, uneasily, at a more horrifying childhood poverty.

She seemed very young for her post: hardly more than a girl. She could almost have been a human girl with gene-mods. Could have chosen to adopt that fine pelt of silky bronze, glimmering against the bare skin of her palms, her throat and face. Chosen those eyes, like drops of black dew; the hint of a mischievous animal muzzle. Her name was Ki-anna, she represented the KiAn authorities. Her partner, a Shet called Roaaat Bhvaaan, his heavy uniform making no concession to the warmth of the space-habitat, was from Interplanetary Affairs, and represented Speranza. The Shet looked far more alien: a head like a gray boulder, naked wrinkled hide hooding his eyes.

Patrice didn’t expect them to be on his side, this odd couple, polite and sympathetic as they seemed. He must be careful, he must remember that his mind and body were reeling from the Buonarotti Transit—two instantaneous interstellar transits in two days, the first in his life. He’d never even seen a non-human sentient biped, in person, this time last week: and here he was in a stark police interview room with two of them.

“You learned of your sister’s death a Martian year ago?”

“Her disappearance. Yes.”

Ki-anna watched, Bhvaaan questioned: he wished it were the other way round. Patrice dreaded the Speranza mindset. Anyone who lives on a planet is a lesser form of life, of course we’re going to ignore your appeals, but it’s more fun to ignore them slowly, very, very slowly—

“We can agree she disappeared,” muttered the Shet, what looked like mordant humor tugging the lipless trap of his mouth. “Yet, aah, you didn’t voice your concerns at once?”

“Lione is, was, my twin. We were close, however far . . . When the notification of death came it was very brief, I didn’t take it in. A few days later I collapsed at work, I had to take compassionate leave.”

At first he’d accepted the official story. She’s dead, Lione is dead. She went into danger, it shouldn’t have happened but it did, on a suffering war-torn planet unimaginably far away . . .

The Shet rolled his neckless head, possibly in sympathy.

“You’re, aah, a Social Knowledge Officer. Thap must be a demanding job. No blame if a loss to your family caused you to crash-out.”

“I recovered. I examined the material that had arrived while I was ill: everything about my sister’s last expedition, and the ‘investigation.’ I knew there was something wrong. I couldn’t achieve anything at a distance. I had to get to Speranza, I had to get myself here—”

“Quite right, child. Can’t do anything at long distance, aah.”

“I had to apply for financial support, the system is slow. The Buonarotti Transit network isn’t for people like me—” He wished he’d bitten that back. “I mean, it’s for officials, diplomats, not civilian planet-dwellers.”

“Unless they’re idle super-rich,” rumbled the Shet. “Or refugees getting shipped out of a hellhole, maybe. Well, you persisted. Your sister was Martian too. What was she doing here?”

Patrice looked at the very slim file on the table. No way of telling if that tablet held a ton of documents or a single page.

“Don’t you know?”

“Explain it to us,” said Ki-anna. Her voice was sibilant, a hint of a lisp.

“Lione was a troposphere engineer. She was working on the KiAn Atmosphere Recovery Project. But you must know . . . ” They waited, silently. “All right. The KiAn war practically flayed this planet. The atmosphere’s being repaired, it’s a major Speranza project. Out here it’s macro-engineering. They’ve created a—a membrane, like a casting mould, of magnetically charged particles. They’re shepherding small water ice asteroids, other debris with useful constituents, through it. Controlled annihilation releases the gases, bonding and venting propagates the right mix. We pioneered the technique. We’ve enriched the Martian atmosphere the same way . . . nothing like the scale of this. The job also has to be done from the bottom up. The troposphere, the lowest level of the inner atmosphere, is alive. It’s a saturated fluid full of viruses, fragments of DNA and RNA, amino acids, metabolizing mineral traces, pre-biotic chemistry. The configuration is unique to a living planet, and it’s like the mycorrhizal systems in the soil, back on Earth. If it isn’t there, or it’s not right, nothing will thrive.”

He couldn’t tell if they knew it all, or didn’t understand a word.

“Lione knew the tropo reconstruction wasn’t going well. She found out there was an area of the surface, under the An-lalhar Lakes, where the living layer might be undamaged. This—where we are now—is the Orbital Refuge Habitat for that region. She came here, determined to get permission from the Ruling An to collect samples—”

Ki-anna interrupted softly. “Isn’t the surviving troposphere remotely sampled by the Project automats, all over the planet?”

“Yes, but that obviously wasn’t good enough. That was Lione. If it was her responsibility, she had to do everything in her power to get the job done.”

“Aah. Raarpht . . . Your sister befriended the Ruling An, she gained permission, she went down, and she stepped on a landmine. You understand that there was no body to be recovered? That she was vaporized?”

“So I was told.”

Ki-anna rubbed her scarred forearms, the Shet studied Patrice. The interview room was haunted by meaning, shadowy with intent—

“Aap. You need to make a ‘pilgrimage.’ A memorial journey?”

“No, it’s not like that. There’s something wrong.”

The shadows tightened, but were they for him or against him?

“Lione disappeared. I don’t speak any KiAn language, I didn’t have to, the reports were in English: when I hunted for more detail there are translator bots. I haven’t missed anything. A vaporized body doesn’t vanish. All that tissue, blood, and bone leaves forensic traces. None. No samples recovered. She was there to collect samples, don’t tell me it was forbidden . . . She didn’t come back, that’s all. Something happened to her, something other than a warzone accident—”

“Are you saying your sister was murdered, Patrice?”

“I need to go down there.”

“I can see you’d feel thap way. You realize KiAn is uninhabitable?”

“A lot of places on Mars are called ‘uninhabitable.’ My work takes me to the worst-off regions. I can handle myself.”

“Aap. How do you feel about the KiAn issue, Messer Ferringhi?”

Patrice opened his mouth, and shut it. He didn’t have a prepared answer for that one. “I don’t know enough.”

The Shet and the Ki looked at each other, for the first time. He felt they’d been through the motions, and they were agreeing to quit.

“As you know,” rumbled Bhvaaan, “The Ruling An must give permission. The An-he will see you?”

“I have an appointment.”

“Then thap’s all for now. Enjoy your transit hangover in peace.”

Patrice Ferringhi took a moment, looking puzzled, before he realized he could go. He stood, hesitated, gave an odd little bow and left the room.

The Shet and the Ki relaxed somewhat.

“Collapsed at work,” said Roaaat Bhvaaan. “Thap’s not good.”

“We can’t all be made of stone, Shet.”

“Aaah well. Cross fingers, Chief.”

They were resigned to strange English figures of speech. The language of Speranza, of diplomacy, was also the language of interplanetary policing. You became fluent, or you relied on unreliable transaid: and you screwed up.

“And all my toes,” said the Ki.

On his way to his cabin, Patrice found an ob-bay. He stared into a hollow sphere, permeated by the star-pricked darkness of KiAn system space: the limb of the planet obscured, the mainstar and the blue “daystar” out of sight. Knurled objects flew around, suddenly making endless field-beams visible. One lump rushed straight at him, growing huge: seemed to miss the ob-bay by centimeters, with a roar like monstrous thunder. The big impacts could be close enough to make this Refuge shake. He’d felt that, already. Like the Gods throwing giant furniture about—

He could not get over the fact that nothing was real. Everything had been translated here by the Buonarotti Torus, as pure data. This habitat, this shipboard jumper he wore, this body. All made over again, out of local elements, as if in a 3D scanner . . . The scarred Ki woman fascinated him, he hardly knew why. The portent he felt in their meeting (had he really met her?) was what they call a “transit hangover.” He must sleep it off.

The Ki-anna was rated Chief of Police, but she walked the beat most days. All her officers above nightstick grade were seconded from the Ruling An’s Household Guard: she didn’t like to impose on them. The Ki—natural street-dwellers, if ever life was natural again—melted indoors as she approached. Her uniform, backed by Speranza, should have made the refugees feel safe: but none of them trusted her. The only people she could talk to were the habitual criminals. They appreciated the Ruling An’s strange appointment.

She made her rounds, visiting the nests where law-abiding people better stay away. The gangsters knew a human had “joined the station.”

They were very curious. She sniffed the wind and lounged with the idlers, giving up Patrice Ferringhi in scraps, a resource to be conserved. The pressure of the human’s strange eyes was still with her—

No one ought to look at her scars like that, it was indecent.

But he was an alien, he didn’t know how to behave.

She didn’t remember being chosen for the treatment that would render her flesh delectable, while ensuring that what happened wouldn’t kill her. She only knew she’d been sold (tradition called it an honor) so that her littermates could live. She would always wonder, why me? What was wrong with me? We were very poor, I understand that, but why me? It had all been for nothing, anyway. Her parents and her littermates were dead, along with everyone else. So few survivors! A handful of die-hards on the surface. A token number of Ki taken away to Speranza, in the staggeringly distant Blue System. Would they ever return? The Ki-anna thought not . . . Six Refuge Habitats in orbit. And of course some of the Heaven-born, who’d seen what was coming before the war, and escaped to Balas or to Shet.

At curfew she filed a routine report, and retired to her quarters in the Curtain Wall. Roaaat, who was sharing her living space, was already at home. It was fortunate that Shet didn’t normally like to sit in Speranza-style “chairs”: he’d have broken a hole in her ceiling. His bulk, as he lay at ease, dwarfed her largest room. They compared notes.

“All the Refuges have problems,” said the Ki-anna. “But I get the feeling I have more than my share. Extortion, intimidation, theft and violence—”

“We can grease the wheels,” said Roaaat. “Strictly off the record, we can pay your villains off. It’s distasteful, not the way to do police work.”

“But expedient.”

“Aap . . . He seemed very taken with you,” said Roaaat.

“The human? I don’t know how you make that out.”

“Thap handsome Blue, yaas. I could smell pheromones.”

“He isn’t a ‘Blue’ ” said the Ki-anna. “The almighty Blues rule Speranza. The humans left behind on Earth, or ‘Mars’—What is ‘Mars’? Is it a moon?”

“Noope. A smaller planet in the Blue system.”

“Well, they aren’t Blues, they’re just ordinary aliens.”

“I shall give up matchmaking. You don’t appreciate my help . . . Let’s hope the An-he finds your ordinary alien more attractive.”

The Ki-anna shivered. “I think he will. He’s a simple soul.”

Roaaat was an undemanding guest, despite his size. They shared a meal, based on “culturally neutral” Speranza Food Aid. The Shet spread his bedding. The Ki-anna groomed herself, crouched by a screen that showed views of the Warrens. Nothing untoward stirred, in the simulated night. She pressed knuckle-fur to her mouth. Sometimes the pain of living, haunted by the uncounted dead, became very hard to bear. Waking from every sleep to remember afresh that there was nothing left.

“I might yet back out, Officer Bhvaaan. What if we only succeed in feeding the monsters, and make bad worse?”

She unfolded her nest, and settled behind him.

He patted her side with his clubbed fist—it felt like being clobbered by a kindly rock. “See how it goes. You can back out later.”

The Ki-anna lay sleepless, wondering about Patrice Ferringhi; the bulk of her unacknowledged bodyguard between her and the teeth of the An

When his appointment with alien royalty came around, Patrice was glad he’d had a breathing space. The world was solid again, he felt in control of himself. He donned his new transaid, settling the pickup against his skull, and set out for the high-security bulkhead gate that led to the Refuge Habitat itself.

Armored guards, intimidatingly tall, were waiting on the other side. They bent their heads, exhaled breath loudly—and indicated that he was to get into a kind of floating palanquin. Probably they knew no English.

The guards jogged around him in a hollow square: between their bodies he glimpsed the approach to an actual castle, like something in a fantasy game. Like a recreation of Mediaeval Europe or Japan, rising from a mass of basic living modules. It was amazing. He’d never been inside a big space-station before, not counting a few hours in Speranza Transit Port. The false horizon, the lilac sky, arcing far above the castle’s bannered towers, would have fooled him completely, if he hadn’t known.

He met the An-he in a windowless, antique chamber hung with tapestries (at least, tapestries seemed like the right word). Sleekly upholstered couches were scattered over the floor. The guard who’d escorted him backed out, snorting. Patrice looked around, vaguely bothered by an overly-warm indoor breeze. He saw someone almost human, loose-limbed and handsome in Speranza tailoring, reclining on a couch—large, wide-spaced eyes alight with curiosity—and realized he was alone with the king.

“Excuse my steward,” said the An. “He doesn’t speak English well, and doesn’t like to embarrass himself by trying. Please, be at home.”

“Thank you for seeing me,” said Patrice. “Your, er, Majesty—?”

The An-he grinned. “You are Patrice. I am the An, let’s just talk.”

The young co-ruler was charming and direct. He asked about the police: Patrice noted, disappointed, that Ki-anna was a title, the Ki-she, or something. He wondered what you had to do to learn their personal names.

“It was a brief interview,” he admitted, ruefully. “I got the impression they weren’t very interested.”

“Well, I am interested. Lione was a great friend to my people. To both my peoples. I’m not sure I understand, were you partners, or litter-mates?”

“We were twins, that means litter-mates, but ‘partners’ too, though our careers took different directions.”

He needed to get partner into the conversation. The An partnership wasn’t sexual, but it was lifelong, and the closest social and emotional bond they knew. A lost partner justified his appeal.

The An-he touched the clip on the side of his head (he was using a transaid, too), reflexively. “A double loss, poor Patrice. Please do confide in me, it will help enormously if you are completely frank—”

In this pairing, the An-she was the senior. She made the decisions, but Patrice couldn’t meet her, she was too important. He could only work on the An-he, who would (hopefully) promote his cause . . . He had the eerie thought that he was doing exactly what Lione had done—trying to make a good impression on this alien aristocrat, maybe in this very room. The tapestries (if that was the word) swam and rippled in the moving air, drawing his attention to scenes he really didn’t want to examine. Brightly dressed lords and ladies gathered for the hunt. The game was driven onto the guns. The butchery, the bustling kitchen scenes, the banquet—

He realized, horrified, that his host had asked him something about his work on Mars, and he hadn’t heard the question.

“Oh,” said the An-he, easily. “I see what you’re looking at. Don’t be offended, it’s all in the past, and priceless, marvelous art. Recreated, sadly. The originals were destroyed, along with the original of this castle. But still, our heritage! Don’t you Blues love ancient battle scenes, heaps of painted slaughter? And by the way, aren’t you closely related, limb for limb and bone for bone, to the beings that you traditionally kill and eat?”

“Not on Mars.”

“There, you are sundered from your web of life. At home on Earth, the natural humans do it all the time, I assure you.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

Notoriously, the Ki and the An had both been affronted when they were identified, by other sentient bipeds, as a single species. Of course they knew, but an indecent topic! In ways, the most disturbing aspect of “the KiAn issue” was not the genocidal war, in which the oppressed had risen up, savagely, against the oppressors. It was the fact that some highly respected Ki leaders actually defended “the traditional diet of the An.”

The An-he showed his bright white teeth. “Then you have an open mind, my dear Patrice! It gives me hope that you’ll come to understand us.” He stretched, and exhaled noisily. “Enough. All I can tell you today is that your request is under consideration. You’re a valuable person, and it’s dangerous down there! We don’t want to lose you. Now, I suppose you’d like to see your sister’s rooms? She stayed with us, you know: here in the castle.”

“Would that be possible?”

“Certainly! I’ll get some people to take you.”

More guards—or servants in military-looking uniform—led him along winding, irregular corridors, all plagued by that insistent breeze, and opened a round plug of a doorway. The An-he’s face appeared, on a display screen emblazoned on a guard’s tunic.

“Take as long as you like, dear Patrice. Don’t be afraid of disturbing the evidence! The police took anything they thought was useful, ages ago.”

The guards gave him privacy, which he had not expected: they shut the door and stayed outside. He was alone, in his sister’s space. The eons he’d crossed, the unthinkable interstellar distance, vanished. Lione was here. He could feel her, all around him. The warm air, suddenly still, seemed full of images: glimpses of his sister, rushing into his mind—

“Recreation” was skin-deep here. Essentially the room was identical to his cabin. A bed-shelf with a puffy mattress; storage space beneath. A desk, a closet bathroom, stripped of fittings. Her effects had been returned to Mars, couriered as data. The police had been and gone “ages ago.” What could this empty box tell him? Nothing, but he had to try.

Was he under surveillance? He decided he didn’t care.

He searched swiftly, efficiently, studying the floor, running his hands over the walls and closet space, checking the seals on the mattress. The screen above the desk was set in an ornate decorative frame. He probed around it, and his fingertips brushed something that had slipped behind. Carefully, patiently, he teased out a corner of the object, and drew it from hiding.

Lione, he whispered.

He tucked his prize inside the breast of his shipboard jumper, and went to knock on the round door. It opened, and the guards were there.

“I’m ready to leave now.”

The An-he looked out of the tunic display again. “By all means! But don’t be a stranger. Come and see me again, come often!”

That evening he searched the little tablet’s drive for his own name, for a message. He tried every password of theirs he could remember: found nothing, and was heartbroken. He barely noted the contents, except that it wasn’t about her work. Next day, to his great surprise, he was recalled to the castle. He met the An-he as before, and learned that the Ruling An would like to approve his mission, but the police were making difficulties.

“Speranza doesn’t mind having a tragedy associated with their showcase Project,” said the young king. “A scandal would be much worse, so they want to bury this. My partner and I feel you have a right to investigate, but we have met with resistance.”

There was nothing Patrice could do . . . and it wasn’t a refusal. If the alien royals were on his side, the police would probably be helpless in the end. Back in his cabin he examined the tablet again and realized that Lione had been keeping a private record of her encounter with “the KiAn issue.”

KiAn isn’t like other worlds of the Diaspora; they didn’t have a Conventional Space Age before First Contact. But they weren’t primitives when “we” found them, nor even Mediaeval. The An of today are the remnant of a planetary superpower. They were always the Great Nation, and the many nations of the Ki were treated as inferior, through millennia of civilization. But it was no more than fifteen hundred standard years ago, when, in a time of famine, the An or “Heaven Born” first began to hunt and eat the “Earth Born” Ki. They don’t do that anymore. They have painless processing plants (or did). They have retail packaging—

Cannibalism happens. It’s known in every sentient and pre-sentient biped species. What developed on KiAn is different, and the so-called “atavists” are not really atavist. This isn’t the survival, as some on Speranza would like to believe, of an ancient prehistoric symbiosis. The An weren’t animals, when this “stable genocide” began. They were people, who could think and feel. People, like us.

The entry was text-only, but he heard his sister’s voice: forthright, uncompromising. She must have forced herself to be more tactful with the An-he! The next was video. Lione, talking to him. Living and breathing.

Inside the slim case, when he opened it, he’d found pressed fragments of a moss, or lichen. Shards of it clung to his fingers; it smelled odd, but not unpleasant. He sniffed his fingertips and turned pages, painfully happy.

Days passed, in a rhythm of light and darkness that belonged to the planet “below.” Patrice shuttled between the “station visitors quarters,” where he was the only guest, and the An castle. He didn’t dare refuse a summons, although he politely declined all dinner invitations, which made the An laugh.

The odd couple showed no interest in Patrice at all, and did not return his calls. He might have tried harder to get their attention, but there was Lione’s journal. He didn’t want to hand it over; or to lie about it either.

Once, as they walked in the castle’s galleries, the insistent breeze nagging at him as usual, Patrice felt he was being watched. He looked up. From a high, curtained balcony a wide-eyed, narrow face was looking down intently. “That was the An-she,” murmured his companion, stooping to exhale the words in Patrice’s ear. “She likes you, or she wouldn’t have let you glimpse her . . . I tell her all about you.”

“I didn’t really see anything,” said Patrice, wary of causing offence. “The breeze is so strong, tossing the curtains about.”

“I’m afraid we’re obsessed with air circulation, due to the crowded accommodation. There are aliens about, who don’t always smell very nice.”

“I’m very sorry! I had no idea!”

“Oh no, Patrice, not you. You smell fresh and sweet.”

The entries in Lione’s journal weren’t dated, but they charted a progress. At first he was afraid he’d find Lione actually defending industrial cannibalism. That never happened. But as he immersed himself, reviewing every entry over and over, he knew Lione was asking him to understand. Not to accept, but to understand the unthinkable—

Compare chattel slavery. We look on the buying and selling of sentient bipeds, as if they were livestock, with revulsion. Who could question that? Then think of the intense bond between a beloved master, or mistress, and a beloved servant. A revered commanding officer and devoted troops. Must this go too? The An and the Ki accept that their way of life must change. But there is a deep equality in that exchange of being, which we “democratic individualists” can’t recognize—

Patrice thought of the Ki-Anna’s scars.

The “deep equality” entry was almost the last.

The journal ended abruptly, with no sense of closure.

Lione’s incense—he’d decided the “lichen” was a kind of KiAn incense, perhaps a present from the An-he—filled his cabin with a subtle perfume. He closed the tablet, murmuring the words he knew by heart, a deep equality in that exchange of being, and decided to turn in. In his tiny bathroom, for a piercing moment it was Lione he saw in the mirror. A dark-skinned, light-eyed, serious young woman, with the aquiline bones of their North African ancestry. His other self, who had left him so far behind—

The whole journal was a message. It called him to follow her, and he didn’t yet know where his passionate journey would end.

When he learned that permission to visit the surface was granted, but the Ki-anna and the Interplanetary Affairs officer were coming too, he knew that the Ruling An had been forced to make this concession—and the bargaining was over. He just wished he knew why the police had insisted on escorting him. To help Patrice discover the truth? Or to prevent him?

He didn’t meet the odd couple until they embarked together. They were all in full protective gear: skin sealed with quarantine film, under soft-shell life-support suits. The noisy shuttle bay put a damper on conversation, and the flight was no more sociable. Patrice spent it encased in an escape capsule and breathing tanked air: the police insisted on this. He saw nothing of KiAn until he was crunching across the seared rubble of their landing field.

The landscape was dry tundra, like Martian desert color-shifted into shades of gray and green. Armed Green Belts were waiting, with a landship and all-terrain hardsuits for the visitors.

“The An-he offered me a military escort,” said Patrice, freedom of speech restored by helmet radio. “What was wrong with that?”

“Sorry,” grunted Bhvaaan. “Couldn’t be allowed.”

The Ki-anna said nothing. He remembered, vividly, the way he’d felt at their meeting. There had been a connection, on her side too: he knew it. Now she was just another bulky Speranza doll, on a smaller scale than her partner. As if she’d read his thoughts, she cleared her faceplate and looked out at him, curiously. He wanted to tell her that he understood KiAn, better than she could imagine . . . but not with Bhvaaan around.

“You’ve been keeping yourself to yourself, Messer Ferringhi.”

“I could say the same of you two, Officer Bhvaaan.”

“Aap. But you made friends with the An-he.”

“The Ruling An were very willing to help me.”

“We’ve been working in your interest too,” said the Ki-anna. She pivoted her suit to look through the windowband in the landship’s flank. “Far below this plateau, back that way, was the regional capital. Were fertile plains, rich forests, towns and fields and parklands. The ‘roof of Heaven’ was never beautiful. It’s strange, this part hardly seems much changed—”

“Except that one dare not breathe,” she added, sadly.

On the shore of the largest ice sheet, the Lake of Heaven, the odd couple and Patrice disembarked. The Ki-anna led the way to a great low arch of rock-embedded ice. The Green Belts had stayed in the ship.

Everything was livid mist.

“We’re going under An-lalhar Lake alone?”

“The Green Belts’ll be on call. It’s not their jurisdiction down there. It’s a precious enclave where the Ki and the An are stubbornly dying together.” Bhvaaan peered at him. “It’s not our jurisdiction either, Messer Ferringhi. If we meet with violence we can protect you, but that’s after the event and it might not save your life. The people under the Lake don’t have a lot to lose and their mood is volatile. Bear that in mind.”

“I could have had an escort they’d respect.”

“You’re better off with us.”

They descended the tunnel. The light never grew less; on the contrary, it grew brighter. When they emerged, the Heaven Lake was above them: a mass of blue-white radiance, indigo shadowed, shot through with rainbow refractions. It was extraordinarily beautiful. It seemed impossible that the ice had captured so much light from the poisoned smog. Far off, in the center of the glacial depression, geothermal vents made a glowing, spiderweb pattern of fire and snowy steam. Patrice checked his telltales, and eagerly began to release his helmet. The Shet dropped a gauntleted fist on his arm.

“Don’t do it, child. Look at your rads.”

“A moment won’t kill me. I want to feel KiAn—”

The odd couple, hidden in their gear, seemed to look at him strangely.

“Maybe later,” said the Ki-anna, soothingly. “It’s safer in the Grottos, where your sister was headed.”

“How do we get there?”

“We walk,” rumbled Bhvaaan. “No vehicles. There’s not much growing but it’s still a sacred park. Let your suit do the work; keep up your fluids.”

“Thanks, I know how to handle a hard shell.”

They walked in file. The desolation, the ruined beauty that had been revered by both “races,” caught at Patrice’s heart. His helmet display counted rads, paces, heart rate: counted down the meters. Thirty kilometers to the place where Lione had last been seen alive.

“Which faction mined the Lake of Heaven parkland?”

“To our knowledge? Nobody did, child.”

It was a question he’d asked over and over, long ago when he thought he could get answers. Now he asked and didn’t care. He followed the Shet, the Ki-anna behind him. His pace was steady, yet the display said his body was pumping adrenalin; not from fear, he knew, but in the grip of intense excitement. He sucked on glucose and tried to calm himself.

As the radiance above them dimmed, they reached the Grotto domain. Rugged rocky pillars seemed to hold up the roof of ice, widely spaced at first, clustering towards a center that could not be seen. There was a Ki community, surviving in rad-proofed modules. The Ki-anna went inside. Patrice and the Shet waited, in the darkening blighted landscape. She emerged after an hour or so.

“We can’t go on without guides, and we can’t have guides until tomorrow. At the earliest. They have to think it over.”

“They weren’t expecting us?”

“They were. They know all about it, but they may have had fresh instructions. They’re in full communication with the castle: there’s some sophisticated kit in there. We’ll just have to wait.”

“Do they remember Lione?” demanded Patrice. “I have transaid, I want to talk to someone.”

“Not now. I’ll ask tomorrow.”

“Can we sleep indoors?” asked the Shet.

“No.”

The Shet and the Ki-anna made camp in the ruins of the former village, using their suits to clear ground and construct a shelter. Patrice moved over to a heap of boulders where he’d noticed patches of lichen. He had fragments of Lione’s incense in the sleeve pocket of his inner, in a First Aid pouch. The police were fully occupied: furtively he opened the arm of his hardshell, and fished the pouch out. He was right, it was the same—

Lione had stood here. The incense was not a gift, she had gathered it. She had been standing right here. His need was irresistible. He released his face-plate, stripped his gauntlets, rubbed away quarantine film.

KiAn rushed in on him, cold and harsh in his throat, intoxicating—

“What is that?”

The Ki-anna was behind him. “A lichen sample,” said Patrice, caught out. “Or that’s what I’d call it at home. It was in my sister’s room, in the An Castle. Look, they’re the same!”

“Not quite,” said the Ki-anna. “Yours is a cultivated variety.”

He thought she’d be angry, maybe accuse him of concealing evidence. To his astonishment she took his bared hand, and bowed over it until her cheek brushed the vulnerable inner skin of his wrist. Her touch was a huge shock, sweet and profoundly sexual. She made him dizzy.

This can’t be happening, he thought. I’m here for Lione—

“I don’t know your name.”

“We don’t do that,” she whispered.

“I felt, I can’t describe it, the moment I met you—”

“I’d better keep this. You must get your gloves and helmet back on.”

“But I want KiAn—”

Gently, she let go of his hand. “You’ve had enough.”

The shelter was a snug fit. Sealed inside, they shared rations and drank fresh water they’d brought from the Habitat. They would sleep in their suits, for warmth and security. Patrice lay down at once, to escape their questions and to be alone with his confusion. He was here for Lione, he was here to join Lione. How could he and the Ki-anna suddenly feel this way?

“Were you getting romantic, with Patrice, over by those rocks?” asked Bhvaaan. “Sniffing his pheromones?”

“No,” said the Ki-anna, grimly. “Something else.”

She showed him the First Aid pouch and its contents.

“Mighty Void!”

“He says it was in the room Lione used, in the castle.”

“I don’t think so! We took that cabin apart.” The Shet’s delicates unfolded from his club of a fist. He turned the clear pouch around, probing her find with sensitive tentacles. “So that’s how, so that’s how—”

“So that’s how the cookie was crumbled,” agreed the Ki-anna.

“What do we do, Chief? Abort this, and run away very quickly?”

“Not without back-up. If we run, and they have heavy weaponry, we’re at their mercy. I see what it looks like, but we should show no alarm.”

“I have had thoughts about him,” she murmured, looking at the dark outline of Patrice Ferringhi. “Don’t know why. It’s something in his eyes.”

“Thaap’s the way it starts,” said the Shet. “Thoughts. Then wondering if anything can come of them. They say sentient bipeds are attracted to each other like . . . like brothers and sisters, long separated. Well, I’ll talk to the Greenies. And you and I had better not sleep.”

The suit was a house the shape of her body. She sat in it, wondering about sexual pleasure: pleasure with Patrice. What would it be like? She had only one strange comparison, but that didn’t frighten her . . . What Roaaat Bhvaaan offered was far more disturbing.

She glimpsed the abyss, and fell into oblivion.

Patrice dreamed he was in a strolling crowd, among bronze and purple trees, with branches that swayed in the breeze. He knew where he was, he was in the KiAn Orientation, a virtual reality. But there was something sinister going on, the crowd pressed too close, the beautiful trees hid what he ought to see. Then Lione came running up and bit him.

He yelled, and shook her off.

She came back and bit his thigh, but now he was in the dark, cold and sore. Lione was gone, he was being hunted by fierce hungry animals—

Suddenly he knew he was not asleep.

He was completely naked. Where was his suit? Where was he?

He had no idea. The air was freezing, the darkness almost complete. He stumbled towards a gleam ahead, and entered a rocky cave. There was ice underfoot, icy stalactites hanging down. A lamp burned incense-scented oil, set on the ground next to a heap of something—

That’s a body, he thought. He went over and knelt down. It was a human body, freeze-dried. She was curled on her side, turned away from him, but he knew he’d found Lione. She was naked too.

Why was she naked?

He lifted the lamp and saw where flesh had been cut away, not by teeth, as in his dream, but by sharp knives. Lione had been butchered. He tried to turn her: the body moved all of a piece. Her face was recognizable, smooth and calm in death, the eyes sunken, the skin like cured leather. Was she smiling? Oh, Lione—

But why am I naked? he thought. Who brought me here?

The Ki entered the cave, and surrounded Patrice and his sister. They had brought more lights. One of them was carrying, reverently, a flattened spherical object, dull gray, the size of Patrice’s fist. It had a seam around the center, a beveled cap. That’s a vapor mine, he thought, shaken by an explosion of understanding. Then the An came. The Ki made no attempt to interfere with the banquet. They were here to witness. Patrice screamed. He fought the knives with his bare hands, kicked out with his bare feet. The An, outraged, kept yelling at him in scraps of English to keep still, be easy Blue, you want this, what’s wrong with you?

The Ki-anna and the Shet had ditched their hard shells, to search the narrow passages. They arrived armed but badly outnumbered, and they couldn’t get near Patrice. “I was the Earth In Heaven!” shouted the Chief of Police. “I say that flesh is not sacred, not yours to take. Let the stranger go!”

She held the fanatics at bay, uncertain because of her former status, until the Green Belts joined the party. Luckily Bhvaaan had summoned them, before he and the Ki-anna followed Patrice into that drugged sleep.

Patrice’s injuries were not dangerous. As soon as he was allowed he signed himself out of medical care. He had to talk to the police again. He met the odd couple in the same bare interview room as before.

“I’m sorry, I need to withdraw my statement. I can’t press charges.”

If the next of kin didn’t press charges, KiAn law made it difficult for Interplanetary Affairs to prosecute. He knew that, but he had no choice.

“I realize the tablet I found in Lione’s room was planted on me. I know her words, if some of them were genuinely hers, had been rearranged to fool me into accepting atavism. It doesn’t matter. My sister wanted to die that way. She gave herself, her body. It was a ritual sacrifice, for peace. She was my twin, I can’t explain, I have to respect her wishes.”

“A beautiful, consensual ritual,” remarked the Shet. “Yaap. That’s what the cannibal die-hards always say. But if you scratch any of these halfway ‘respectable’ atavists, such as our Ruling An here—”

“You find the meat-packing industry,” said the Ki-anna.

Patrice heard the blinkered, Speranza mindset.

“My sister was willing.”

“I believe she was.” To his confusion, the Ki-anna reached out, took his injured hand and held his wrist, where the blood ran, to her face. The same sweet, intimate gesture as on KiAn. “So are you, a little. It’ll wear off.”

She drew back, and placed an evidence bag, containing his First Aid pouch and the scraps of lichen, on the table.

“In English, the common name of this herb, or lichen, would be ‘Willingness.’ It grows naturally only under the Lake of Heaven. Long ago it was known as a powerful aphrodisiac: the labwork kind has another use. It’s given to a child chosen to be the Ki-anna, which means sold to the An as living meat. It’s a refined form of cannibalism, practiced in my region. A drugged child, a willing victim, with a strong resistance to infection and trauma, is eaten alive, by degrees. If one of these children survives to adulthood, they are free, the debt is paid.

The Ki-anna showed her teeth. “I made it, as you see; but I haven’t forgotten that scent. When I smelled your flesh, under the Lake, I knew you’d been treated for butchery—and I understood. They drugged Lione until she was delirious with joy to be eaten, and they sent her to the atavist fanatics under An-lalhar. Then they tried the same trick on you.”

Bhvaaan tapped the casefile tablet with his delicates. “Your sister died too quickly, that was the problem.”

“What—?”

“We couldn’t prove it, but we knew they’d killed Lione, Messer Ferringhi. We could even show, thanks to the Chief here, who was pulling the strings, and how they got the prohibited ordnance into the Grottos. Your sister fell into a trap. She had to get under the Heaven Lake and that suited the atavists just fine. It would have been a powerful message. A Speranza scientist ritually eaten, then consumed by the very air of KiAn—”

“Controlled annihilation,” whispered Patrice. “That’s what I saw, in the cave. Something they would understand—”

“Thap was the idea. The atavists are planning to bring back the meat factories, once their planet has an atmosphere again. Your sister was going to help them: except something didn’t work out. You were right about the tropo sampling: there’s also stringent military activity monitoring. If a mine had gone off under the Lake, we’d know. If a human-sized body had been atomized, there’d have been a spike. So we knew the ‘consummation’ hadn’t happened, and we couldn’t figure it out. We think we know the answer now: she died too quickly. She had to be vaporized alive, a dead body can’t be willing. But she wasn’t a Ki, and they hit an artery or something.”

Patrice had gone gray in the face.

“You going to crash out, child—?”

“No, go on—”

The Shet rearranged his bulk on the inadequate office chair. “The autopsy’ll tell us the details. Then you came along, Patrice. We saw a chance to get ourselves to the crime scene, and wasted Diaspora funds pushing on an open door. And you nearly died, because we drank the nice fresh water from this Habitat. Which happened to be doped—”

“The atavists thought the willingness they’d cooked up for Lione would work on you,” explained the Ki-anna. “They’ve never heard of ‘fraternal twins.’ Ki litter-mates can be of any sex, but otherwise they are identical. You were begging to be lured to the Grottos, it was perfect, you would replace Dr Ferringhi. Luckily, you and your sister weren’t clones. You were affected, but you weren’t ready to be butchered. You fought for your life.”

“You see, Messer Ferringhi,” said Bhvaaan, “what really happened here is that a pair of murdering atavist bastards thought they’d appoint themselves as Chief of Police a child who had been eaten. A girl like that, they thought, will never dare to do us any damage. Instead they found they had a tiger by the tail . . . ” He opened the casefile tablet, and pushed it over to Patrice. “They’re glamorous, the Atavist An. But your sister would never have fallen for them in her right mind, from what I’ve learned of her. Still want to withdraw this?”

Patrice was silent, eyes down. The Ki-anna saw him shedding the exaltation of the drug; quietly taking in everything he’d been told. A new firmness in the lines of his face, a deep sadness as he said farewell to Lione. The human felt her eyes. He looked up and she saw another farewell, sad but final, to something that had barely begun—

“No,” he said. “But I should go through it again. Can we do that now?”

The Ki-anna returned to her quarters.

Roaaat joined her in a while. She sat by her window on the streets, small chin on her silky paws, and didn’t look round when he came in.

“He’ll be fine. What will you do? You’ll have to leave, after this.”

“I know. Leave or get killed, and I must not get killed.”

“You could go with Patrice, see what Mars is like.”

“I don’t think so. The pheromones are no more, now that he knows what ‘making love to the Ki-anna’ is supposed to be like.”

“I’ve no idea what making love to you is supposed to be like. But you’re a damned fine investigator. Why don’t you come to Speranza?”

Yes, she thought. I knew all along what you were offering.

Banishment, not just from my own world, but from all the worlds. Never to be a planet-dweller any more. And again I want to ask, Why me? What did I do? But you believe it is an honor and I think you are sincere.

“Maybe I will.”

First published in Engineering Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan.

About the Author

Gwyneth Jones was born in Manchester, England and is the author of more than twenty novels for teenagers, mostly under the name Ann Halam, and several highly regarded SF novels for adults. She has won two World Fantasy awards, the Arthur C. Clarke award, the British Science Fiction Association short story award, the Dracula Society’s Children of the Night award, the Philip K. Dick award, and shared the first Tiptree award, in 1992, with Eleanor Arnason. Her most recent books are novel Spirit and essay collection Imagination/Space. Upcoming is new story collection The Universe of Things. She lives in Brighton, UK, with her husband and son; a Tonkinese cat called Ginger and her young friend Milo.

A Night at the Tarn House

George R.R. Martin

Through the purple gloom came Molloqos the Melancholy, borne upon an iron palanquin by four dead Deodands.

Above them hung a swollen sun where dark continents of black ash were daily spreading across dying seas of dim red fire. Behind and before the forest loomed, steeped in scarlet shadow. Seven feet tall and black as onyx, the Deodands wore ragged skirts and nothing else. The right front Deodand, fresher than the others, squished with every step. Gaseous and swollen, his ripening flesh oozed noxious fluid from a thousand pinpricks where the Excellent Prismatic Spray had pierced him through. His passage left damp spots upon the surface of the road, an ancient and much-overgrown track whose stones had been laid during the glory days of Thorsingol, now a fading memory in the minds of men.

The Deodands moved at a steady trot, eating up the leagues. Being dead, they did not feel the chill in the air, nor the cracked and broken stones beneath their heels. The palanquin swayed from side to side, a gentle motion that made Molloqos think back upon his mother rocking him in his cradle. Even he had had a mother once, but that was long ago. The time of mothers and children had passed. The human race was fading, whilst grues and erbs and pelgranes claimed the ruins they left behind.

To dwell on such matters would only invite a deeper melancholy, however. Molloqos preferred to consider the book upon his lap. After three days of fruitless attempts to commit the Excellent Prismatic Spray to memory once again, he had set aside his grimoire, a massive tome bound in cracked vermillion leather with clasps and hinges of black iron, in favor of a slender volume of erotic poetry from the last days of the Sherit Empire, whose songs of lust had gone to dust eons ago. Of late his gloom ran so deep that even those fervid rhymes seldom stirred him to tumescence, but at least the words did not turn to worms wriggling on the vellum, as those in his grimoire seemed wont to do. The world’s long afternoon had given way to evening, and in that long dusk even magic had begun to crack and fade.

As the swollen sun sank slowly in the west, the words grew harder to discern. Closing his book, Molloqos pulled his Cloak of Fearsome Mien across his legs, and watched the trees go past. With the dying of the light each seemed more sinister than the last, and he could almost see shapes moving in the underbrush, though when he turned his head for a better look they were gone.

A cracked and blistered wooden sign beside the road read:

TARN HOUSE
Half a League On
Famous for Our Hissing Eels

An inn would not be unwelcome, although Molloqos did not entertain high expectations of any hostelry that might be found along a road so drear and desolate as this. Come dark, grues and erbs and leucomorphs would soon be stirring, some hungry enough to risk an assault even on a sorcerer of fearful mien. Once he would not have feared such creatures; like others of his ilk, it had been his habit to arm himself with half a dozen puissant spells whenever he was called up to leave the safety of his manse. But now the spells ran through his mind like water through his fingers, and even those he still commanded seemed feebler each time he was called upon to employ them. And there were the shadow swords to consider as well. Some claimed they were shapechangers, with faces malleable as candle wax. Molloqos did not know the truth of that, but of their malice he had no doubt.

Soon enough he would be in Kaiin, drinking black wine with Princess Khandelume and his fellow sorcerers, safe behind the city’s tall white walls and ancient enchantments, but just now even an inn as dreary as this Tarn House must surely be preferable to another night in his pavilion beneath those sinister pines.

Slung between two towering wooden wheels, the cart shook and shuddered as it made its way down the rutted road, bouncing over the cracked stones and slamming Chimwazle’s teeth together. He clutched his whip tighter. His face was broad, his nose flat, his skin loose and sagging and pebbly, with a greenish cast. From time to time his tongue flickered out to lick an ear.

To the left the forest loomed, thick and dark and sinister; to the right, beyond a few thin trees and a drear gray strand dotted with clumps of salt-grass, stretched the tarn. The sky was violet darkening to indigo, spotted by the light of weary stars.

“Faster!” Chimwazle called to Polymumpho, in the traces. He glanced back over his shoulder. There was no sign of pursuit, but that did not mean the Twk-men were not coming. They were nasty little creatures, however tasty, and clung to their grudges past all reason. “Dusk falls. Soon night will be upon us! Bestir yourself! We must find shelter before evenfall, you great lump.”

The hairy-nosed Pooner made no reply but a grunt, so Chimwazle gave him a lick of the whip to encourage his efforts. “Move those feet, you verminious lout.” This time Polymumpho put his back into it, legs pumping, belly flopping. The cart bounced, and Chimwazle bit his tongue as one wheel slammed against a rock. The taste of blood filled his mouth, thick and sweet as moldy bread. Chimwazle spat, and a gobbet of greenish phlegm and black ichor struck Polymumpho’s face and clung to his cheek before dropping off to spatter on the stones. “Faster!” Chimwazle roared, and his lash whistled a lively tune to keep the Pooner’s feet thumping.

At last the trees widened and the inn appeared ahead of them, perched upon a hummock of stone where three roads came together. Stoutly-built and cheery it seemed, stone below and timber higher up, with many a grand gable and tall turret, and wide windows through which poured a warm, welcoming, ruddy light and the happy sounds of music and laughter, accompanied by a clatter of cup and platters that seemed to say, Come in, come in. Pull off your boots, put up your feet, enjoy a cup of ale. Beyond its pointed rooftops the waters of the tarn glittered smooth and red as a sheet of beaten copper, shining in the sun.

The Great Chimwazle had never seen such a welcome sight. “Halt!” he cried, flicking his whip at Polymumpho’s ear to command the Pooner’s attention. “Stop! Cease! Here is our refuge!”

Polymumpho stumbled, slowed, halted. He looked at the inn dubiously, and sniffed. “I would press on. If I were you.”

“You would like that, I am sure.” Chimwazle hopped from the cart, his soft boots squishing in the mud. “And when the Twk-men caught us, you would chortle and do nothing as they stabbed at me. Well, they will never find us here.”

“Except for that one,” said the Pooner.

And there he was: a Twk-man, flying bold as you please around his head. The wings of his dragonfly made a faint buzzing sound as he couched his lance. His skin was a pale green, and his helm was an acorn shell. Chimwazle raised his hands in horror. “Why do you molest me? I have done nothing!”

“You ate the noble Florendal,” the Twk-man said. “You swallowed Lady Melescence, and devoured her brothers three.”

“Not so! I refute these charges! It was someone else who looked like me. Have you proof? Show me your proof! What, have you none to offer? Begone with you then!”

Instead, the Twk-man flew at him and thrust his lance point at his nose, but quick as he was, Chimwazle was quicker. His tongue darted out, long and sticky, plucked the tiny rider from his mount, pulled him back wailing. His armor was flimsy stuff, and crunched nicely between Chimwazle’s sharp green teeth. He tasted of mint and moss and mushroom, very piquant.

Afterward, Chimwazle picked his teeth with the tiny lance. “There was only the one,” he decided confidently, when no further Twk-men deigned to appear. “A bowl of hissing eels awaits me. You may remain here, Pooner. See that you guard my cart.”

Lirianne skipped and spun as on she walked. Lithe and long-legged, boyish and bouncy, clad all in gray and dusky rose, she had a swagger in her step. Her blouse was spun of spider-silk, soft and smooth, its top three buttons undone. Her hat was velvet, wide-brimmed, decorated with a jaunty feather and cocked at a rakish angle. On’her hip, Tickle-Me-Sweet rode in a sheath of soft gray leather that matched her thigh-high boots. Her hair was a mop of auburn curls, her cheeks dusted with freckles across skin as pale as milk. She had lively gray eyes, a mouth made for mischievous smiles, and a small upturned nose that twitched as she sniffed the air.

The evening was redolent with pine and sea salt, but faintly, beneath those scents, Lirianne could detect a hint of erb, a dying grue, and the nearby stench of ghouls. She wondered if any would dare come out and play with her once the sun went down. The prospect made her smile. She touched the hilt of Tickle-Me-Sweet and spun in a circle, her boot heels sending up little puffs of dust as she whirled beneath the trees.

“Why do you dance, girl?” a small voice said. “The hour grows late, the shadows long. This is no time for dancing.”

A Twk-man hovered by her head, another just behind him. A third appeared, then a fourth. Their spear points glittered redly in the light of the setting sun, and the dragonflies they rode glimmered with a pale green luminescence. Lirianne glimpsed more amongst the trees, tiny lights darting in and out between the branches, small as stars. “The sun is dying,” Lirianne told them. “There will be no dances in the darkness. Play with me, friends. Weave bright patterns in the evening air whilst still you can.”

“We have no time for play,” one Twk-man said.

“We hunt,” another said. “Later we will dance.”

“Later,” the first agreed. And the laughter of the Twk-men filled the trees, as sharp as shards.

“Is there a Twk-town near?” asked Lirianne.

“Not near,” one Twk-man said.

“We have flown far,” another said.

“Do you have spice for us, dancer?”

“Salt?” said another.

“Pepper?” asked a third.

“Saffron?” sighed a fourth.

“Give us spice, and we will show you secret ways.”

“Around the tarn.”

“Around the inn.”

“Oho.” Lirianne grinned. “What inn is this? I think I smell it. A magical place, is it?”

“A dark place,” one Twk-men said.

“The sun is going out. All the world is growing dark.” Lirianne remembered another inn from another time, a modest place but friendly, with clean rushes on the floor and a dog asleep before the hearth. The world had been dying even then, and the nights were dark and full of terrors, but within those walls it had still been possible to find fellowship, good cheer, even love. Lirianne remembered roasts turning above the crackling fire, the way the fat would spit as it dripped down into the flames. She remembered the beer, dark and heady, smelling of hops. She remembered a girl too, an innkeeper’s daughter with bright eyes and a silly smile who’d loved a wandering warfarer. Dead now, poor thing. But what of it? The world was almost dead as well. “I want to see this inn,” she said. “How far is it?”

“A league,” the Twk-man said.

“Less,” a second insisted.

“Where is our salt?” the two of them said, together. Lirianne gave them each a pinch of salt from the pouch at her belt. “Show me,” she said, “and you shall have pepper too.”

The Tarn House did not lack for custom. Here sat a white-haired man with a long beard, spooning up some vile purple stew. There lounged a dark-haired slattern, nursing her glass of wine as if it were a newborn babe. Near-the wooden casks that lined one wall a ferret-faced man with scruffy whiskers was sucking snails out of their shells. Though his eyes struck Chimwazle as sly and sinister, the buttons on his vest were silver and his hat sported a fan of peacock feathers, suggesting that he did not lack for means. Closer to the hearth fire, a man and wife crowded around a table with their two large and lumpish sons, sharing a huge meat pie. From the look of them, they had wandered here from some land where the only color was brown. The father sported a thick beard; his sons displayed bushy mustaches that covered their mouths. Their mother’s mustache was finer, allowing one to see her lips.

The rustics stank of cabbage, so Chimwazle hied to the far side of the room and joined the prosperous fellow with the silver buttons on his vest.”How are your snails?” he inquired.

“Slimy and without savor. I do not recommend them.”

Chimwazle pulled out a chair. “I am the Great Chimwazle.”

“And I Prince Rocallo the Redoubtable.”

Chimwazle frowned. “Prince of what?”

“Just so.” The prince sucked another snail, and dropped the empty shell onto the floor.

That answer did not please him. “The Great Chimwazle is no man to trifle with,” he warned the so-called princeling.

“Yet here you sit, in the Tarn House.”

“With you,” observed Chimwazle, somewhat peevishly.

The landlord made his appearance, bowing and scraping as was appropriate for one of his station. “How may I serve you?”

“I will try a dish of your famous hissing eels.”

The innkeep gave an apologetic cough. “Alas, the eels are . . . ah . . . off the bill of fare.”

“What? How so? Your sign suggests that hissing eels are the specialty of the house.”

“And so they were, in other days. Delicious creatures, but mischievous. One ate a wizard’s concubine, and the wizard was so wroth he set the tarn to boiling and extinguished all the rest.”

“Perhaps you should change the sign.”

“Every day I think the same when I awaken. But then I think, the world may end today, should I spend my final hours perched upon a ladder with a paintbrush in my hand? I pour myself some wine and sit down to cogitate upon the matter, and by evening I find the urge has passed.”

“Your urges do not concern me,” said Chimwazle. “Since you have no eels, I must settle for a roast fowl, well crisped.”

The innkeep looked lachrymose. “Alas, this clime is not salubrious for chicken.”

“Fish?”

“From the tarn?” The man shuddered. “I would advise against it. Most unwholesome, those waters.”

Chimwazle was growing vexed. His companion leaned across the table and said, “On no account should you attempt a bowl of scrumby. The gristle pies are also to be avoided.”

“Begging your pardon,” said the landlord, “but meat pies is all we have just now.”

“What sort of meat is in these pies?” asked Chimwazle.

“Brown,” said the landlord. “And chunks of gray”

“A meat pie, then.” There seemed to be no help for it.

The pie was large, admittedly; that was the best that could be said for it. What meat Chimwazle found was chiefly gristle, here and there a chunk of yellow fat, and once something that crunched suspiciously when he bit into it. There was more gray meat than brown, and once a chunk that glistened green. He found a carrot too, or perhaps it was a finger. In either case, it had been overcooked. Of the crust, the less said, the better.

Finally Chimwazle pushed the pie away from him. No more than a quarter had been consumed. “A wiser man might have heeded my warning,” said Rocallo.

“A wiser man with a fuller belly, perhaps.” That was problem with Twk-men; no matter how many you ate, an hour later you were hungry again. “The earth is old, but the night is young.” The Great Chimwazle produced a pack of painted placards from his sleeve. “Have you played peggoty? A jolly game, that goes well with ale. Perhaps you will assay a few rounds with me?”

“The game is unfamiliar to me, but I am quick to learn,” said Rocallo. “If you will explain the rudiments, I should be glad to try my hand.”

Chimwazle shuffled the placards.

The inn was grander than Lirianne had expected, and seemed queer and out of place, not at all the sort of establishment she would have expected to find along a forest road in the Land of the Falling Wall. “Famous for Our Hissing Eels,” she read aloud, and laughed. Behind the inn a sliver of the setting sun floated red upon the black waters of the tarn.

The Twk-men buzzed around her on their dragonflies. More and more had joined Lirianne as she made her way along the road. Two score, four, a hundred; by now she had lost count. The gauzy wings of their mounts trilled against the evening air. The purple dusk hummed to the sound of small angry voices.

Lirianne pinched her nose and took a sniff. The scent of sorcery was so strong it almost made her sneeze. There was magic here. “Oho,” she said. “I smell wizard.”

Whistling a spritely tune, she sauntered closer. A ramshackle cart was drawn up near the bottom of the steps. Slumped against one of its wheels was a huge, ugly man, big-bellied and ripe, with coarse dark hair sprouting from his ears and nostrils. He looked up as Lirianne approached. “I would not go up there if I were you. It is a bad place. Men go in. No men come out.”

“Well, I am no man as you can plainly see, and I love bad places. Who might you be?”

“Polymumpho is my name. I am a Pooner.”

“I am not familiar with the Pooners.”

“Few are.” He shrugged, a massive rippling of his shoulders. “Are those your Twk-men? Tell them my master went inside the inn to hide.”

“Master?”

“Three years ago I played at peggoty with Chimwazle. When my coin ran out, I bet myself.”

“Is your master a sorcerer?”

Another shrug. “He thinks he is.”

Lirianne touched the hilt of Tickle-Me-Sweet. “Then you may consider yourself free. I shall make good your debt for you.”

“Truly?” He got to his feet. “Can I have the cart?”

“If you wish.”

A wide grin split his face. “Hop on, and I will carry you to Kaiin. You will be safe, I promise you. Pooners only eat the flesh of men when the stars are in alignment.”

Lirianne glanced up. Half a dozen stars were visible above the trees, dusty diamonds glimmering in a purple velvet sky. “And who will be the judge of whether the stars are properly aligned for such a feast, or no?”

“On that account you may place your trust in me.” She giggled. “No, I think not. I am for the inn.”

“And I for the road.” The Pooner lifted the traces of the cart. “If Chimwazle complains of my absence, tell him that my debt is yours.”

“I shall.” Lirianne watched as Polymumpho rumbled off toward Kaiin, the empty cart bouncing and jouncing behind him. She scampered up the winding stone steps, and pushed her way through the door into the Tarn House.

The common room smelled of mold and smoke and ghouls, and a little leucomorph as well, though none such were presently in evidence. One table was packed with hairy rustics, another occupied by a big-bosomed slattern sipping wine from a dinted silver goblet. An old man attired in the antique fashion of a knight of ancient Thorsingol sat lonely and forlorn, his long white beard spotted with purple soup stains.

Chimwazle was not hard to find. He sat beneath the ale casks with another rogue, each of them appearing more unsavory than the other. The latter had the stink of rat about him; the former smelled of toad. The rattish man wore a gray leather vest with sparking silver buttons over a tight-fitting shirt striped in cream and azure, with large puffy sleeves. On his pointed head perched a wide-brimmed blue hat decorated with a fan of peacock feathers. His toadish companion, beset by drooping jowls,’pebbled skin, and greenish flesh that made him look faintly nauseated, favored a floppy cap that resembled a deflated mushroom, a soiled mauve tunic with golden scrollwork at collar, sleeve, and hem, and green shoes turned up at the toe. His lips were full and fat, his mouth so wide it all but touched the pendulous lobes of his ears.

Both vagabonds eyed Lirianne lasciviously as they weighed the possibilities of erotic dalliance. The toad actually dared to venture a small smile. Lirianne knew how that game was played. She removed her hat, bowed to them, and approached their table. A spread of painted placards covered its rough wooden surface, beside the remains of a congealed and singularly unappealing meat pie. “What game is this?” she asked, oh so innocent.

“Peggoty,” said the toadish man. “Do you know it?”

“No,” she said, “but I love to play. Will you teach me?”

“Gladly. Have a seat. I am Chimwazle, oft called the Gallant. My friend is known as Rocallo the Reluctant.”

“Redoubtable,” the rat-faced man corrected, “and I am Prince Rocallo, if it please you. The landlord is about here somewhere. Will you take a drink, girl?”

“I will,” she said. “Are you wizards? You have a sorcerous look about you.”

Chimwazle made a dismissive gesture. “Such pretty eyes you have, and sharp as well. I know a spell or two.”

“A charm to make milk sour?” suggested Rocallo. “That is a spell that many know, though it takes six days to work.”

“That, and many more,” boasted Chimwazle, “each more potent than the last.”

“Will you show me?” Lirianne asked, in a breathless voice.

“Perhaps when we know each other better.”

“Oh, please. I have always wanted to see true magic.”

“Magic adds spice to the gristle that is life,” proclaimed Chimwazle, leering, “but I do not care to waste my wonderments before such lumpkins and pooners as surround us. Later when we are alone, I shall perform such magics for you as you have never seen, until you cry out in joy and awe. But first some ale, and a hand or three of pegotty to get our juices flowing! What stakes shall we play for?”

“Oh, I am sure you will think of something,” said Lirianne.

By the time Molloqos the Melancholy caught sight of the Tarn House, the swollen sun was setting, easing itself down in the west like an old fat man lowering himself into his favorite chair.

Muttering softly in a tongue no living man had spoken since the Gray Sorcerers went to the stars, the sorcerer commanded a halt. The inn beside the tarn was most inviting to the casual glance, but Molloqos was of a suspicious cast, and had long ago learned that things were not always as they seemed. He muttered a brief invocation, and lifted up an ebon staff. Atop the shaft was a crystal orb, within which a great golden eye looked this way and that. No spell nor illusion could deceive the True-Seeing Eye.

Stripped of its glamour, the Tarn House stood weathered and gray, three stories tall and oddly narrow. It leaned sideways like a drunken wormiger, a crooked flight of flagstone steps leading upwards to its door. Diamond-shaped panes of green glass gave the light from within a diseased and leprous cast; its roof was overgrown with drooping ropes of fungus. Behind the inn the tarn was black as pitch and redolent of decay, dotted with drowned trees, its dark oily waters stirring ominously. A stable stood off to one side, a structure so decayed that even dead Deodands might balk at entering.

At the foot of the inn’s steps was a sign that read:

TARN HOUSE
Famous for Our Hissing Eels

The right front Deodand spoke up. “The earth is dying and soon the sun will fail. Here beneath this rotten roof is a fit abode for Molloqos to spend eternity.”

“The earth is dying and soon the sun shall fail,” Molloqos agreed, “but if the end should overtake us here, I shall spend eternity seated by a fire savoring a dish of hissing eels, whilst you stand shivering in the dark and cold, watching pieces of your body ripen and rot and tumble to the ground.” Adjusting the drape of his Cloak of Fearful Mein, he gathered up his tall ebony staff, descended from the palanquin, stepped into the weed-choked yard, and began to climb the steps up to the inn.

Above, a door banged open. A man emerged, a small and servile creature with gravy spatters on his apron who could only be the innkeeper. As he hurried down, wiping his hands upon his apron, he caught his first good sight of Molloqos, and paled.

As well he might. White as bone was the flesh of Molloqos, beneath his Cloak of Fearful Mien. Deep and dark and full of sadness were his eyes. His nose curved downward in a hook; his lips were thin and rather dour; his hands large, expressive, long-fingered. On his right hand his fingernails were painted black, on his left scarlet. His long legs were clothed in striped pantaloons of those same colors, tucked into calf-high boots of polished grue hide. Black and scarlet was his hair as well, blood and night mixed together; on his head perched a wide-brimmed hat of purple velvet decorated with a green pearl and a white quill.

“Dread sir,” the innkeep said, “those . . . those Deodands . . . ”

“ . . . will not trouble you. Death diminishes even such savage appetites as theirs.”

“We . . . we do not oft see sorcerers at the Tarn House.”

Molloqos was unsurprised. Once the dying earth had teemed with such, but in these last days even magic was waning. Spells seemed less potent than before, their very words harder to grasp and hold. The grimoires themselves were crumbling, falling to dust in ancient libraries as their protective charms winked out like guttering candles. And as the magic failed, so too did the magicians. Some fell to their own servants, the demons and sandestins who once obeyed their every whim. Others were hunted down by shadow swords, or torn apart by angry mobs of women. The wisest slipped away to other times and other places, their vast and drafty manses vanishing like mist before the sunrise. Their very names had become the stuff of legend: Mazirian the Magician, Turjan of Miir, Rhialto the Marvelous, the Enigmatic Mumph, Gilgad, Pandelume, Ildefonse the Perceptor.

Yet Molloqos remained, and it was his intent to go on remaining, to live to drink a final cup of wine while he watched the sun go out. “You stand in the presence of Molloqos the Melancholy, poet, philosopher, archmage, and necromancer, a student of forgotten tongues and bane of demonkind,” he informed the cringing landlord. “Every corner of this dying earth is known to me. I collect curious artifacts from eons past, translate crumbling scrolls no other man can read, converse with the dead, delight the living, frighten the meek, and awe the unenlightened. My vengeance is a cold black wind, my affection warm as a yellow sun. The rules and laws that govern lesser men I brush off as a wayfarer might brush the dust from his cloak. This night I will honor you with my custom. No obsequies are necessary. I will require your best room, dry and spacious, with a feather mattress. I shall sup with you as well. A thick slice of wild boar would fill me nicely, with such side dishes as your kitchen may supply.”

“We have no boars hereabouts, wild or tame. The grues and the erbs ate most of them, and the rest were dragged down into the tarn. I can serve you a meat pie, or a piping hot bowl of purple scrumby, but I don’t think you’d like the one, and I know you’d hate t’other.” The innkeep swallowed. “A thousand pardons, dread sir. My humble house is not fit for such as you. No doubt you would find some other inn more comfortable.”

Molloqos let his visage darken. “No doubt,” said he, “but as no other inn presents itself, I must make do with yours.”

The innkeep dabbed at his forehead with his apron. “Dread sir, begging your pardons and meaning no offense, but I’ve some trouble from sorcerous folk before. Some, not so honest as you, settle their accounts with purses of ensorcelled stones and chunks of dung glamoured to look like gold, and others have been known to inflict boils and warts on unhappy serving wenches and innocent innkeepers when the service does not meet their standards.”

“The remedy is simple,” declared Molloqos the Melancholy. “See that the service is all that it should be, and you will have no difficulties. You have my word, I will perform no sorceries in your common room, inflict no boils nor warts upon your staff, nor settle my account with dung. But now I grow weary of this banter. The day is done, the sun is fled, and I am weary, so here I mean to stay the night. Your choice is simple. Accommodate me, or else I shall pronounce Gargoo’s Festering Reek upon you and leave you to choke upon your own stench until the end of your days. Which will not be long in coming, as pelgranes and erbs are drawn to the smell as mice are drawn to a nice ripe cheese.”

The innkeep’s mouth opened and closed, but no words emerged. After a moment, he shuffled to one side. Molloqos acknowledged the surrender with a nod, ascended the rest of the steps, and shoved through the inn’s front door.

The interior of the Tarn House proved to be just as dark, damp, and dismal as the exterior. A queer sour odor hung in the air, though Molloqos would not have ventured to say whether it emanated from the innkeep, the other customers, or whatever was cooking in the kitchen. A hush fell upon the common room at his entrance. All eyes turned toward him, as was only to be expected. In his Cloak of Fearful Mein, he was a fearful sight.

Molloqos took a seat at the table by the window. Only then did he permit himself to inspect his fellow guests. The group near the fire, growling at each other in low, gutteral voices, reminded the sorcerer of turnips with hair. Over by the ale casks, a pretty young girl was laughing and flirting with a pair of obvious scoundrels, one of whom appeared to be not entirely human. Nearby an old man slept, his head on the table, pillowed atop his folded arms. There was a woman just beyond him, sloshing the dregs of her wine and eying the wizard speculatively across the room. A glance was enough to tell Molloqos that she was a woman of the evening, though in her case evening was edging on toward night. Her visage was not altogether hideous, although there was something odd and unsettling about the look of her ears. Still, she had a pleasing shape, her eyes were large and dark and liquid, and the fire woke red highlights in her long black hair.

Or so it seemed through the eyes that Molloqos had been born with, but he knew better than to put his trust in those. Softly, softly, he whispered an invocation, and looked again through the enchanted golden eye atop his staff. This time he saw true.

For his supper, the sorcerer ordered a meat pie, as the specialty of the house was unavailable. After one bite Molloqos put down his spoon, feeling even more melancholy than he had a moment before. Wisps of steam rose through the pie’s broken crust to form hideous faces in the air, their mouths open in torment. When the landlord returned to inquire if the repast was to his liking, Molloqos gave,him a reproachful look and said, “You are fortunate that I am not so quick to wroth as most of my brethren.”

“I am grateful for your forbearance, dread sir.”

“Let us hope that your bedchambers keep to a higher standard than your kitchen.”

“For three terces you can share the big bed with Mumpo and his family,” the landlord said, indicating the rustics near the hearth. “A private room will cost you twelve.”

“None but the best for Molloqos the Melancholy.”

“Our best room rents for twenty terces, and is presently occupied by Prince Rocallo.”

“Remove his things at once, and have the room readied for me,” Molloqos commanded. He might have said a good deal more, but just then the dark-eyed woman woman rose and came over to his table. He nodded toward the chair across from him. “Sit.”

She sat. “Why do you look so sad?”

“It is the lot of man. I look at you, and see the child that you were. Once you had a mother who held you to her breast. Once you had a father who dandled you upon his knee. You were their pretty little girl, and through your eyes they saw again the wonders of the world. Now they are dead and the world is dying, and their child sells her sadness to strangers.”

“We are strangers now, but we need not remain so,” the woman said. “My name is”

“—no concern of mine. Are you a child still, to speak your true name to a sorcerer?”

“Sage counsel.” She put her hand upon his sleeve. “Do you have a room? Let us repair upstairs, and I will make you happy.”

“Unlikely. The earth is dying. So too the race of men. No erotic act can change that, no matter how perverse or energetic.”

“There is still hope,” the woman said. “For you, for me, for all of us. Only last year I lay with a man who said a child had been born to a woman of Saskervoy.”

“He lied, or was deceived. As Saskervoy, the women weep as elsewhere, and devour their children in the womb. Man dwindles, and soon shall disappear. The earth will become the haunt of Deodands and pelgranes and worse things, until the last light flickers out. There was no child. Nor will there be.”

The woman shivered. “Still,” she said, “still. So long as men and women endure, we must try. Try with me.”

“As you wish.” He was Molloqos the Melancholy, and he had seen her for what she was. “When I retire, you may come to my bedchamber, and we shall try the truth of things.”

The placards were made of dark black wood, sliced paper thin and brightly painted. They made a faint clacking sound when Lirianne turned them over. The game was simple enough. They played for terces. Lirianne won more than she lost, though she did not fail to note that whenever the wagering was heavy, somehow Chimwazle showed the brightest placards, no matter how promising her own had seemed at first.

“Fortune favors you this evening,” Chimwazle announced, after a dozen hands, “but playing for such small stakes grows tiresome.” He placed a golden centum on the table. “Who will meet my wager?”

“I,” said Rocallo. “The earth is dying, and with it all of us. What do a few coins matter to a corpse?”

Lirianne looked sad. “I have no gold to wager.”

“No matter,” said Chimwazle. “I have taken a fancy to your hat. Put that in the wager, against our gold.”

“Oho. Is that the way of it?” She cocked her head and ran the tip of her tongue across her lip. “Why not?”

Shortly she was hatless, which was no more than she had expected. She handed the prize to Chimwazle with a flourish and shook out her hair, smiling as he stared at her. Lirianne took care never to look directly at the sorcerer seated by the window, but she had been aware of him since the moment he had entered. Gaunt and grim and fearsome, that one, and he stank of sorcery so strongly that it overwhelmed the lesser magics wafting off the odious fraud Chimwazle. Most of the great mages were dead or fled, slain by shadow swords or gone to some underworld or overworld, or perhaps to distant stars. Those few who remained upon the dying earth were gathering in Kaiin, she knew, hoping to find safety there behind the white-walled city’s ancient enchantments. This was surely one of them.

Her palm itched, and Tickle-Me-Sweet sang silent by her side. Lirianne had tempered its steel in the blood of the first wizard she had slain, when she was six-and-ten. No protective spell was proof against such a blade, though she herself had no defense but her wits. The hard part of killing wizards was knowing when to do it, when most of them could turn you into dust with a few well-chosen words.

A round of ales arrived, and then another. Lirianne sipped at her first tankard while her second sat untouched by her elbow, but her companions drank deep. When Rocallo called for a third round, Chimwazle excused himself to answer a call of nature, and loped across the common room in search of a privy. He gave the necromancer’s table a wide berth, Lirianne did not fail to note. That pale grim creature seemed deeply engrossed in conversation with the inn’s resident doxy, oblivious to the wattled pop-eyed rogue scuttling past, but the golden eye atop his wizard’s staff had fixed on Chimwazle and watched his every move.

“Chimwazle has been cozening us,” she told Rocallo when the toad-faced creature was gone. “I won the last showing, and you the two before that, yet his pile of terces is as large as ever. The coins move whenever we’re not looking. Creeping home across the table. And the placards change their faces.”

The prince gave a shrug. “What does it matter? The sun grows dark. Who shall count our terces when we’re dead?”

His ennui annoyed her. “What sort of prince sits by and lets some feeble wizard make a fool of him?”

“The sort who has experienced Lugwiler’s Dismal Itch, and has no desire to experience it again. Chimwazle amuses me.”

“It would amuse me to tickle Chimwazle.”

“He will laugh and laugh, I have no doubt.”

Then a shadow fell across them. Lirianne looked up, to find the grim-visaged necromancer looming over them. “It has been three hundred years since last I played a hand of pegotty,” he intoned in a sepulchral tone. “May I sit in?”

The Great Chimwazle’s stomach was a-heave. The meat pie might be to blame, all that gristle and suet. Or perhaps it was the Twk-men he had eaten in the woods. Delicious little things, but never easy to digest. They might be in his belly still, stabbing at him with their silly little spears. He should have stopped at a dozen, but once he had started, it was so easy to think, well, one more would be nice, and perhaps another after that one. He wondered if their spears were poisoned. Chimwazle had not considered that. It was a disagreeable thought.

Almost as disagreeable as this inn. He should have paid more heed to the Pooner. The Tarn House had little to recommend it, save perhaps the pretty freckly thing who had joined his little game of peggoty. Already he had won her hat. Her boots would soon follow, and then her stockings. Chimwazle was only waiting for some of the other travelers in the common room to retire to their beds before beginning his assault in earnest. Rocallo was too dull and diffident to interfere, he was certain. Once he’d won her clothes the girl would have nothing to wager but her indenture, and afterward he could harness her to his cart an arm’s length ahead of Polymumpho. Let the Pooner chase after her henceforth, that should serve to keep those hairy legs of his pumping briskly. Chimwazle might not even need to ply the whip.

The inn’s privy was cramped and smelly, and offered neither bench nor bar, but only a ragged hole in the floor. Squatting over it with his breeches round his ankles, Chimwazle grunted and groaned as.he voided his bowels. The act was never a pleasant one for him, attended as it was by the risk of waking the imp nested in the fleshier portions of his nether parts, whose second favorite amusement was loudly describing Chimwazle’s manhood in terms of withering scorn (its first favorite amusement was something Chimwazle did not wish to think about).

He was spared that ordeal on this occasion, but worse awaited him when he returned to the inn’s common room and found that the tall magician with the fearsome face had taken a seat at his own table. Chimwazle had had enough experiences with great sorcerers to know that he did not want any more such experiences. His present appearance was the legacy of a misunderstanding at a crossroads with one such, and the imp with the loquacious mouth hidden in his breeches was a souvenir left him by the witch Eluuna, whose affections he had enjoyed for a fortnight when he was young and slim and handsome. This sorcerer in scarlet and black lacked Eluuna’s charms, but might well share her fickle temper. One never knew what small gaffes and innocent omissions a wizard might take for mortal insult.

Still, there was no help for it, unless he meant to flee at once into the night. That course seemed less than advisable. The nights belonged to grues and ghouls and leucomorphs, and there was some small chance more Twk-men might be awaiting him as well. So Chimwazle donned his best smile, resumed his seat, and smacked his lips. “We have another player, I see. Innkeep, run fetch some ale for our new friend. And be quick about it, or you may find a carbuncle growing on the end of your nose!”

“I am Molloqos the Melancholy, and I do not drink ale.”

“I perceive you are of the sorcerous persuasion,” said Chimwazle. “We have that in common, you and I. How many spells do you carry?”

“That is none of your concern,” warned Molloqos.

“There now. It was an innocent inquiry, between colleagues. I myself am armed with six great spells, nine minor enchantments, and a variety of cantraps.” Chimwazle shuffled the placards. “My sandestin awaits without, disguised as a Pooner and bound to my cart, yet ready to whisk me off into the sky at my command. But no sorcery at table, please! Here dame fortune rules, and may not be confounded by spells!” And so saying, he placed a golden centum in the center of the table. “Come, come, put in your stakes! Pegotty has more savor when gold is glinting in the pot.”

“Just so.” Prince Rocallo laid his centum atop Chimwazle’s.

The girl Lirianne could only pout (which she did very prettily). “I have no gold, and I want my hat back.”

“Then you must put your boots into the wager.”

“Must I? Oh, very well.”

The sorcerer said nothing. Instead of reaching into his own purse, he rapped thrice upon the floor with his ebon staff and pronounced a small cantrap for the dispelling of illusions and concealments. At once, Chimwazle’s centum transformed into a fat white spider and walked slowly from the board on eight hairy legs, while the pile of terces in front of him turned into as many cockroaches and scuttled off in all directions.

The girl squealed. The prince chortled. Chimwazle gulped down his dismay and drew himself up, his jowls a-quiver. “Look what you have done! You owe me a golden centum.”

“Far be it!” Molloqos said, with outrage. “You aspired to hoodwink us with a cheap conjurer’s glamour. Did you truly believe such a feeble ploy would work upon Molloqos the Melancholy?” The great golden eye atop his staff was blinking, as green vapors swirled ominously within its crystal orb.

“Softly, softly,” protested Prince Rocallo. “My head is hazy from the ale, and harsh words make it ring.”

“Oh, will you fight a wizard’s duel?” Lirianne clapped her hands together. “What grand magics shall we see?”

“The innkeep may protest,” said Rocallo. “Such contests are the bane of hospitality. When swordsmen duel, the only damage is some broken crockery and perchance a bloodstain on the floorboards. A pail of hot water and a good elbow will set that aright. A wizard’s duel is like to leave an inn a smoking ruin.”

“Pah,” said Chimwazle, jowls quivering. A dozen rejoinders sprang to, his lips, each more withering than the one before, but caution bid him swallow every syllable. Instead he jerked to his feet, so quickly that it sent his chair crashing to the floor. “The innkeep need have no fear on that account. Such spells as I command are far too potent to be deployed for the idle amusement of hatless trollops and feigned princes. The Great Chimwazle will not be mocked, I warn you.” And so saying, he made a hasty retreat, before the scarlet and black sorcerer could take further umbrage. A fat white spider and a line of cockroaches scuttled after him, as fast as their legs would carry them.

The fire had burned down to embers, and the air was growing cold. Darkness gathered in the corners of the common room. The rustics by the hearth huddled closer, muttering at one another through their whiskers. The golden eye atop the staff of Molloqos the Melancholy peered this way and that.

“Do you mean to let the cheat escape?” the girl asked.

Molloqos did not deign to answer. Soon all the veils would fall away, he sensed. The fraud Chimwazle was the least of his concerns. The shadow swords were here, and worst things too. And it seemed to him that he could hear a faint, soft hissing.

The landlord rescued him from further inquiry, appearing suddenly by his elbow to announce that his room was ready, should he wish to retire.

“I do.” Molloqos rose to his feet, leaning on his staff. He adjusted his Cloak of Fearful Mien and said, “Show me.”

The innkeep took a lantern off the wall, lit the wick, turned up the flame. “If you would follow me, dread sir.”

Up three long flights of crooked steps Molloqos climbed, following the landlord with his lantern, until at last they reached the upper story and a heavy wooden door.

The Tarn House’s best room was none too grand. The ceiling was too low, and the floorboards creaked alarmingly. A single window looked out across the tarn, where black waters churned and rippled suggestively beneath the dim red light of distant stars. Beside the bed, on a small three-legged table, a tallow candle stood crookedly in a puddle of hardened wax, flickering. A chest and a straightback chair were the only other furnishings. Shadows lay thickly in the corners of the room, black as the belly of a Deodand. The air was damp and chill, and Molloqos could hear wind whistling through gaps in the shutters. “Is that mattress stuffed with feathers?” he asked.

“Nothing but honest straw at the Tarn House.” The innkeep hung his lantern from a hook. “See, here are two stout planks that slide in place to bar the door and window, so. You may rest easy tonight, with no fear of intruders. The chest at the foot of the bed contains an extra blanket, and may be used to store your garments and other valuables. Beside it is your chamberpot. Is there anything else you might require?”

“Only solitude.”

“As you command.”

Molloqos listened as the innkeep made his descent. When he was satisfied that he was alone, he gave the room a careful inspection, tapping on the walls, checking the door and window, thumping the floorboards with the butt of his staff. The chest at the foot of the bed had a false bottom that could be opened from beneath, to give access to a crawlway. Doubtless that was how the thieves and murderers crept in, to relieve unwary travelers of their goods and lives. As for the bed . . .

Molloqos gave the mattress a wide berth, seating himself instead in the chair, his staff in hand. His last few spells were singing in his head. It did not take long for the first of his visitors to arrive. Her knock was soft, but insistent. Molloqos opened the door, ushered her into the bedchamber, and slid the bar in place behind her. “So we are not disturbed,” he explained.

The dark-haired woman smiled seductively. She pulled the ties that closed her robe, then shrugged it off her shoulders to puddle on the floor. “Will you remove your cloak?”

“As soon remove my skin,” said Molloqos the Melancholy.

The woman shivered in his arms. “You talk so strangely. You frighten me.” Gooseprickles covered her arms. “What do you have in your hand?”

“Surcease.” He stabbed her through the throat. She sank to her knees, hissing. When her mouth opened, her fangs gleamed in the half-light, long and pointed. Her blood ran black down her neck. A leucomorph, he judged, or something stranger still. The wilds were full of queer things now; mongrels fathered by demons on Deodands, spawn of succubi and incubi, mock men grown in vats, bog-born monsters made of rotting flesh.

Bending over her pale corpse, Molloqos the Melancholy brushed her hair back from her cheek and kissed her; once upon the brow, once upon each cheek, deeply on the mouth. Life left her with a shudder and entered him with a gasp, as warm as a summer wind in the days of his youth when the sun burned brighter and laughter could still be heard in the cities of men.

When she was cold, he spoke the words of Cazoul’s Indenture, and her corpse opened its eyes again. He bid her rise, to stand sentry while he slept. A great weariness was on him, but it would not do to be taken unawares. He would have other visitors before the night was done, he did not doubt.

He dreamt of Kaiin, shimmering behind its high white walls.

A chill hung in the night air as Chimwazle slipped from the inn through a side door. A gray mist was rising off the tarn, and he could hear the waters stirring down below, as if something were moving in the shadows. Crouching low, he peered this way and that, his bulbous eyes moving beneath his floppy cap, but he saw no sign of Twk-men. Nor did he hear the soft ominous trill of dragonfly wings.

They had not found him, then. That was good. It was time he was away. That there were grues and ghouls and erbs out in the wood he did not doubt, but he would sooner take his chances with them than with the necromancer. A few brisk licks of the whip, and his Pooner would outrace them all. And if not, well, Polymumpho had more meat on him than Chimwazle. Grinning ear to ear, he loped down the rocky hummock, his belly wobbling.

Halfway down, he noticed that his cart was gone. “Infamous Pooner!” he cried, stumbling in shock. “Thief! Thief! Where is my cart, you lice-ridden lump?” No one gave reply. At the foot of the steps, there was nothing to be seen but a sinister iron palaquin and four huge Deodands with flesh as black as night, standing knee deep in the tarn. The waters were rising, Chimwazle realized suddenly. The Tarn House had become an island.

Fury pushed aside his fear. Deodands relished the taste of man flesh, it was known. “Did you eat my Pooner?” he demanded.

“No,” said one, showing a mouth full of gleaming ivory teeth, “but come closer, and we will gladly eat you.”

“Pah,” said Chimwazle. Now that he was closer, he could see that the Deodands were dead. The necromancer’s work, he did not doubt. He licked his ear lobe nervously and a cunning ploy occurred to him. “Your master Molloqos has commanded you to carry me to Kaiin with all haste.”

“Yessss,” hissed the deodand. “Mollogos commands and we obey. Come, clamber on, and we’ll away.”

Something about the way he said that made Chimwazle pause to reconsider the wisdom of his plan. Or perhaps it was the way all four of the Deodands began to gnash those pointed teeth. He hesitated, and suddenly grew aware of a faint stirring in the air behind him, a whisper of wind at the back of his neck.

Chimwazle whirled. A Twk-man was floating a foot from his face, his lance couched, and a dozen more hovering behind him. His bulging eyes popped out even further as he saw the upper stories of the Tarn House acrawl with them, thick as tarps and twice as veriminous. Their dragonflies were a glowing green cloud, roiling like a thunderhead. “Now you perish,” the Twk-man said.

Chimwazle’s sticky tongue struck first, flicking out to pull the small green warrior from his mount. But as he crunched and swallowed, the cloud took wing, buzzing angrily. Yelping in dismay, the Great Chimwazle had no choice but to flee back up the steps to the inn, hotly pursued by a swarm of dragonflies and the laughter of a Deodand.

Lirianne was vexed.

It would have been so much easier if only she could have set the two wizards to fighting over her, so they might exhaust their magic on one another. That the ghastly Molloqos would make short work of the odious Chimwazle she did not doubt, but however many spells that might have required would have left him with that many fewer when the time came for her to tickle him.

Instead, Molloqos had retired to his bed, while Chimwazle had scuttled off into the night, craven as a crab. “Look what he did to my hat,” Lirianne complained, snatching it off the floorboards. Chimwazle had trampled on it on his haste to depart, and the feather was broken.

“His hat,” said Prince Rocallo. “You lost it.”

“Yes, but I meant to win it back. Though I suppose I should be grateful that it did not turn into a cockroach.” She jammed the hat back on her head, tilted at a rakish angle. “First they break the world, and then my hat.”

“Chimwazle broke the world?”

“Him,” Lirianne said darkly, “and his sort. Wizards. Sorcerers and sorceresses, sages and mages and archmages, witches and warlocks, conjurers, illusionists, diabolists. Necromancers, geomancers, aeromancers, pyromancers, thaumaturges, dreamwalkers, dreamweavers, dreameaters. All of them. Their sins are written on the sky, dark as the sun.”

“You blame black magic for the world’s demise?”

“Bah,” said Lirianne. Men were such fools. “White magic and black are two sides of the same terce. The ancient tomes tell the tale, for those who have the wit to read them correctly. Once there was no magic. The sky was bright blue, the sun shone warm and yellow, the woods were full of deer and hare and songbirds, and everywhere the race of man was thriving. Those ancient men built towers of glass and steel taller than mountains, and ships with sails of fire that took them to the stars. Where are these glories now? Gone, lost, forgotten. Instead we have spells, charms, curses. The air grows cold, the woods are full of grue and ghouls, Deodands haunt the ruins of ancient cities, pelgranes rule the skies where men once flew. Whose work is this? Wizards! Their magic is a blight on sun and soul. Every time a spell is spoken here on earth, the sun grows that much darker.”

She might have revealed even more, had not the pop-eyed Chimwazle chosen that very moment to make a sudden reappearance, stumbling through the door with his long arms wrapped around his head. “Get them off!” he bellowed, as he lurched between the tables. “Ow, ow, ow. Get off me, I am innocent, it was someone else!” Thus shouting, he went crashing to the floor, where he writhed and rolled, slapping himself about the head and shoulders while continuing to implore for assistance against attackers who seemed nowhere in evidence. “Twk,” he cried, “twk, twk, wretched twk! Off me, off me!”

Prince Rocallo winced. “Enough! Chimwazle, cease this unmanly caterwauling. Some of us are attempting to drink.”

The rogue rolled unto his rump, which was wide and wobbly and amply padded. “The Twk-men—”

“—remain without,” said Lirianne. The door remained wide open, but none of the Twk-men had followed Chimwazle inside. Chimwazle blinked his bulbous eyes and peered about from side to side to make certain that was true. Although no Twk-men were to be seen, the back of his neck was covered with festering boils where they had stung him with their lances, and more were sprouting on his cheeks and forehead.

“I do hope you know a healing spell,” Rocallo said. “Those look quite nasty. The one on your cheek is leaking blood.” Chimwazle made a noise that was half a groan and half a croak and said, “Vile creatures! They had no cause to abuse me thus. All I did was thin their excess populace. There were plenty left!” Puffing, he climbed back onto his feet and retrieved his cap. “Where is that pestilential innkeep? I require unguent at once. These pin-pricks have begun to itch.”

“Itching is only the first symptom,” said Lirianne, with a helpful smile. “The lances of the Twk-men are envenomed. By morning, your head will be as large as a pumpkin, your tongue will blacken and burst, your ears will fill with pus, and you may be seized by an irresistible desire to copulate with a hoon.”

“A hoon?” croaked Chimwazle, appalled.

“Perhaps a grue. It depends upon the poison.”

Chimwazle’s face had turned a deeper shade of green. “This affront cannot be borne! Pus? Hoons? Is there no cure, no salve, no antidote?”

Lirianne cocked her head to one side thoughtfully. “Why,” she said, “I have heard it said that the blood of a sorcerer is a sure remedy for any bane or toxin.”

“Alas,” Chimwazle said, relieved. “Our plan is foiled. Back to the common room, then. Let us reconsider over ale.” He scratched furiously beneath his chin, groaned.

“Why not break the door down?” asked Lirianne. “A big strong man like you . . . ” She squeezed his arm and smiled. “Unless you would rather give pleasure to a hoon?”

Chimwazle shuddered, though even a hoon might be preferable to this itching. Glancing up, he saw the transom. It was open just a crack, but that might be enough. “Rocallo, friend, lift me up onto your shoulders.”

The prince knelt. “As you wish.” He was stronger than he looked, and seemed to have no trouble hoisting Chimwazle up into the air, for all his bulk. Nor did the nervous trumpet notes emitted by Chimwazle’s nether parts dismay him unduly.

Pressing his nose to the transom, Chimwazle slid his tongue through the gap and down the inside of the doorframe, then curled it thrice around the wooden plank that barred the way. Slowly, slowly, he lifted the bar from its slot . . . but the weight proved too great for his tongue, and the plank fell clattering to the floor. Chimwazle reeled backwards, Prince Rocallo lost his balance, and the two of them collapsed atop each other with much grunting and cursing while Lirianne skipped nimbly aside.

Then the door swung open.

Molloqos the Melancholy did not need to speak a word.

Silent he bid them enter and silent they obeyed, Chimwazle scrambling over the threshold on hands on feet as his fellows stepped nimbly around him. When all of them had come inside he closed the door behind them and barred it once again.

The rogue Chimwazle was almost unrecognizable beneath his floppy hat, his toadish face a mass of festering boils and buboes where some Twk-men had kissed him with their lances. “Salve,” he croaked, as he climbed unsteadily to his feet. “We came for salve, sorry to disturb you. Dread sir, if you perchance should have some unguent for itching . . . ”

“I am Molloqos the Melancholy. I do not deal in unguents. Come here and grasp my staff.”

For a moment, Chimwazle looked as he might bolt the room instead, but in the end he bowed his head and shuffled closer, and wrapped a soft splayed hand around the ebon shaft of the tall sorcerer’s staff. Inside the crystal orb the True-Seeing Eye had fixed on Lirianne and Rocallo. When Molloqos thumped the staff upon the floor, the great golden eye blinked once. “Now look again upon your companions, and tell me what you see.”

Chimwazle’s mouth gaped open, and his bulging eyes looked as though they might pop out of his skull. “The girl is cloaked in shadows,” he gasped, “and under her freckly face I see a skull.”

“And your prince . . . ”

“ . . . is a demon.”

The thing called Prince Rocallo laughed, and let all his enchantments dissolve. His flesh was red and raw, glowing like the surface of the sun, and like the sun half-covered by a creeping black leprosy. Smoke rose stinking from his nostrils, the floorboards began to smolder beneath his taloned feet, and black claws sprang from his hands as long as knives.

Then Molloqos spoke a word and stamped his staff hard against the floor, and from the shadows in a corner of the room a woman’s corpse came bursting to leap upon the demon’s back. As the two of them lurched and staggered about the room, tearing at each other, Lirianne danced aside and Chimwazle fell backwards onto his ample rump. The stench of burning flesh filled the air. The demon ripped one of the corpse’s arms off and flung it smoking at the head of Molloqos, but the dead feel no pain, and her other arm was wrapped about its throat. Black blood ran down her cheeks like tears as she pulled him backward onto the bed.

Molloqos stamped his staff again. The floor beneath the bed yawned open, the mattress tilted, and demon and corpse together tumbled down into a gaping black abyss. A moment later, there came a loud splash from below, followed by a furious cacophony, demonic shrieking mingled with a terrible whistling and hissing, as if a thousand kettles had all come to a boil at once. When the bed righted itself the sound diminished, but it was a long while before it ended. “W-what was that?” asked Chimwazle.

“Hissing eels. The inn is famous for them.”

“I distinctly recall the innkeep saying that the eels were off the menu,” said Chimwazle.

“The eels are off our menu, but we not off theirs.”

Lirianne made a pouty face and said, “The hospitality of the Tarn House leaves much to be desired.”

Chimwazle was edging toward the door. “I mean to speak firmly to the landlord. Some adjustment of our bill would seem to be in order.” He scratched angrily at his boils.

“I would advise against returning to the common room,” said the necromancer. “No one in the Tarn House is all that he appears. The hirsute family by the hearth are ghouls clad in

suits of human skin, here for the meat pies. The greybeard in the faded raiment of a knight of Old Thorsingol is a malign spirit, cursed to an eternity of purple scrumby for the niggardly gratuities he left in life. The demon and the leucomorph are no longer a concern, but our servile host is vilest of all. Your wisest course is flight. I suggest you use the window.”

The Great Chimwazle needed no further encouragement. He hurried to the window, threw the shudders open, and gave a cry of dismay. “The tarn! I had forgotten. The tarn has encircled the inn, there’s no way out.”

Lirianne peered over his shoulder, and saw that it was true. “The waters are higher than before,” she said thoughtfully. That was a bother. She had learned to swim before she learned to walk, but the oily waters of the tarn did not look wholesome, and while she did not doubt that Tickle-Me-Sweet would be a match for any hissing eel, it was hard to swim and swordfight at the same time. She turned back to the necromancer. “I suppose we’re doomed, then. Unless you save us with a spell.”

“Which spell would you have me use?” asked Molloqos, in a mordant tone. “Shall I summon an Agency of Far Dispatch to whisk us three away to the end of the earth? Call down fire from the sky with the Excellent Prismatic Spray to burn this vile hostelry to the ground? Pronounce the words of Phandaal’s Shivering Chill to freeze the waters of the tarn as hard as stone, so that we may scamper safely over them?”

Chimwazle looked up hopefully. “Yes, please.”

“Which?”

“Any. The Great Chimwazle was not meant to end up in a meat pie.” He scratched a boil underneath his chin.

“Surely you know those spells yourself,” said Molloqos.

“I did,” said Chimmwazle, “but some knave stole my grimoire.”

Molloqos chuckled. It was the saddest sound that Lirianne had ever heard. “It makes no matter. All things die, even magic. Enchantments fade, sorceries unravel, grimoires turn to dust, and even the most puissant spells no longer work as they once did.”

Lirianne cocked her head. “Truly?”

“Truly.”

“Oho.” She drew her sword and gave his heart a tickle.

The necromancer died without a sound, his legs folding slowly under him as if he were kneeling down to pray. When the girl slipped her sword out of his chest, a wisp of scarlet smoke rose from the wound. It smelled of summer nights and maiden’s breath, sweet as a first kiss.

Chimwazle was aghast. “Why did you do that?”

“He was a necromancer.”

“He was our only hope.”

“You have no hope.” She wiped her blade against her sleeve. “When I was fifteen a young adventurer was wounded outside my father’s inn. My father was too gentle to let him die there in the dust, so we carried him upstairs and I nursed him back to health. Soon after he departed I found I was with child. For seven months my belly swelled, and I dreamed of a babe with his blue eyes. In my eighth month the swelling ceased. Thereafter I grew slimmer with every passing day. The midwife explained it all to me. What use to bring new life into a dying world? My womb was wiser than my heart, she said. And when I asked her why the world was dying, she leaned close and whispered ‘wizard’s work.’ ”

“Not my work.” Chimwazle scratched at his cheeks with both hands, half mad with the itching. “What if she was wrong?”

“Then you’ll have died for naught.” Lirianne could smell his fear. The scent of sorcery was on him, but faintly, faintly, drowning beneath the green stink of his terror. Truly, this one was a feeble sort of magician. “Do you hear the eels?” she asked him. “They’re still hungry. Would you like a tickle?”

“No.” He backed away from her, his bloody fingers splayed.

“Quicker than being eaten alive by eels.” Tickle-Me-Sweet waved in the air, glimmering in the candlelight.

“Stay back,” Chimwazle warned her, “or I will call down the Excellent Prismatic Spray upon you.”

“You might. If you knew it. Which you don’t. Or if it worked. Which it won’t, if our late friend can be believed.”

Chimwazle backed away another step, and stumbled over the necromancer’s corpse. As he reached out to break his fall, his fingers brushed against the sorcerer’s staff. Grasping it, he popped back to his feet. “Stay away. There’s still power in his staff, I warn you. I can feel it.”

“That may be, but it is no power you can use.” Lirianne was certain of that. He was hardly half a wizard, this one. Most likely he had stolen those placards, and paid to have the roaches glamoured for him. Poor sad wicked thing. She resolved to make a quick end to his misery. “Stand still. Tickle-Me-Sweet will cure your itch. I promise you, this will not hurt.”

“This will.” Chimwazle grasped the wizard’s staff with both hands, and smashed the crystal orb down on her head.

Chimwazle stripped both corpses clean before tossing them down the chute behind the bed, in hopes of quieting the hissing eels. The girl was even prettier naked than she had been clothed, and stirred feebly as he was dragging her across the room. “Such a waste,” Chimwazle muttered as he heaved her down into the abyss. Her hat was much too small for him and had a broken feather, but her sword was forged of fine strong springy steel, her purse was fat with terces, and the leather of her boots was soft and supple. Too small for his feet, but perhaps one day he’d find another pretty freckly girl to wear them for him.

Even in death the necromancer presented such a frightful countenance that Chimwazle was almost afraid to touch him, but the eels were still hissing hungrily down below, and he knew his chances of escape would be much improved if they were sated. So he steeled himself, knelt, and undid the clasp that fastened the dread wizard’s cloak. When he rolled his body over to pull the garment off, the sorcerer’s features ran like black wax, melting away to puddle on the floor. Chimwazle found himself kneeling over a wizened toothless corpse with dim white eyes and parchment skin, his bald pate covered by a spiderweb of dark blue veins. He weighed no more than a bag of skin, but he had a little smile on his lips when Chimwazle tossed him down to the hissing eels.

By then the itching seemed to be subsiding. Chimwazle gave himself a few last scratches and fastened the necromancer’s cloak about the shoulders. All at once, he felt taller, harder, sterner. Why should he fear the things down in the common room? Let them go in fear of him!

He swept down the steps without a backward glance. The ghost and ghouls took one look at him and moved aside. Even creatures such as they knew better than to trouble a wizard of such fearsome mein. Only the innkeep dared accost him. “Dread sir,” he murmured, “how will you settle your account?”

“With this.” He drew his sword and gave the thing a tickle. “I will not be recommending the Tarn House to other travelers.”

Black waters still encircled the inn, but they were no more than waist deep, and he found it easy enough to wade to solid ground. The Twk-men had vanished in the night and the hissing eels had grown quiescent, but the Deodands still stood where he had seen them last, waiting by the iron palanquin. One greeted him. “The earth is dying and soon the sun shall fail,” it said. “When the last light fades, all spells shall fail, and we shall feast upon the firm white flesh of Mollogos.”

“The earth is dying, but you are dead,” replied Chimwazle, marveling at the deep and gloomy timbre of his voice. “When the sun goes out, all spells shall fail, and you shall decay back into the primeval ooze.” He climbed into the palanquin and bid the Deodands to lift him up. “To Kaiin.” Perhaps somewhere in the white-walled city, he would find a lissome maid to dance naked for him in the freckly girl’s high boots. Or failing that, a hoon.

Off into purple gloom rode Molloqos the Melancholy, borne upon an iron palanquin by four dead Deodands.

First published in Songs of the Dying Earth, edited by by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois.

About the Author

Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award-winner George R.R. Martin, New York Times best-selling author of the landmark A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series, the inspiration for the immensely popular HBO series “A Game of Thrones,” has been called “the American Tolkien.” Born in Bayonne, New Jersey, George R.R. Martin made his first sale in 1971, and soon established himself as one of the most popular SF, fantasy, and horror writers of his generation. After a decade spent working in Hollywood as a writer and story editor for television series such as Beauty and the Beast and The Twilight Zone, Martin made a triumphant return to the print world in 1996 with the publication of the hugely successful fantasy novel A Game of Thrones, the start of his “Song of Ice and Fire” sequence. A free-standing novella taken from that work, “Blood of the Dragon,” won Martin another Hugo Award in 1997. Further books in the “Song of Ice and Fire” series; A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, A Feast for Crows, and A Dance with Dragons, have made it one of the most popular, acclaimed, and best-selling series in all of modern fantasy. His most recent book are a massive retrospective collection spanning the entire spectrum of his career, GRRM: A RRetrospective, a novel written in collaboration with Gardner Dozois and Daniel Abraham, Hunter’s Run, and, as editor, several anthologies edited in collaborations with Gardner Dozois, Warriors, Songs of the Dying Earth, Songs of Love and Death, Down These Strange Streets, Dangerous Women, Old Mars, Old Venus, and Rogues, plus two new volumes in his long-running Wild Cards anthology series, Wild Cards: Busted Flush and Wild Cards: Inside Straight. In 2012, Martin was given the Life Achievement Award by the World Fantasy Convention.

Difficulties of an Asteroid Capture Mission

Karen Burnham

2013 is shaping up to be the Year of the Asteroid.

On February 15th a 10,000 ton meteor, undetected until it streaked through the sky, exploded above the Russian city of Chelyabinsk. According to National Geographic, the shock wave from the explosion circled the entire globe twice before dying down.

Coincidentally, it came on the same day that dedicated asteroid watchers were all eyeing the heavens looking at Asteroid 2012 DA14, a 130,000 ton asteroid that passed Earth within about 17,000 miles—closer than our geosynchronous satellites (for comparison, the Moon is more than fifteen times further away, at about 250,000 miles). In the wake of these sobering reminders that there are still asteroid collisions all the time in our Solar System, NASA has proposed an interesting mission: instead of sending astronauts out to meet an asteroid, the intent would be to capture an asteroid and bring it close enough to Earth for the currently planned Orion capsule to send astronauts out to it.

Add to that not one, but two private enterprises that have started up this year to examine the potential for asteroid mining, and this is a good year to be thinking about asteroids. However, extracting information and resources from asteroids may be more difficult than it would seem at first blush.

Why do we care about asteroids? For one, as illustrated above, they can kill us. And of course they can tell us quite a bit about the early days of the Solar System and its formation. But they can also provide us with resources. Shen Ge and Neha Satak of SPACE (Scientific Preparatory Academy for Cosmic Explorers) have an excellent chart in their paper on the economics of asteroid mining. It has two intersecting curves. One shows that inevitably the costs of extracting mineral resources here on Earth will go up. The other shows that (presumably) inevitably, the costs of doing business in space will go down over time. At some point in the future, although no one knows just when, it will be cheaper to mine certain materials in space than on Earth; if the full environmental impact of extractive industries were factored in, that point would probably arrive much sooner.

Science fiction has been imagining asteroid mining and habitation (carving out the interior volume of a chunk of rock to live in) for a very long time. We can go back to Isaac Asimov’s ice capture mission in “The Martian Way” (1952) and up to M. J. Locke (Laura Mixon)’s 2011 novel Up Against It, and those are just a small sample. Asteroid resource utilization is also important for a certain brand of post-human futures. In Greg Egan’s Diaspora, humans send very small spacecraft at very high sub-light speeds to interesting new planetary systems. The digital human consciousness spend their travel time in the VR simulation of their choice or unconscious, ready to be woken up if something interesting happens. When they reach their destination an army of nanomachines locates and reassembles whatever habitat/sensor package/solar power station/etc. that the post-human explorers need based on the resources available in the new system.

But even if we can’t send our digital consciousnesses to a distant star yet, why aren’t we already out there picking apart asteroids for fun and profit? There are a lot of answers to that question: a simple one is politics and the lack of political support for pretty much any single vision for space exploration. At a recent AIAA conference Beth Fischer was asked about her vision for the next 100 years of space exploration and she replied: “My vision is that we pick a vision and stick with it.” The applause was loud and sustained.

Another answer is that space launches, especially out to lunar orbit or beyond, are still difficult and expensive. Still, in 2029 the asteroid 99942 Apophis (a science fictional name if ever there was one) is predicted to pass within 18,000 miles of Earth, and researchers have estimated that it weighs around 30 million tons. Since it is so big and will be passing so close, why not just head on out and hitch a ride?

Let’s look at a few of the challenges facing a prospective asteroid mission. The first question we have to answer is: humans or robots? Humans are infinitely more versatile, but robots are much, much cheaper. So let’s look at what we can do with robots. We’ve had robots exploring the solar system for years: the Russians had a rover touring around the Moon’s surface, and NASA has had four incredibly successful Mars rovers. All of those have engaged in some form of geological research, scraping rocks for samples and analyzing them. Sounds like the perfect groundwork for prospecting an asteroid, right?

Unfortunately, no. It turns out that robots operating on a planet, even one with a very low gravity such as Mars (1/3 that of Earth) or the Moon (1/6 that of Earth) have many advantages that an asteroid robot wouldn’t. The gravity of even a large asteroid is so small that you could achieve escape velocity just by jumping. Without gravity to keep you on the surface, a rover driving around would leave the asteroid for good whenever it hit a bump. If it tried to swing a pick to break up a rock, it would simply push itself off the surface. There are plenty of means of tethering to a surface, but then you’re faced with a trade-off versus mobility and flexibility.

Then there’s the problem of actually extracting the minerals. Almost everything we know about mining was developed in the context of Earth, with its rich oxygen atmosphere, warm temperatures, and sturdy gravitational field. On an asteroid, none of that applies.

Consider platinum. Platinum is rare and valuable on Earth, and it occurs in somewhat higher concentrations on the Moon and in asteroids than it does here (some of the richer platinum sites on Earth are associated with meteor strikes). But like many metals, platinum must be separated from the ore in which it is found. In one typical mine in South Africa, they mined 16 million tons of ore in a year to yield 1.125 million ounces of platinum. That’s 2.2 parts per million, meaning that for every metric ton of ore they mined, they got 2.2 grams of platinum.

So even with a slightly better ratio on an asteroid, you still have to break up a lot of rocks to get what you’re looking for. That poses the first challenge. When you break a rock on Earth, the pieces fall down on the ground and you can pick them up. If you broke up an outcropping on an asteroid, most of the pieces would have enough velocity to go flying off into space, never to be seen again. Explosives, very common in terrestrial mining, would essentially launch everything that you were looking for off into the deep dark sky. So the first problem that has to be solved is breaking up and containing the ore that you’re working with.

Next, how do we separate the platinum from the ore? There are many ways, but almost all of them involve melting. That allows all the materials involved to flow and separate from each other, either by density (the platinum would sink compared to normal rock) or by magnetism (platinum is often found with iron, which can be separated out with a magnet). Again, we start to see the problems: melting things is much more difficult in space because out in the vacuum, everything wants to either freeze solid or boil away completely. And in a microgravity environment, a dense material won’t necessarily sink to the bottom of a processing container. This problem can be solved with centrifuges (spinning the materials instead of letting gravity do the work), but again you’re adding weight and complexity to your mission.

Similar problems would be found with those minerals that are usually extracted using some kind of dissolving solution, like the use of cyanide for gold mining. First ore is extracted, then crushed and mixed with water to form slurry. We’ve already seen some of the problems with liquids in space, but it gets worse. The chemical reaction that allows the gold to bind with the cyanide requires large amounts of dissolved oxygen, which would have to be introduced artificially, since there’s no oxygenated atmosphere available on the asteroid.

Nanotechnology would seem to be the answer to a lot of these problems, but the science fictional view of nanotech as a nigh-unto-magical grey goo is a long way in the future. While that’s worth another article all on its own, for now let’s just say that nanotechnology is far more limited in what it can achieve than the asteroid-stripping solar-panel-building bots of many post-human futures.

None of these problems are insurmountable, and as we travel along the curves that make minerals more expensive here on Earth and cheaper up in space, the economic incentives to solve these problems will increase rapidly. Miners have been enormously clever in devising ways to profit from resource extraction even in very hostile environments. But it is clear that the challenges ahead for asteroid mining are steep.

We won’t derive much benefit from all our experience with space robots or with terrestrial mining; instead a lot of processes will need to be devised from scratch. If we are to start laying the groundwork for this sort of mission, it seems like NASA’s asteroid capture mission would be a good place to start, with the added bonus of learning some lessons about changing an asteroid’s orbit—something we’ll want to be able to do the next time a killer asteroid is headed our way. As much of science fiction has imagined, it seems likely that in the future we will end up working with asteroids one way or another. But we’re just starting the journey of learning how to work with them.

There’s a long way to go yet.

About the Author

Karen Burnham is an electrical engineer working at NASA’s Johnson Space Center (all opinions expressed in this piece are her own, and no reflection of NASA’s official policy). She is also a book reviewer writing for Locus, Strange Horizons, SFSignal, and Cascadia Subduction Zone. She writes non-fiction about science when she can, and recently started writing for GeekMom.com.

Deep into the Dark:
A Conversation with Lavie Tidhar

Jeremy L. C. Jones

It was easy to write.

“I honestly wish I knew why,” said Lavie Tidhar. “Some books are like that. Most aren’t! It just felt right but, you know, I wish that could happen with every book, but the truth is it’s so rare, you just have to be thankful when it happens.”

He’s talking about Osama, the winner of the 2012 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel—a novel featuring a pulp writer, a detective, a vigilante named Osama Bin Laden, and a view of the world that seems at once brilliant and dark, dulled by a wise man’s weariness and sharpened by a young man’s exposure to a very real, very immediate truth.

Tidhar, who was born in Israel, has spent most of his adult life travelling, each trip seeming to add a layering to his writing, while deepening his sense of rootedness in the past. Story after story and novel after novel—from The Bookman Histories to Martian Sands to The Violent Century (due out this month) there is always that forward thrust, that delving deeper into a darker space that is also, somehow, more revealing, more full of light.

I went into our interview expecting the globe-trotting man of letters to be simply bubbling with enthusiasm for his craft. He is not, mind you, a grump or premature curmudgeon, but his relationship sitting at the keyboard is a bit more conflicted than I expected.

“I don’t know if enjoy is the right word,” said Tidhar. “But if I don’t do it for a length of time I know get very irritable, restless, physically itching to write. So perhaps ‘obsession’ would be a better description.”

Fortunately for the world, Tidhar’s obsessions—whether writing, collecting Hebrew pulp fiction, writing screenplays, or what have you—tend to be entertaining, evocative, and enlightening.

How about James Ellroy’s blurb for The Violent Century: “A brilliantly etched phantasmagoric reconfiguring of that most sizzling of eras—the twilight 20th.” What do you think of it? Is he spot on? Off?

To be honest, I’m just so chuffed to have a James Ellroy blurb! I finally got to read his books when I was living in Laos, in 2008—a short time after writing Osama, I think—and I admire more than anything just how deep he is willing to go inside, the courage of putting everything on the page, no matter how sordid or terrible it is.

It’s a courage I don’t quite have yet, though I hope I am getting closer—the novel I’ve been working on the past year is the one where I’ve really tried to go deep into the dark, if that makes sense (and it was a strange and uncomfortable experience! It can really mess you up, that sort of thing).

Can you expand on “deep into the dark” and how it relates to the novel you’re currently working on?

I think in a way it’s my most personal novel, in that it goes deepest into my obsessions, particularly with the Holocaust, but with pulp fiction, with pornographic fiction (which I’ve been fascinated by as a mode of storytelling). I wrote it very quickly, mostly at night, because it was such an unpleasant space to inhabit, but at the same time, like with Osama, it felt very true to be doing it. I think it’s very dark, but also very funny, if that makes sense. We’ll see what happens!

Can you talk a little bit where you started with The Violent Century? How you developed it? What some of the surprises were along the way?

I keep referring to The Violent Century as my “accidental book”. I never meant to write it!

It started with an e-mail exchange with a friend of mine who’s a film producer in the UK. She mentioned in passing they had been looking to make a British superhero film, but never found the right script. So I fired off an e-mail banging on about how well of course you can’t do that because you have to understand superheroes in terms of the Jewish experience during the lead up to World War 2 (virtually all the creators of superheroes were first generation Jews born in the United States to immigrant parents). And once I wrote that, I kind of thought, well, actually, that’s not such a bad idea! So I sat down that same day and wrote, I think, five or eight pages of script, and then forgot about it.

At the time I was moving back to the UK, and I got stuck for a couple of months visiting my parents, sorting out paperwork, so to keep myself occupied I worked on the screenplay of what was going to become The Violent Century. And I was quite happy with it! It was fun (I write screenplays occasionally for fun, as weird as that sounds!)

I showed it to my friend, and she liked it—but she also pointed out that, as a movie, we were looking at something that could only really be done by a big Hollywood studio. “Why don’t you turn it into a novel?” she said. And again, this little light bulb went off in my head and I thought, well, why not turn it into a novel!

So it was all very accidental—and also a very different experience, an experience in adaptation, really, which is something I am fascinated with. It was hard work . . . It went through an enormous amount of drafts and, of course, the book is a very different creature to the screenplay. I was also working on a comics adaptation of it, to the extent that we had the first issue written, and a few pages of art—I hoped we could sell the comics first and then the novel but, as it turned out, the book sold very, very quickly after submission, and my artist (Paul McCaffrey) and I went on to do a comic called Adler instead (Titan Comics is releasing it next year).

What’s “fun” about working on a screenplay. Or, put differently, how is it different for you to create stories in that form as opposed to narrative prose?

Maybe it’s stripping the story down so much. I’m quite minimalist, which is good. I don’t need to provide elaborate descriptions or instructions, I can just go straight in with character and dialogue and a maybe little bit of stage-setting. It’s different! And a ninety page screenplay is much quicker to write than a novel, it’s like taking a break. And of course writing screenplays has worked out quite well for me—one eventually became The Violent Century, one became Adler (my forthcoming comics mini-series) and I’m actually writing one now for some producers, so I have a genuine writing “gig”. We’ll see what happens with it!

What’s at the heart of the book for you?

To me, and I think like Osama, The Violent Century is a love story. That’s the core of it.

There’s a murder mystery of sort in there, and the big historical stuff I love to do, and it does I hope say something about our conception of heroism, and it’s about World War 2, and to a much smaller extent the Holocaust (which, again, I think you can only understand superheroes if you understand the world that created them). But at the heart of it, it’s a love story. What else is there to write about, if not love?

Ironically, some early reviews seem to suggest I was “obviously” inspired by all different kinds of comic books. The truth is I never read much comics—it wasn’t something we really had when I was growing up. I have been trying to educate myself more in reading them, and I love hanging out with comics creators, who are some of the nicest people you’d ever meet—but I was trying to come at the theme as if it were being created from scratch, in the 1930s, by these geeky Jewish kids (which I suppose is what I am!)

You know, they all had to change their names—Stanley Lieber became Stan Lee, Jacob Kurzberg became Jack Kirby, Robert Kahn became Bob Kane. I was fascinated by that erasure. And Lee and Jerry Siegel both appear as minor characters in The Violent Century!

I wonder what your geeky Jewish kid turned early 20th Century American comic book writer would’ve been. And how would changing your name to fit a market effect your writing? Would it be freeing? Limiting? Like wearing a mask? Like being forced to hide?

I was thinking about this recently, actually—I’d have gone for an Anglophone sounding equivalent—Larry Tiddler or something equally ridiculous, which sort of sounds the way English people usually tend to pronounce my name anyway!

My writerly alter-ego, who sometimes appears in the fiction, is Lior Tirosh. I also quite like the pen name “Sebastian Bruce” (who is briefly mentioned in Osama, and who I have written a short biography of—where he said “never trust a man with two first names.”).

The habit of using Anglophone names was quite common in Hebrew pulp fiction, where it was by “Mike Longshott” or “Kim Rockman”—great names! And then the actual writer’s name was usually given as “Translated by”. So I love the idea of alter egos and fictitious identities, but I think I’m far enough in to just stick with ‘Lavie Tidhar’ and hope for the best.

Hebrew pulp fiction! Can you talk a little more about Hebrew pulp novels influenced your writing?

They’re wonderful—wonderfully bad, and with the most amazingly lurid covers imaginable. They were pocket books, cheap paperbacks from the 1950s and 1960s—so many of them essentially produced by this one publisher, under different names. It’s said some of the best Israeli writers got their breaks writing pulps to begin with (under a host of pseudonyms).

I’ve been fascinated with them for a long time, especially the infamous Stalag novels, or Nazisploitation material that was incredibly popular (in an under the counter sort of way) in the 1960s, and which is incredibly rare (and collectible) now. They’re violent, pornographic (though very tame by today’s standard) and I think were able to say something, in pulp, that mainstream fiction wasn’t able to deal with.

I collect Hebrew pulp, to an extent—I was lucky recently that I lived in Jaffa right next door to its grand flea market, and I was able to walk through the market and pick up these incredibly rare books for next to nothing—romance chapbooks from the 1940s, early pornography, spy series (the improbable Patrick Kim: Karate Man, about a two meter tall Korean secret agent, which ran for years and an enormous amount of titles)—the marginal literature that people read but that is seldom recorded, seldom acknowledged.

The one I’m particularly obsessed with is the (real life) figure of David Tidhar, known as “the first Hebrew Detective”. He was a larger-than-life character who became the hero of a series of chapbooks written about him. I have two of them—they date back to the 1930s. I also have a signed copy of his autobiography, which is utterly bizarre—in four pages early on he seems to single-handedly—and in cold blood!—kill about forty people! He’s appeared in a couple of my works—particularly “The Projected Girl”, a novelette Ellen Datlow published a couple of years back in an anthology called Naked City. And he’s forthcoming again in a story I did for an anthology called Tel Aviv Noir. But I’m not done with him yet . . .

Back to The Violent Century: how did that novel challenge you in ways that your other books haven’t?

It was a nightmare to write! You know, Osama was probably the easiest thing I ever wrote, strangely enough. And the book I’ve been working on this year, I wrote it incredibly quickly (mostly because it was so dark—I couldn’t bear the thought of spending too long in that mental space).

The Violent Century was the opposite. It was hard, it was slow, it went through rewrite after rewrite—but each time it was getting closer to what it should have been. I made a stylistic choice early on in the way it is told, and the response to that wasn’t good, and I stopped working for three months because I didn’t know what to do—and then I decided I knew best after all, and kept going. You have to trust your instincts (though it can be scary!).

And it was written very much in the middle of a lot of transition, both in my circumstances and in my career—I started work on it when I thought my career was essentially over before it’s began, and finished it literally a week before winning the World Fantasy Award for Osama. So it’s been a real rollercoaster in many ways!

You’ve lived and traveled all around the world. How do you suppose that has affected your writing and sense of place?

I’ve said it before, that sense of place is incredibly important to me—not necessarily in overblown descriptions of places but for my own feel for a place in order for me to write about it. But at the same time, though I have set stories widely across the world, and I’ve lived in many of those places, I am increasingly uncomfortable with doing that—I am feeling more and more that I need to concentrate on my personal background, heritage, geography. I’m conflicted, in a way.

Vanuatu was a big influence on my science fiction short stories, for instance in the use of Bislama (the pidgin/creole English used in Vanuatu) which has fed into my fiction a lot. Laos strongly influenced Gorel & The Pot-Bellied God (and Osama starts and ends there). I’ve been lucky—I’ve climbed volcanoes and sailed canoes and I’ve lived in some of the most remote and beautiful places on Earth. I’ve hitchhiked across Eastern Europe and Southeast Africa. I travelled on the trans-Siberian railway and stood on a frozen river of ice in the Gobi desert. But so what? That doesn’t make you a good writer, necessarily (though it can make you a boring dinner companion!).

So I’m trying to go deeper inside myself, instead. And to write honestly and authentically from my own identity.

Which is not to say I’m at all averse to writing the occasional very silly mash-up!

You started off as a poet, with a Hebrew collection, and poetry continues to appear in your work—both English poetry and I think also Bislama poetry? What is the importance of poetry to you?

I’ve said this before, that I wish I was a great poet, but I’m not—I’m decent, maybe even good, but I won’t be great, the way Larkin or Plath were, say. Or Amichai or Celan—take your pick. I did publish, a little, here and there, but if I do write (which is very infrequently, sadly—and I think you never know if you’ll ever write another poem, which is what happened to Larkin, he knew it was over, and that was three years I think before he died—it was all gone), well, these days I just work them into the novels or a story, so at least they’re there, if only for myself!

Back when we started, you mentioned the novel you’re working on now. Can you talk a little bit about it?

I don’t want to say much at this stage, obviously—it’s on the face of it a Hardboiled detective novel, which is actually quite hard to do, a proper Hardboiled (Osama is noir, but it’s very far from Hardboiled!)—but of course it’s not really a detective novel at all. It’s sort of alternate history, but again, like Osama, it’s not really an alternate history either. It’s . . . going to be interesting to see what happens with it. I’m just going over it now before sending it to my editor. And it’s about the Holocaust again—I think this will have to be my last work set in, or about, World War 2 for a while (after Martian Sands and The Violent Century). I just can’t sustain it any more. It’s draining, but something I also can’t escape. My mother was born in a refugee camp in Germany, her parents survived Auschwitz. Most of my family died there. A handful lived through the camp. It’s something that I need to talk about almost obsessively, but finding the right way, the right form of art in which to do it, that’s difficult, and I think I come at it from a weird angle.

But this will be my final statement on a lot of that stuff—Nazism and sexuality and pulp fiction and Hitler and Zionism and and metafictional worlds and what have you! And there are a couple of novellas still that I’m toying with about all that. But I’d like to write something very different after that. And a part of me just wants to do an honest-to-God big old science fiction novel. And a part of me—in all seriousness—wants to do a Star Wars novel. Just because I’d be fascinated to take that big property and try and treat it really seriously—do a literary novel set in that world!

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:
What Are You Doing Here?

Daniel Abraham

One of my favorite movies of all time is 2007’s The Lookout. It’s a gorgeous, twisty little noir that manages to co-opt all the expectations of the genre and do something just a little different with all of them. In particular, there’s a scene where Jeff Daniels’ blind protector-figure Lewis sits down with love interest Luvlee played by Isla Fisher. He tells her the story of how he lost his sight, and ties his experience back into hers with a simple, telling question: What are you doing here?

When I was starting out as a professional writer, with a few stories here and there and working on a novel that might be publishable, I spent a lot of time talking to people who were further along in the business than I was. I asked one question of accomplished writers—“What is your ambition?” It was my own way of phrasing the idea “what are you doing here?” The answers I got never quite satisfied me.

Some folks wanted to win awards, some wanted to be taught a part of the modern literary canon, some wanted to be New York Times bestsellers. They told me about some things that people thought would be cool, things that would be genuinely gratifying to the ego. Maybe that was what they heard when I asked the question. Looking back, I don’t think that was what I meant, but it’s possible the question I was trying to ask doesn’t fit so well into casual conversation.

Anyone who dedicates a large chunk of their life to the pursuit of a massive and at least partly self-defined project—writing novels, dog agility, martial arts, building robots in the garage, programming, whatever—has something very interesting happening to them.

Often, when we don’t make money from them, we call these hobbies, but I have to say I really dislike that word. It has too many nuances of frivolity and fecklessness. I prefer fetishist. It’s also inaccurate, but it captures the idea of excitement and obsession and transgression in a way that seems more nearly true.

In a culture that is most comfortable defining us—you and me and all the rest—in terms of workers and consumers, the idea of someone throwing a deep passion into something that doesn’t make them money, passively entertain them, or get them laid is a little dangerous. It questions things that we don’t always feel comfortable questioning. Like, what’s the point of being alive? How am I different from the people around me, and do I have the courage to celebrate that, knowing that, to some degree of another, I will be punished for it?

Writers—even dedicated unpublished writers—can spend thousands of hours of their lives working with a craft that pays poorly and inconsistently for the chance to have their efforts casually dismissed by anyone with a Goodreads account. Most writers don’t make a living at it. Most books fail in the marketplace. By any rational standard, what we do is a terrible, terrible idea. Or consider cosplayers who can spend weeks and a fair amount of money on costumes for which they will not receive any professional or monetary credit. Or civil war reenactors who will actually go out in period-style wool uniforms in the heat of summer and man the walls of old forts and sleep in the encampments of the 1800s.

All of us are doing something that exists outside the realm of getting a good job and consuming things that entertain us or raise our social status. And the word “love” comes up a lot when we talk about these little enthusiasms. So you see why I reach for “fetish” over “hobby.” When I asked what people’s ambitions were, I was reaching for that question. What are we getting out of this? What desires to these things feed?

That’s why my first formulation—“What is your Ambition?”—was a bad one. I actually meant: “What are you doing here?” They heard: “What do you want?” That’s also a fair question, but it isn’t what I was looking for. The confusion’s pretty easy to track. They thought I was asking about goals, and “goal” sounds a lot like “end point.”

One of the interesting things I’ve found about writing stories is that a lot of times I won’t really understand what the story is about until I get to the end. My instinct is that these projects of ours are similar. Only with stories, there’s another step. I can edit stories. Fix them. Change their shapes to match the meaning that I found only at the end.

I don’t get to do that with my life. You don’t either. First drafts are what we are. And so, I hoped people would tell me what the end was they imagined their project was working toward. The fact that someone who wins a Hugo or the Booker or the Nobel doesn’t then stop working means that wasn’t the goal. They had some other ambition, because the drive didn’t stop. Likewise a cosplayer who has fashioned the perfect Duela Dent outfit doesn’t, I think, feel a sense of relief at never having to make another costume again. The best we could do, I thought, was define what would actually complete our work.

It was a failure of imagination on my part to think that all projects are moving toward completion.

And still, there were things I learned by asking the wrong questions, because the things we think—mistakenly—will satisfy us and tell us something about what our projects are, who we care about, and which fetish precisely we’re cultivating. And, more to the point, which ones we aren’t.

When I was in high school, I was very active in the theater program. I acted, I worked tech, and I volunteered at the local community theater. The important lesson—the one I still carry with me—came very early in that process. I must have been a freshman. I don’t remember the name of the woman who was running the program then, but the play we were working on was called “Her Infinite Variety”. It was basically a Shakespeare clips show with scenes from a bunch of different plays, all focusing on women. I’d gotten the role of Enobarbus from Antony and Cleopatra and all the interstitial bits bridging one scene from another. The only other male in the cast was Chad Thomas playing Petruchio against a Kate by a Stephanie . . . whose last name I can never recall, but she was Nellie’s friend and I liked her. It was not, you could say, the zenith of all high school theater productions. We were very young and greener than grass and uncomfortable in our skins and in ourselves. I have exactly two memories from the play.

One of them is being on stage trying not to cough while Chad and Stephanie were the center of attention. The other was one of the most important insights I had in that period of my life.

We were at rehearsal in the auditorium. The stage was wood and painted black. There was no one there but us, mumbling our Shakespeare and trying to make our gestures small and unobtrusive. If self-consciousness had mass, we’d have been a singularity. The director despaired. At the end of the hour, she called us all up the edge of the stage and said, “You’re up here to be seen. You’re up here to be heard.” And I understood. To this day, I have no fear of speaking in public. When I’m in front of a class or a room full of people, I know what I’m doing. I’m there to be seen and heard.

In college, I realized—with some help from a plain-spoken advisor—that theater wasn’t actually the project to which I wanted to dedicate my time and energy.

It was writing.

And for a long time, I went looking for something similar. That I didn’t quite know is probably why I spent so much time asking other people. Here I was, spending hours on the work and money on the postage. I knew I was there for something, but I couldn’t articulate what it was.

I don’t have a penny-drop moment for this. There wasn’t a bolt from the blue that made it all clear. Instead, it’s been a long, slow accretion of opinions, a process of trial and error. But here’s what I’ve come to—This is my ambition: I want to write stories that are hard to put down, that linger in memory, and that can be enjoyed by people who aren’t just like me.

That sounds simple. It isn’t. In all the professional writers I asked in all the years I posed the question, no one—not one—said that. They all answered with awards or sales figures or whatever happened to be the tower on their horizon at the time.

Goals, it seems to me, are like signposts. Ambitions are more like directions. The difference between them is like answering the question Where are you going? with New York or else East, east, farther and farther and always east. Goals, once reached, lose their power. I know that. I’ve reached a lot of mine, and they lose their shine as soon as you have them. They’re good for setting a direction for a while, but once you’re there, they aren’t useful anymore. Ambition never wears out.

So, artists and makers and cosplayers and dog agility enthusiasts and composers, I was wondering. What are you doing here?

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:
Seven and Counting

Neil Clarke

This issue marks the seventh anniversary of Clarkesworld Magazine. When we began publishing Clarkesworld in 2006, we started small—publishing two stories (each under four thousand words long) and a cover in each issue. Over the years we’ve gradually expanded, offering non-fiction, additional original stories, and most recently, reprints. We owe a debt of gratitude to the many people who supported us along the way and made our growth and continued existence possible. Quite a bit of credit goes to our staff, and, certainly to the authors and artists that entrusted us with their work. We also count on the various vendors that provide web and distribution services. Most of all we are thankful to our many readers, subscribers, and donors who make this all possible. Thank you all.

This month we’ll be increasing the number of devices that Clarkesworld subscriptions are available on. We’ve partnered with Maz Digital to produce apps for the iPad, iPhone and Android devices. That means Clarkesworld will be available through the Apple and Google Play newsstands. This project has been in the works for months, so it’s very satisfying to see it come to fruition. One of the more exciting things about this project is that we can work the podcasts into these editions. As the audio versions of stories become available, play buttons will activate within the issue!

Speaking of the podcast, this is also Kate Baker’s fourth anniversary as Podcast Director. I have to go on record as saying that bringing Kate on-board was probably the smartest hire I’ve made in my life. Under her supervision, the podcast has developed a loyal (and growing) following. She is the voice of Clarkesworld and never ceases to impress me with the level of professionalism and sheer talent that she brings to each episode. If you’ve never listened to one of our podcasts, do yourself a favor and try one. I was particularly impressed by her recent episode with Jim Kelly, where the two of them teamed up to read “The Promise of Space” from our September issue. It would make a great place to start. The live reading they did at Worldcon moved the audience to tears.

Oh, and Worldcon! I have to at least talk briefly about that. I think that was most fun I’ve had at a convention in ages. It was great meeting and chatting with so many of our readers. It was also uplifting to know so many people were pulling for us in the Hugos this year. (I’m looking at you, mystery people who yelled from the back of packed elevators, as they stopped and passed our floor.) As to the Hugos, to win the award for Best Semiprozine after everything that happened in 2012, (heart attack, kidney stones, losing my day job, hurricane, etc.), well, there aren’t words to describe it. I was simply overwhelmed and to be able to accept the award with Sean, Kate and Jason up there beside me . . . it just doesn’t get better. We will endeavor to live up to the honor.

Left to right: Neil Clarke, Sean Wallace, Jason Heller, Kate Baker.
Photo by James J. Seals.

The Chesley Award Ceremony was also held at Worldcon and I was invited to hand out the award for Best Magazine Cover. Three of the six nominees were from Clarkesworld: Ken Barthelmey, Julie Dillon, and Martin Faragasso. The ASFA (Association of Science Fiction & Fantasy Artists) members awarded the Chesley to Ken for his November 2012 cover! This is the second time a Clarkesworld cover has been so honored. Congratulations, Ken! Here’s his winning cover:

In addition to our new subscription tools, we have more improvements coming in the year ahead. The next item on the to-do list is the addition of the fourth original story, which will happen when we reach our next subscription milestone. After that, I’m hoping to add an art feature to our non-fiction offerings. I’ve been consulting with some of our artists to help shape that one. And of course, there is another secret project. Sorry, can’t talk about that one until contracts are signed.

The long-term goal remains to make this my full-time job, which probably isn’t as interesting to you as it is to me, but it will provide me time to dedicate to further improvements. There is only so far nights and weekends can take you. Later this month, Sean, Kate, and I will get together at Capclave, where I hope we’ll have time to do some brainstorming about our future. If you were there, what would you toss on the table?

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.