The Empress in Her Glory

Robert Reed

Fruits ripen and worlds ripen.

If not taken at the right moment, any ripe prize falls from its tree and rots away, and nothing is gained.

That was how They looked at the situation.

Call them “alien.” The word isn’t ridiculous, yet by the same token, no label does justice to their origins or far-reaching powers. And after four and a half billion years of slow, often irregular growth, the Earth was deemed ripe. In the parlance of universal laws, that little orb had grown just soft enough and sweet enough. That’s why They came. That’s why an ordinary day in late June came and left again, and in those hours, by invasive and ephemeral means, every aspect of human existence was conquered.

The new rulers were few, less than a hundred, but they were an experienced, well-practiced partnership. Avoiding sloppiness and haste, they followed their occupation with months of careful study. This was a new colony, one realm among ten thousand thousand scattered about the galaxy, and their first job was to understand the world’s nature. Out of that collection of meat and history, failure and divine promise, they had to select one good leader—a human face and mind to be entrusted with the administration of what was theirs.

At fifty-eight, Adrianne Hammer ruled an empire of cubicles and computers as well as an impressive stockpile of Folgers Classic Roast. She was sharp-minded and quietly demanding of her seven-person staff. Weighing data from multiple sources, she was paid to make honest, unsentimental guesses about the future. Economic growth and downturns were predicted. The odds of storms and plagues and various medical breakthroughs had to be rendered as numbers. Hers was one minuscule department inside a major insurance conglomerate, but while other departments often duplicated their work, Adrianne and her team were unusually competent. Which is to say that the eight of them were correct a little more often than their competitors.

She was a widow. People who barely knew Adrianne knew that much. Her husband had struggled for a year against liver cancer. His prognosis was poor but never hopeless, and he might have survived. There were good reasons for optimism. But the man must have been too terrified to face his difficult future. One morning, Adrianne kissed him before driving to work, and the man subsequently drank half a bottle of quality wine and then jabbed a pistol under his fleshy chin.

As a rule, humans enjoy tragedies that involve others. They also believe suffering lends depth to the afflicted. Years after the event, co-workers still spoke about the police coming to deliver the awful news. It happened to be a rainy day. The poor lady was sitting alone in the cafeteria. The officers sat in front her and beside her, speaking slowly, and she seemed to hear them. But shock and pain must have left her numb. With a flat, unemotional voice, she asked, “Where did it happen?” Her husband shot himself at home. “But what room?” Inside the home office. “Who found him?” A delivery man looked through the window, called it in. She nodded, eyes narrowing. “Which gun?” she demanded. “And how bad is the mess?”

That’s when a bystander took hold of her hands, urging Adrianne to shut her eyes for a moment, to collect her wits.

She had one child, a grown boy already living in a distant state. Husband and son were the only people pictured on her work desk, and in keeping with a spirit of relentless honesty, neither photograph was flattering. The dead Mr. Hammer sported a beefy, rounded face dominated by an alcoholic’s bright nose. The son was an ugly fellow needing a comb and a smile. People on Adrianne’s staff knew about her life. She wasn’t particularly secretive, no. But there was a persistent story, popular in the other departments and divisions, that she was a cat lady. Didn’t she look the part? Except Adrianne didn’t keep any pets, and she didn’t suffer from mothering urges, and despite some very confident rumors, she also didn’t quilt or garden or ride cruise ships. She wasn’t unattractive, and so acquaintances imagined male friends. But except for a few dinner dates and a couple change of sheets, she never dated. Men and romance were difficulties best left behind. Alone inside the tidy, cat-free house, Mrs. Hammer filled her private hours with activities that mirrored her official job, She stood before a tall desk, in the same office where her husband killed himself. To her, the world was one giant and splendid puzzle, and like the best puzzles, it was built out of simple repeating pieces. Her passion was to searched the Internet for odd papers and unexplored pools of data, reading everything interesting as slowly and carefully as she could, and when she was ready—but only when ready—she would weave conclusions that were often a little more true than every other half-mad opinion on the Web.

Adrianne Hammer was a blogger.

Regularity. Reliability. Those were qualities she demanded of herself, and her tiny audience had always appreciated the results. She posted every Sunday, and the only postings missed were because of one bout of swine flu, and before that, her husband’s messy suicide. Thousands of people had her tools and intellect, or they had better. But brilliance likes to be focused. The average genius wants to fall in love with some narrow cause, a topic that generates passion and that she can master better than anyone else. And the most powerful minds often ended up being driven by the rawest, most predictable emotions.

But this human didn’t suffer from a narrow focus.

In fifteen years, that lifelong Republican had successfully predicted elections and civil wars as well as giving shrewd warnings about which stable nations would fail to rule effectively. She warned her readers about stock bubbles and the diminishing stocks of easy petroleum. China was on the precipice of ten environmental disasters. Russia was a rotted husk. She studied SARS and MERS and then successfully predicted the onset of GORS. Climate change was a growing maelstrom worth visiting every couple months, and with a perpetually reasoned tone, she warned her careless species to watch out for even more serious hazards. Comet impacts. Solar flares. Nuclear war between small players and firestorms born from mistakes made in North Dakota.

In one popular posting, she wrote about the Singularity. “I can only guess when the day comes, but self-aware computers are inevitable. In fact, synthetic intelligence is more likely today than it was yesterday. And it’s a little more plausible this afternoon than it was just this morning.”

At the heart of every posting was the inescapable truth: The future was chaos smothered inside more chaos. Even at her best, Adrianne cautioned that no marriage of learning and insight can envision what comes in another ten years, or in some cases, in another ten seconds.

Yet even the most difficult, disorganized race had to have its winner.

And Adrianne Hammer was among of the quickest of the best.

The invisible lords made her one candidate among twenty-three. Each human was secretly examined, every life measured against an assortment of ideals. Adrianne was fifth on the list, and she wouldn’t have climbed any higher. But her son called her at home one evening. Intoxicated, plainly furious, the young man began by telling his mother that she was a bloodless bitch, unloving and ugly.

Adrianne reacted with a soft sigh, shaking her head.

The son’s rapid prattle continued, insults scattered through recollections from childhood. Old slights and embarrassments were recounted. One cold, wicked parent had destroyed the young man’s future. Didn’t she see the crimes? Didn’t she understand what a miserable mess she had made of his little life?

Once and then again, she said her son’s name. Quietly, but not softly.

The tirade finally broke. Then he muttered, “Dad.”

She nodded, apparently unsurprised by the conversation’s turn.

“Yes,” she said.

“You should have known,” the young man said. “Of all people, you should have seen it coming. Why didn’t you sense what he was planning?”

“Because he didn’t give clues.”

“Dad didn’t have to kill himself,” her son said. “He wasn’t that sick.”

She said, “Honey, he was very ill. And that doesn’t matter now.”

“It does matter.”

“Not after the gunshot,” she said. “That’s why people kill themselves. One action, and everything else is inconsequential.”

Both stopped talking.

Forty seconds passed.

“I wasn’t there,” her son complained.

“Nobody was.”

“Poor Dad was alone.”

“We’re all alone, honey.”

By a thousand means, the Earth’s new owners studied the woman’s pain. They watched the candidate open her mouth and close it again. They measured her breathing, her heart. The electricity running along her wet neurons. They even tried to read her thoughts, which was difficult with most humans and quite impossible with this specimen.

To their minds, opacity was a noble quality.

“After he shot himself,” her son began.

“I know.”

“At the funeral—”

“I remember.”

“You were angry at him. Because he used the .357. Because he aimed up and made a mess in the ceiling, and you’d have to find someone to come pull out the bones and make patches and then paint. That’s why you were angry with him.”

“I wasn’t angry,” she said.

“Yes you were.”

“No, I was reasonable frustrated,” she said. “You’re always the furious one.”

“Don’t fucking say that.”

Eyes narrowed. Adrianne fell silent.

Her pulse was slow, regular.

“You see everything, Mom. You should have predicted this.”

Just then, Adrianne’s heart rate elevated. Slightly.

“You could have taken precautions,” he said.

“It was my mistake,” she agreed. “I underestimated your father’s fears, and overestimated his aversion to violence.”

Her son sobbed.

Honesty was easy for the woman. “I always assumed your father would drink himself to death,” she said. “Which perhaps was how he made himself sick in the first place.”

“Listen to yourself.”

“I always do.”

“You don’t care. You make an awful mistake like that, and it’s nothing to you.”

“One error among thousands,” she pointed out.

The young man said nothing.

Adrianne’s pulse had returned to normal.

“Do you miss him, Mom?”

She said nothing, apparently giving the problem some thought. “I miss you,” she said at last.

Her son broke the connection.

Adrianne set the phone down on the desk, and after a sigh and seven seconds of introspection, she glanced up at the patched, repainted ceiling. Then she returned to work, crafting a long, tightly reasoned blog about thorium reactors, their blessings and why they were coming too late to the discussion.

Those watching came to one enduring conclusion: This was an exceptionally tough-minded, determined beast.

Which was why a month later, without warnings or the barest explanations, an obscure blogger was given complete control over the secretly conquered world.

At work and at home, Adrianne wielded tools that she didn’t understand. The web crawlers and other bots gathered data and then filtered it for her eyes. But even the most competent expert wouldn’t have noticed the unique bots added to her account. That small event happened early on a Saturday morning. Waking at ten after five, as usual, she discovered e-mails and classified reports from mainland China. Asking for origin reports, the new software told reasonable lies about failures to encrypt and a nameless hacker who must have left her cleverness sit exposed for too long.

This week’s blog was supposed to focus on a renewed US space program.

Not anymore.

Adrianne read and reread the translations, slept five hours, and finished her research on Sunday morning. The blog was written in two hours, which was quick for her. Instead of railguns, she described the secret fissures inside the Three Gorges Dam and how the Chinese government was doing nothing of significance, nervously hoping that their wildest worries would prove without merit.

At the moment of publication, the empress had 709 scattered followers.

Sunday evening was unremarkable, and the next two days were pleasant enough. Wednesday seemed to offer more of the same. A courtyard was adjacent to the cafeteria. Adrianne sat in the shadows, eating a peanut butter sandwich and small apple and then two Girl Scout cookies bought from a colleague’s daughter. Thin Mints. Arguably the finest cookie in the history of humankind.

“How bad?” a bypasser asked.

“They still don’t know,” his companion said.

“How many people live downstream?”

“Millions.”

The men were past, gone. The final cookie was half eaten. That very calm woman took a moment to examine her tooth marks in the bright black chocolate. Then she finished the cookie and the last of her low fat milk, and she disposed of the trash and used the restroom, returning to her station two minutes before one o’clock.

Every monitor in the office showed the Chinese flood. The giant dam didn’t just split open. It had failed catastrophically, dissolving into rubble and a wall of filthy black water that was slashing through the nightbound countryside, and it wouldn’t stop flowing until wreckage was washing up on American shores.

That portion of the future was easy to predict.

Other parts were less certain.

Most humans would have been traumatized, and many would have mentioned their brilliance or dumb luck. But no, Adrianne had a project to shepherd along. Her department was trying to calculate the likely changes in life spans in the Western world. Insurance companies never stopped making these assessments. Until now, she had been enjoying a productive week, discovering speculative works in places that normally didn’t share ideas, including several interesting reports about a small start-up in France working with anti-aging drugs.

Adrianne was the only person in the office who had found the anti-aging references. Which was bothersome. Her staff was badly distracted, but she sent one of her boys chasing the French story, expecting and even hoping that he would follow the crumbs to the same destination.

But he didn’t, no.

“I’m not finding anything, ma’am. Where am I supposed to look?”

Adrianne drove home as usual. The evening news was filled with videos of cities being gutted, churning waters filled with animal corpses and human corpses. She stayed awake past midnight, just after a light-water reactor and various storage facilities were inundated. The disaster had reached a new level of appalling. By five o’clock the next morning, her time, martial law had been imposed across China, and there were rumors of a major shake-up in Beijing.

The Chinese civil war remained weeks in the future.

Arriving late to work, Adrianne found one of her boys standing beside her desk. He smiled nervously. The young man looked happy yet uncertain, rocking from foot to foot. His voice cracked when he said, “Hello,” and then he laughed at his obvious terror.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

Her voice broke. Just a little, in places only she could hear.

The man tried laughing again. But he couldn’t make himself. “I don’t read it a lot,” he confessed.

“Read what?” she asked.

“Your blog.” He sighed. “But I did see something . . . I don’t know . . . it’s been a couple years. And you were right.”

“Was I?”

“China. It was ripe for environmental disaster.”

At that moment, Adrianne would have been hard-pressed to write any coherent opinions about Chinese futures. The flood was enormous, but good things might come from this. Sometimes chaos supplied the fuel to make meaningful changes, destroying corruption, ensuring stability for hundreds of millions of survivors.

“You were right,” he repeated.

Finally, she saw what was obvious. “You didn’t read my last article. Did you?”

“No, ma’am, I’m sorry. Like I said, I don’t get to it much.”

Adrianne felt sick.

“Why? Should I become a follower?” He was nearly a boy, years younger than her son. “I’ll read it right now. How’s that?”

“No,” she said.

Loudly, almost shouting.

He blinked. “Okay. You’re right. Work first.”

Adrianne’s hope was to cross the day, to finish these hours and escape back home and then make some accommodations to this very unlikely coincidence. But the peace only lasted until ten in the morning. People from other departments began to stop outside the office. Familiar, nameless faces came to look at the slender woman with the neat gray hair and out-of-fashion glasses. With caution and nervous wonder, they stared, and then she would glance up and they would retreat. Then one bold lawyer asked how she could be so right about this goddamn mess. And suddenly her own people were demanding explanations. Adrianne had no choice but some species of honesty, and then nobody was working. Everyone inside her office and throughout the complex began to read and reread a few thousand words predicting the century’s largest disaster.

Adrianne took her lunch home and called in sick.

By evening, with the help of two cocktails, she checked her blog. The comments went on and on, many in Chinese. And she had just under fourteen thousand followers, the number rising every time she refreshed.

Someone had fed her the information.

That was the first and still obvious explanation. She kept imagining the Chinese dissident, crafty and out of reach, and with that bit of false-knowledge in hand, Adrianne wrote her next blog—a careful piece using bits of new research. With words and tidy graphs, she reminded her readers that hydrocarbons were common, both in the world and across the universe. But being common didn’t matter. Most of the world’s oil was too expensive to lift out of the ground, and what could be lifted was often too expensive to refine, and the energy gained at the day’s end was approaching the grim fulcrum where the modern world couldn’t afford to pay its bills.

The topic was familiar. She had investigated peak oil many times. But she had more followers now, a lot of new heads to absorb her thinking, and that’s why she wrote the piece, expecting that a few of her readers would appreciate and maybe even welcome her calm logic.

Fifty-eight years of life gives a person experience with insults and curses. But what surprised Adrianne was the intimacy of the threats—violent words coupled with images from people who didn’t simply doubt her numbers and good sense, but who wanted to come her house just so they could cut off her head, to claim it as a trophy they would nail to their truck hoods or use in ways far worse than that.

She slept badly for a week. And while awake, every stranger deserved small anxieties.

Yet nothing evil ever came to her door, and everything that was good proved to be excellent. Adrianne’s staff rallied around her. Unfit men in their thirties and forties acted as unofficial bodyguards, and without fanfare, the youngest member of her staff—a girl in her mid-twenties—broke company rules by bringing both a Taser and pepper spray into the office.

That next Sunday, Adrianne published a brief, dense blog about magneto-inertial fusion engines—the best means for opening up the solar system. And inside the piece, she included schematics plucked from what looked like a NASA website.

Her followers had reached eighty thousand.

The rocket blog was followed by a long, complicated piece about increasing lifespans and why that was a damnable trend. Long-term environmental successes would never be possible if too many bodies were prepared to live comfortably in the increasingly overheated world.

By then, her followers’ comments had dropped by half, insults by one third, and she had the carefully plotted data to prove it.

By then, the Chinese civil war was underway, and feeling invested in that particular horror, Adrianne suggested a solution. Like an innoculate into a sick body, she proposed that one of the peripheral Chinese enclaves could supply a new paradigm. Taiwan was offered, then dismissed. Too much history. Hong Kong had its potentials, but it didn’t have the necessary freedom of motion. So instead she voted for the distant and very wealthy city-state of Singapore. Its authoritarian leaders and billionaires were Chinese by heritage. They could broker deals and supply guidance that wouldn’t end the strife today, but in another couple years, perhaps with only fifty million dead from war and famine, some new normalcy could be established.

Adrianne’s final Monday at work was pleasantly forgettable.

Actuarial adventures.

Lunch.

More adventures.

Plus one long meeting.

Then home and a light dinner, one drink and idle reading, and bed.

On Monday, Ghawar was the greatest oil field on the Earth. But early Tuesday, Adrianne’s time, a series of prolonged earthquakes rolled across northern Saudi Arabia. By Wednesday morning, virtually every oil well in the region had seized up and died. The spot market for crude was driving towards three hundred dollars. An initial explanation, full of panic and half-informed conjecture, blamed the greedy Saudis. An ocean of oil had been removed from the Ghawar field, and the strata must have been pushed too hard. Despite sound geologic evidence that this was impossible, an entire region had slumped, and the world was several million barrels short of oil today and tomorrow, and always.

By Wednesday evening, the Prime Minister of Singapore was opening public talks with three of the main combatants inside China.

Thursday morning saw a news conference from France. An upstart medical firm was going to sell expensive compounds that could only be described as elixirs, and lifespans would soon triple.

But the blogger at the heart of it remained surprisingly unnoticed. Only half a dozen news crews sat on the street outside Adrianne’s home. With her phone off and drapes closed, it was possible to believe that her life hadn’t changed. Then came Friday morning, and a team of MIT engineers announced that the design for a novel rocket propulsion system, posted on a small blog, was not from any governmental database. Or commercial database. Nor any other reasonable source. Yet A. Hammer’s documents contained quite a few interesting features, some invoking the newest ideas about energy in the universe, and it might be possible to build a prototype star-drive within the next five years.

By then, the world was plunging into its Grand Depression.

But those financial horrors were augmented by promises of endless life and easy commutes to the other worlds.

The raging chaos had a center—one quiet woman barely known a month ago.

Adrianne escaped her house through the back gate, taking a cab to work. Nobody in her office was pretending to work. They watched the news together, the door left mostly closed. A manager and two security people arrived before lunch, and Adrianne was ushered into the largest conference room. Every important person in the corporation had gathered to stare at her. Several of them remembered to thank her for her long service. Then the CFO offered her a worried smile and a substantial buyout.

Everybody adored her work, but she was too much of a distraction.

Twenty million followers were just the beginning. Adrianne was going to have advertising revenues flowing from her blog, and she had her buyout package, plus savings and numerous offers of cash for appearances on news networks and talk shows. With those prospects and a numbed resolve, she began the long walk back to her office and the cubicle, ready to wish her people the best before heading off into this unforeseen life.

But stepping through the door, an idea took hold.

Seven others watched the old lady make coffee for everyone. The Folgers was brewing, and she sat with her back to her desk, in a pose they had never seen before. She didn’t look regal or even particularly confident. No, nothing was special in her appearance, save for the weariness of great events, and they felt sorry for the lady, even while wondering which of them would end up in charge. She looked at each face. Then she gave the carpet a long stare. Somebody thought to pour coffee into eight mugs and everyone had their share and there was sitting and more silence, except out in the hallway where someone had slipped indoors. A supporter or an enemy: The invader’s goals were never known. Security noticed the interloper and tackled her, and when the screaming was finished, Adrianne looked up at the ceiling. Quietly, soberly, she said, “There’s no reasonable set of factors that can make this possible. What’s happening. To me and to the world. I don’t know why, but I seem to have a pipeline to things I don’t understand.”

Nobody could disagree with that assessment.

Then she surprised them, saying, “If somebody has to wield this kind of influence, why not me?”

It was the first inkling that their boss saw the potential.

“But I need a staff,” she said. “A well-paid, familiar group of people who know me well enough not to take offense when I’m lost in work.”

The girl with the Taser said, “Oh. You want to hire us.”

“And later, others,” Adrianne admitted. “But you’re my nucleus.”

Every head nodded.

There. It was agreed. They would leave work together, after tendering their resignations.

“Nothing about this is reasonable,” Adrianne continued. “But this world is built on unreasonable coincidences. Until we understand what’s happening, I’m going to be the Empress of Everything. And for as long as I have the job, I should at least try to do my best.”

Her house was abandoned. There was no choice in the matter. Adrianne lived for three days on the Taser girl’s sofa, writing a sharp blog delineating recent history and her apparent, surprising hold on some form of cosmic power or blunt magic. Whatever this was. Her hostess suggested adding a little personal noise to the piece. “So people think they know you.” But it was Adrianne who gave the post its signature moment. Mentioning the horrors of liver cancer, she added a quick request for people to send a few dollars to one of several appropriate agencies. And by the time she slipped out of the girl’s apartment, nearly a hundred million dollars had appeared in the welcoming coffers. With a flood of unexpected gifts choking the blogger’s PayPal account too.

That next week was spent in anonymous hotel rooms, talking strategy, giving possibilities flesh and shadow. Her people did their best to keep the media at bay, scaring off senators and business leaders as well. And they also found a recently constructed, never occupied warehouse complex, far from the city but close to highways and a high-grade optical cable that could be secured.

Only the president was given access to the world’s boss. There were three long, very exhausting conversations. The last talk was a face-to-face session. Adrianne was touring the warehouse, preparing to sign a long-term lease on the facility and a power commitment from an adjacent windmill farm. A security firm still needed to be hired, and her team was interviewing remodelers. Apartments would be installed in back, and because nobody knew where this madness would lead, plans were being drawn up for a school and playground for children, a swimming pool for everyone, and a bar for the ruling class.

In those two phone conversation, the president tried charm. But charm had proved useless. Ready to unleash stronger tactics, his helicopters landed on the empty parking lot. Flanked by high-ranking civilians and officers in dress uniforms, he met the empress in the front office. With a careful blending of rage and authority, he defined his level of scorn. Adrianne listened silently. Then he invited his aides to talk about various legal actions that might be appropriate. She interrupted with a raised hand, which amusingly was enough to stop every voice. Everyone stared at her. “Which laws have I broken? I would very much like to know,” she said. Then the ranking general outlined what his people would do if faced with a dangerous power trying to usurp the nation’s security. “Except that sounds like war,” was her response. “And I don’t approve of war. If I can find the words, I intend to make every army in the world obsolete.”

That brought a chill, and more rage.

Sensing failure, the president returned to charm.

“You’re a registered Republican,” he pointed out. “I’m assuming you voted for me.”

“No,” she said. “I’ve never voted for national candidates.”

“But you do vote, correct?”

“Only for local candidates. Bond issues. I have a tiny but real chance of making an impact. But I can’t pretend to have a role in presidential races.”

The man needed had to pause, giving himself a chance to recalculate.

“Come over here, sir. If you would.”

He joined her beside a laptop.

“I’ve been working on a new blog. In fact, I intend to publish in the next few minutes.”

Some prior briefing came to mind. “It’s Saturday. I was told that you put these things out on Sundays.”

“Except I don’t have a normal job anymore. And with the change of fates, I think I need to embrace a more ambitious schedule. Which makes this is a good day to begin.”

Keys were pressed. The unpublished text appeared.

Stepping back, she said, “Read the piece, if you wish. Sir.”

The blog spoke about the dangers inherent in the aging nuclear fleets. Adrianne was arguing that the only wise course was to put the weapons to bed, today if possible. But she was afraid that people wouldn’t change their natures until they received a good clear warning. So at the end of the piece, she had written, “I want to see one of their swords pull itself out of its scabbard.”

The president hadn’t finished reading the piece.

“Lady, what are you talking about?” he asked.

She didn’t answer. Her heart pounding, she clicked the publish button and stepped back. “I don’t understand what’s happened to me,” she said, quietly but not quietly. “I can make guesses. I doubt if anyone can decipher what’s true, not in the short-term. But there are clues. If you look hard. With the Three Gorges and the stardrive, I was fed information of something already happening. Which is one phenomena. But I wrote about oil. On my own. And whatever this power is, it needed time to make preparations before the quake struck, before we started this overdue collapse into economic ruin.

“Sir, I have a sense,” she said. “My very strong intuition is that simple directions are more likely to lead to immediate effects.

“Consider this blog a test.

“Both of us need to know. What marvels do I have in this hand?”

Moments later, an alarm sounded.

An Air Force general turned away, muttering into a sat-phone.

Voices spoke of “the football.”

“It’s ours and it’s launched,” someone cried out.

The president looked ill, looked simple, his face drained of blood and most of its life. He glared at Adrianne. He stared numbly at his own hands. And then someone said, “No, the missile broke apart after launching. It’s down. It over.”

Adrianne turned to her people.

Winked.

Then looking at the visitors, she said, “I have six blogs written. They’re waiting on servers around the world. If anything unseemingly happens to me or to any of my people, those pieces get published automatically. And you don’t want those ideas getting loose on the world. Believe me.”

They believed, at least enough to retreat.

Then the Taser girl asked, “Is that right? Six blogs waiting to kill the world?”

The Empress didn’t seem to hear the questions. She seemed intrigued by the details in the her own tiny hand. Then to the hand, in that calm dry voice, she said, “By tomorrow, there will be. Now let’s get to work.”

Eventually she would be known as Adrianne the First. But in those early years, she was the Hammer, a respected and feared and often scorned entity sitting in a warehouse in the bleakest bowels of Ohio. She appeared on television when she wanted, which was rare. Her speeches and occasional interviews proved nothing except that she was no public speaker. And where the lowliest princess—some creature born with a good name and small inheritance—would have carried her head high, Adrianne became more and more like she had always been. Chilled. Collected. Long of thought, careful with words. Not the smartest person in a room, but the entity most likely to see exactly what was happening and what the next step needed to be.

During her brief, busy reign, she oversaw a thousand projects. Not every initiative was a success. Some were close to disasters, in fact. Urging Egypt and Jordan to annex the Palestine enclaves proved horrific, and her plan for paying the Jewish populations to emigrate to Canada was only a little more productive. But approaching her mid-sixties, Adrianne saw lifespans expanding and the first eight flights of the infamous Hammer Drive. Words carrying her name triggered changes in tax codes worldwide. Small, tidy rebellions began and ended with her words, various authoritarian regimes swept away, and she was better than anyone else when it came to picking the most deserving winners. And more importantly, she was very quick to admit errors and change paths.

No, the lady wasn’t loved, but that didn’t stop people from building temples in her honor.

Her rational mind was the largest force among many, but the public talked about her magic for saving lives that she had never noticed.

Her stoic personality never failed. Early on, she told her core group that she was an agent in a very mysterious game. Aliens, machines, or demons from some unmapped dimension: Explanations were numerous and useless and why bother? But she accepted that she was too old to benefit from the new elixirs, and even if she lived a million years, she was still human. In other words, she was going to run out of good advice.

“Ten or twelve years from now,” she guessed.

She was wrong by a factor of two.

A very good guess, in other words.

On an ordinary Wednesday, she published a small blog about the desperate need for rain in northern Mexico. It was one of the little gifts that she gave to single places, and she didn’t expect instantaneous results. But that same day, in Capetown, a half Zulu and half Boer fellow published plans for a machine that would suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere—a simple and quick device powered by sunlight and the earth’s heat.

His machine was authentic.

Her rain never fell.

She retired, but not without some difficulties. Within a week, this woman who cared nothing for pomp and spectacle had little to fill her time, and perhaps that’s why she ended up in a serious depression. Returning to her old house, she drank. She slept too much. And then she didn’t sleep at all, weeping for no reason.

The tumor was discovered three months after she became an ordinary citizen.

Surgery was a possibility, but with the likelihood of significant brain damage. She refused. Radiation and various forms of chemo would be stopgaps, prolonging life by weeks at most. She considered and decided otherwise. On their own initiative, three of her original team flew to Capetown, attempting to meet with the new emperor. Their plan was to argue for a special blog, perhaps a call for a new cancer-fighting agent. The right words written in the proper order, not unlike a magical chant, might lead researchers to find a miracle hiding inside some little tropical plant. But the emperor refused to see them, much less consider their request. And hearing about the trip and the verdict, Adrianne sighed, saying, “Wisdom and kindness. They’re not the same word spelled with different letters.”

There was still money in the coffers.

Doctors and cooks and maids and more doctors arrived and then left the house again, following complicated schedules.

And the original seven disciples took up residence in the nearby houses, complete with spouses and kids and at least one mistress.

Adrianne left her doors unlocked.

Her balance wasn’t worth trusting anymore, and she hated the chore of seeing who was calling.

One day, a boy from another neighborhood invited himself inside that famous house. He was curious what brain cancer looked like. It looked like an ordinary old lady sitting before a small desk, watching a thousand solar panels opening like giant flowers on someone’s desert. It looked like a dull thing to watch, and he said so.

The woman turned slowly, looking at him and then looking back at the monitor.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“Sitting,” she said. And she began to laugh, one hand touching the back of her skull. He thought she was strange and left.

She didn’t notice her solitude.

Then another boy said, “You should lock your doors.”

Adrianne turned to discover what she assumed was the first boy. Except he had grown up in the last few moments. Grown up and grown heavy too, and his hair had left him and then come back again. The new hair was paler and thicker than natural, which was common with these treatments.

Thirty years had passed in an instant.

This was a very interesting disease, she thought.

But no, that face wasn’t the same face, even with the added decades. She almost remembered the face and its name. But then with a hurt tone, the new visitor said, “I’m your son. I’ve come to see you.”

That seemed enough reason to stand.

The legs proved strong, at least for the moment.

“I heard the news,” her son said.

“There’s always news,” she said. “What are you talking about?”

“Your health,” he said.

“Is there something I don’t know?”

“Oh, Mother.” The man blinked, shrinking down a bit.

“You mean this growth.” She tapped her head and laughed again. Twice in one day. She was practically a giddy little girl. “Yes, it’s going to kill me. But probably not today.”

The conversation stopped altogether.

Casting for words, she fell into cliches. “How is your life, son?”

“Well,” he said, happy for the prodding. “I’m doing well. Sober three years, and very rich.”

“Are you?”

“Exceptionally rich, thanks to you.”

“Sober, I meant.”

But the man with the fresh hair didn’t want to dwell on old weaknesses. “It’s amazing what people give you, particularly when they learn that your mother controls the world and everyone on it.”

Honest thoughts came to Adrianne.

She worked hard, and her mouth remained closed.

The man was wearing both fine clothes and a smug smile, and he was watching her. But his thoughts were on the move. Feeling strong enough, he stopped smiling. “This is where he killed himself. Isn’t it?”

She said nothing.

He looked at the ceiling. Then he stepped past her, touching the desk. The earlier desk was gone, too big and too bloody for the room that she had wanted. Maybe he didn’t remember the original furniture. She refused to clear up these matters. What she wanted was to be left alone . . .

But this was her only child.

Mindless, uncaring pressure on neurons. Pressure bringing emotion. Is that where this sudden trickle of tears was coming from?

Her son didn’t notice.

Again, the smug, rich-man’s smile.

“I was sorry when you lost the job,” he confessed.

“Were you?”

“But it’s all right,” he said. “Our relationship is still valuable.”

“Is it?” she asked, wiping one wet eye.

“You often talk to our overlords,” he said.

“I don’t,” she said.

“But they don’t know that. And I’m very convincing.”

She approached the office door. Wanting something. To send him away, or flee for herself?

The awful man kept talking.

“In fact, I’ll sometimes claim that I can talk to them too. The powers in charge. Not so much that I have to prove anything. But you know, it’s crazy what smart people believe, if you give them any excuse.”

She gasped.

Her son blinked, straightening his back.

“Help me,” she said. “Would you do me one enormous favor?”

He nodded.

“Wait,” she said.

Waiting was an easy favor, easily accomplished.

She returned with the handgun and bullets, and his first reaction was to warn, “Guns are illegal now. You made it so.”

“I did,” she agreed. “Maybe somebody should arrest me.”

He watched her load one chamber.

“Now,” she said. “Kill me.”

“What?”

“That’s the favor. I’m sick. I’m going to get sicker and die horribly. But according to euthanasia laws—my wise laws—I can implore another person to end my suffering by whatever means I want.”

“Mother . . . !”

“And I don’t want to do the chore myself. So if you would.” She shoved the gun into his hands, aiming the barrel at her chest. Then, as if having second thoughts, she said, “No, wait. Let me sit, and we can catch the bullet and the spray with pillows. I’ll get my pillows out of the bedroom.”

“Mother, no!”

The heavy man dropped the gun and ran away.

The disturbance was finished.

Alone, Adrianne unloaded the one bullet, placing the weaponry into a closet. And exhausted, she sat at the desk, watching a live view from a probe launched last month and already halfway to Neptune.

Time passed.

And someone else came to visit.

The first boy was back, an older sister holding his hand.

“This is her,” he said with conviction. “That’s our Empress.”

Adrianne didn’t have the legs to stand. That’s why their faces were at the same level when she said, “Yes, it’s your empress. Sitting in her glory.”

She laughed hard.

The children laughed with her, to be friendly.

Touching her head once more, she said, “The monster inside my head. It’s pushing at the best nerves.”

They stopped.

“A talent for comedy,” she said, her laugh growing dark and slow. “That’s what the gods give you, if they want to be kind, right before you die.”

About the Author

Robert Reed has had eleven novels published, starting with The Leeshore in 1987 and most recently with The Well of Stars in 2004. Since winning the first annual L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future contest in 1986 (under the pen name Robert Touzalin) and being a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer in 1987, he has had over 200 shorter works published in a variety of magazines and anthologies. Eleven of those stories were published in his critically-acclaimed first collection, The Dragons of Springplace, in 1999. Twelve more stories appear in his second collection, The Cuckoo’s Boys [2005]. In addition to his success in the U.S., Reed has also been published in the U.K., Russia, Japan, Spain and in France, where a second (French-language) collection of nine of his shorter works, Chrysalide, was released in 2002. Bob has had stories appear in at least one of the annual “Year’s Best” anthologies in every year since 1992. Bob has received nominations for both the Nebula Award (nominated and voted upon by genre authors) and the Hugo Award (nominated and voted upon by fans), as well as numerous other literary awards (see Awards). He won his first Hugo Award for the 2006 novella “A Billion Eves“. His most recent book is the The Memory of Sky (Prime Books, 2014).

Let Baser Things Devise

Berrien C. Henderson

1: Pierre

Before Clockwork Corp.’s space ape project heads managed to uplift the chimpanzee, he was simply known as No. 157. Some anonymous lab assistant nicknamed him Pierre, and the moniker stuck. After Pierre survived the rigors of testing and training, his world went dark for a time once the Neuroscience Division got their needles and scalpels and computer-brain interfaces onto and into him.

He was a child again. A sponge. Malleable. He had dreams and remembered them—the great ape facility from which he‘d come, the jungle before that. A troop. He had flirted with moonlight and squinted against sunshine while his troop loped through the undergrowth and scampered up the trees and foraged amid the generous loam where he groomed and was groomed. Various Shes were there in limbo, too, between dream and memory. Pierre’s mind reached out, clutching at phantoms from a blurry past and running into the long now—all of it oozing and hrmmm-ing like fluorescent lights with faulty ballasts. He weighed his new life amid antiseptic halls, an institution’s sterility and scientists’ data points and vagaries of conditioning against the harsher realities of death, quick in its smiting, in the tropics and faces framed with their own intelligence. He yearned for a place absent this new awareness—signals of higher and greater thoughts like thunder at the hem of distant mountains.

Inside a year, he learned to speak with his newly acquired vocal cords—3D bio-printed wonders of Clockwork Corp.’s NuFlesh(tm) proprietary systems—and, thus, No. 157 became the first uplifted articulate chimpanzee.

And he was going to the moon.

2: Comped

Pierre received the ping of a incoming message on his way out the door. He had a mandatory conditioning session and made to ignore the message to queue up later, then fell short of his initial plans.

Bureau of Personhood.

He caught himself wanting to oohoohooh in anxiety and excitement but tamped down those impulses. Some quirks hadn’t quite ironed out since uplift, and his human handlers and colleagues overlooked much, thank goodness.

“This is Pierre.”

A woman’s face greeted him with a sliver of a smile that bespoke scores of such practiced smiles daily and the beginnings of crow’s feet at the edges of her eyes. Pierre wondered what kind of punishment the poor liaison had done to deserve shuffling files and contacting various hominids and none too few uplifted canines (a recent development) along with some advanced NuEmote(tm) Model Mark robots. Still, he was glad she had contacted him.

“Pierre, I have good news.”

Finally.

“I’ve sent you a message with a printable, watermarked certificate of personhood.”

“Thank you, Sarah, for all your help.”

“Thank the lawyers at Clockwork Corp.,” she said. “They saw the handwriting on the wall. You had the virtue of many legal precedents on your side.”

“I”—the words sometimes wouldn’t come—“appreciate your taking time to-oohooh face-contact me.”

The practiced smile widened, and he saw the glimmers of a few teeth. “Why, thank you kindly, Pierre.”

“At least I’m not working basic municipal services,” he said. The majority of uplifted apes ended up employed in recycling facilities or treatment plants unless, of course, one was part of an R&D department for the largest corporation in the world and a handy PR football tossed around in the mining claims wars raging on the moon.

“Well, there’s that,” she said. “You realize how fortunate you are.”

“Yes.” And he felt immediately unlucky to be condescended to. Or complimented. He still had trouble navigating social mores. “Thank you.”

“Have a good day, Pierre.”

“You, too-ooh, Sarah.”

As her image faded, Pierre stared at the screen and considered his newfound reality.

Personhood.

The company wanted a poster child for the new wave of lunar exploration. All he had to do was make a loathsome trip to Human Resources and request an addendum to his work contract for this upcoming expedition. The concept of money didn’t escape him, but he had little use for it. He banked a pittance for little things like sodas. Sodas he loved.

The ideas grew. Humans talked with anticipation about taking vacations, and he wanted vacation time, which was not a component of his old contract. No more day passes into the city. No more permission requests for visits to museums or . . . or . . .

The possibilities unfurled in his mind, and Pierre smiled.

3: Human Resources

“Well, this is a first,” said the HR rep. “Wonder if the company ought to consider changing the name of the department now?”

Pierre didn’t laugh during the man’s pregnant pause. “New territory.”

“In more ways than one. First, congratulations on your official personhood status. You’ve come a long way, Pierre.”

“Hmmmm.”

A flash of jungle memory stung him: sunlight lancing the canopy and the screams of another chimpanzee caught in a great cat’s jaws. He could expect a headache—the single and sometimes debilitating side effect of the CBI gear in his head.

“You still have a week before launch. It takes three days to process a contract addendum request. I can message you.”

“Do you see any reason it might be denied?”

“No more than any other request.”

“Ooh.”

“What’s that?”

“I mean, ‘Oh.’ ”

They shuffled through several documents that required e-signatures, eye-stamps, and DNA proofs as Pierre did his best to maneuver the platitudes of small talk.

“Is this what they meant by signing in blood?”

The fat man chuckled. “I suppose so.” He offered his hand to Pierre, who hesitated, then shook. A rarity. All of his physical reinforcement and interactions had consisted of claps on the shoulder and good-natured squeezes of the upper arm—even one high five. Very few handshakes. His hand met the clammy palmflesh of the fat man, who seemed quite appreciative.

When Pierre excused himself, he left with the distinct impression that the fat man was lonely despite dealing with other humans on a daily basis. Alone in a troop. Pierre was stung again as he walked the fluorescent-lit halls to the Fitness and Conditioning wing, signed out, and trained outside. A hard workout in the obstacle course would boost his endorphins and help him fight the headache. He hated the humans’ pain relievers while understanding their necessity.

A bright yellow sun bathed him. A great eye whose warmth slithered down through a noisy canopy. Pierre allowed himself thoughts of trees and courting and earth and night-nesting, and the daydream became a nightmare Klaxon calling out his buried limbic fears of being hunted. Captured.

FLEE!

He scaled trunks and brachiated vines and limbs, missed one and plummeted to earth. He became a caged thing in a preserve; the trees were not the same—constructs for primates to climb and maintain their facade of health and activity. A group of handlers seized him and parleyed him to an alien, antiseptic landscape full of hooting and yowling.

The real nightmare, the waking one, happened when he fell asleep and woke to the reality of his uplifting and a flood of information, a cascade of new schema expanding exponentially—the synaptic flood churning and frothing in his mind from the cerebral implant. He understood the cries of the other animals the way an adult understands a child’s cries—a mixture of sympathy tinged with the patina of intellectual distance.

The memory remained, still blunted by time and his uplifting—a photo fading from color to monochrome or perhaps spackled brightly, overexposed and portions blotted out.

He needed to get away.

4: Tsuki

The susurration of servos and hissing of actuators alerted Pierre as he finished his gymnastics and, planning to warm down with yoga, dropped to the ground.

The Model Mark II lunar-bot approached him in hexapod form, and Pierre couldn’t help thinking of a gigantic arachnid, some mutant lurking and emerging from the shadows of the thick foliage of once-home, ready to snatch baby chimps from the troop. Still, Pierre’s edginess softened when he saw Tsuki.

“Good afternoon, Pierre. News travels fast.”

“Of?”

“Your having been granted personhood. How does that make you feel?”

Tendrils of the headache coiled around his brain. “I put in for a vacation after we revised the contract.”

“A reward. I see.” She skittered alongside him and used one of her four arms to retrieve his water bottle and hand it to him.

“Thank you, Tsuki. It still seems a mere formality.”

“While conferring you wider latitude of rights and privileges.”

“Today would have been the same regardless.”

“A rather cynical view, if perhaps a valid observation.”

His head echoed with the ghost-strains of the headache. A ripple from the back of his neck straight-lined from the CBI’s scar and to his eyes.

“If you say so-ooh.”

“Would you care to run through a mission simulation with me in the Augmentation Array?”

“Hold on a moment.” Pierre retrieved his wafer tablet, which buzzed slightly, and he queued up his meager bank account. It had already been flagged for a deposit. “Huh. They actually did it.”

“ ‘They’?”

“The company. Given today’s news, I’ve received dividends on shares retroactively for the duration of my employment. Good faith call on their part.”

“That was charitable if manipulative.”

“At least I have more money to put toward that vacation.”

“And sodas.”

Pierre smiled. “Good idea. Care to join me for a cafeteria pit stop?”

“Gladly.”

5: “Apollo’s Death (and Perhaps a Resurrection)”

REUTERS
OP-ED
Byron Pettigrew

The Apollo program ended in 1975 with the catastrophic failure of the Apollo 20 mission. Col. William “Memphis” Cato and geologist Dr. Angela Phelps had the unfortunate encounter with Mr. Murphy in the form of a cascade of failures. A dying retro-thruster. On the same side as the thruster—since the module came down harder—a leg collapsed. Other than the rough landing (and thankfully the LRV suffered no damage), Cato and Phelps had every reason to believe they could return to the orbiter. They could do what the stalwart trio of Apollo 13 did. Or the crew of Apollo 19.

Only, they couldn’t, especially not when, after five hours of work, a baseball-sized meteor ripped through the top of the lunar module. The duo awaited the inevitable.

NASA held its memorial with the rest of the nation. The Cato and Phelps families held their respective memorials while Mission Control decided to close the Apollo program with this disaster and move on.

There is no better time to return to the moon than the fiftieth anniversary of the mission. Consider the time and tide of change: The joint venture featuring a Russian multistage rocket along with a United States orbiter and a Japanese lunar module that could only be capped with Clockwork Corp.’s lunar-bot, a Tsuki Model 2, and Pierre the Uplifted Chimp (so labeled by at least one children’s book spinning out of the affair).

There have been the predictable protests about using uplifted animals, but because of a corporate law loophole along with legal precedents set in prior years for uplifted dogs and cats (and one gecko), Pierre would not be the first ape in space, but he would be the first uplifted ape to walk on the moon. Other such chimpanzees see this as quite a boon to their quest for equality.

That Pierre volunteered for the flight has been lost on some of the more vocal and otherwise well-intentioned anti-upli—.

::SKIP AD SURVEY? CONTINUE TO REMAINDER OF ARTICLE?::

6: Fly Me to the Moon

“Now that we are up here, I am farther removed from being a political football and poster child for a handful of advocacy groups,” said Pierre. He swiveled his chair after he deleted a dozen invitations to speak from organizations.

“An interesting idiom,” replied a section of the wall. Tsuki had slaved herself to the orbiter’s computer system. The Clockwork Corp. lunar-bot had all-terrain capacity like her forebears, but the TLRV possessed additional mimetic qualities beta-tested in Earth’s most inhospitable climates. Her maiden voyage was at hand with this mining mission. Even if something happened to the main computer, she could manage the rest. Designed for versatility, she was a good tool to have on board. “At least you are not configured into the hull’s interior.”

“But, Tsuki, you’re saving space,” said Pierre. “So very ergonomic. Efficient.”

The pilot chuckled. “Never thought I’d be flying to the moon with a chimp and a robot, much less myself. Or hearing unintended puns.”

“It was intended,” said Pierre.

“Might I suggest some practice? It’s a long enough ride.”

“So, the UN and the North American Directorate finally opened up some lunar territory for mining,” said the pilot. “And I get to ferry a robot and a sapient ape.”

“More accurately, exploratory missions,” said Tsuki.

“And furthering the accuracy, uplifted,” said Pierre.

“Touché.”

“Indeed,” said Tsuki.

7: Mare Serenitatis

Almost three full months into the rotation, and Pierre could taste his vacation amid the mapping and spectrography. He had to admit that the stillness and the gliding and jumping freedom of a low-gravity environment excited him, and farther out on their digs, he imagined Tsuki did her fair share of indulging his ooh-ooh-ooh’s of joy. If he played golf, he would’ve driven plenty of golf balls as far across the Sea of Serenity as possible.

But all such thoughts faded fast as he stared at a lunar lander.

“Tsuki, I need you at my location,” said Pierre.

Her voice, tinny through his helmet’s speakers, replied, “Are you all right, Pierre?”

“Yes. No. I’ve found something—ooh-ooh—somethings, to be precise.”

“ETA in seven minutes.”

“Roger that.”

He hop-drifted several more meters, and his concern grew.

Ooh-ooh-ooh.

Nearby lay an older model emergency habitat.

Pierre stared down from the ridge upon the swath of Mare Serenitatis, but closer were two bodies in spacesuits. He bounded down to them; they lay facing each other. Their desiccated faces grinned and yawned at each other from across the decades, and Pierre knew enough of history to realize that today’s mining spectrometer experiments were rendered moot.

“Pierre?”

Tsuki had retracted her trundles into her back and skittered down to him on her hex-legs.

“We’ve found a fifty-years-dead pair of astronauts, Tsuki.”

“Company protocol dictates immediate contact and securing of the site,” said the ’bot.

“Already done that. Col. William Cato and Dr. Angela Phelps, it looks as if you two are finally going home,” said Pierre.

All these years and frozen in such a tableau.

“We should follow our exact path in back out, Pierre, so as not to disturb further the site.”

“You know they’ll want to examine every millimeter and—Get a look.”

He pointed at words written in the soil near Tsuki’s legs.

“ . . . let baser things devise / To die in dust, . . . ” Tsuki said. “Interesting final words.”

Pierre figured there would be some closure for the descendants and the few aging members from that bygone era.

He had no inkling Tsuki possessed among a multitude of photos the one that would be voted Photo of the Year. It was here, now, etched in the linotype of his uplifted mind: Pierre’s crouching at the quote with one of Col. Cato’s hands at the words in the lunar soil and another hand stretched back toward Dr. Phelps.

In his mind, only the curious tableau of a pair of bodies facing each other and space-gloved hands in a fifty-year clutch would remain.

8: Interstitium

Robot and Uplifted Chimp Discover Lost Apollo 20 Astronauts

—AP—A fifty-year mystery unfolded on the moon recently when a pair of Clockwork Corp. employees on a routine mining mission on the Sea of Serenity stumbled upon the remains of Col. Cato and Dr. Phelps. The families have prepared for a host of press conferences . . .

9: From Clockwork Corp.

Pierre
Admin
RE: Recovery/Phelps-Cato
Cc: Tsuki

Pierre,

We have attached the link for the coffins’ schematics. The Board decided to aid both the current space administration and the Phelps and Cato families. It is a powerful reminder of the human cost of lunar exploration—of space travel itself.

Once you have fabricated their coffins, transfer the bodies for transport to Camelot Base for pickup. Know that you and Tsuki have played a fundamental role in helping a pair of families find their lost loved ones.

Thank you for your professionalism in helping us handle the matter and for being a credit to the corporation.

With much appreciation,

The Board

10: Little Cupids

“What do you extrapolate given the writing we found?” said Tsuki.

“The allusion sounds familiar,” said Pierre.

She sent him the full text. He pored over it while the 3D printer whirred through its matrix.

“Based on biographical and scholarly cross-referencing, including its inclusion in the Amoretti sequence, it may be less a note to us than simply a coda for themselves.”

“A testament.”

“Or testimony, if you will.”

Whoever had considered Cato and Phelps being more than colleagues were, most of them, lost to time.

Pierre said, “I have to finish the coffins.”

“Do you wish to be left alone, Pierre?”

“Yes. No. Sorry, Tsuki. I’m indecisive. Surely you have other tasks that would better suit you this evening.”

The ’bot offered a wave of a four-fingered hand and trundled away. As the automatic door slid shut with a hiss, she looked at Pierre, who didn’t notice her for his busy-ness.

Pierre’s mind toiled while his hands engaged the mundanity of work. For a moment he looked at his hands as though they belonged to someone else, and his head became balloon-drifty as if he were in the midst of an out-of-body experience. He felt a pang for the trees and the games. Her. All of the Shes. A twinge of regret—no—loss insinuated itself through Pierre’s heart like a tree viper.

Finishing the coffins was lonely work, he thought, glancing periodically at the door.

11: LXXV

After helping send the bodies back to Earth, Pierre couldn’t bring himself to sleep it off, so he wandered the lonely halls of Camelot Base. He passed only a handful of humans—mere platitudes they offered each other—and a few ’bots and droids and found himself wanting to ping Tsuki for her company, but she had plenty of spectrography to analyze. And would she really need to indulge Pierre his melancholy at sending the corpses of Cato and Phelps on their way?

He entered the biosphere with its crisp temperate zone. Pierre inhaled the green and earthiness and moistness but resented the underlying counterfeit to it all. In his mind he was a mere hop, skip, and jump away from the awful steel and stone and polymer playrooms at the research facility. At just over a decade old, the trees could have stood more than limited growth, but at least it was a stand of trees, and trees he could enjoy. He fought the urge to snap off an armload of limbs and go ahead and nest for the night.

Sitting under one of the dwarf pines, Pierre queued up a reading list on his tablet. The screen cast its glow on Pierre’s face as his eyelids drooped. Words tunneled through his mind, then tried to string themselves along entangled metrical feet—looping in his alpha-state brain:

SONNET LXXV.

One day I wrote her name vpon the strand,
    but came the waues and washèd it away:
    agayne I wrote it with a second hand,
    but came the tyde, and made my paynes his pray.
Vayne man, sayd she, that doest in vaine assay,
    a mortall thing so to immortalize.
    for I my selue shall lyke to this decay,
    and eek my name bee wyped out lykewize.
Not so, (quod I) let baser things deuize,
    to dy in dust, but you shall liue by fame:
    my verse your vertues rare shall eternize,
    and in the heuens wryte your glorious name.
Where whenas death shall all the world subdew,
our loue shall liue, and later life renew.

As he slept that night, Pierre cooed and reached up for elusive dream-limbs. When his arm tired and plopped down, his hand twitched, index finger dancing just above the floor and inscribing ghost words on the patterned tiles.

12: Banter

Pierre woke and startled himself: arm outstretched and clutching the air and the dream receding fast. He jumped at the whirr-buzz-shush of Tsuki’s servos and hissing actuators as she trundled into the room.

“You sounded . . . distressed.”

He zipped into his worksuit and stifled a yawn. “Just talking in my sleep.”

“More accurately, intoning with grunts and hoots,” she said.

He put on his boots. “Ooh.”

“Would you like to be left alone?”

“Not really. Please join me while I eat?”

“Yes. We could play holo-chess.”

“That would be nice.”

A short trip down the hall brought them into the mess. A few humans ambled around—as always, congenial yet aloof. Everyone was here to do a job, and no one seemed interested in befriending a knuckle-walking novelty like Pierre.

He ate but didn’t care. It was welcome stimulation to play chess and took his mind off work and dead astronauts.

“Based on our current timeline,” said Tsuki, “we may return Earthside in a week. A day early, in fact.”

“Has it already been so long?”

“Eleven weeks, approximately. The apropos idiom is, I believe, ‘give or take.’ ”

“You’re learning.”

“Cross-referencing and extrapolating linguistic scenarios.”

“Conversing, Tsuki.”

“Pierre?”

“Yes?”

“Checkmate.”

“Well—ooh—shit.”

The ’bot said, “A crude if somewhat apropos remark.”

“It fits. Come on. Let’s go to work.”

“I have been working while you slept.”

“Infer, please.”

“Ah. Your use of first-person plural indicates an implied continuance of company.”

“Exactly, Tsuki. So long as it’s not another game of chess.”

Pierre could’ve sworn he heard hollow laughter from the ’bot. A most endearing trait on her part.

13: Departure

They went through their departure checklist and reached the Camelot Base launchpad. A sleek Clockwork Corp. courier hunkered on the pad. The pilot waved at them from behind his window, held up a wrist, and tapped it impatiently.

Pierre shook his head and glide-hopped ahead of Tsuki. They each kicked up plumes of lunar dust.

It was about time!

A goferit ’bot already waited on Pierre with his gear. He was so glad he’d pre-processed out.

“Well, Tsuki, it was good working with you.”

“The sentiment is mutual, Pierre.”

He sent the goferit ’bot aboard the ship.

“Don’t work too hard.”

“I have plenty of missions and data to continue analyzing.”

“Stay in touch.”

“Of course.”

Pierre left Tsuki behind on the moon and shrinking amid Camelot Base in the wake of the courier’s blast off. Out of his window, he thought he saw the ’bot waving good-bye.

After a while Pierre allowed himself the luxury of relaxing. Poring over spectrum analyses had left him fuzzy-headed and drained on top of the endemic mundanity and tedium.

Plus, Cato and Phelps.

Existing somewhere between a robot and a human left him even more drained—a murky middle state. The courier sped through the long emptiness between the moon and Earth. Pierre had his first dreamless sleep in a long time. He had no headache, especially when he received the ping from headquarters.

RE: LEAVE APPROVAL
noreply.confirmation
CLICK RECEIPT ACKNOWLEDGEMENT LINK.
INSERT CODE TH@SGR8 FOR FINALIZATION

14: Coda: Pan trogolodytes of Guinea

Waves broke and hush-shushed ashore. Pierre listened to the waves’ lulling susurration and found himself mesmerized even as the waves spoke louder for the incoming tide. Far behind him the jungle unspooled its teeming glossolalia of birdcalls and growls, grunts and hoots. Creatures dying. Mating. Hunger. Nature wanted propagation—its children’s perpetuation.

Pierre wrote his name and another in the sand.

The moon crept out and blued the world as the tide reached Pierre, and he didn’t begrudge its work upon the names in the sand. He massaged his neck and skull, then wished to have another hand to clutch.

Far down the beach a lioness and two cubs ventured out, and Pierre watched them with a twofold sense of flighty self-preservation and bemusement—the potential threat not lost on his old self nor the new one once the lioness probed the air and yawed her head in his direction. After a moment she and the cubs retreated to the luxuriant green treeline.

He needed to move, so he set his tablet to BUSY and shed his clothes, those faulty constructs that indulged society yet shamed Pierre himself.

He approached the shadow-swathed jungle.

With his toes he kneaded the loam. He sprang up to catch hold of and swing upon the nearest limb. As he clambered higher, thoughts of Tsuki and Cato and Phelps accompanied him—the need for troop and family and consortships.

Swinging, bounding, clambering now.

It had been too long since he had experienced the thrill of tempting Earth’s gravity and cheating its constancy with each grab of a limb. Dark shapes bounded through the trees and brush, and Pierre kept both pace and distance. There was shame at his own scent they would no doubt catch if not already—too much blend of civilization and cleansing and humanity.

Paths opened before him. Night drew on while the moon cast her dapple-down light through the canopy. This was another kind of freefall, another kind of release. Before long, he was spent, so Pierre busied himself, snapping off branches and weaving them for his night’s nesting, and his hands seemed for a moment—just a moment—to belong to some other chimpanzee.

Back on the beach the tide had long since taken the names even as night and exhaustion claimed Pierre and engrafted him among its humid folds. The sea shushed and grated its rhythms through the jungle.

He hugged himself amid a tangle of dreams and sought her name and whispered it as his arm lolled and hand twitched. Pierre clutched only the tropical night while the drift of moonlight played against his open palm and weaved itself through his fingers.

“Ooh-ooh-ooh.”

About the Author

Berrien C. Henderson lives in the deepest, darkest wilds of southeast Georgia. He teaches high school Literature and Composition with a Southern accent. Berrien’s writing has appeared in such diverse venues as The Journal of Asian Martial Arts, The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, The Dead Mule School of Southern literature, Abyss & Apex, Kaleidotrope, and Bloody Knuckles: The MMAnthology. His mini-collection of Southern magical realism, Old Souls and the Grammar of Their Wanderings, is available from Papaveria Press. He is a fiction editor at Farrago’s Wainscot. In his not-so-copious free time, Berrien practices martial arts.

The Petals Abide

Benjanun Sriduangkaew

In the womb-tank coded with thought and memory, Twoseret learned three things: that her life will be full of peace, that she will never die, and that she will know precisely one tragedy. These facts are absolute, untarnished by chance and impregnable to intervention.

After that, petals started blooming in her mouth.

They come at dawn at a regulated hour; she knows to be awake with her mouth empty so she does not choke. A tickle in her throat, a pressure against tonsil, and they emerge fluttering: the shape of hands with spindly digits, the color of unlit space that demarcates empires. She likes to speculate whose hands they might be modeled on, or whether they are the quintessence of hands, a mannequin standard.

They are pristine and velvet, untouched by teeth and untainted by saliva: like no part of the body at all, no effort to resemble tissue or keratin.

Here Twoseret finds her orders, in the capillaries that call to the light of accretion disks and press against her nerves in synesthetic licks. The petals are the flowers of prophecy, the blooms of destiny. As long as she follows their instructions, like any memorialist Twoseret stands deathless.

She arranges the petals, four, radiant—fingers pointing out, fluttering in the low salted wind, the heels of their palms held down by mosaic stones. A murmur of sun slants across unlighted velvet. She bends to read, sibyl to her own fate.

The city ground is a canvas, the avenues brushstrokes, history a palette. An avian view yields faces gone to carcass and archive, some self-portraits, others celebrating personal affection and past deeds—the war heroes, the founding scholars, the beloved siblings. Within these walls, nothing is forgotten. Outside them, everything is.

Twoseret walks through parabola gates of porphyry and persimmons heavy on the bough, down bridges whose curves follow theta-rhythms. The petals have given her a course, a target.

It will be a channel, she expects, through which she may monitor a life and from that material suture together a new person. Broad edits are crude: a wholesale revision of a planet’s chronology, a rearrangement of civil wars and epidemics and sundry. The work she does, however, requires more finesse. In identity reassignment the subject must feel at home in their new path, natural to a strange career and family and spouse as though they have always lived this life. The more moving pieces there are, the more skilled a memorialist has to be. Twoseret counts herself one of the best in the city, if not the very best.

The only one to whom she conceded supremacy was Umaiyal, but ey is long gone.

She stops at the basin of faces, where bone dunes in a hundred twenty-seven colors—most visible, a few not—rotate hourly, resolving into the faces of the first memorialists. There, at the border of grinding femurs and fibulae, she finds a casket.

The edges of it are sharp as invasion, its casing radiant as war-beads, its lid heavy as regret. Around this a homunculus of encryption hovers, epidermis full of paradoxes clenched shut. She coaxes them open, by intuition and determination. Her routines grant her a surplus of leisure, and she’s spent it on dead languages, ciphers, puzzle-solving.

She expects a soldier, a spy, a politician of high standing. Those are ever the first to develop a taste for sedition. But once the homunculus has been whispered and peeled off, she finds instead a foreign assassin.

Beneath a canopy of chameleon fish and isometry rosettes, she thaws the body. Their face is blunt, singed at temple and jawline by ecclesiastic tattoos. Their neck looks as though branded by bird beaks, their biceps abraded by bird claws. The marks of the Cotillion and the divine Song under which they march.

The assassin is armed too, but Twoseret is unconcerned, for the petals did not forecast that she will die today. When the fluids have been drained and the cryogenic phase deactivated, the assassin wakes: all at once, without the transitional stage between occluded cognition and full alertness. The gaze that latches onto Twoseret’s is clear and iridescent with corneal implants.

They jackknife and heave. A splat of saliva and bile, so black, so blue. Waking up this way is never pleasant, no more than being decanted from a tank. Twoseret has vivid recall of her own birth, her first breath and emergence, of volition beyond the crèche-parents.

She reads their name and gender as they come online. “Sujatha Sindh.” The name susurrates like parched leaves, from a language spoken on several Hegemonic constituents. Not entirely foreign, but the two empires have regular exchanges; citizens of one flee and become refugees in another, diasporic. Their descendants repeat the cycle.

The assassin gains their composure in turns, gray and shuddering, on their back then on their knees. Twoseret offers a hand; they take it. Long fingers, velvet where synthetic dermis has replaced fingerprints.

“You have been sent to abduct or kill one of us,” Twoseret murmurs, off the dossier. “Did you choose a specific target or would any of us have done?”

“My instructions were not discriminating.” Sujatha’s voice is a blasted echo, its wealth and timbre gouged out. Cotillion personnel wield their voices for sacred music, better than any weapon. Without that the assassin’s bite is much blunted.

Because they do not ask what their fate will be, Twoseret does not provide. Perhaps they already know, as surely as if they had read the same petals Twoseret did. She gives them her shoulder, her arm around the heft of a torso honed to swift retribution, limbs trained to kinetic poetry. Those too have been weakened, ligament augmens snipped off, bone enhancement ripped out. Where once there was puissance, now there is brittle mortality.

Muscles spasm in Sujatha’s cheeks as they walk. It’s not the only part of them that trembles in withdrawal from the destruction of their voice. Twoseret imagines how it was done. An operation, painless. An appointment with precise instruments during which Sujatha was awake for every minute, nerves primed to open wounds. Dilated time.

Sujatha’s prison is a palimpsest of deep-sea salt and abyssal cold. Its frictive patterns convert to musical notations, echoing the voice of a deceased memorialist. The assassin gazes at the water. Their mouth parts, habit, but they press it shut.

“It isn’t really a song,” Twoseret says.

“All ordered sound is part of the eternal symphony. The birth of universes. The end of them. Entropic culmination and singularities.” Sujatha touches their throat. “I will not sully any of it with the voice I have now.”

Twoseret does not present a secular objection—that sound is merely sound, can be synthesized and reproduced; that sound has no purchase without air, and what is a deific verity that cannot cross stars? She helps Sujatha settle into their bed of solid-state husks and slaughtered engine cores. Battle salvage is material for art. It speaks of Hegemonic peace spreading abroad, a reminder of the army’s might. What are memorialists and their city without the commanders and the troops, their strategies and victories?

That thought dogs the heel of another. “Who captured you?” For someone must have, an act of heroism and advancement.

Sujatha takes a cracked breath, perhaps weighing their tactics: to tell, to withhold. “A soldier. Oridel Nehetis.”

Twoseret’s expression must have spoken louder than her silence. She corrects that. “I see,” she says, and seals the oceanic palimpsest between them.

“Do you remember,” she asks one of her age-mates, “Umaiyal?”

His answer is interrupted by a trio of petals. He catches them as they fall, fans them like a spread of cards on the game board between him and Twoseret. “Yeah,” Riam says, reading his instructions, not disclosing them. “How goes it for em? The exception.”

The exception to have punctured the city’s skin from the inside. The exception to have left. Twoseret will never know how this was done, what deal was brokered, what Umaiyal’s petals spoke; whether this was mandate or Umaiyal’s volition. She only knew—knows—the loss like a suppurating hurt. Out there ey goes by Oridel, a good elegant name. Ey wears eir face differently too, sharp-boned and pearl-pale, chased in nacre that traces and wraps eir skull in place of a scalp. A short clip that Twoseret plays, over and over, with Umaiyal caught mid-chuckle. Wry and polished in dress uniform, eir throat a choker of respiratory implants for work in toxic battlefields. She wonders how many deaths ey has logged.

Umaiyal once asked her what name she would take, out there, if she could leave. On a whim she picked Nehetis.

Twoseret moves her piece, desultory, not much caring for the game’s result. “Ey’s as well as can be expected. Alive, certainly.”

“So you don’t know either?” Riam flicks his head, apologetic. “Uncharitable of me. Not as if they would have let you keep in touch. I always thought if anyone got out, it’d be Umaiyal. And ey would take you with em.”

Umaiyal never asked. One day ey was there, the next gone. Even eir clothes, eir jewelry: the nexus-choker of corneal opals, the eigenvector jacket she gave em.

“I’m content here,” says Twoseret. “Aren’t we all?”

The petals yoke her to the prisoner’s cycles. She comes to know the palimpsest’s smell as well as that of her own bed, and Sujatha’s face as well as her own reflection. The questions she puts to the assassin are broad and she’s rarely interested in the answers, so much so it provokes Sujatha to say, “You aren’t what I would call an adequate interrogator.”

Twoseret sinks her hand into the water, warm and viscous as gestation plasma. She imagines pulling Sujatha through it and the assassin coming out her side reborn, a blank canvas numinous with possibility. “I’m no interrogator. Would you like to talk about something else? Tell me secrets. Not state matters, just little things.”

Sujatha sits cross-legged, and despite the palimpsest distortion they look much better: they’ll never have their old strength back, nor their voice, but their colors are healthier. Umber rather than jaundiced sepia. “Why would I do that?”

There is an acid-edge of animus that Twoseret finds strangely personal. “To pass the time, as I can’t persuade you to sing and you wouldn’t learn origami or any of the games I’ve brought you.”

“I play nothing well behind a prison cell, and I’m not a graceful loser.” The assassin cranes their neck back, looking up. From their perspective the world entire is sunlight filtered through depth, exegesis by fiber-optic sharks and hydrogen anemones. “There’s a dessert of egg yolk shaped like gilded drops that I indulge in to a fault. From each of my bed-partners I’ve collected a necklace, a scarf, a collar; as long as it’s been close to them like a garrote. In all my life I’ve fallen in love only once.”

“Yes?” The barrier is permeable up to a point. Twoseret encounters soft resistance once her hands have sunk through to the wrist. “Tell me about love.”

They laugh, a stutter-bark of actuators guttering out. “You’ve never been happy. No species of love would be known to you.”

“If happiness is freedom from deprivation and pain, then I’ve never known anything but.”

“Happiness,” Sujatha says, “is more than that. You haven’t seen—”

“Beyond this circle of existence,” Twoseret says, drawing up her knees and resting her chin on them, “the calculus of being distills to this: rule or be ruled. Under Hegemonic peace your past is robbed; under the Cotillion your future is sealed. There are only so many places for power, and most will never rise to them nor even see the path.”

The assassin blinks, a play of lamplight on black pearl in their irises. “You aren’t what I expected.”

“Mindless, you mean? As long as I follow the petals, nothing is forbidden. The province of my mind belongs to me alone, and in that I have what most outside this city never will.”

Perhaps some of that turns a key in Sujatha’s heart. For the assassin says, “I’ll tell you of my love. Much you won’t comprehend and have no basis with which to compare, but I’ll tell you.”

“And I’ll tell you of mine.” Twoseret leans forward, her nose almost nuzzling the vertical tide. “We may surprise each other.”

“The person I love is absolute, untarnished by loneliness and unsullied by lust. They require no justification to exist; they are beholden to no outer forces or obligations. Like the drive of a warship, but those require guidance and crew, hull and superstructure. Like a sun, but those has a finite age and obey greater forces. So,” Sujatha says, softly, “they are like the Song, given human body, human visage. And to think that is to blaspheme beyond absolution.”

“Today, the person I love is shaped like a hole. But once upon a time that they had arms like polished teak, cheeks like bathyal amber, and eyes like lodestars.” Twoseret unrolls permutative paper in her lap, tears out a precise square. “When they couldn’t sleep they liked to keep their hands busy, and they’d fold this into animals neither of us has ever seen. Lava alligators and polar butterflies, thunder wasps and aquatic bees. They kept their hair very long, dipped in an attar of comets. I’d try to braid those paper things in it, but the hair was difficult of temper, just like their owner.”

Sujatha has flinched as though each of Twoseret’s sentences have pierced them, needle by needle under the nails. “That isn’t a person,” they say, voice tight. “That’s a childhood.”

“Childhood is formative; no person springs into being fully-formed, like a sun or warship or holy music. Everyone has a past. That’s the definition of personhood.”

“The larval stage of it, perhaps. The person someone becomes is honed by time, tempered by experience, the true shape.” The assassin frowns. “Do you fence, wrestle, or box? I feel the need to test you in combat.”

Twoseret laughs and gazes with interest at the hard lines of Sujatha’s body. Umaiyal was built like a willow, but out there ey would have received combat augmens, and assiduous training would have changed em. “I don’t do any of that, and in your state you wouldn’t be able to defeat a child. I’ll play you any sort of game, conquer you in any sort of puzzle.”

“You’re trying to offend me.”

“Yes. No. But tell me more about your personal blasphemy.”

The assassin’s mouth curves then, tracing the arc of a blade. “The person I love has far more in common with me than you, than this city, than anything you know.”

It is, perhaps, not wrong. Twoseret puts two calligraphic avenues between them before she allows her hand to press against her sternum as though to staunch a wound. But her palms come away clean.

In her room, roofed by silver beaten chiffon-thin, she composes. On the malleable walls that submit to her nails, on the permutative paper that yields to her thumbs. She sketches the same figure again and again, an outline of slender limbs and rounded narrow shoulders. Then it becomes more sinuous and muscle-dense, shedding the eigenvector jacket and robe for something more martial. Close-cut uniform that gloves the body, a long coat with severe hem. Twoseret leaves out the sidearm.

A visualization is not required, but she has always found it helpful. The petals give instruction and goal, but the means to achieve them are her own. She begins scanning her own memory segments. A person is gestalt. There is past, present, and the potential for the future.

Now that Umaiyal is gone, of the entire city she is the best memorialist alive.

Twoseret gazes through Sujatha’s eyes. She is almost Sujatha, for a while. Total immersion has its risks, but the best of her compositions often arise from that.

Sujatha’s meetings with Oridel-Umaiyal began at a distance, observing a figure limned in pale light through a corridor of spiral glass. A figure tall and compactly made, unrecognizable to Twoseret. Over weeks the assassin observed, followed.

Was noticed, one day.

An eel-twist of the street where Umaiyal disappeared. The assassin sidestepped, turned in time to catch Umaiyal’s knife on an armguard. The blade locked; Sujatha pulled. Fell with Umaiyal as ey went down, hand on throat—precise pressure—and knees straddling arms.

Both held still: aortae marching to the same adrenal tempo, muscles stretched taut. Then Umaiyal smiled. “You’re very good,” ey said. “Galling as it is to admit, I’m no match for a Cotillion assassin. Had you wanted me dead, I would have been cremated a week ago. So what is it?”

Sujatha drew back slightly, caught by frankness. “Captain.”

“Shall we get a drink? My treat.”

They did, and more than once. An uneasy negotiation, tenser for Sujatha than for Umaiyal. By their fifth meeting in a club of enameled ice, Umaiyal leaned forward and pulled the trigger on a question both of them had always circled around. “You targeted me for my background, didn’t you?”

In that club, at a table laden with conch-shell bowls, Sujatha stopped eating. Curved a hand around a glass, took a long, deliberate sip.

“I can give you a way into that place. Only you’ll have to trust me.” Umaiyal drew closer. “That will be my gift to you.”

It takes Twoseret two heartbeats to realize that had been spoken to her. Meant for her ear, not Sujatha’s. It is not the only instance—many other times Umaiyal couched eir messages in conversations with the assassin. There’s a childhood place I miss, where the bones resolve into faces or Have you ever seen upside-down gardens?

Where I was born, Umaiyal said as ey stood watching the breaking of Sujatha’s voice, there’s a palimpsest that sings.

As Umaiyal put a stunned Sujatha in the casket, ey held the assassin’s hand, saying, “This is the closest I can get to going back.” A harsh breath inhaled. “This is the closest I can get to talking to you.” The lid clipped. “I’ll never be able to go back. I’m sorry I didn’t say goodbye. And I can’t explain. There are no petals here, but even so some things are forbidden. Some things are prophecy, and to disobey them is to accept death.”

The casket slipped shut.

For hours after, Twoseret is not herself. She remembers being in a stronger body; she remembers parts of the surgery that took her—their—voice. An immersive link to the subject’s memory doesn’t give her the subject’s feelings.

Nevertheless Sujatha’s want is plain, blazing gold across the fabric of their recall. “The person I love is absolute,” she says softly, startling herself when what comes out is not in Sujatha’s voice. The original voice brimming with Song, one with the code of existence.

The next time she visits the assassin, she brings a small drawer of perfumes captured in vials of chameleon jade. One takes on the texture of Twoseret’s palm as she handles it. “Do you know the scent?” she asks, opening a window through the prison-tide. “I’ve no idea if this is available outside. Probably it is. Some of us have hobbies but I don’t think anyone distills perfumes, so this must have come with a supply drop.”

Sujatha edges forward. Stiffens in recognition. “What of it?”

“The person I love—” The euphemism, still. “Left this behind, even though they were some of eir favorites. No time to pack it, I suppose, and these bottles are so fragile. I don’t wear perfume, though. Do you?”

No answer.

“It’ll spoil eventually, go rancid.” Twoseret pulls more vials out of their slots, idly rotating one between her fingers. “I could have the containers recycled. The perfume though, that’s a bit of a waste.”

“Then I might as well accept them.”

“There are other things, too.” Talking around and keeping up the pretense, like Umaiyal is the forbidden secret: profane or else too pure and wondrous a word to utter. “I’ll bring them. Clothes that don’t fit me, jewelry, and so on.”

Two sets of petal later, Sujatha smells and dresses a little like Umaiyal. They must know this, but do not object and seem content simply to have Umaiyal’s belongings next to their skin, scenting their clavicles. When Twoseret brings them a lattice necklace, their breath hitches: an object that’s lived next to Umaiyal’s throat.

She cannot claim to understand their terrible longing for Umaiyal; it seems so much, and burns so bright, for such distance and so little return. But it is there, their shared knot, and she makes use of it.

Desire complicates, between to love and to want to be. A certain affinity between those two, she thinks, a bridge that can be built and directed. She makes more sketches of Sujatha, of Umaiyal as she remembers em. She compares and finds herself not dissatisfied. That will be my gift to you.

One day she lets down the prison, which after all was for effect rather than any real intent to cage. As the water cascades away and the kaleidoscope of sharks evaporates, the petals come. Twoseret cups her hands for them, spends half a minute absorbing their directives; when she looks up she finds the assassin staring at her, appalled. “It’s nothing,” she tries to explain. “It doesn’t hurt. This is only an artist’s whim made real by a biotech.”

“It’s not all right,” Sujatha says, then surrenders to silence, as though even that thread of anger exhausts.

“It’s more interesting than receiving messages the conventional way.” She folds her petals into her dress. By nighttime she will have to dispose of them properly, a ritual.

Sujatha tires easily, has to be eased down onto benches and soft grass. Twoseret eventually lets them rest at a fountain that gurgles gossamer pennants, translucent kites, streamers in soft copper and gold.

Eyes shut, the assassin says, “You don’t feel the limits of your world? You don’t find it confined, claustrophobic even? This place isn’t even large enough for fifty million. What’s up there isn’t a sky. This is all you will ever see, all the air you’ll ever breathe. What you do, how you live, it’s all bound up in those fucking flowers. Doesn’t it chafe? Doesn’t it choke?”

“You are very angry,” Twoseret observes, “on behalf of someone you don’t know and hardly like. I have no illusions that you’d choose my society, given other choices. How can it matter if I live a constricted life, or one whose limits of liberty you disapprove?”

“The person you love—” The words come out like retched poison. “Did they live like this?”

She catches a twist of streamer; it convulses around her wrist, prehensile, rose-touched platinum. “To that you already know the answer or you wouldn’t have asked. It’s a life. For most of mine, I never lacked for anything. I still don’t see why you were sent here, though; you obviously can’t get out.”

The assassin smiles a rictus. “As I came, I was transmitting my location. That stopped at a point, but the approximation is sufficient.”

“This entire city can be moved.”

“Very slowly. With considerable difficulty. It’d be a feat of years. Our ships are much faster, inescapable, will not be outraced. Of course negotiating the gravity snarl that protects this place would be a trick and a half, but the same maze that safeguards you also makes relocating the city . . . vexing.”

Twoseret strokes Sujatha’s head the way she might soothe a distressed animal. The assassin’s hair used to be shoulder-length, in those memories, but it’s been growing since. Someday it will be long, serpentine, and she will find an attar of comets to anoint it full of light. “Will they attack?”

A short laugh, that same noise of failing machines. “No. We only wanted some idea of where this might be, just in case. For that I gave my life, without regret. Acquiring this information for the cost of a single person is an extravagant bargain.”

“Patriotism is very nice.” Twoseret has never experienced such a concept, but she means it. Belief—faith—in some vast, grand ideal must be reassuring. The notion that after one has passed, one’s contribution will live on as part of that ideal or, in this case, system of brutal oppression. Still, it’s certainly a greater thing than a single human being or even a billion.

“You’re mocking me.” But this too is said listlessly, the annoyance perfunctory.

“No, I think fervor is admirable. Passion is its own virtue. It animates. It can give an otherwise ordinary thing a terrible magnetism, an ensnaring brilliance . . . ” She unties the streamer and casts it forward, where it catches on an updraft, snapping toward the sky-that-is-not. “Oh, that’s why. All this time, you’ve been so weakened but there’s been this—fire? This gravity, this pull. I think that’s why ey decided on you.”

Sujatha’s head rises a fraction. “Decided like a calculation, the way you say it.”

“It probably was. But not an exact thing, no, eir variables were more organic than numbers. Perhaps it had to do with how you moved, the way you sang, how your face was limned in profile at sunset. And always the fire that burns within you, visible between your teeth, behind your eyes.” She helps them to their feet. “Do you want to see the gardens? Ey loved those.”

Twoseret continues sketching in her head, drawing points of like and unlike. A framework of contrast and potential markers for synaptic joints. In the swaying garden with its inverted field, she picks clusters of edible hydrangea, mangosteens the size of her thumb, syrup oranges with thin ripe peel about to burst. These and more she puts in Sujatha’s lap, absent the assassin’s interest. As the pile grows they pick at it, a bite here, a lick there. Inevitably they have juices running down their fingers, their chin, sticky and fragrant.

She thinks of kissing them away, drop by drop. In the end she unthinks it. Not the right person, not the right time. As of now they are both in love with an idea.

Twoseret stirs to the city quaking and Sujatha’s shadow laying across her like whip-scars. “I know you’re awake,” the assassin says in that fractured, devoured voice. “We’re under attack.”

She peers up at them through her eyelashes. “From whom?”

“Must you ask?”

“But they’ll kill you too,” she points out calmly as she pushes to her elbows, dislodging sheets, baring shoulders and breasts. Baring, too, the places on her ribcage and waist where the incisions were made and implants seeded so she would be able to receive the petals each morning.

Sujatha’s gaze snags on those places and the cartography of their features shifts, sideways, to that region between disgust and fascination. It makes Twoseret want to say that the scars are quite all right: she chose to keep them when they could have been operated away to smoothness, leaving skin unmarred. Of course their horror is really for Umaiyal’s sake, the thought that Umaiyal once lived like this, bore these same scars. Still Sujatha is nearly tender, as though she’s a small child prone to spooking. “Are you in shock?”

“Oh, no.” Her bed trembles as though a beast shaking itself from hibernation, sloughing off sleep and matted grass, or whatever it is that animals coming out of hibernation do. Paper moths flutter from their shelves. “I’m in full command of myself.” She doesn’t say that the petals came early today, and they did not instruct either Twoseret or the city to die. No doubt pointing that out will only distress the assassin.

Twoseret stands all the way up, knows as she turns her back that Sujatha stares at the tiger-stripes up her spine that culminate at the top—below her nape—in a dainty port, flourished in nacre and tiny citrines. “You believed I’m incapable of love because I have never experienced its prerequisites. Is it so hard to believe I’m not panicking because I’ve had no experience of terror, of illness or fear of dying?”

“Even a creature like you must retain her survival instinct.”

“How wrong you are.” Twoseret shrugs into her dress of suede cuffs and amethyst whorls, the fabric whispering like origami in fire as it molds to her. “Umaiyal used to help me dress, pick my clothes. Ey had—still has, I should think—these long fingers, with calluses from the wood-carving ey used to do as a hobby. Ey wasn’t much good at it, though ey tried to make me birds.” The calluses would be different now. Imprints from wielding a chisel and from wielding a gun are nothing alike, she imagines.

“Who?”

“The person you and I love. Pretending further is obscene, isn’t it? I don’t know if ey ever gave you eir birth name.” She slides her shoes on, lavender gray, texture almost petal-like.

Sujatha presses their lips into a hard line and leads her by the hand. Twoseret is startled at the force of their grip, the limber grace of their stride, their familiarity with the puzzle-paths. An assassin would of course be able to map a place from memory, with speed and attention. Even so the unerring way with which they negotiate the city fills her heart, and their recovered strength makes her glad.

“My superiors have given me up for dead,” Sujatha says as they emerge into artificial morning under the sky that is not. “So have I. For all intents and purposes I’m no longer alive; my presence makes no difference.”

“But we’re running somewhere rubble can’t fall on us. A corpse doesn’t run.” Though ultimately the city’s swarm-bounds can shatter; the ceiling of Twoseret’s world is an unbearable weight, upheld by a thread of synaptic aegis. If it falls there will be no escaping it.

“My sense of self-preservation hasn’t deserted me. Flight or fight.” But their expression creases as though they’d said something different, a thing of ache and thorn cupped on their tongue.

A sudden ruthlessness seizes Twoseret. “This city holds the memory of the only person you’ve ever loved. While you breathe you won’t permit its destruction.”

Sujatha doesn’t meet her eyes. “I need a node I can broadcast from. This isn’t a full assault—a veilship or two, not much more. Just scouts.”

Other memorialists have poured into the streets, as calm as Twoseret, intrigued by this new development. A few crèche-parents lead their charges by the hand, clear-eyed children from five to nine in various stages of wiring. By twelve they will be tested, and on success granted the petals. The sight of them draws a smile from her, reflexive and uncomplicated.

“There are consoles we use for supply drops.” Routine communications for assigning and dividing up the items. There’s always abundance and most memorialists can have their pick, tools and luxuries and raw material with which to feed fabricators: steel for hair-ribbons, glass for skirts, a hundred types of gemstones for belts and bedspreads. Everyone wears jewels, is sheathed in it until skin and facets are one.

Twin shadows press against the unsky, each the shape of a hornbill’s head. Another tremor sweeps through like a racking cough, or so Twoseret imagines, never having seen hypothermia in action. There are defenses, but she supposes absently that those must have been breached: they are automated, and while some memorialists know them well—Umaiyal did—most of them never train themselves to battle. The nearest military outpost is too far to make it in time. The city’s greatest protection has always been in its secrecy and location rather than firepower. She finds a wall and activates the console, feeding it a cluster of authentications like grapes, and steps aside.

Sujatha bends close, their breath fogging the obsidian curlicues that frame the console. Twoseret watches with avid interest as they connect to the Cotillion channel with a lover’s intimacy. “Veilship couplet, identify yourselves.”

The shaking pauses. From the console comes a low note, strain of music made by sighing woods and running currents.

“Remotely piloted,” Sujatha murmurs, “as I thought. That’ll be easier.”

“Yes?”

The assassin straightens and inhales. More affectation than any real need for oxygen, Twoseret expects. And they sing.

Sujatha’s voice makes a dirge for extinguished suns and singularistic contractions that kill worlds, for defeat in empty reaches that will go unknown and uncommemorated. It jolts Twoseret’s nerves, constricts her throat, pries at the seams of her flesh.

When it ends Sujatha turns away, trembling slightly. “They will leave. It’s the only command override I can access now, with my voice the way it—in any case it won’t work a second time.”

“It was exquisite.”

“It was nothing of the sort.” The assassin sags, as though the song has leeched their arteries dry and drained their limbs of strength.

Up above the shadows have disappeared. Twoseret catches the assassin. “You’re exhausted. Let’s get you somewhere to rest.”

Sujatha doesn’t resist or push her away. “I’ve been sleeping on grass, under trees.”

“Then come to my bed. I’ll tuck you in.”

In the street, the crowd thins, memorialists returning to their duties and routines now that the excitement is past. Riam nods to Twoseret, perhaps guessing at her intent, giving tacit approval or merely mute indifference.

She frees the assassin from their shoes and vest, and eases them down between the sheets. She holds them until they fall limp and asleep, and very gently kisses their brow, their eyelids, the tip of their nose. Sujatha smells so right.

When she is sure they are deep in dreams, she gathers up her composition and resumes her work. Making a person—an identity—is delicate labor, but it is a labor of love. She thinks she will keep the singing, to retain the best of both worlds, and sends out a request for the casket.

Twoseret watches the sky for silhouettes of insects, vast, their wings enveloping half the city, their antennae slashing the horizon to segments. The outpost has become more attentive and sent them guardians since the attack. She never sees any of the soldiers, though she can imagine them helmeted and carapaced, animated statues of lustrous absence. Faceless, voiceless, nameless. She wonders if, far away, there is a war going on. A real one, sparked off by the assault here. On that the petals are silent.

The weather is getting warm, though never humid or uncomfortable. She’s taken to seed-pearl sandals and lighter dresses with skirts that snap like prayer flags in an assassin’s memory.

She kneels. A casket on the pavement, surrounded by mosaic pieces. The person in it has been sleeping a long time, nested in dreams of being reared by crèche-parents and of being wired; of pride when the first petals came. The casket is like the tank, incubating, preparing a sacred genesis.

Twoseret begins to unlatch the lid. A fetus must push through eventually or be stillborn. That is rare, but she’s seen it happen. The locks and puzzles fall away quickly this time, decorative more than protective.

Eir hair has grown to eir waist. Thick frosted lashes twitch in sleep. A curl of cool breath, body temperature artificially lowered, rises to meet the thick air. Crossed wrists coiled in origami vipers. She runs her palm over eir forehead; she imagines to em the contact must feel like a flame tickling candle wax. In this way she thaws her dreamer, waking em with her own warmth. No fluid to drain, no instrument to detach—this was, almost, a simple and natural sleep.

Ey turns on eir side as though wishing to rest a little longer. Twoseret brushes eir hair, her fingertips grazing the side of eir neck. When eir eyes open, they are terribly clear: irises deeply brown, circumference gilded in amber. The scent of eir favorite perfume wafts, the angular folds of eir favorite vest rises and falls to eir breathing.

“You always slept so heavily.” Twoseret takes em into her arms, helping them out of the casket. “Do I call you Oridel now? Captain Oridel Nehetis. It sounds all grand.”

Ey rubs at eir eyes, groggy, one of those slightly childish gestures—she’s never been able to break eir habit. “No, of course not. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? When did we have hornet fliers guarding our sky? God, I miss piloting those.”

“Recent addition. I find their silhouette very charming. There’s so much to tell you.” She pecks em on the lips. “Welcome back, Umaiyal.”

And Umaiyal laughs, in what is nearly eir voice, straightening to eir feet and taking her hand in that light-firm way that belongs to Umaiyal alone. “I’m home.”

At the moment of her birth, Twoseret learned three things: that her life will be full of peace, that she will never die, and that she will know precisely one tragedy. These facts are absolute, untarnished by chance and impregnable to intervention.

As she walks arm in arm with Umaiyal up the puzzle-paths, her tragedy falls away like pale chrysalis, dissipating on the mosaic tiles and dispersing in the low salted wind.

When her next petals come she reads them and smiles, and casts them aside.

About the Author

Benjanun Sriduangkaew writes love letters to strange cities, beautiful bugs, and the future. Her work has appeared in Tor.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Phantasm Japan, The Dark, and year’s bests. She has been shortlisted for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer and her debut novella Scale-Bright has been nominated for the British SF Association Award.

Postcards From Monster Island

Emily Devenport

Sometimes people ask me, “Why didn’t you run?”

“Because I had the Martian Death Flu,” I tell them.

They look at me funny because they’ve seen the footage of people clogging the roads, and the subways and trains, desperate to get out of town the day he waded ashore. I wasn’t in that crowd. I was flat on my back in my studio apartment, blitzed out of my mind with medicine. Two of my cats slept on top of me and my dog was snoring beside us when the whole building began to shake. Some of my books fell off their shelves, and I could hear the dishes clattering in their cupboards. I thought it was an earthquake. I considered dragging myself out of bed and crouching in a doorway.

That impulse didn’t make it past the notion stage. I couldn’t even muster the ambition to be worried as more books tumbled off my shelves and the windows rattled. I only managed a little curiosity when I noticed that the shaking was a side effect of slow, ponderous BOOMs, spaced like colossal footsteps. If the Statue of Liberty took a walk through town, she might make noises like that.

Wow, I thought. This is the weirdest fever dream I’ve ever had. And then I fell asleep again.

All night long I felt the tremors and heard the sirens. Once I awoke to a sound like ten foghorns going off at once. The cry was challenging, yet—oddly lonesome. That was the only time during the night when I believed something might really be going on. I thought I should at least try to get up. And then I passed out.

When the bombs started to drop, I pried my eyes open and squinted at the window. Morning light was trying to penetrate the dust and debris floating in the air. It wasn’t making much headway.

Any normal person would have been thinking about evacuating the scene by that point. But the Martian Death Flu, though not actually from Mars, made me feel anything but normal. For one thing, when I sat up, the room started to spin. For another, my pets let me know in no uncertain terms that they were hungry. Plus my dog needed to potty.

I had to answer my own call of nature first. Halfway to the bathroom, I decided I’d better crawl if I really wanted to get there. Afterward I took more medicine, my head pounding in tune with the bombs going off outside.

The war sounded like it might be about a mile away. My apartment shook more than it had during the night, yet everything was still pretty much intact. My pets didn’t like the noise, but they seemed more worried about their stomachs, so I staggered out of the bathroom and fixed their bowls.

I could barely hold myself upright long enough to do it. Once my dog had eaten, she reminded me that I needed to do something more challenging. I managed to get her collar attached and find the pooper-scooper. Then it was out into the cold, cruel world.

We passed one of my neighbors in the hall: Mr. Abé. He operated an African-clothing shop on our street. As the BOOMs and RAT-TAT-TATs shook our building, I lurched back and forth across the hall, and Mr. Abé gracefully sidestepped me.

“Sorry,” I rasped.

“I hope you feel better soon, Miss Herrmann,” he said. “Terrible racket, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” I managed, before Peachy almost pulled me off my feet. She had her priorities, and she would tolerate no delay.

Under the circumstances it was crazy to get into the elevator, but I knew I wouldn’t make it down the stairs. I don’t remember how we got outside from there, but we ended up in the alley behind our building. Peachy did her business cautiously, but not as nervously as I expected she would. She stopped from time to time and perked her ears at the sounds of battle. She sniffed out her favorite spots, and I pooper-scooped. Then she pulled me back toward the alley door, and I took a moment to be grateful she wasn’t going to insist on walkies. The way I was feeling, it would have been more like draggies.

Just before we got through the door, that foghorn cry sounded again. It was much louder without the walls of our well-constructed building to muffle it. Both Peachy and I were extremely impressed. Instead of loneliness, this time I heard a note of exasperation.

Peachy trotted through the door and I stumbled after her. I don’t remember how I got rid of the poop I had scooped, but I can only hope I did the right thing with it. I made it back up to our floor and into our little apartment.

I really wanted to fall into bed. I also wanted to throw up. But I made myself grab my phone, and I also snagged the remote. All four of the cats were on the bed by then, but they made room for me once they realized I was about to fall on them.

For several moments I just lay there, the remote and phone still clutched in my hands, my stomach and my head competing for Most Amazingly Wretched Body Part. I waited until I was fairly sure I wasn’t going to throw up, and then I dialed the first of my three jobs.

They were part-time jobs, the best I could find with my new bachelor’s degree in library science, and I juggled them to keep myself afloat. Only one of them paid for sick time, so I had planned to dose myself with the medicine and stagger in to work, regardless of how horrible I felt. That plan had wilted in the painful (and extremely filtered) light of day. I speed-dialed the morning job.

An operator told me the number was no longer in service. I got the same message for the afternoon job. The number for the evening job didn’t even connect with a recording; it just made horrible noises.

I gave up on the phone. “Guess what, gang,” I croaked. “I don’t have to go to work—ever again.”

My building shook, the dishes rattled, and another book fell off the shelf. I should have been worried, possibly even depressed to lose my livelihood. Yet somehow I felt relieved. I knew it wasn’t a rational reaction, but I couldn’t help it.

I pointed the remote at the TV and pushed the ON button.

I didn’t have to surf for a news channel. The story was on all of them. I hadn’t seen that kind of coverage since 9/11 (though I was in the 4th grade at the time, and spent most of my time watching the Cartoon Channel, so maybe I wasn’t an authority on that). Talking heads babbled about the giant creature who had waded ashore, and the bombs that didn’t seem to do anything but annoy it, and the pollution and/or nuclear waste that had probably created it, and the wreckage that used to be our city, and the conference with the president that was supposed to happen any minute (but never did on that night)—and on the bottom of the screen scrolled the words: SCIENTISTS BAFFLED BY BEHEMOTH.

It was hard to get a good look at him with all the smoke, fire, tracers, exploding debris, etc. But I could see bits and pieces. He was colossal (apparently they felt behemoth was easier to spell). He sometimes stood on two legs, sometimes on four, and I couldn’t help comparing him to a giant lemur—except that he had a thick tail that he used to bash things.

Another not-so-lemur-ish characteristic was his hide. Instead of fur, he had these triangular, rocky scales that seemed impervious to everything they hurled at him. No missiles could penetrate that hide. And some of them were really big missiles.

They did no damage to Behemoth. But they did plenty of damage to our city. Just when I thought they would wise up and stop with the bombs, a troops of marines jumped out of an airplane and parachuted onto him. They bounced off too. When they landed, the ones who didn’t get tangled in their parachutes launched grenades at him. He turned and walked away from them, toppling several buildings that had been damaged by the bombs.

“This just in,” said the reporter, who sounded like he might OD on the excitement. “All troops are being withdrawn. Readings on the geiger counters are spiking. The creature seems to be generating dangerous levels of radiation.”

That didn’t sound good. But no one had anything very smart to add, and amazingly, the behemoth story began to suffer from the same problem every other big news story seems to have: endless rehashing of theories and footage, without anything new or intelligent to offer.       

I passed out again while waiting for clarification on the radiation thing. It sounded pretty bad, and it also sounded like a good reason to clear out, assuming I could find a way to wrangle four cats and a dog. And my dizzy, flu-bedeviled ass. To where, I couldn’t imagine. Because no shelter was going to take my pets; I had heard about what happened to the pets in New Orleans after that hurricane.

Maybe the radiation wouldn’t reach my part of the city . . .

A few hours later I woke to hear someone on the TV saying that Behemoth wasn’t radioactive all the time, just when a lot of missiles had been fired at him. Like maybe it was a defense mechanism or something. But then they started that old rehash again, and I stopped listening. The only thing that made my ears perk up was a rumor that another giant creature had been spotted over our city, this one in the clouds.

Yes, that was the Cloud Squid. She showed up inside a thunder storm. The rain thrashed us so long, parts of the city flooded. It did clean most of the smoke and debris out of the air, though. You’ve got to look on the bright side.

The bright side was pretty easy for me to see. Because thanks to Behemoth, I wouldn’t have to drag my half-dead carcass out of bed and go to work anytime soon. Sadly, it was that simple. I wondered if I might qualify for some kind of hazard pay, or even radiation disability. When I passed out again, I dreamed I was taking selfies of my new, glow-in-the-dark face, and I kept having to do it over because I couldn’t quite seem to capture the pretty colors of my triangular scales.

When I woke up, my neighbor Frida stood looking down at me. “Bernadette—are you still alive?” she wondered.

This was an ironic question, considering that Frida, who actually did look like Frida Khalo when she wasn’t in Santa Muerta drag, had painted her face to look like a flowery Dia de los Muertos skull. The effect was quite gorgeous, but it looked as if Death herself had paid me a visit. Death carrying a container of chicken soup. Accompanied by a pet ferret on a leash.

“Maybe,” I croaked. I sounded even worse than the last time I had tried to communicate, but I felt better. Not great, but there was a definite improvement; my head wasn’t spinning and my stomach had settled. The chicken soup smelled good.

“Can you sit up?” asked Frida. “I’ll fix you a bowl of this soup and then take Peachy for her walk.”

“You really are a saint, Miss Muerta.” I pushed myself into a sitting position and watched her putter in the kitchen. Frankenferret sat on the foot of the bed, ignoring and being ignored by the cats while she socialized with Peachy, her best walkies buddy. Frida took Peachy out every day while I was at work, and in return she had a key to my place and unlimited borrowing privileges to my extensive library.

Frida is an artist who specializes in skeleton/calavera images, though her repertoire is much broader, including murals for businesses and private homes and illustrations for children’s books. She is a successful artist, which in this day and age means that she barely makes a living and has to rent a studio in our odd little building. But she is living La Vida Loca, and her soup is good. She dished up a bowl and put it on a tray, then waited with her hands on her hips until she was sure I could get it down and keep it there.

“I investigated the water tank on our roof,” she informed me. “I worried there might be gunk in there because of all the smoke and debris from the explosions. You know what I found?”

I swallowed a spoonful of soup and guessed, “Gunk?”

“Nope. Pure rainwater. The cleanest water I’ve ever seen. I have a theory about why, but I’m going to do some investigation when I take these rascals on their walk.”

“Okay.”

Frida herded Peachy and Frankenferret out the door and I reached for the remote. No bombs were going off, so I thought I’d better turn on the TV and find out where things stood.

Once again, the Creature Crisis dominated all stations, but now it was the Cloud Squid they couldn’t get enough of. I watched some very entertaining footage of her evading air force jets and attack helicopters. Every time they fired something at her she darted away, leading them on quite a merry chase. What was not so entertaining was the destruction they caused when their missiles hit what was left of the city. So they weren’t making any more headway against the Cloud Squid than they had against Behemoth. And I learned something else from the news ticker scrolling across the bottom of the TV screen:

DANGER ZONE HAS BEEN CLOSED . . . NO ONE ALLOWED IN OR OUT DUE TO RADIATION THREAT . . .

Closed. Yet I still had electricity, cable, water—all the important stuff. This would make life easier, as long as it lasted. Now that the Danger Zone was closed, I couldn’t leave even if I wanted to, so that simplified things. But if they were isolating us, did that mean they might drop a bomb on us? I mean a really big bomb? As in nuclear? Since we were already kind of radioactive sometimes?

I tried to reassure myself that they would have the common sense to realize the radiation from nuclear bombs would travel, along with dust and debris that would cause a nuclear winter. I tried and tried. And tried.

I gave that up and surfed the channels on the TV, until I found a story that was unfolding in real time. The Cloud Squid and Behemoth had discovered each other.

“It looks as though we’re about to see a battle royale between those two monsters.” The reporter was trying to sound worried, but instead he sounded like this would be the coolest thing ever.

The Cloud Squid eased herself into the airspace over Behemoth, moving almost shyly. She hovered over him, her limbs opening like the petals of a flower. He gazed up, his mouth open, revealing rows of teeth that looked like stalactites (and stalagmites).

Damn, I thought. I didn’t want to see them fight. They were both beautiful in their odd ways. But then something amazing happened.

The Cloud Squid began to flash with color. I remembered the idea of bioluminescence: cephalopods communicating with each other using light and color. It was a glorious sight. Behemoth seemed to think so too, from the way he gazed at her.

And then another amazing thing happened. Behemoth’s hide began to flash with color too. And why would the giant lemur with the rocky skin have bioluminescence? Beats me (though he did come out of the sea).

They flashed colors at each other for maybe twenty minutes. Reporters chattered, baffled by the scene, yet feeling compelled to make inane comments anyway. They were still hoping for a fight, but that wasn’t going to happen. The two creatures stopped flashing colors, and then the Cloud Squid drifted away with her rainstorm. Behemoth sat in the rubble he had been collecting and gazed at the news cameras, and if to say, What do you think of that?

Reporters dutifully started their rehash cycle. After another half hour of that, I turned off the set. I was about to drift off to sleep again when Frida came in with Peachy and Frankenferret.      

“Our branch of the subway line is intact,” said Frida. “And as far as I can tell, so are the cables that provide our internet and electricity. If you were willing to walk, you could get from here to the edge of the Danger Zone, but you’d have to cross some flooded parts up to your chest, maybe even up to your neck.”

“Are you planning to leave?” I asked.

She looked surprised. “No way. They’d have to drag me out of here.”

I felt happy to hear that. I doubted anyone else would bring me chicken soup. “So—did you see anyone down there?”

“Nope. Something better.” She pulled her iPad out of her backpack and called up a picture file. “I found another creature.”

The picture she showed me was murky. There was very little light in the tunnel, and the water level was high enough to hide a lot of stuff. But right in the middle of it all, a face grinned at me. “It looks like a friendly dog,” I said. “A giant—happy—water dog.”

“He acts like one, too,” said Frida, calling up more pictures. “You can’t see from these pics, but he’s about the size of a school bus. It’s hard to tell how many legs he has, because the number seems to change—see?” She selected a picture where he seemed to have five limbs, and then another where he might have only three, though in both of them he seemed to have a vaguely tail-shaped appendage. “I call him Mega Whatsis. Sometimes he seems to be solid, but other times he’s kind of gelatinous. Here’s a short video I took on my iPad.”

My stomach stirred uneasily at the thought of looking at something that was sometimes kind of gelatinous, but when I watched Mega Whatsis in the video, I saw a creature who moved confidently, even joyously, both in and out of the water. “Cool!”

“He’s smart,” said Frida. “Watch this next part.”

Frida’s hand appeared in the bottom edge of the picture. She held a cookie out to Mega Whatsis. His colossal head filled the frame until all I could see was a giant nostril sniffing the cookie. He delicately maneuvered the cookie into his mouth, using his rubbery lips, then pulled back for a moment and contemplated the taste, his happy face shifting into thoughtful lines. After another minute, he produced the cookie intact and nudged it back into Frida’s hand.

“It was dry,” said Frida. “No creature slobber on it.”

“Wow. Peachy couldn’t do that.”

Frida pulled up some more pictures on the laptop. “I expected the water down there to be full of waste and toxins. But it was more like natural creek water.”

I remembered what she had said about our water tank. “You think Mega Whatsis cleaned our water? Is that what you went down to investigate?”

She nodded. “But I don’t think it was him. He likes to stay underground. And his water has mud and silt in it.” She closed the picture files and put her pad back into its case. “I’m not telling anyone about this. If those jerks go down there to shoot bombs at Mega Whatsis, they’ll cut off our supply route. And he’s a big sweetheart, there’s no reason to hurt him.”

I decided to keep the radiation argument to myself for the time being. After all, I didn’t have a geiger counter.

Frida undid Peachy’s leash and patted her head. “She’s already gone potty. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Thanks,” I said.

After Frida had left, I surfed the TV stations, looking for evidence that anyone besides Frida knew about Mega Whatsis. I didn’t find any—now they were full of politicians arguing about whether or not any more money ought to be spent trying to kill Behemoth and the Cloud Squid. They couldn’t agree on that any more than they could agree on other stuff, so I drifted off to sleep again.

Sometime later, I approached wakefulness like a swimmer floating toward a bright surface. I couldn’t quite open my eyes, but I felt one of the cats lying across my stomach. I petted it, enjoying the velvety feel of its fur and its plump, warm body. I heard purring, but didn’t feel it vibrating in the body I was stroking.

And the fur felt too short. Way too short. Almost like you would expect the fur of a seal to be. I opened my eyes and saw the fat thing stretched across me. It tapered to a narrow tip that was lazily curling to and fro like a cat’s tail. It widened as it crossed my body and continued off the bed, onto the floor, and out the window, most of which was blocked by its bulk.

It was a tentacle.

Two things occurred to me then. The first was that you don’t expect a tentacle to be warm and fuzzy. The second was that the Cloud Squid was probably going to drag me through the window and eat me.

I lay there frozen, waiting for the Squid to make her move. When she ate me, who would take care of Peachy? Who would take care of Sheba, and Buster, and Thugly, and Jingle Monster (four more pets than I had officially declared in my lease agreement)? Would she eat them too? Jingle was grooming the tentacle as if it were another cat. Peachy had rested her head on top of it, and she was snoring again.

I’m not sure how long I lay there arguing with myself. But it was the Cloud Squid who resolved the situation. She used the tip of her tentacle like a hand and gently moved Peachy’s head onto the bed. Then she patted each of the cats and the dog, and slipped away out the window.

I stayed frozen for a few more moments, but I couldn’t resist the urge to look out the window to see where she had gone. I poked my head into mild morning air and the clean smell of recent rain. I saw the tentacle slipping back over the top of the roof. But why was she on the roof?

The water tank, I thought. She’s the one who put the rainwater in there . . .

After all, she moved around in a rain cloud. Maybe the rainwater was a pleasant side effect to one of her visitations. Whatever the reason, I didn’t feel like I wanted to lie in bed anymore. And I was sick of trying to get information out of the stupid talking-heads TV. Instead, I headed for my computer.

I logged onto Facebook. I wasn’t surprised to see that rumors about our creatures dominated the feed. What did surprise me was that there were still plenty of posts about politics, religion, status reports of how people’s diets were going, and pictures of funny cats. Once I got used to that, I composed my own status report and posted it.

To everyone who lives outside the Danger Zone, I said. Please stop bombing us. Don’t send any more troops. And please don’t let them drop an atomic bomb. Stop attacking, period! You’re doing more damage than good.

Once I had posted that, and tweeted an abbreviated version, I got an idea. I logged onto Google Blogger and created a blog called Postcards From Monster Island. It was just a template, but I thought maybe I could get Frida to send me some picture files. As I was plotting and scheming over all this, I realized something.

I felt better. I could breathe. I wasn’t dizzy. My head didn’t hurt. I was snarf-free. And my stomach was no longer my mortal enemy.

So I fed the beasties and took Peachy out for her business. Once we were outside, we even did a little walkies. But our world looked very different now.

A sort of mountain range had grown between my street and Behemoth’s battle zone. It seemed to consist of a combination of ruined buildings and actual rock. Hardly anyone was on the street, which looked largely untouched by the destruction. The temperature was mild, flowers bloomed in pots and window boxes, cooking smells tempted my starved palate, and most of the odd little shops were open, though there could be very few customers these days. The air still had that freshly washed smell, and breezes blew along the new corridor that had been created by Behemoth’s Makeshift Mountains.

Call me weird, but I thought it was an improvement. The noise of traffic was gone too, though I would still hear Behemoth moving big things around, with thuds and groans as stuff fell into place. He didn’t trumpet any challenges, but grumbled to himself, as if thinking aloud. Peachy perked her ears, seeming to understand every word. She even replied a few times.

Once she felt satisfied in every possible way, we came back inside and walked through the empty halls of our building. I wondered how many residents had evacuated. There weren’t that many of us in the first place, maybe around ten people. Our bottom floor had been converted into shops (or maybe the top floors had been converted into apartments, I wasn’t sure). We saw our super just once a month, though he did a good job with repairs. And he had put up bulletin boards next to the elevators, so I saw the note:

MEETING AT HOUDINI’S, UNIT 3C, 1:00 P.M. PLEASE COME AND DISCUSS THE CREATURE SITUATION  

The numbering in our building was as eccentric as the residents, so Apartment 3C was on the 2nd floor. The door stood open—someone had stuck a sign on it with an arrow pointing inside.

I pushed the door open further and saw Mr. Abé across the room. He waved from a wingback chair, where he nursed a cup of coffee. As I hesitated on the threshold, Houdini poked his tattooed head around the corner from his kitchen. “Come on in,” he said, with the voice of a carney barker.

Houdini had a magician’s name, but his true passion was the classic sideshow. He honored that tradition with the tattoos that covered him from head to toe, and he split his time between his circus memorabilia shop and a variety of sword-swallowing, fire-eating, knife-juggling gigs. His apartment was dominated by his personal collection, but everything was lovingly displayed, not jumbled together.

Over his couch hung a giant poster featuring all of the lions and tigers in the Barnum & Bailey Circus. Beneath the leaping cats sat Beetle, whose specialty was mounting insects for collectors and museums, and his partner Poe, who did professional skeleton articulation. Both held plates with orange scones made by Oskar, who perched on one arm of the couch, sipping a cup of mint tea. Oscar owned a bakery, and seeing the scones reminded me that my stomach was back to normal.

The gathering was completed by Frida, who fussed at the computer with her occasional boyfriend, Gee, who was a buyer for the Museum of Weird Stuff.

“So . . . ” I took account of my neighbors. “We’re the ones who stayed. Somehow, that doesn’t surprise me.”

Oskar sipped his tea. “Running seemed like a hysterical reaction,” he said. “Like lemmings jumping off a cliff.”

“Yes,” agreed Mr. Abé. “I’ve lived through much worse conflicts. And I can tell you from personal experience that refugee camps are not necessarily better than war zones.”

If you were wondering why two normal guys like Mr. Abé and Oskar would be friends with a tattooed knife juggler, a skull-faced artist, the Bug Guy, the Skeleton Guy, Mr. Weird Stuff, and Crazy Cat/Library Girl, I can only say that Mr. Abé’s remark about refugee camps might explain why he’s willing to look past the surface and put up with our eccentricities. And as for Oskar, baker par excellence, he’s a very nice fellow with a flaw that was well tolerated in Germany, but is decidedly odd in the U.S. Oskar looks like Uncle Fester from The Addams Family. He smiles like him, too.

Houdini snagged a chair for me and for himself. “So here’s why I called the meeting.” His tone was so commanding, even Frida and Gee stopped surfing. “For all intents and purposes, we are now in the Danger Zone. We are stuck here, and we’re the ones getting hurt by the bombs and stuff. We have to start telling the outside world what we want.”

“Won’t they just ignore us?” asked Beetle, around a bit of scone.

“Maybe not,” I said. “We’re what passes for experts now.”

Mr. Abé raised an eyebrow. “Interesting. How did we pull that off?”

But Poe was nodding enthusiastically. “No, we are! I’ve been tweeting about it. I got the president’s office to talk to me—can you believe it?”

“Good.” Houdini waved a hand at Poe as if he were one of his side show performers, and he wanted everyone to step right up. “Because the biggest problem we’ve got is not the creatures. It’s the idiots in Congress who want to drop an A-bomb on us. The only thing we’ve got going for us is that the president is commander in chief, and he thinks it won’t work.”

“But what will he think when he finds out we’ve got three creatures now?” I worried.

“There are more than three,” said Gee. “I think there may be as many as seven in our city alone. So far. Look at the pictures we took.”

Frida tapped the screen to show us action shots. “They’re all doing stuff, but none of them are attacking people. See? There are people in all of these shots—some of them taking pics like we were doing, so it won’t be long until the outside world finds out.”

“Ah, but what are the creatures doing, Miss Muerta? That’s what we need to prove.”

Gee pushed a lock of his blue hair out of his face. “All we have is theories about most of them right now—except for Behemoth. Frida thinks he’s an artist.”

That remark provoked a conspicuous silence. But Frida was undaunted. “You notice he’s been piling debris up? Well, he’s fusing it together in particular ways. Look . . . ” She found the video she wanted and hit play. We watched Behemoth shove debris into piles, then look at it critically. He rearranged things a bit, then pondered it again. When he felt satisfied, he stretched out on the pile and his underside began to glow.

When he stepped away from it, the result was an oddly pleasing amalgam of cityscape and mountain range. I had never seen anything quite like it.

“He’s an artist,” said Frida, with the reverence most people reserve for guys like Michelangelo.

“And I think that’s why radiation levels keep spiking and then falling off. That’s how he’s melting stuff together.”

“All well and good,” Oskar said. “But that will only make people angry when we tell them. They think Behemoth is a monster, like from the movies. They see that he’s giant, he waded ashore and destroyed the city. We know the military did most of that, but that will leave egg on the faces of the politicians and the generals. They will despise us if we point that out.”

I heard him, but something that was unfolding on Frida’s screen snared my attention. “Hey—is that footage you guys took?”

“No,” said Gee. “That’s from YouTube; someone took it with their cell phone the night Behemoth came ashore.”

Behemoth was walking through the city, away from planes that shot missiles at him. An elevated train line stretched across his path; the train was stranded, and full of people. It looked like Behemoth was going to walk right into them, so people were screaming, trying to climb out windows. Then Behemoth paused, pivoted just as another missile was fired at him, and the bridge started to collapse.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Did you see that? Can you go back and play it again?”

He replayed the segment, then froze it at the crucial moment.

“Wow,” said Frida. “Did I just see that?”

We watched the segment again.

“We’ve got to blitz social media with this clip,” said Frida. “I’ve seen the early part of the footage, but they keep cutting out the end. A lot of people probably haven’t seen the whole thing!”

“And there’s something else we have to do,” I said. “If we want to make them believe that we’re experts, and they should listen to us, we need to work on our bona fides.”

“But how?” wondered Houdini.

I pointed to the image on the screen. “We need to make contact with Behemoth.”

Our trip into the Makeshift Mountains made me wonder if Behemoth and the other creatures were having some positive effect on us after all. It was a challenging climb (though a few parts of Behemoth’s construct still had functioning elevators), yet I was able to troop alongside the others, despite the fact that I had just been very sick. We let Frida and Gee lead the way, since they were the youngest, and since they had also made several forays into those mountains.

For over two hours we wormed our way through mountain passages, walked single file along ridges, climbed in and out of shattered windows and across rooftops and balconies. We could hear Behemoth doing his work. We knew we were close.

“My friends,” Oskar warned, “we hope Behemoth will not hurt us, but what if we’re wrong? What if all those bombs and grenades have taught him to hate us?”

I didn’t have an answer to that, and by then I realized I wasn’t nearly as scared as I should have been. I just wanted to find Behemoth, I wasn’t even thinking about how we should contact him. But we had to do it if we wanted a future. We were bound together with him, for better or worse.

We climbed several rows of steps, some from old structures and some newly formed, until we reached a lookout point. As we made our way around an outcrop on the pinnacle, we came face-to-face with Behemoth. He stood in the valley on the other side of the peak, not more than one hundred yards away from us—a distance he could have crossed in just a few steps. His head was almost level with us.

Those great, golden eyes rolled in our direction and focused on us.

“Oops,” I said.

Yet I didn’t turn to run back down the path. None of us did. And it wasn’t just because we couldn’t have gotten away. Those eyes saw us, and we stared back at them, but it wasn’t an exchange between predator and prey. We, the Oddballs of the City, recognized Behemoth, the Oddball of the World.

We had seen it in that footage when he bumped into the elevated train. The cars began to topple from the track. Behemoth reached out and grabbed the train as it was going down. Once he had it settled more or less on terra firma, he shielded the people from the missiles until they could get out and flee the scene. One guy with a cell phone had caught that moment, and no one said anything about it. But we saw it. And now we were looking him right in his gigantic eyes.

Behemoth opened his mouth and emitted that cry we had heard so often in the last few days. There was no mistaking what he meant by it. I think he tempered it for us, it was gentler. It was still full of loneliness. But a new note had entered that symphony. To me, it sounded like hope.

“What should we do?” wondered Frida.

Without discussing it, we all waved at Behemoth. His ears perked. His pupils expanded, as if he were drinking in the sight. He sighed, and settled down to contemplate us further.

We sat down and ate the lunch Oskar and Houdini had packed for us, where Behemoth could see us. When we had finished, Oskar said, “I can sit with him for a few hours. You guys go home and rest up.”

“I’ll spell you after that,” offered Frida.

And so it went. For the next few days, one of us was always where Behemoth could see us. Once we had established that habit with him, more of the creatures began to come into the open. We waved at them. Cloud Squid waved back with all her tentacles. Mega Whatsis grinned and wagged his vaguely tail-shaped appendage.

But that’s not all we were doing. We started blitzing social media with our posts and pictures.

“Stop attacking!” we pleaded. “We’ve reached an accord with the creatures. We can manage them.”

When outraged people demanded to know just where they were going to rebuild the centers of commerce and culture that had once dominated our city, we pointed out that it would be a hundred times more expensive to rebuild that stuff than it would be to build new centers of commerce somewhere else. In response, we got a lot of flack from trolls. “Do the math!” we pleaded.

Just when we thought no one was listening, the trolling stopped. And the talking heads on TV stopped speculating whether more marines were going to jump out of planes so they could bounce off Behemoth’s teflon hide. Instead, the government started to drop emergency supplies for us along the Neutral Zone. And that’s when I got an email from the president.

We’ll make sure you have electricity and water, he promised. We’ll keep the food and medicine coming, too. Your debts have been settled, and you won’t be paying rent anymore. In return, all that we ask is that you keep managing the creatures. Keep them peaceful. Can you do that?

Yes, I replied, though I felt a little guilty about claiming credit for what seemed more like good luck.

On the other hand, it might be something more than that. It might be the fact that even when the city seemed to be coming down around us, we didn’t want to leave. The more people outside lost hope, the more we gained it. They wanted to throw bombs at Behemoth, we wanted to sit down and have lunch with him. That counted for something.

So—you remember that footage of all the people pouring out of the city the day Behemoth came ashore? Now a lot of people want to come back. Not to live—to see the creatures. So we started Danger Zone Tours. We take selected visitors to multiple stops, including the shops of Mr. Abé, Houdini, and Gee, to Oskar’s bakery and Frida’s gallery, Beetle’s exhibit and Poe’s museum, and to lots of other odd places that have sprung up. We’ve all got some extra cash on the side now.

We take them to see the creatures, too. Ten of them have come out into the open, so far. Mega Whatsis is the usual favorite (though he still doesn’t like cookies).

The last stop on the tour is a spot where people can see Behemoth. When he looks our way, we all wave. People love that. It’s the kind of reverence you would expect to see for whales breaking the surface next to a Greenpeace boat. When our visitors leave us, they talk about how glad they are the creatures showed up to teach us the error of our ways, that we were poisoning our world.

I agree that Nature has a reason for everything it does. If people who live outside of Monster Island think the creatures appeared because we abused the Earth, I won’t try to tell them otherwise. Maybe they’ll behave more responsibly. But I think there’s another reason.

Last night, I went to sit with Behemoth, and the two of us gazed at the stars. We’ve done that a lot, lately. Now that the Danger Zone is dark at night, we can see the Milky Way. Behemoth usually ponders the sky with a combination of wonder and inquiry, but last night was different. Last night, he watched with a vigilance that put me on edge. When Oskar came to spell me at midnight, I didn’t leave. The two of us studied the heavens alongside Behemoth.

Then one of the stars glowed brighter. It glowed so bright, I realized it wasn’t a star. It moved closer; I could see other lights on it. Behemoth stood to his full height, a low rumble sounding deep within his chest. The lights began to flash at him in patterns.

Behemoth’s eyes glowed red, his brows clashed together like thunderclouds, and he fixed that bright light in the sky with his vigilant glare, opened his mouth, and sucked a colossal lungful of air for one of his fog-horn blasts.

This time his cry had no trace of loneliness in it. I wouldn’t even call it a cry. This was a full-throated roar, so loud the farthest stars must have heard it. This was the sound of challenge, the promise of doom to anyone who would threaten our world.

The light flashed white-hot, then streaked across the sky and away from Earth.

“Was that what I think it was?” Oskar asked, warily.

“Yep,” I agreed. “A UFO. I think Behemoth scared it away.”

The creatures aren’t here to destroy us. They’re not even here to rebuke us for our destructive ways. They’re here to defend us.

“The Creature War isn’t over,” I told Oskar. “This is the war that is yet to be fought.”

Oskar settled down for his vigil. “Better tell the others what you saw.”

I climbed back down through the Makeshift Mountains and walked up my street in our remade city, past all the odd shops, new and old, that defined the true character of the Danger Zone, until I arrived home to tend my beasties and compose a letter to the president.

About the Author

Emily Devenport has been published in the U.S., the U.K., Italy, and Israel, under three pen names. Her novels are Shade, Larissa, Scorpianne, Eggheads, The Kronos Condition, Godheads, Broken Time (which was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award), Belarus, and Enemies. Her short stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Full Spectrum, and Aboriginal SF, whose readers honored her with a Boomerang Award (an actual boomerang, attractively inscribed). Look for her new novels, The Night Shifters, Spirits of Glory, and Pale Lady on Amazon, Barnes &ampl Noble, and Smashwords. She’s married to artist/writer Ernest Hogan, and they live in Arizona. She’s currently studying geology, and hopes that one day she’ll be able to volunteer full time in our local National and State parks as resident geo-geek.

Noble Mold

Kage Baker

For a while I lived in this little town by the sea. Boy, it was a soft job. Santa Barbara had become civilized by then: no more Indian rebellions, no more pirates storming up the beach, nearly all the grizzly bears gone. Once in a while some bureaucrat from Mexico City would raise hell with us, but by and large the days of the old Missions were declining into forlorn shades, waiting for the Yankees to come.

The Company operated a receiving, storage, and shipping terminal out of what looked like an oaken chest in my cell. I had a mortal identity as an alert little padre with an administrative career ahead of him, so the Church kept me pretty busy pushing a quill. My Company duties, though, were minor: I logged in consignments from agents in the field and forwarded communiqués.

It was sort of a forty-year vacation. There were fiestas and fandangos down in the pueblo. There were horse races along the shore of the lagoon. My social standing with the De La Guerra family was high, so I got invited out to supper a lot. And at night, when the bishop had gone to bed and our few pathetic Indians were tucked in for the night, I would sneak a little glass of Communion wine and then relax out on the front steps of the church. There I’d sit, listening to the night sounds, looking down the long slope to the night sea. Sometimes I’d sit there until the sky pinked up in the east and the bells rang for Matins. We Old Ones don’t need much sleep.

One August night I was sitting like that, watching the moon drop down toward the Pacific, when I picked up the signal of another immortal somewhere out there in the night. I tracked it coming along the shoreline, past the point at Goleta; then it crossed the Camino Real and came straight uphill at me. Company business. I sighed and broadcast, Quo Vadis?

Hola, came the reply. I scanned, but I knew who it was anyway. Hi, Mendoza, I signaled back, and leaned up on my elbows to await her arrival. Pretty soon I picked her up on visual, too, climbing up out of the mists that flowed along the little stream; first the wide-brimmed hat, then the shoulders bent forward under the weight of the pack, the long walking skirt, the determined lope of the field operative without transportation.

Mendoza is a botanist, and has been out in the field too long. At this point she’d been tramping around Alta California for the better part of twelve decades. God only knew what the Company had found for her to do out in the back of beyond; I’d have known, if I’d been nosy enough to read the Company directives I relayed to her from time to time. I wasn’t her case officer anymore, though, so I didn’t.

She raised burning eyes to me and my heart sank. She was on a Mission, and I don’t mean the kind with stuccoed arches and tile roofs. Mendoza takes her work way too seriously. “How’s it going, kid?” I greeted her in a loud whisper when she was close enough.

“Okay.” She slung down her pack on the step beside me, picked up my wine and drank it, handed me back the empty glass and sat down.

“I thought you were back up in Monterey these days,” I ventured.

“No. The Ventana,” she replied. There was a silence while the sky got a little brighter. Far off, a rooster started to crow and then thought better of it.

“Well, well. To what do I owe the pleasure, et cetera?” I prompted.

She gave me a sharp look. “Company Directive 080444-C,” she said, as though it were really obvious.

I’d developed this terrible habit of storing incoming Green Directives in my tertiary consciousness without scanning them first. The soft life, I guess. I accessed hastily. “They’re sending you after grapes?” I cried a second later.

“Not just grapes.” She leaned forward and stared into my eyes. “Mission grapes. All the cultivars around here that will be replaced by the varieties the Yankees introduce. I’m to collect genetic material from every remaining vine within a twenty-five-mile radius of this building.” She looked around disdainfully. “Not that I expect to find all that many. This place is a wreck. The Church has really let its agricultural program go to hell, hasn’t it?”

“Hard to get slave labor nowadays.” I shrugged. “Can’t keep ’em down on the farm without leg irons. We get a little help from the ones who really bought into the religion, but that’s about it.”

“And the Holy Office can’t touch them.” Mendoza shook her head. “Never thought I’d see the day.”

“Hey, things change.” I stretched out and crossed my sandaled feet one over the other. “Anyway. The Mexicans hate my poor little bishop and are doing their level best to drive him crazy. In all the confusion with the Missions being closed down, a lot of stuff has been looted. Plants get dug up and moved to people’s gardens in the dark of night. There are still a few Indian families back in some of the canyons, too, and a lot of them have tiny little farms. Probably a lot of specimens out there, but you’ll really have to hunt around for them.”

She nodded, all brisk. “I’ll need a processing credenza. Bed and board, too, and a cover identity. That’s your job. Can you arrange them by 0600 hours?”

“Gosh, this is just like old times,” I said without enthusiasm. She gave me that look again.

“I have work to do,” she explained with exaggerated patience. “It is very important work. I’m a good little machine and I love my work. Nothing is more important than My Work. You taught me that, remember?”

Which I had, so I just smiled my most sincere smile as I clapped her on the shoulder. “And a damned good machine you are, too, I know you’ll do a great job, Mendoza. And I feel that your efficiency will be increased if you don’t rush this job. Take the time to do it right, you know? Mix a little rest and rec into your schedule. After all, you really deserve a holiday, a hard-working operative like you. This is a great place for fun. You could come to one of our local cascaron balls. Dance the night away. You used to like to dance.”

Boy, was that the wrong thing to say. She stood up slowly, like a cobra rearing back.

“I haven’t owned a ballgown since 1703. I haven’t attended a mortal party since 1555. If you’ve chosen to forget that miserable Christmas, I can assure you I haven’t. You play with the damned monkeys, if you’re so fond of them.” She drew a deep breath. “I, myself, have better things to do.” She stalked away up the steps, but I called after her:

“You’re still sore about the Englishman, huh?”

She didn’t deign to respond but shoved her way between the church doors, presumably to get some sleep behind the altar screen where she wouldn’t be disturbed.

She was still sore about the Englishman.

I may have a more relaxed attitude toward my job than some people I could mention, but I’m still the best at it. By the time Mendoza wandered squinting into morning light I had her station set up, complete with hardware, in one of the Mission’s guest cells. For the benefit of my fellow friars she was my cousin from Guadalajara, visiting me while she awaited the arrival of her husband from Mexico City. As befitted the daughter of an old Christian family, the senora was of a sober and studious nature, and derived much innocent pleasure from painting flowers and other subjects of natural history.

She didn’t waste any time. Mendoza went straight out to what remained of the Mission vineyard and set to work, clipping specimens, taking soil samples, doing all those things you’d have to be an obsessed specialist to enjoy. By the first evening she was hard at work at her credenza, processing it all.

When it came time to loot the private gardens of the Gentes de Razon her social introductions went okay, too, once I got her into some decent visiting clothes. I did most of the talking to the Ortegas and Carrillos and the rest, and the fact that she was a little stiff and silent while taking grape brandy with them could easily be explained away by her white skin and blue veins. If you had any Spanish blood you were sort of expected to sneer about it in that place, in those days.

Anyway it was a relief for everybody when she’d finished in the pueblo and went roving up and down the canyons, pouncing on unclaimed vines. There were a few Indians settled back in the hills, ex-neophytes scratching out a living between two worlds, on land nobody else had wanted. What they made of this woman, white as their worst nightmares, who spoke to them in imperious and perfectly accented Barbareno Chumash, I can only imagine. However she persuaded them, though, she got samples of their vines too. I figured she’d soon be on her way back to the hinterlands, and had an extra glass of Communion wine to celebrate. Was that ever premature!

I was hearing confessions when her scream of excitement cut through the subvocal ether, followed by delighted profanity in sixteenth-century Galician. My parishioner went on:

“ . . . which you should also know, Father, was that I have coveted Juana’s new pans. These are not common iron pans but enamelware, white with a blue stripe, very pretty, and they came from the Yankee trading ship. It disturbs me that such things should imperil my soul.”

Joseph! Joseph! Joseph!

“It is good to be concerned on that account, my child.” I shut out Mendoza’s transmission so I could concentrate on the elderly mortal woman on the other side of the screen. “To covet worldly things is very sinful indeed, especially for the poor. The Devil himself sent the Yankees with those pans, you may be certain.” But Mendoza had left her credenza and was coming down the arcade in search of me, ten meters, twenty meters, twenty-five . . . “For this, and for your sinful dreams, you must say thirty Paternosters and sixty Ave Marias . . . ” Mendoza was coming up the church steps two at a time . . . “Now, recite with me the Act of Contrition—”

“Hey!” Mendoza pulled back the door of the confessional. Her eyes were glowing with happiness. I gave her a stern look and continued the Act of Contrition with my somewhat disconcerted penitent, so Mendoza went out to stride up and down in front of the church in her impatience.

“Don’t you know better than to interrupt me when I’m administering a sacrament?” I snapped when I was finally able to come out to her. “Some Spaniard you are!”

“So report me to the Holy Office. Joseph, this is important. One of my specimens read out with an F-M Class One rating.”

“And?” I put my hands in my sleeves and frowned at her, refusing to come out of the role of offended friar.

“Favorable Mutation, Joseph, don’t you know what that means? It’s a Mission grape with a difference. It’s got Saccharomyces with style and Botrytis in rare bloom. Do you know what happens when a field operative discovers an F-M Class One, Joseph?”

“You get a prize,” I guessed.

“Si señor!” She did a little dance down the steps and stared up at me in blazing jubilation. I hadn’t seen her this happy since 1554. “I get a Discovery Bonus! Six months of access to a lab for my own personal research projects, with the very finest equipment available! Oh joy, oh rapture. So I need you to help me.”

“What do you need?”

“The Company wants the parent plant I took the specimen from, the whole thing, root and branch. It’s a big vine, must have been planted years ago, so I need you to get me some Indians to dig it up and bring it back here in a carreta. Six months at a Sciences Base, can you imagine?”

“Where did you get the specimen?” I inquired.

She barely thought about it. “Two kilometers south-southeast. Just some Indian family back in the hills, Joseph, with a hut in a clearing and a garden. Kasmali, that was what they called themselves. You know the family? I suppose we’ll have to pay them something for it. You’ll have to arrange that for me, okay?”

I sighed. Once again the kindly padre was going to explain to the Indian why it was necessary to give up yet another of his belongings. Not my favorite role, all things considered.

But there we were that afternoon, the jolly friar and his haughty cousin, paying a call on the Kasmali family.

They were good parishioners of mine, the old abuela at Mass every day of the week, rain or shine, the rest of the family lined up there every Sunday. That was a lot to expect of our Indians in this day and age. They were prosperous, too, as Indians went: they had three walls of a real adobe house and had patched in the rest with woven brush. They had terraced their tiny hillside garden and were growing all kinds of vegetables on land not fit for grazing. There were a few chickens, there were a few little brown children chasing them, there were a few cotton garments drying on the bushes. And, on the crest of the hill, a little way from the house, there was the vineyard: four old vines, big as trees, with branches spreading out to shade most of an acre of land.

The children saw us coming and vanished into the house without a sound. By the time we reached the top of the winding stony path, they had all come out and were staring at us: the toothless old woman from daily Mass, a toothless old man I did not know, the old son, the two grown grandsons, their wives, and children of assorted ages. The elder of the grandsons came forward to greet us.

“Good evening, little Father.” He looked uneasily at Mendoza. “Good evening, lady.”

“Good evening, Emidio.” I paused and pretended to be catching my breath after the climb, scanning him. He was small, solidly built, with broad and very dark features; he had a stiff black moustache. His wide eyes flickered once more to Mendoza, then back to me. “You have already been introduced to my cousin, I see.”

“Yes, little Father.” He made a slight bow in her direction. “The lady came yesterday and cut some branches off our grapevines. We did not mind, of course.”

“It is very kind of you to permit her to collect these things.” I eyed Mendoza, hoping she’d been tactful with them.

“Not at all. The lady speaks our language very well.”

“That is only courtesy, my son. Now, I must tell you that one of your vines has taken her fancy, for its extraordinary fruit and certain virtues in the leaves. We have come back here today, therefore, to ask you what you will accept for that near vine at the bottom of the terrace.”

The rest of the family stood like statues, even the children. Emidio moved his hands in a helpless gesture and said, “The lady must of course accept our gift.”

“No, no,” said Mendoza. “We’ll pay you. How much do you want for it?” I winced.

“She must accept the gift, please, Father.” Emidio’s smile was wretched.

“Of course she shall,” I agreed. “And, Emidio, I have a gift I have been meaning to give you since the feast of San Juan. Two little pigs, a boar and a sow, so they may increase. When you bring down the vine for us you may collect them.”

The wives lifted up their heads at that. This was a good deal. Emidio spread out his hands again. “Of course, little Father. Tomorrow.”

“Well, that was easy,” Mendoza remarked as we picked our way down the hill through the chaparral. “You’re so good with mortals, Joseph. You just have to treat Indians like children, I guess, huh?”

“No, you don’t,” I sighed. “But it’s what they expect you to do, so they play along.” There was more to it than that, of course, but something else was bothering me. I had picked up something more than the usual stifled resentment when I had voiced my request: someone in the family had been badly frightened for a second. Why? “You didn’t do anything to, like, scare those people when you were there before, did you, Mendoza? Didn’t threaten them or anything, did you?”

“Heavens, no.” She stopped to examine a weed. “I was quite polite. They weren’t comfortable around me, actually, but then mortals never are. Look at this! I’ve never seen this blooming so late in the year, have you?”

“Nice.” I glanced at it. I don’t know from plants. I know a lot about mortals, though.

So I was surprised as hell next day when Emidio and his brother appeared at the Mission, trundling a cart full of swaying leaves into the open space by the fountain. I went out to greet them and Mendoza was behind me like a shadow. She must have been prowling her room, listening for the squeak of wheels.

“This is very good, my sons, I am proud of you—” I was saying heartily, when Mendoza transmitted a blast of subvocal fury.

Damn it, Joseph, this is wrong! These are just clippings, they haven’t brought the whole vine!

“—but I perceive there has been a misunderstanding,” I continued. “My cousin requested the vine itself, with its roots, that she may replant it. You have brought only cut branches, apparently.” The Indians exchanged glances.

“Please forgive us, little Father. We did not understand.” They set down the traces and Emidio reached into the back. “We did bring all the grapes that were ripe. Maybe it was these the lady wanted?” And he proffered a big woven dish of grapes. I looked close and noticed they did have a funny look to them, a bloom on the skin so heavy it was almost . . . furry?

“No,” said Mendoza, in clearest Chumash. “Not just the grapes. I want the vine. The whole plant. You need to dig it up, roots and all, and bring it here. Do you understand now?”

“Oh,” said Emidio. “We’re very sorry. We didn’t understand.”

“But you understand now?” she demanded.

“I am certain they do,” I said smoothly. “What remarkable grapes these are, my sons, and what a beautiful basket! Come in and rest in the shade, my sons, and have a cool drink. Then we will go catch one of the little pigs I promised you.”

By the time we got back, Mendoza had vanished; the grapes and the vine cuttings were gone too. The brothers trudged away up the hill with their cart and one squealing shoat, his legs bound with twine. Pig Number Two remained in the Mission pen, to be paid on delivery of the vine. I figured if the wives got that message they’d see to it the job got done.

Mendoza came out when they were gone. She looked paler than usual. She handed me a sheet of paper from her credenza. “This is a Priority Order,” she told me. “I sent them the codes on the grapes and clippings anyway, but it’s not enough.”

I read the memo. She wasn’t kidding; it was a first-class trans-departmental Priority Gold telling me I was to do everything in my power to facilitate, expedite and et cetera. “What have we got here, anyway, cancer cures from grapes?” I speculated.

“You don’t need to know and neither do I,” said Mendoza flatly. “But the Company means business now, Joseph. We must get that vine.”

“We’ll get it tomorrow,” I told her. “Trust me.”

Next day, same hour, the brothers came with hopeful smiles and a big muddy mess of a vine trailing out of their cart. Such relief! Such heartfelt praise and thanks the kindly friar showered on his obedient sons in Christ! Mendoza heard their arrival and came tearing out into the courtyard, only to pull up short with an expression of baffled rage.

THAT’S NOT THE VINE! she transmitted, with such intensity I thought for a second we were having an earthquake.

“ . . . And yet, my sons, I am afraid we have not understood each other once again,” I went on wearily. “It appears that, although you have brought us a whole vine, you have not brought the particular vine that was specifically asked for by my cousin.”

“We are so sorry,” replied Emidio, averting his eyes from Mendoza. “How stupid we were! But, Father, this is a very good vine. It’s in much better condition than the other one and bears much prettier grapes. Also, it was very difficult to dig it all up and we have brought it a long way. Maybe the lady will be satisfied with this vine instead?”

Mendoza was shaking her head, not trusting herself to speak, although the air around her was wavering like a mirage. Hastily I said:

“My dearest sons, I am sure it is an excellent vine, and we would not take it from your family. You must understand that it is the other vine we want, the very one you brought cuttings from yesterday. That vine and no other, and all of that vine. Now, you have clearly worked very hard and in good faith, so I will certainly send you home with your other pig, but you must come back tomorrow with the right vine.”

The brothers looked at each other and I picked up a flash of despair from them, and some weird kind of fear too. “Yes, little Father,” they replied.

But on the next day they didn’t come at all.

Mendoza paced the arcade until nine in the evening, alarming the other friars. Finally I went out to her and braced myself for the blast.

“You know, you lost yourself two perfectly good pigs,” she informed me through gritted teeth. “Damned lying Indians.”

I shook my head. “Something’s wrong here, Mendoza.”

“You bet something’s wrong! You’ve got a three-day delay on a Priority Gold.”

“But there’s some reason we’re not getting. Something is missing from this picture . . . ”

“We never should have tried to bargain with them, you know that? They offered it as a gift in the first place. We should have just taken it. Now they know it’s really worth something! I’ll go up there with a spade and dig the damned vine up myself, if I have to.”

“No! You can’t do that, not now. They’ll know who took it, don’t you see?”

“One more crime against the helpless Indians laid at the door of Spain. As if it mattered any more!” Mendoza turned on her heel to stare at me. Down at the other end of the arcade one of my brother friars put his head out in discreet inquiry.

It does matter! I dropped to a subvocal hiss. It matters to them and it matters to me! I call them my beloved sons, but they know I’ve got the power to go up there and confiscate anything they have on any excuse at all because that’s how it’s always been done! Only I don’t. They know Father Rubio won’t do that to them. I’ve built up a cover identity as a kindly, honorable guy because I’ve got to live with these people for the next thirty years! You’ll get your damn specimen and go away again into the sagebrush, but I’ve got a character to maintain!

My God, she sneered, He wants his little Indians to love him.

Company policy, baby. It’s easier to deal with mortals when they trust you. Something you used to understand. So just you try screwing with my cover identity! Just you try it and see what happens.

She widened her eyes at that, too furious for words, and I saw her knuckles go white; little chips of whitewash began falling from the walls. We both looked up at them and cooled down in a hurry.

Sorry. But I mean what I say, Mendoza. We handle this my way.

She threw her hands up in the air. What are you going to do, then, smart guy? You have to do something.

Day four of the Priority Gold, and Company Directive 081244-A anxiously inquired why no progress on previous transdepartmental request for facilitation?

Situation Report follows, I responded. Please stand by. Then I put on my walking sandals and set off up the canyon alone.

Before I had toiled more than halfway, though, I met Emidio coming in my direction. He didn’t try to avoid me, but as he approached he looked down the canyon past me in the direction of the Mission. “Good morning, little Father,” he called.

“Good morning, my son.”

“Is your cousin lady with you?” He dropped his voice as he drew close.

“No, my son. We are alone.”

“I need to speak with you, little Father, about the grapevine.” He cleared his throat. “I know the lady must be very angry, and I am sorry. I don’t mean to make you angry too, little Father, because I know she is your cousin—”

“I understand, my son, believe me. And I am not angry.”

“Well then.” He drew a deep breath. “This is the matter. The grapevines do not belong to me, nor to my father. They belong to our grandfather Diego. And he will not let us dig up the vine the lady wants.”

“Why will he not?”

“He won’t tell us. He just refuses. Don’t be stupid, we told him. Father Rubio has been good to us, he has treated us fairly. Look at the fine pigs he has given us, we said. He just sits in the sun and rocks himself, and refuses us. And our grandmother came and touched his feet and cried, though she didn’t say anything, but he wouldn’t even look at her.”

“I see.”

“We have said everything we could say to him, but he will not let us dig up that vine. We tried to fool the lady twice by pretending to make mistakes (and that was a sin, little Father, and I’m sorry), but it didn’t work. Somehow she knew. Then our grandfather—” he paused in obvious embarrassment. “I don’t know how to say this, little Father—you know the old people are superstitious and still believe foolish things—I think he somehow has the idea that your cousin lady is a nunasis. Please don’t take this the wrong way—”

“No, no, go on—”

“We have an old story about a spirit who walks on the mountains and wears a hat like hers, you see, throwing a shadow cold as death. I know it’s stupid. Even so, Grandfather won’t let us dig up that vine. Now, you might say, our grandfather is only an old man and a little bit crazy now, and we’re strong, so he can be put aside as though he were a little baby; but if we did that, we would be breaking the commandment about honoring the old people. It seems to us that would be a worse sin than the white lady not getting what she wanted. What do you think, little Father?”

Boy, oh, boy. “This is very hard, my son,” I said, and I meant it. “But you are right.”

Emidio studied me in silence for a long moment, his eyes narrowed. “Thank you,” he said at last. After another pause he added, “Is there anything we can do that will make the lady happy? She’ll be angry with you, now.”

I found myself laughing. “She will make my life a Purgatory, I can tell you,” I said. “But I will offer it up for my sins. Go home, Emidio, and don’t worry. Perhaps God will send a miracle.”

1 wasn’t laughing when I got back to the Mission, though, and when Mendoza came looking for me she saw my failure right away.

“No dice, huh?” She squinted evilly. “Well. This is no longer a matter of me and my poor little bonus now, Joseph. The Company wants that vine. I suggest you think of something fast or there are liable to be some dead Indians around here soon, pardon my indelicate phrasing.”

“I’m working on it,” I told her.

And I was. I went to the big leatherbound books that held the Mission records. I sat down in a corner of the scriptorium and went over them in minute detail.

1789—here was the baptism of Diego Kasmali, age given as thirty years. 1790, marriage to Maria Conception, age not given. 1791 through 1810, a whole string of baptisms of little Kasmalis: Agustin, Xavier, Pablo, Juan Bautista, Maria, Dolores, Guadalupe, Dieguito, Marta, Tomas, Luisa, Bartolomeo. First Communion for Xavier Kasmali, 1796. One after the other, a string of little funerals: Agustin age two days, Pablo age three months six days, Juan Bautista age six days, Maria age two years . . . too sad to go on down the list, but not unusual. Confirmation for Xavier Kasmali, 1802. Xavier Kasmali married to Juana Catalina of the Dos Pueblos rancheria, age 18 years, 1812. Baptism of Emidio Kasmali, 1813. Baptism of Salvador Kasmali, 1814. Funeral of Juana Catalina, 1814. First Communions, Confirmations, Marriages, Baptisms, Extreme Unctions . . . not a sacrament missed. Really good Catholics.

Why the old, old woman was at Mass every single day of the year, rain or shine, though she was propped like a bundle of sticks in the shadows at the back of the church. Maria Conception, wife of Diego Kasmali. But Diego never, ever at Mass. Why not? On a desperate hunch I went to my transmitter and typed in a request for something unusual.

The reply came back: Query: first please resolution Priority Gold status?

Request relates Priority, I replied. Resolving now. Requisition Sim ParaN Phenom re: Priority resolution?

That gave them pause. They verified and counterverified my authority, they re-scanned the original orders and mulled over their implications. At least, I guessed they were doing that, as the blue screen flickered. Feeling I had them on the run, I pushed for a little extra, just for my own satisfaction: Helpful Priority specify mutation. What? Why?

Pause while they verified me again, then the bright letters crawled onscreen in a slow response:

Patent Black Elysium.

I fell back laughing, though it wasn’t exactly funny. The rest of the message followed in a rapid burst: S-P Requisition approved. Specify Tech support?

I told them what I needed.

Estimate resolution time Priority Gold?

I told them how long it would take.

Expecting full specimen consign & report then, was the reply, and they signed off.

“Why don’t they ever put convenient handles on these things?” grumbled Mendoza. She had one end of the transport trunk and a shovel; I had the other end of the trunk and the other shovel. It was long after midnight and we were struggling up the rocky defile that led to the Kasmali residence.

“Too much T-field drag,” I explained.

“Well, you would think that an all-powerful cabal of scientists and businessmen, with advance knowledge of every event in recorded history and infinite time in which to take every possible advantage of said events, and every possible technological resource at their command, and unlimited wealth—” Mendoza shifted the trunk again and we went on “—you’d think they could devise something as simple as a recessed handle.”

“They tried it. The recess cuts down on the available transport space inside,” I told her.

“You’re kidding me.”

“No. I was part of a test shipment. Damn thing got me right in the third cervical vertebra.”

“I might have known there’d be a reason.”

“The Company has a reason for everything, Mendoza.”

We came within earshot of the house, so conversation ended. There were three big dogs in the yard before the door. One slept undisturbed, but two raised their heads and began to growl. We set down the mink. I opened it and from the close-packed contents managed to prize out the hush unit. The bigger of the dogs got to his feet, preparing to bark.

I switched on the unit. Good dog, what a sleepy doggie; he fell over with a woof and did not move again. The other dog dropped his head on his paws. Dog Number Three would not wake at all now, nor would any of the occupants of the house, not while the hush field was being generated.

I carried the unit up to the house and left it by the dogs, Mendoza dragging the trunk after me. We removed the box of golden altar vessels and set off up the hill with it.

The amazing mutated vine was pretty sorry-looking now, with most of its branches clipped off in the attempt to appease Mendoza. I hoped to God their well-meaning efforts hadn’t killed it. Mendoza must have been thinking the same thing, but she just shrugged grimly. We began to dig.

We made a neat hole, small but very deep, just behind the trunk and singled slightly under it. There was no way to hide our disturbance of the earth, but fortunately the ground had already been so spaded up and trampled over that our work shouldn’t be that obvious.

“How deep does this have to be?” I panted when we had gone about six feet and I was in the bottom passing spadefuls up to Mendoza.

“Not much deeper; I’d like it buried well below the root ball.” She leaned in and peered.

“Well, how deep is that?” Before she could reply my spade hit something with a metallic clank. We halted.

Mendoza giggled nervously. “Jesus, don’t tell me there’s already buried treasure down there!”

I scraped a little with the spade. “There’s something like a hook,” I said. “And something else,” I got the spade under it and launched it up out of the hole with one good heave. The whole mass fell on the other side of the dirt heap, out of my view. “It looked kind of round,” I remarked.

“It looks kind of like a hat—” Mendoza told me cautiously, bending down and turning it over. Abruptly she yelled and danced back from it. I scrambled up out of the hole to see what was going on.

It was a hat, all right, or what was left of it; one of the hard-cured leather kind Spain had issued to her soldiers in the latter half of the last century. I remembered seeing them on the presidio personnel. Beside the hat, where my spade-toss had dislodged it, was the head that had been wearing it. Only a brown skull now, the eyes blind with black earth. Close to it was the hilt of a sword, the metallic thing I’d hit.

“Oh, gross!” Mendoza wrung her hands.

“Alas, poor Yorick,” was all I could think of to say.

“Oh, God, how disgusting. Is the rest of him down there?”

I peered down into the hole. I could see a jawbone and pieces of what might have been cavalry boots. “Looks like it, I’m afraid.”

“What do you suppose he’s doing down there?” Mendoza fretted, from behind the handkerchief she had clapped over her mouth and nose.

“Not a damn thing nowadays,” I guessed, doing a quick scan of the bones. “Take it easy: no pathogens left. This guy’s been dead a long time.”

“Sixty years, by any chance?” Mendoza’s voice sharpened.

“They must have planted him with the grapevine,” I agreed. In the thoughtful silence that followed I began to snicker. I couldn’t help myself. I leaned back and had myself a nice sprawling guffaw.

“I fail to see what’s so amusing,” said Mendoza.

“Sorry. Sorry. I was just wondering: do you suppose you could cause a favorable mutation in something by planting a dead Spaniard under it?”

“Of course not, you idiot, not unless his sword was radioactive or something.”

“No, of course not. What about those little wild yeast spores in the bloom on the grapes, though? You think they might be influenced somehow by the close proximity of a gentleman of Old Castile?”

“What are you talking about?” Mendoza took a step closer.

“This isn’t a cancer cure, you know.” I waved my hand at the vine-stock, black against the stars. “I found out why the Company is so eager to get hold of your Favorable Mutation, kid. This is the grape that makes Black Elysium.”

“The dessert wine?” Mendoza cried.

“The very expensive dessert wine. The hallucinogenic-controlled-substance dessert wine. The absinthe of the twenty-fourth century. The one the Company holds the patent on. That stuff. Yeah.”

Stunned silence from my fellow immortal creature. I went on:

“I was just thinking, you know, about all those decadent technocrats sitting around in the future getting bombed on an elixir produced horn . . . ”

“So it gets discovered here, in 1844,” said Mendoza at last. “It isn’t genetically engineered cultivar at all. And the wild spores somehow came from . . . ?”

“But nobody else will ever know the truth, because we’re removing every trace of this vine from the knowledge of mortal men, see?” I explained. “Root and branch and all.”

“I’d sure better get that bonus,” Mendoza reflected.

“Don’t push your luck. You aren’t supposed to know.” I took my shovel and clambered back into the hole. “Come on, let’s get the rest of him out of here. The show must go on.”

Two hours later there was a tidy heap of brown bones and rusted sled moldering away in a new hiding place, and a tidy sum in gold plate occupying the former burial site. We filled in the hole, set up the rest of the equipment we’d brought, tested it, camouflaged it, turned it on and hurried away back down the canyon to the Mission, taking the hush unit with us. I made it in time for Matins.

News travels fast in a small town. By nine there were Indians, and some of the Gentes de Razon too, running in from all directions to tell us that I he Blessed Virgin had appeared in the Kasmalis’ garden. Even if I hadn’t known already, I would have been tipped off by the fact that old Maria Conception did not show up for morning Mass.

By the time we got up there, the bishop and I and all my fellow friars and Mendoza, a cloud of dust hung above the dirt track from all the traffic. The Kasmalis’ tomatoes and corn had been trampled by the milling crowd. People ran everywhere, waving pieces of grapevine; the oilier plants had been stripped as bare as the special one. The rancheros watched from horseback, or urged their mounts closer across the careful beds of peppers and beans.

Around the one vine, the family had formed a tight circle. Some of them watched Emidio and Salvador, who were digging frantically, already about five feet down in the hole; others stared unblinking at the floating image of the Virgin of Guadalupe who smiled upon them from midair above the vine. She was complete in every detail, nicely three-dimensional and accompanied by heavenly music. Actually it was a long tape loop of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, which nobody would recognize because it hadn’t been composed yet.

“Little Father!” One of the wives caught me by my robe. “It’s the Mother of God! She told us to dig up the vine, she said there was treasure buried underneath!”

“Has she told you anything else?” I inquired, making the sign of the cross. My brother friars were falling to their knees in raptures, beginning to sing the Ave Maria; the bishop was sobbing.

“No, not since this morning,” the wife told me. “Only the beautiful music has gone on and on.”

Emidio looked up and noticed me for the first time. He stopped shoveling for a moment, staring at me, and a look of dark speculation crossed his face. Then his shovel was moving again, clearing away the earth, and more earth, and more earth.

At my side, Mendoza turned away her face in disgust. But I was watching the old couple, who stood a little way back from the rest of the family. They clung to each other in mute terror and had no eyes for the smiling Virgin. It was the bottom of the ever-deepening hole they watched, as birds watch a snake.

And I watched them. Old Diego was bent and toothless now, but sixty years ago he’d had teeth, all right; sixty years ago his race hadn’t yet learned never to fight back against its conquerors. Maria Conception, what had she been sixty years ago when those vines were planted? Not a dried-up shuffling old thing back then. She might have been a beauty, and maybe a careless beauty.

The old bones and the rusting steel could have told you, sixty years ago. Had he been a handsome young captain with smooth ways, or just a soldier who took what he wanted? Whatever he’d been, or done, he’d wound up buried under that vine, and only Diego and Maria knew he was there. All those years, through the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, he’d been there. Diego never coming to Mass because of a sin he couldn’t confess. Maria never missing Mass, praying for someone.

Maybe that was the way it had happened. Nobody would ever tell the story, I was fairly sure. But it was clear that Diego and Maria, alone of all those watching, did not expect to see treasure come out of that hole in the ground.

So when the first glint of gold appeared, and then the chalice and altar plate were brought up, their old faces were a study in confusion.

“The treasure!” cried Salvador. “Look!”

And the rancheros spurred their horses through the crowd to get a better look, lashing the Indians out of the way; but I touched the remote hidden in my sleeve and the Blessed Virgin spoke, in a voice as sweet mid immortal as a synthesizer:

“This, my beloved children, is the altar plate that was lost from the Church at San Carlos Borromeo, long ago in the time of the pirates. My beloved Son has caused it to be found here as a sign to you all that ALL SINS ARE FORGIVEN!”

I touched the remote again and the Holy Apparition winked out like a soap bubble, and the beautiful music fell silent.

Old Diego pushed his way forward to the hole and looked in. There was nothing else there in the hole now, nothing at all. Maria came timidly to his side and she looked in too. They remained there staring a long time, unnoticed by the mass of the crowd, who were watching the dispute that had already erupted over the gold.

The bishop had pounced on it like a duck on a June bug, as they say, asserting the right of Holy Mother Church to her lost property. Emidio and Salvador had let it be snatched from them with hard patient smiles. One of the Gentes de Razon actually got off his horse to tell the bishop that the true provenance of the items had to be decided by the authorities in Mexico City, and until they could be contacted the treasure had better be kept under lock and key at the alcalde’s house. Blessed Virgin? Yes, there had seemed to be an apparition of some kind; but then again, perhaps it had been a trick of the light.

The argument moved away down the hill—the bishop had a good grip on the gold and kept walking with it, so almost everyone had to follow him. I went to stand beside Diego and Maria, in the ruins of their garden.

“She forgave us,” whispered Diego.

“A great weight of sin has been lifted from you today, my children,” I told them. “Rejoice, for Christ loves you both. Come to the church with me now and I will celebrate a special Mass in your honor.”

I led them away with me, one on either arm. Unseen behind us, Mendoza advanced on the uprooted and forgotten vine with a face like a lioness kept from her prey.

Well, the old couple made out all right, anyway. I saw to it that they got new grapevines and food from the Mission supplies to tide the family over until their garden recovered. Within a couple of years they passed away, one after the other, and were buried reasonably near one another in the consecrated ground of the Mission cemetery, in which respect they were luckier than the unknown captain from Castile, or wherever he’d come from.

They never got the golden treasure, but being Indians there had never been any question that they would. Their descendants lived on and multiplied in the area, doing particularly well after the coming of the Yankees, who (to the mortification of the Gentes de Razon) couldn’t tell an Indian from a Spanish Mexican and lumped them all together under the common designation of Greaser, treating one no worse than the other.

Actually I never kept track of what happened to the gold. The title dispute dragged on for years, I think, with the friars swearing there had been a miracle and the rancheros swearing there hadn’t been. The gold may have been returned to Carmel, or it may have gone to Mexico City, or it may have gone into a trunk underneath the alcalde’s bed, I didn’t care; it was all faked Company-issue reproductions anyway. The bishop died and the Yankees came and were the new conquerors, and maybe nothing ever did get resolved either way.

But Mendoza got her damned vine and her bonus, so she was as happy as she ever is. The Company got its patent on Black Elysium secured. I lived on at the Mission for years and years before (apparently) dying of venerable old age and (apparently) being buried in the same cemetery as Diego and Maria. God forgave us all, I guess, and I moved on to less pleasant work.

Sometimes, when I’m in that part of the world, I stop in as a tourist and check out my grave. It’s the nicest of the many I’ve had, except maybe for that crypt in Hollywood. Well, well; life goes on.

Mine does anyway.

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, March 1997.

About the Author

One of the most prolific new writers to appear in the late ’90s, the late Kage Baker made her first sale in 1997, with “Noble Mold,” the first of her long sequence of sly and compelling stories of the adventures and misadventures of the time-traveling agents of the Company. Her Company novels include, In the Garden of Iden, Sky Coyote, Mendoza in Hollywood, The Graveyard Game, The Life of the World to Come, The Machine’s Child, Sons of Heaven, and Not Less Than Gods. Her other books include fantasy novels The Anvil of the World, The House of the Stag, and The Bird on the River, science fiction novel The Empress of Mars, YA novel The Hotel Under the Sand, and Or Else My Lady Keeps the Key, about some of the real pirates of the Caribbean. Her many stories were collected in Black Projects, White Knights, Mother Aegypt and Other Stories, The Children of the Company, Dark Mondays, and Gods and Pawns. Her posthumously published books include Neil Gwynne’s Scarlet Spy, Neil Gwynne’s On Land and Sea (with Kathleen Barholomew), and a collection, In the Company of Thieves. Baker died, tragically young, in 2010.

Weep For Day

Indrapramit Das

I was eight years old the first time I saw a real, living Nightmare. My parents took my brother and I on a trip from the City-of-Long-Shadows to the hills at Evening’s edge, where one of my father’s clients had a manse. Father was a railway contractor. He hired out labor and resources to the privateers extending the frontiers of civilization towards the frozen wilderness of the dark Behind-the-Sun. Aptly, we took a train up to the foothills of the great Penumbral Mountains.

It was the first time my brother and I had been on a train, though we’d seen them tumble through the city with their cacophonic engines, cumulous tails of smoke and steam billowing like blood over the rooftops when the red light of our sun caught them. It was also the first time we had been anywhere close to Night—Behind-the-Sun—where the Nightmares lived. Just a decade before we took that trip, it would have been impossible to go as far into Evening as we were doing with such casual comfort and ease.

Father had prodded the new glass of the train windows, pointing to the power-lines crisscrossing the sky in tandem with the gleaming lines of metal railroads silvering the hazy landscape of progress. He sat between my brother Velag and I, our heads propped against the bulk of his belly, which bulged against his rough crimson waistcoat. I clutched that coat and breathed in the sweet smell of chemlis gall that hung over him. Mother watched with a smile as she peeled indigos for us with her fingers, laying them in the lap of her skirt.

“Look at that. We’ve got no more reason to be afraid of the dark, do we, my tykes?” said Father, his belly humming with the sound of his booming voice.

Dutifully, Velag and I agreed there wasn’t.

“Why not?” he asked us, expectant.

“Because of the Industrialization, which brings the light of Day to the darkness of Night,” we chimed, a line learned both in school and home (inaccurate, as we’d never set foot in Night itself). Father laughed. I always slowed down on the word “industrialization,” which caused Velag and I to say it at different times. He was just over a year older than me, though.

“And what is your father, children?” Mother asked.

“A knight of Industry and Technology, bringer of light under Church and Monarchy.”

I didn’t like reciting that part, because it was had more than one long “y” word, and felt like a struggle to say. Father was actually a knight, though not a knight-errant for a while. He had been too big by then to fit into a suit of plate-armor or heft a heavy sword around, and knights had stopped doing that for many years anyway. The Industrialization had swiftly made the pageantry of adventure obsolete.

Father wheezed as we reminded him of his knighthood, as if ashamed. He put his hammy hands in our hair and rubbed. I winced through it, as usual, because he always forgot about the pins in my long hair, something my brother didn’t have to worry about. Mother gave us the peeled indigos, her hands perfumed with the citrus. She was the one who taught me how to place the pins in my hair, both of us in front of the mirror looking like different sized versions of each other.

I looked out the windows of our cabin, fascinated by how everything outside slowly became bluer and darker as we moved away from the City-of-Long-Shadows, which lies between the two hemispheres of Day and Night. Condensation crawled across the corners of the double-glazed panes as the train took us further east. Being a studious girl even at that age, I deduced from school lessons that the air outside was becoming rapidly colder as we neared Night’s hemisphere, which has never seen a single ray of our sun and is theorized to be entirely frozen. The train, of course, was kept warm by the same steam and machinery that powered its tireless wheels and kept its lamps and twinkling chandeliers aglow.

“Are you excited to see the Nightmare? It was one of the first to be captured and tamed. The gentleman we’re visiting is very proud to be its captor,” said Father.

“Yes!” screamed Velag. “Does it still have teeth? And claws?” he asked, his eyes wide.

“I would think so,” Father nodded.

“Is it going to be in chains?”

“I hope so, Velag. Otherwise it might get loose and—” he paused for dramatic effect. I froze in fear. Velag looked eagerly at him. “Eat you both up!” he bellowed, tickling us with his huge hands. It took all my willpower not to scream. I looked at Velag’s delighted expression to keep me calm, reminding myself that these were just Father’s hands jabbing my sides.

“Careful!” Mother said sharply, to my relief. “They’ll get the fruit all over.” The indigo segments were still in our laps, on the napkins Mother had handed to us. Father stopped tickling us, still grinning.

“Do you remember what they look like?” Velag asked, as if trying to see how many questions he could ask in as little time as possible. He had asked this one before, of course. Father had fought Nightmares, and even killed some, when he was a knight-errant.

“We never really saw them, son,” said Father. He touched the window. “Out there, it’s so cold you can barely feel your own fingers, even in armor.”

We could see the impenetrable walls of the forests pass us by—shaggy, snarled mare-pines, their leaves black as coals and branches supposedly twisted into knots by the Nightmares to tangle the path of intruders. The high, hoary tops of the trees shimmered ever so slightly in the scarce light sneaking over the horizon, which they sucked in so hungrily. The moon was brighter here than in the City, but at its jagged crescent, a broken gemstone behind the scudding clouds. We were still in Evening, but had encroached onto the Nightmares’ outer territories, marked by the forests that extended to the foothills. After the foothills, there was no more forest, because there was no more light. Inside our cabin, under bright electric lamps, sitting on velvet-lined bunks, it was hard to believe that we were actually in the land of Nightmares. I wondered if they were in the trees right now, watching our windows as we looked out.

“It’s hard to see them, or anything, when you’re that cold, and,” Father breathed deeply, gazing at the windows. “They’re very hard to see.” It made me uneasy, hearing him say the same thing over and over. We were passing the very forests he traveled through as a knight-errant, escorting pioneers.

“Father’s told you about this many times, dear,” Mother interjected, peering at Father with worried eyes. I watched. Father smiled at her and shook his head.

“That’s alright, I like telling my little tykes about my adventures. I guess you’ll see what a Nightmare looks like tomorrow, eh? Out in the open. Are you excited?” he asked, perhaps forgetting that he’d already asked. Velag shouted in the affirmative again.

Father looked down at me, raising his bushy eyebrows. “What about you, Valyzia?”

I nodded and smiled.

I wasn’t excited. Truth be told, I didn’t want to see it at all. The idea of capturing and keeping a Nightmare seemed somehow disrespectful in my heart, though I didn’t know the word then. It made me feel weak and confused, because I was and always had been so afraid of them, and had been taught to be.

I wondered if Velag had noticed that Father had once again refused to actually describe a Nightmare. Even in his most excitable retellings of his brushes with them, he never described them as more than walking shadows. There was a grainy sepia-toned photograph of him during his younger vigils as a knight-errant above the mantle of our living-room fireplace. It showed him mounted on a horse, dressed in his plate-armor and fur-lined surcoat, raising his longsword to the skies (the blade was cropped from the picture by its white border). Clutched in his other plated hand was something that looked like a blot of black, as if the chemicals of the photograph had congealed into a spot, attracted by some mystery or heat. The shape appeared to bleed back into the black background.

It was, I had been told, the head of a Nightmare Father had slain. It was too dark a thing to be properly caught by whatever early photographic engine had captured his victory. The blot had no distinguishing features apart from two vague points emerging from the rest of it, like horns or ears. That head earned him a large part of the fortune he later used to start up his contracting business. We never saw it, because Nightmares’ heads and bodies were burned or gibbeted by knights-errant, who didn’t want to bring them into the City for fear of attracting their horde. The photograph had been a source of dizzying pride for my young self, because it meant that my father was one of the bravest people I knew. At other times, it just made me wonder why he couldn’t describe something he had once beheaded, and held in his hand as a trophy.

My indigo finished, Mother took the napkin and wiped my hands with it. My brother still picked at his. A waiter brought us a silver platter filled with sugar-dusted pastries, their centers soft with warm fudge and grünberry jam. We’d already finished off supper, brought under silver domes that gushed steam when the waiters raised them with their white-gloved hands, revealing chopped fungus, meat dumplings, sour cream and fermented salad. Mother told Velag to finish the indigo before he touched the pastries. Father ate them with as much gusto as I did. I watched him lick his powdered fingers, that had once held the severed head of a Nightmare.

When it was time for respite, the cabin lights were shut off and the ones in the corridor were dimmed. I was relieved my parents left the curtains of the windows open as we retired, because I didn’t want it to be completely dark. It was dim enough outside that we could fall asleep. It felt unusual to go to bed with windows uncovered for once.

I couldn’t help imagine, as I was wont to do, that as our train moved through Evening’s forested fringes, the Nightmares would find a way to get on board. I wondered if they were already on the train. But the presence of my family, all softly snoring in their bunks (Velag above me, my parents opposite us); the periodic, soothing flash of way-station lights passing by outside; the sigh of the sliding doors at the end of the carriage opening and closing as porters, waiters, and passengers moved through the corridors; the sweet smell of the fresh sheets and pillow on my bunk—these things lulled me into a sleep free of bad dreams, despite my fear of seeing the creature we’d named bad dreams after, face-to-face, the next vigil.

When I was six I stopped sleeping in my parents’ room, and started sleeping in the same room as my brother. At the time of this change, I was abnormally scared of the dark (and consider, reader, that this was a time when fear of the dark was as normal and acceptable as the fear of falling from a great height). So scared that I couldn’t fall sleep after the maids came around and closed our sleep-shutters and drew the curtains, to block out the western light for respite.

The heavy clatter of the wooden slats being closed every respite’s eve was like a note of foreboding for me. I hunkered under the blankets, rigid with anxiety as the maids filed out of the room with their lanterns drawing wild shadows on the walls. Then the last maid would close the door, and our room would be swallowed up by those shadows.

In the chill darkness that followed, I would listen to the clicking of Nightmares’ claws as they walked up and down the corridors of our shuttered house. Our parents had often told me that it was just rats in the walls and ceiling, but I refused to believe it. Every respite I would imagine one of the Nightmare intruders slinking into our room, listening to its breathing as it came closer to my bed and pounced on me, not being able to scream as it sat on my chest and ran its reeking claws through my hair, winding it into knots around its long fingers and laughing softly.

Enduring the silence for what seemed like hours, I would begin to wail and cry until Velag threw pillows at me and Mother came to my side to shush me with her kisses. To solve the problem, my parents tried keeping the sleep-shutters open through the hours of respite, and moved my brother to a room on the windowless east-facing side of the house when he complained. Unfortunately, we require the very dark we fear to fall asleep. The persistent burning line of the horizon beyond the windows, while a comforting sight, left me wide awake for most of respite.

In the end Velag and I were reunited and the shutters closed once more, because Father demanded that I not be coddled when my brother had learned to sleep alone so bravely. I often heard my parents arguing about this, since Mother thought it was madness to try and force me not to be afraid. Most of my friends from school hadn’t and wouldn’t sleep without their parents until they were at least eleven or twelve. Father was adamant, demanding that we learn to be strong and brave in case the Nightmares ever found a way to overrun the city.

It’s a strange thing, to be made to feel guilty for learning too well something that was ingrained in us from the moment we were born. Now nightmare is just a word, and it’s unusual to even think that the race that we gave that name might still be alive somewhere in the world. When Velag and I were growing up, Nightmares were the enemy.

Our grandparents told us about them, as did our parents, as did our teachers, as did every book and textbook we had ever come across. Stories of a time when guns hadn’t been invented, when knights-errant roved the frigid forest paths beyond the City-of-Long-Shadows to prove their manhood and loyalty to the Monarchy and its Solar Church, and to extend the borders of the city and find new resources. A time coming to a close when I was born, even as the expansion continued onward faster than ever.

I remember my school class-teacher drawing the curtains and holding a candle to a wooden globe of our planet to show us how the sun made Night and Day. She took a piece of chalk and tapped where the candlelight turned to shadow on the globe. “That’s us,” she said, and moved the chalk over to the shadowed side. “That’s them,” she said.

Nightmares have defined who we are since we crawled out of the hot lakes at the edge of fiery Day, and wrapped the steaming bloody skins of slaughtered animals around us to walk upright, east into the cooler marches of our world’s Evening. We stopped at the alien darkness we had never seen before, not just because of the terrible cold that clung to the air the further we walked, but because of what we met at Evening’s end.

A race of walking shadows, circling our firelight with glittering eyes, felling our explorers with barbed spears and arrows, snatching our dead as we fled from their ambushes. Silently, these unseen, lethal guardians of Night’s bitter frontier told us we could go no further. But we couldn’t go back towards Day, where the very air seems to burn under the sun’s perpetual gaze.

So we built our villages where sun’s light still lingers and the shadows are longest before they dissolve into Evening. Our villages grew into towns, and our towns grew into the City-of-Long-Shadows, and our City grew along the Penumbra until it reached the Seas-of-Storms to the north and the impassable crags of World’s-Rim (named long before we knew this to be false) to the south. For all of history, we looked behind our shoulders at the gloaming of the eastern horizon, where the Nightmares watched our progress.

So the story went, told over and over.

We named bad dreams after them because we thought Nightmares were their source, that they sent spies into the city to infect our minds and keep us afraid of the dark, their domain. According to folklore, these spies could be glimpsed upon waking abruptly. Indeed, I’d seen them crouching malevolently in the corner of the bedroom, wreathed in the shadows that were their home, slinking away with impossible speed once I looked at them.

There are no Nightmares left alive anywhere near the City-of-Long-Shadows, but we still have bad dreams and we still see their spies sometimes when we wake. Some say they are spirits of their race, or survivors. I’m not convinced. Even though we have killed all the Nightmares, our own half-dreaming minds continue to populate our bedrooms with their ghosts, so we may remember their legacy.

To date, none of our City’s buildings have windows or doors on their east-facing walls.

And so the train took us to the end of our civilization. There are many things I remember about Weep-for-Day, though in some respects those memories feel predictably like the shreds of a disturbing dream. Back then it was just an outpost, not a hill-station town like it is now. The most obvious thing to remember is how it sleeted or snowed all the time. I know now that it’s caused by moist convective winds in the atmosphere carrying the warmth of the sun from Day to Night, their loads of fat clouds scraping up against the mountains of the Penumbra for all eternity and washing the foothills in their frozen burden. But to my young self, the constant crying of that bruised sky was just another mystery in the world, a sorcery perpetrated by the Nightmares.

I remember, of course, how dark it was. How the people of the outpost carried bobbing lanterns and acrid magenta flares that flamed even against the perpetual wind and precipitation. How everyone outside (including us) had to wear goggles and thick protective suits lined with the fur of animals to keep the numbing cold of outer Evening out. I had never seen such darkness outdoors, and it felt like being asleep while walking. To think that beyond the mountains lay an absence of light even deeper was unbelievable.

I remember the tall poles that marked turns in the curving main road, linked by the ever-present electric and telegraph wires that made such an outpost possible. The bright gold-and-red pennants of the Monarchy fluttered from those poles, dulled by lack of light. They all showed a sun that was no longer visible from there.

I remember the solar shrines—little huts by the road, with small windows that lit up every few hours as chimes rang out over the windy outpost. Through the doors you could see the altars inside; each with an electric globe, its filament flooded with enough voltage to make it look like a hot ball of fire. For a minute these shrines would burn with their tiny artificial suns, and the goggled and suited inhabitants of Weep-for-Day would huddle around them like giant flies, their shadows wavering lines on the streaks of light cast out on the muddy snow or ice. They would pray on their knees, some reaching out to rub the faded ivory crescents of sunwyrm fangs on the altars.

Beyond the road and the slanted wet roofs of Weep-for-Day, there was so little light that the slope of the hill was barely visible. The forested plain beyond was nothing but a black void that ended in the faint glow of the horizon—the last weak embers in a soot-black fireplace just doused with water.

I couldn’t see our City-of-Long-Shadows, which filled me with an irrational anxiety that it was gone forever, that if we took the train back we would find the whole world filled with darkness and only Night waiting on the other side.

But these details are less than relevant. That trip changed me and changed the course of my life not because I saw what places beyond the City-of-Long-Shadows looked like, though seeing such no doubt planted the seeds of some future grit in me. It changed me because I, with my family by my side, witnessed a living Nightmare, as we were promised.

The creature was a prisoner of Vorin Tylvur, who was at the time the Consul of Weep-for-Day, a knight like Father, and an appointed privateer and mining coordinator of the Penumbral territories. Of course, he is now well remembered for his study of Nightmares in captivity, and his campaigns to expand the Monarchy’s territories into Evening. The manse we stayed in was where he and his wife lived, governing the affairs of the outpost and coordinating expansion and exploration.

I do not remember much of our hosts, except that they were adults in the way all adults who aren’t parents are, to little children. They were kind enough to me. I couldn’t comprehend the nature of condescension at that age, but I did find the cooing manner of most adults who talked to me boring, and they were no different. Though I’m grateful for their hospitality to my family, I cannot, in retrospect, look upon them with much returned kindness.

They showed us the imprisoned Nightmare on the second vigil of our stay. It was in the deepest recesses of the manse, which was more an oversized, glorified bunker on the hill of Weep-for-Day than anything else. We went down into a dank, dim corridor in the chilly heart of that mound of crustal rock to see the prisoner.

“I call it Shadow. A little nickname,” Sir Tylvur said with a toothy smile, his huge moustache hanging from his nostrils like the dead wings of some poor misbegotten bird trapped in his head. He proved himself right then to have not only a startling lack of imagination for a man of his intelligence and inquisitiveness, but also a grotesquely inappropriate sense of levity.

It would be dramatic and untruthful to say that my fear of darkness receded the moment I set eyes on the creature. But something changed in me. There, looking at this hunched and shivering thing under the smoky blaze of the flares its armored gaolers held to reveal it to its captor’s guests, I saw that a phantom flayed was just another animal.

Sir Tylvur had made sure that its light-absorbent skin would not hinder our viewing of the captured enemy. There is no doubt that I feared it, even though its skin was stripped from its back to reveal its glistening red muscles, even though it was clearly broken and defeated. But my mutable young mind understood then, looking into its shining black eyes—the only visible feature in the empty dark of its face—that it knew terror just as I or any human did. The Nightmare was scared. It was a heavy epiphany for a child to bear, and I vomited on the glass observation wall of its cramped holding cell.

Velag didn’t make fun of me. He shrank into Mother’s arms, trying to back away from the humanoid silhouette scrabbling against the glass to escape the light it so feared; a void-like cut-out in reality but for that livid wet wound on its back revealing it to be as real as us. It couldn’t, or would not, scream or vocalize in any way. Instead, we just heard the squeal of its spider-like hands splayed on the glass, claws raking the surface.

I looked at Father, standing rigid and pale, hands clutched into tight fists by his sides. The same fists that held up the severed head of one of this creature’s race in triumph so many years ago. Just as in the photograph, there were the horn-like protrusions from its head, though I still couldn’t tell what they were. I looked at Mother who, despite the horrific vision in front of us, despite her son clinging to her waist, reached down in concern to wipe the vomit from my mouth and chin with bare fingers, her gloves crumpled in her other hand.

As Sir Tylvur wondered what to do about his spattered glass wall, he decided to blame the Nightmare for my reaction and rapped hard on the cell with the hilt of his sheathed ceremonial sword. He barked at the prisoner, wanting to frighten it away from the glass, I suppose. The only recognizable word in between his grunts was “Shadow.” But as he called it by that undignified, silly nickname, the thing stopped its frantic scrabbling. Startled, Sir Tylvur stepped back. The two armored gaolers stepped back as well, flares wavering in the gloom of the cell. I still don’t know why the Nightmare stopped thrashing, and I never will know for sure. But at that moment I thought it recognized the nickname its captor had given it, and recognize that it was being displayed like a trophy. Perhaps it wanted to retain some measure of its pride.

The flarelight flickered on its eyes, which grew brighter as moisture gathered on them. It was clearly in pain from the light. I saw that it was as tall as a human, though it looked smaller because of how crouched into itself it was. It cast a shadow like any other animal, and that shadow looked like its paler twin, dancing behind its back. Chains rasped on the wet cell floor, shackled to its limbs. The illuminated wound on its back wept pus, but the rest of it remained that sucking, indescribable black that hurt the human eye.

Except something in its face. It looked at us, and out of that darkness came a glittering of wet obsidian teeth as unseen lips peeled back. I will never forget that invisible smile, whether it was a grimace of pain or a taunting leer.

“Kill it,” Velag whispered. And that was when Mother took both our hands tight in hers, and pulled us away from the cell. She marched us down that dank corridor, leaving the two former knights-errant, Father and Sir Tylvur, staring into that glimmering cell at the spectre of their past.

That night, in the tiny room we’d been given as our quarters, I asked Velag if the Nightmare had scared him.

“Why should it scare me,” he said, face pale in the dim glow of the small heating furnace in the corner of the chamber. “It’s in chains.”

“You just looked scared. It’s okay to be scared. I was too. But I think it was as well.”

“Shut up. You don’t know what you’re saying. I’m going to sleep,” he said, and turned away from me, his cot groaning. The furnace hissed and ticked.

“I think papa was scared also. He didn’t want to see a Nightmare again,” I said to Velag’s back.

That was when my brother pounced off his cot and on top of me. I was too shocked to scream. My ingrained submission to his power as an elder male authority figure took over. I gave no resistance. Sitting on my small body, Velag took my blanket and shoved it into my mouth. Then, he snatched my pillow and held it over my face. Choking on the taste of musty cloth, I realized I couldn’t breathe. I believed that my brother was about to kill me then. I truly believed it. I could feel the pressure of his hands through the pillow, and they were at that moment the hands of something inhuman. I was more terrified then than I’d ever been in my entire short life, plagued though I’d always been by fear.

He held the pillow over my head for no more than four seconds, probably less. When he raised it off my face and pulled the blanket out of my mouth he looked as shaken as I was. His eyes were wet with tears, but in a second his face was twisted in a grimace.

“Never call papa a coward. Never call papa a coward. Papa was never afraid. Do you hear me? You never had to sleep alone in the dark, you don’t know. I’m going to grow up and be like papa and kill them. I’ll kill them,” he hissed the words into my face like a litany. I started crying, unable and probably too scared to tell him I hadn’t called Father a coward. I could still barely breathe, so flooded was I with my own tears, so drunk on the air he had denied me. Velag went back to his cot and wrapped himself in his blanket, breathing heavily.

As I shuddered with stifled sobs, I decided that I would never tell my parents about this, that I would never have Velag punished for this violence. I didn’t forgive him, not even close, but that is what I decided.

I was seventeen the last time I saw Velag. I went to visit him at the Royal Military Academy’s boarding school. He had been there for four years already. We saw him every few moons when he came back to the City proper to visit. But I wanted to see the campus for myself. It was a lovely train ride, just a few hours from the central districts of the City-of-Long-Shadows to the scattered hamlets beyond it.

It was warmer and brighter out where the Academy was. The campus was beautiful, sown with pruned but still wild looking trees and plants that only grew further out towards Day, their leaves a lighter shade of blue and their flowers huge, craning to the west on thick stems. The sun still peered safely behind the edge of the world, but its gaze was bright enough to wash the stately buildings of the boarding school with a fiery golden-red light, sparkling in the waxy leaves of vines winding their way around the arched windows. On every ornate, varnished door was a garish propaganda poster of the Dark Lord of Nightmares, with his cowled cloak of shadows and black sword, being struck down by our soldiers’ bayoneted guns.

I sat with Velag in a cupola in the visitors’ garden, which was on a gentle bluff. In the fields adjacent, his fellow student-soldiers played tackleball, their rowdy calls and whistles ringing through the air. We could see heavy banks of glowing, sunlit storm-clouds to the west where the atmosphere boiled and churned in the heat of Day, beyond miles of shimmering swamp-forests and lakes. To the east, a faint moon hung over the campus, but no stars were visible so close to Day.

Velag looked so different from the last time I saw him. His pimples were vanishing, the sallow softness of adolescence melting away to reveal the man he was to become. The military uniform, so forbidding in red and black, suited his tall form. He looked smart and handsome in it. It hurt me to see him shackled in it, but I could see that he wore it with great pride.

He held my hand and asked about my life back home, about my plans to apply to the College of Archaeology at the University of St. Kataretz. He asked about our parents. He told me how gorgeous and grown-up I looked in my dress, and said he was proud of me for becoming a “prodigy.” I talked to him with a heavy ache in my chest, because I knew with such certainty that we hardly knew each other, and would get no chance to any time soon, as he would be dispatched to the frontlines of Penumbral Conquest.

As if reading my thoughts, his cheek twitched with what I thought was guilt, and he looked at the stormy horizon. Perhaps he was remembering the night on which he told me he would grow up and kill Nightmares like Father—a promise he was keeping. He squeezed my hand.

“I’ll be alright, Val. Don’t you worry.”

I gave him a rueful smile. “It’s not too late. You can opt to become a civilian after graduation and come study with me at St. Kataretz. Ma and papa would think no less of you. You could do physics again, you loved it before. We can get an apartment in Pemluth Halls, share the cost. The University’s right in the middle of the City, we’d have so much fun together.”

“I can’t. You know that. I want this for myself. I want to be a soldier, and a knight.”

“Being a knight isn’t the same thing as it was in papa’s time. He was independent, a privateer. Things have changed. You’ll be a part of the military. Knighthoods belong to them now and they’re stingy with them. They mostly give them to soldiers who are wounded or dead, Velag.”

“I’m in military school, by the saints, I know what a knighthood is or isn’t. Please don’t be melodramatic. You’re an intelligent girl.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“I’m going. I have more faith in my abilities than you do.”

“I have plenty of faith in you. But the Nightmares are angry now, Velag. We’re wiping them out. They’re scared and angry. They’re coming out in waves up in the hills. More of our soldiers are dying than ever before. How can I not worry?”

His jaw knotted, he glared down at our intertwined hands. His grip was limp now. “Don’t start with your theories about the benevolence of Nightmares. I don’t want to hear it. They’re not scared, they are fear, and we’ll wipe them off the planet if need be so that you and everybody else can live without that fear.”

“I’m quite happy with my life, thank you. I’d rather you be alive for ma and papa and me than have the terrible horde of the Nightmares gone forever.”

He bit his lip and tightened his hand around mine again. “I know, little sister. You’re sweet to worry so. But the Monarchy needs me. I’ll be fine. I promise.”

And that was the end of the discussion as far as he was concerned. I knew it was no point pushing him further, because it would upset him. This was his life, after all. The one he had chosen. I had no right to belittle it. I didn’t want to return to the City on bad terms with him. We made what little small talk was left to make, and then we stood and kissed each other on the cheek, and I hugged him tight and watched him walk away.

What good are such promises as the one he made on our final farewell, even if one means them with all of one’s heart? He was dispatched right after his graduation a few moons later, without even a ceremony because it was wartime. After six moons of excited letters from the frontlines at the Penumbral Mountains, he died with a Nightmare’s spear in his chest, during a battle that earned the Monarchy yet another victory against the horde of darkness. Compared to the thousands of Nightmares slaughtered during the battle with our guns and cannons, the Monarchy’s casualties were small. And yet, my parents lost their son, and I my brother.

In death, they did give Velag the knighthood he fought so hard for. Never have I hated myself so much for being right.

When Velag was being helped out of Mother by doctors in the city, my father had been escorting pioneers in the foothills. I see him in his armor, the smell of heated steel and cold sweat cloying under his helm, almost blind because of the visor, sword in one hand, knotted reins and a flaming torch in the other, his mount about to bolt. A new metal coal-chamber filled with glowing embers strapped to his back to keep the suit warm, making his armor creak and pop as it heated up, keeping him off-balance with its weight and hissing vents but holding the freezing cold back a little. Specks of frozen water flying through the torch-lit air like dust, biting his eyes through the visor. His fingers numb in his gloves, despite the suit. The familiar glitter of inhuman eyes beyond the torchlight, nothing to go by but reflections of fire on his foes, who are invisible in the shadows, slinking alongside the caravan like bulges in the darkness. The only thing between the Nightmares and the pioneers with their mounts and carriages weighed down by machinery and thick coils of wire and cable that will bring the light of civilization to these wilds, is him and his contingent.

How long must that journey have been to him? How long till he returned alive to see his wife and new son Velag in a warm hospital room, under the glow of a brand new electric light?

By the time I was born, armorers had invented portable guns and integrated hollow cables in the suit lining to carry ember-heated water around armor, keeping it warmer and enabling mercenaries and knights-errant to go deeper into Evening. The pioneers followed, bringing their technology to the very tops of the foothills, infested with Nightmares. That was when Father stopped going, lest he never return. They had new tools, but the war had intensified. He had a son and daughter to think of, and a wife who wanted him home.

When I watched Velag’s funeral pyre blaze against the light of the west on Barrow-of-Bones cremation hill, I wondered if the sparks sent up into the sky by his burning body would turn to stardust in the ether and migrate to the sun to extend its life, or whether this was his final and utter dissolution. The chanting priest from the Solar Church seemed to have no doubts on the matter. Standing there, surrounded by the fossilized stone ribs of Zhurgeith, last of the sunwyrms and heraldic angel of the Monarchy and Church (who also call it Dragon), I found myself truly unsure about what death brings for maybe the first time in my life, though I’d long practiced the cynicism that was becoming customary of my generation.

I thought with some trepidation about the possibility that if the Church was right, the dust of Velag’s life might be consigned to the eternal dark of cosmic limbo instead of finding a place in the sun, because of what he’d done to me as a child. Because I’d never forgiven him, even though I told myself I had.

How our world changes.

The sun is a great sphere of burning gas, ash eventually falls down, and my dead brother remains in the universe because my family and I remember him, just as I remember my childhood, my life, the Nightmares we lived in fear of, the angel Dragon whose host was wiped out by a solar flare before we could ever witness it.

Outside, the wind howls so loud that I can easily imagine it is the sound of trumpets from a frozen city, peopled by the horde of darkness. Even behind the insulated metal doors and heated tunnels of the cave bunkers that make up After-Day border camp, I can see my breath and need two thick coats to keep warm. My fingers are like icicles as I write. I would die very quickly if exposed to the atmosphere outside. And yet, here I am, in the land of Nightmares.

Somewhere beyond these Penumbral Mountains, which we crossed in an airtight train, is the City-of-Long-Shadows. I have never been so far from it. Few people have. We are most indebted to those who mapped the shortest route through the mountains, built the rails through the lowest valleys, blasted new tunnels, laid the foundations for After-Day. But no one has gone beyond this point. We—I and the rest of the expeditionary team from St. Kataretz—will be the first to venture into Night. It will be a dangerous endeavor, but I have faith in us, in the brave men and women who have accompanied me here.

My dear Velag, how would you have reacted to see these beautiful caves I sit in now, to see the secret culture of your enemy? I am surrounded by what can only be called their art, the lantern-light making pale tapestries of the rock walls on which Nightmares through the millennia scratched to life the dawn of their time, the history that followed, and its end, heralded by our arrival into their world.

In this history we are the enemy, bringing the terror of blinding fire into Evening, bringing the advanced weapons that caused their genocide. On these walls we are drawn in pale white dyes, bioluminescent in the dark, a swarm of smeared light advancing on the Nightmares’ striking, jagged-angled representations of themselves, drawn in black dyes mixed from blood and minerals.

In this history Nightmares were alive when the last of the sunwyrms flew into Evening to scourge the land for prey. Whether this is truth or myth we don’t know, but it might mean that Nightmares were around long before us. It might explain their adaptation to the darkness of outer Evening—their light-absorbent skin ancient camouflage to hide from sunwyrms under cover of the forests of Evening. We came into Evening with our fire (which they show sunwyrms breathing) and pale skins, our banners showing Dragon and the sun, and we were like a vengeful race of ghosts come to kill on behalf of those disappeared angels of Day, whom they worshipped to the end—perhaps praying for our retreat.

In halls arched by the ribcages and spines of ancient sunwyrm skeletons I have seen burial chambers; the bones of Nightmares and their children (whom we called imps because we didn’t like to think of our enemy having young) piled high. Our bones lie here too, not so different from theirs. Tooth-marks show that they ate their dead, probably because of the scarcity of food in the fragile ecosystem of Evening. It is no wonder then that they ate our dead too—as we feared. It was not out of evil, but need.

We have so much yet to learn.

Perhaps it would have given you some measure of peace, Velag, to know that the Nightmares didn’t want to destroy us, only to drive us back from their home. Perhaps not.

Ilydrin tells me it is time for us to head out. She is a member of our expedition—a biologist—and my partner. To hide the simple truth of our affection seems here, amidst the empty city of a race we destroyed, an obscenity. Confronted by the vast, killing beauty of our planet’s second half, the stagnant moralities of our city-state appear a trifle. I adore Ilydrin, and I am glad she is here with me.

One team will stay here while ours heads out into Night. Ilydrin and I took a walk outside to test our armored environmental suits to protect us from the lethal cold. We trod down from the caves of After-Day and into the unknown beyond, breath blurring our glass faceplates, our head-lamps cutting broad swathes through the snow-swarmed dark. We saw nothing ahead but an endless plain of ice—perhaps a frozen sea.

No spectral spires, no black banners of Night, no horde of Nightmares waiting to attack, no Dark Lord in his distant obsidian palace (an image Ilydrin and I righteously tore down many times in the form of those Army posters, during our early College vigils). We held each others’ gloved hands and returned to Camp, sweating in our cramped shells, heavy boots crunching on the snow. I thought of you, Father, bravely venturing into bitter Evening to support your family. I thought of you, Brother, nobly marching against the horde for your Monarchy. I thought of you, Mother, courageously carrying your first child alone in that empty house before it became our home. I thought of you, Shadow—broken, tortured prisoner, baring your teeth to your captors in silence.

Out there, I was shaking—nervous, excited, queasy. I wasn’t afraid.

I have Father’s old photograph with the Nightmare’s head (he took it down from above the mantelpiece after Velag died). I have a photograph of Mother, Father, Velag and I all dressed up before our trip to Weep-for-Day. And finally, a smiling portrait of Velag in uniform before he left for the Academy, his many pimples invisible because of the monochrome softness of the image. I keep these photographs with me, in the pockets of my overcoat, and take them out sometimes when I write.

So it begins. I write from the claustrophobic confines of the Night-Crawler, a steam-powered vehicle our friends at the College of Engineering designed (our accompanying professors named it with them, no doubt while drunk in a bar on University-Street). It is our moving camp. We’ll sleep and eat and take shelter in it, and explore further and longer—at least a few vigils, we hope. If its engines fail, we’ll have to hike back in our shells and hope for the best. The portholes are frosted over, but the team is keeping warm by stoking the furnace and singing. Ilydrin comes and tells me, her lips against my hair: “Val. Stop writing and join us.” I tell her I will, in a minute. She smiles and walks back to the rest, her face flushed and soot-damp from the open furnace. I live for these moments.

I will lay down this pen now. A minute.

I don’t know what we’ll find out here. Maybe we will find the Dark Lord and his gathered horde of Nightmares. But at this point, even the military doesn’t believe that, or they would have opposed the funding for this expedition or tried to hijack it.

Ilydrin says there’s unlikely to be life so deep into Night—even Nightmares didn’t venture beyond the mountains, despite our preconceptions. But she admits we’ve been wrong before. Many times. What matters is that we are somewhere new. Somewhere other than the City-of-Long-Shadows and the Penumbral territories, so marked by our history of fear. We need to see the rest of this world, to meet its other inhabitants—if there are others—with curiosity, not apprehension. And I know we will, eventually. This is our first, small step. I wish you were here with me to see it, Velag. You were but a child on this planet.

We might die here. It won’t be because we ventured into evil. It will be because we sought new knowledge. And in that, I have no regrets, even if I’m dead when this is read. A new age is coming. Let this humble account be a preface to it.

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, August 2012

About the Author

Indrapramit Das is a writer from Kolkata, India. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in various publications and anthologies including Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, and Tor.com. He is an Octavia Butler scholar and a grateful graduate of Clarion West 2012. He completed his M.F.A. at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where he wore many hats, including dog hotel night attendant, TV background performer, minor film critic, and video game tester. His debut novel The Devourers is forthcoming from Penguin Books India. Follow him on Twitter @IndrapramitDas

Small Markets, Big Wonders

Julie Novakova

How many copies make a bestseller? What does an author need to do in order to have a novel accepted by a publishing house? How does a SF magazine work? We often contemplate these questions but perhaps rarely realize how vastly the answers can differ between national markets.

Last summer, I met Neil Clarke at Worldcon in London and we spoke about speculative fiction (SF, or fantastika) on the Anglo-American and Czech markets, finding sometimes unexpected differences, and the idea to zoom in on the workings of Czech SF sprang up.

But before you read further, beware: This is a zombie story.

From reading market statistics and talking with people in publishing, one can easily come to the notion that current Czech SF market is a high castle built of cards, splendid but fragile and constantly on the verge of collapse. But in spite of all financial crises, VAT changes and an alleged decrease in reading habits, it refuses to collapse, for which most of us are eternally grateful. Is it really as fragile as it looks? How does it differ from the English-speaking market and can either offer any useful insights to the other?

Czech SF has a rich history, from Jakub Arbes or Svatopluk Čech to J. M. Troska, Karel Čapek or Josef Nesvadba and to many modern authors. However, publishing was severely affected by political changes in the twentieth century. Nazi occupation during WWII and the subsequent decades of communist regime resulted in sixty years of very little freedom in this aspect as well as many others. After 1989, the market grew rapidly. Books and authors previously banned by the regime experienced a big boom and numbers of copies in tens of thousands were no exception. Yet on such a small market—Czechoslovakia (before division into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993) had about fifteen million inhabitants—this could not go on for long. After early 1990s, the numbers went down and stabilized rather in the thousands. Today, works of fiction are usually being published in fifteen hundred to two thousand copies, though the number varies largely depending on the author, genre, and publishing house. How many sold copies make a bestseller? There is no official statement; some say three thousand already, but most publishers agree on ten thousand. In SF, many put the line at five thousand copies.

There are typically seventeen thousand published titles in a year (about ninety percent of them are new titles, about ten percent reprints). A little under seven thousand of them are fiction, and almost seven hundred constitutes speculative fiction1, from which slightly more than fifty percent is fantasy, almost thirty percent science fiction and less than twenty percent horror (not broken into more specific categories like YA, genre romance etc.).

Most of them are translations; the number of novels, anthologies or story collections by Czech SF authors fluctuates around one hundred per year. The increasing trend of translated fiction is more apparent in SF than in the whole market: Overall, translations account for more than a third of all books published in the Czech Republic. More than half of the translations are from English titles, but German and French are also numerous with other languages falling behind behind these three. For comparison: The ratio of translated fiction on the US market is about one percent.

In the number of book titles published per year per one million people, the Czech Republic with fifteen hundred and eighty titles scored fifth in Europe, after Denmark, the United Kingdom, Slovenia and Spain.2 That doesn’t sound bad, does it? But does it reflect how much people read? According to the NOP World Culture Score Index, Czech people spend on average seven and a half hours a week reading, which made for the sixth position, the first being taken by India with more than ten and a half hours of reading per week. These results paint a nice picture of the Czech Republic from the view of publishing. But there is no official data for the speculative fiction market. Can something tell us more?

Luckily, yes. To find more answers, we should go to the magazines.

We have two professional speculative fiction magazines in the Czech Republic: XB-1 (formerly Ikarie) and Pevnost. Both are quite lively zombies.

Let me explain: Ikarie had been the first professional Czech SF magazine, founded in 1990. It was canceled in December 2010 by the publisher due to a decline in advertising revenue (surprisingly, a SF magazine drew fewer advertisers than lifestyle magazines). But the staff did not give up, found an independent publisher and without pause continued the magazine under the name XB-1 (from the classic Czech SF film Ikarie XB-1), as the former publisher still held rights for Ikarie.

Similarly, Pevnost closed down in January 2013 but it was revived two months later thanks to a risk-loving and SF-loving investor.

Then again in June 2013, XB-1 announced closure due to financial problems but later in the same month, another such investor stepped in and saved the magazine.

Pevnost and XB-1 were resurrected by fans that believed the magazines brought something good and irreplaceable to readers and could ultimately prosper given wiser financial decisions and PR. To this day, they are both stable and popular.

Their sale numbers could tell us more about the number of SF readers; unfortunately, neither of the magazines discloses them. The estimate is somewhere between five and eight thousand sold copies each month, with Pevnost (more multimedia, film, fantasy and YA-focused) likely selling more than XB-1 (focused primarily on fiction, translated as well as Czech). The vast majority of the sales are print versions. How is it comparable to situation on other markets?

We can try to make a comparison to Anglo-American magazines. Gardner Dozois’s summation of 2013 in his 31st Year’s Best SF anthology indicates that Asimov’s sells around twenty-three thousand copies, as well as Analog. F&SF was around eleven thousand. But the American market is unique in the number of electronic and online magazines very successfully competing with their print cousins.

Interzone, the most famous British SF magazine with a long-standing tradition, was estimated to sell around two thousand copies. Yet the United Kingdom has a population of about sixty-four million people—six times more than the Czech Republic. However, the sales are hardly comparable because there is no language barrier between the UK and USA. We should look at countries with national languages other than English. There are a lot of European magazines, but they’re mostly nonpaying ezines. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to locate the sales numbers for regular print magazines, which are not many. For those which have social network accounts, I could only look at their online communities, typically much less active and smaller than for the Czech magazines.3

And as far as I know, XB-1 and Polish Nowa Fantastyka are the only European paying print magazines that regularly publish translations of foreign stories. One of the most famous European magazines, Russian Esli, which had been doing so as well, ceased publication three years ago.

In these circumstances, I cannot be but grateful for XB-1 and Pevnost.

We’ve got zombie magazines—and they’re magazines to be proud of.

Nevertheless—there are really only two magazines. Recently, the Slovakian irregularly published e-magazine Jupiter joined them as another paying venue for short SF in Czech and Slovak. But imagine you were Ray Bradbury and you wrote one good short story a week. If all of them should be published and paid, you’d need to fill all these magazines yourself and also contribute to most anthologies on the market—impossible. If you were that productive short fiction writer, you’d either need to publish short story collections or offer your stories online—but in the latter case, you couldn’t expect to make profit.

When I wrote about Anglo-American online genre magazines for the website of XB-1, some people asked in the comments why we haven’t got a professional online magazine in the Czech Republic. Surely it would be a good thing!

It certainly would. Unfortunately, it’s verging on the impossible. Even with a similar percentage of paying readers that Clarkesworld has, an online magazine in such a small market would be extremely lucky just to break even. It’s a risk no one is willing to take now, though that may change in the future if the readers’ behavior shifts significantly towards supporting their favorite projects even if they can access their contents for free.

However, while pro-paying online periodicals could hardly exist in today’s Czech market, that doesn’t apply to ebooks or electronic magazines. Ebooks currently account for less than two percent of revenue on the market but their impact is growing larger every year—and I’ve already mentioned the magazine Jupiter. What’s more, those two percent apply to the book market as a whole. In science fiction publishing, the number is approaching twenty percent. Ebooks are certainly proving a viable strategy for publishers and many who refused to do them just a few years ago are now happily publishing them and would strive much harder without them.

But let’s go back to the authors. The process from having a story/novel accepted and published is not much different from anywhere else; it’s the part before that differs.

For a start, forget an agent. We’re talking about a tiny market where only a handful of authors can make a living from writing—if they don’t have a very expensive lifestyle. Agents are just unheard of. It’s up to authors to submit their work to publishers. Unfortunately, most don’t quite know how to do it. Publishers receive countless e-mails from authors who send them partial work; sagas printed out in Comic Sans, and novels totally outside their publishing scope.

A reasonable author figures on her own that the manuscript should be complete, with simple, readable formatting and ideally a synopsis, with a concise cover letter. But there are ways to help authors and publishers at the same time—especially by utilizing submission guidelines. Most Czech publishers don’t have these. Any information about submitting manuscripts and whether the publisher is willing to look at unsolicited work is missing from the vast majority of publishing houses’ sites. That results not just in a flood of crazy queries and submissions but also in uncertainty on the author’s side. The lack makes it more complicated for both sides—but for some mysterious reason, nothing changes.

Why, you ask? The answer is again “small market;” a market where beginning authors are expected to make their appearance in contests first and have a couple of stories published in anthologies of the winning pieces before they submit to the magazines or write a novel. Once you follow the contest results and read the anthologies and magazines, you start noticing some names and if their fiction appeals to you, you either solicit new stories from them or read their submission if they send you something. Apart from contests, anthology entries are typically solicited too. Or, sometimes, the guidelines travel by word of mouth.

In such a small and tight community as the Czech fandom undoubtedly is, it works, but this status quo may make it hard for new writers to establish themselves unless they participate in short story contests. On the other hand, the contests don’t charge any submission fees, with one recent exception. But they also don’t pay the published authors, unlike the magazines. Breaking onto the market with paid pieces is difficult almost regardless of how good you already are—which is a significant difference from the Anglo-American market, where nothing prevents you from submitting to the best magazines right away and the result is just up to the quality of your work and a bit of luck. All of that makes clear submission guidelines and tracking submissions very new—and pleasant!—for Czech authors once they venture abroad.

So what can we gather about the Czech market from all this? The number of published speculative fiction books, the magazines and their sales, compared to the number of Czech speakers, seem almost unreal. It suggests the Czech SF fan base is strong and active, but the peripeties faced by the magazines and some publishers also show that the current situation, however remarkable, really is fragile. We’ve mostly had happy endings so far, but can we count on it?

The rise of ebooks and rapidly growing popularity of audiobooks are a sign that the traditional market is changing, though it’s coming later and more slowly than on the Anglo-American market. On the other hand, we can’t expect the changes to copy that development due to the small size of our market, which renders some of the changes next to impossible.

Czech SF works feature ambitious sagas as well as adventure-based book series, space opera as well as high fantasy, hard SF, military, detective SF and countless other subgenres. Maybe only weird and slipstream fiction don’t seem to be doing very well on the home turf. The market is small yet flourishing, at least more than would be expected, but it’s rather isolated; the flow of translations—especially from English—goes in but very few Czech SF works go out. A handful of short stories had been translated into English, others, including novels, into Polish. Thanks to Jaroslav Olša, Jr., the former Czech ambassador in South Korea (currently in the Republic of The Philippines), some pieces were also translated into Korean. Classics like Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. were published in many languages, however, modern works rarely have any translations. With uncertainty about publishing the translation and the cost of it, the risk is too high.

I don’t dare predict if and how this trend changes but I know of several authors considering writing in English or trying to get their works translated. Another question is whether the shift to writing in English is just a good thing or it takes something away as well. Vilma Kadlečková, a well-known Czech SF author whose story “Longing for Blood” had been translated and published in F&SF in 1997, says that despite her experience as a translator from English into Czech, she wouldn’t write in English because her language is richer and more nuanced when writing in her mother tongue. That’s certainly true for a majority of authors. Is writing in a foreign tongue more restrictive on one’s style and imagination?

I’d say there’s no definitive answer. In my view, it depends on the individual authors, their particular word power and the stories they write. Let us see when we have a large enough sample to compare . . .

The future seems more uncertain than ever—but also promising and full of adventure. If publishing taught me anything so far, it’s that it is largely unpredictable. Let’s take a ride into the future and see. And while we’re at it, let’s try to wisely use the steering wheel as well.

Useful links:

Europa SF site (in English)

XB-1’s website (in Czech)

Pevnost’s website (in Czech)

Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror, annual summaries (in Czech)

Footnotes:

1 For a rough comparison: According to Locus magazine, the number of English-language books of interest in the SF field published in 2013 was a little over 2600 (via Gardner Dozois in his Year’s Best SF: Thirty-First Annual Collection).

2 http://jakubmarian.com/number-of-books-published-per-year-per-capita-by-country-in-europe/

3 Facebook followers numbers: nearly 2000 for XB-1, more than 3000 for Pevnost.

About the Author

Julie Novakova was born in 1991 in Prague, the Czech Republic. She works as a writer, evolutionary biologist and occasional translator. So far, she has published five novels and more than thirty short stories in Czech, and three stories in English. Besides speculative fiction, she regularly writes nonfiction, usually concerning either science and technology or publishing. 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).

Spanish Science Fiction:
A Round Table Discussion with
Spain’s Top Contemporary Voices

Alvaro Zinos-Amaro

Though I spent my first decade or so in Madrid, where I was born, I didn’t discover science fiction until I was a teen, by which time I was living in Germany and the available supply was all in German or English. As a result, it wasn’t until I returned to Spain in my twenties that I really grasped the existence of Spanish science fiction as its own unique entity and proceeded to read original Spanish SF anthologies and novels. When I recently heard that Mariano Villareal, editor of the Terra Nova anthology series, was going to be working on Castles in Spain / Castillos en el Aire, a new Spanish-English bilingual anthology of Spanish science fiction, fantasy, and horror, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to speak with him and ask if he could help set up a roundtable with some of the anthology’s contributors. Mariano was extremely helpful in connecting us across time zones and facilitating the conversation. And so I’m going to let him introduce our roundtable members:

Elia Barceló, prolific award-winning author of science fiction, fantasy and horror stories and novels, is the genre’s foremost Spanish-language female writer.

César Mallorquí is the author of the short story collection El Círculo de Jericó, the single most awarded book in the history of Spanish science fiction, as well as young adult novels, novels with historical settings, and Jules Verne-style adventures.

Juan Miguel Aguilera is the award-winning co-author, along with Javier Redal, of Mundos en el Abismo and Hijos de la Eternidad, two canonical Spanish space operas; he is also a prolific illustrator, screenplay writer, and soon-to-be director.

Rafael Marín, a scholar of science fiction and the history of comics, is the author of the novel Lágrimas de Luz, considered a classic of modern Spanish science fiction, and several other key works.

Rodolfo Martínez, the publisher of Sportula books, has written, among other things, cyberpunk, space opera, urban fantasy, Sherlock Holmes pastiches and alternate history secret agent romps, in the process earning the field’s top Spanish awards.

Eduardo Vaquerizo, a prolific contributor to short story magazines and anthologies, is the author of Danza de Tinieblas and Memoria de Tinieblas, both of which won the Ignotus (the Spanish equivalent of the Hugo), as well as other well-regarded works richly informed by history.

Javier Negrete, one of Spanish science fiction’s premier stylists, is the author of several critically-acclaimed novels inspired by classical history and mythology, as well as La Espada de Fuego, the first in a bestselling epic fantasy series.

I’d like to start by asking you about your greatest literary influences.

Rodolfo Martínez: They are many and they are quite varied. Authors like Robert Graves, Isaac Asimov, Gabriel García Márquez, John Le Carré, Philip K. Dick, J. R. R. Tolkien.

Eduardo Vaquerizo: The main ones for me would be Cortázar and Borges. I admire them greatly. After that, I love many others, most of them science fiction writers: Le Guin, Bradbury, Lem, Ballard and others.

Elia Barceló: Authors who are or have been influential in my writing: Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. Le Guin, Julio Cortázar, Stephen King, Philip K. Dick, Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, Edgar Allan Poe, Leonard Cohen, and John Fowles. And many individual novels, poems and theater plays.

Rafael Marín: Non-genre writers: García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Francisco Umbral. From within the field: Stephen King, Robert Howard.

Javier Negrete: Honestly, it changes over time. Within science fiction, I like the imagination of Jack Vance, the speculative audacity of Vernor Vinge, Will McCarthy and Charles Sheffield, the style and character development of George R. R. Martin. I’m also fascinated by Dan Simmons, whose Hyperion and Ilium sagas I have read and re-read. It’s grand stuff, though at times so grand that it can be a bit exhausting.

César Mallorquí: Many of my influences are North American, such as Ray Bradbury and Fredric Brown, but I could also name Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar.

Juan Miguel Aguilera: Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Larry Niven and Joe Haldeman.

What is the most exciting thing happening in Spanish science fiction today (authors, movements, editors, etc.)?

Eduardo Vaquerizo: I’d say there are two exciting things going on. On the one hand, and little by little, science fiction is becoming more respectable. More mainstream readers and writers are coming to the genre, which for me is a positive thing. The second item is the growth of small publishers, combined with the presence of more writers. It’s leading to an increased focus on the quality of Spanish science fiction.

Rafael Marín: We’re living through an implosion. Bad times aren’t particularly exciting.

Elia Barceló: I don’t follow Spanish science fiction as closely as I did twenty years ago, but I still try to read current novels and anthologies. It has become impossible to read everything, and that’s good news, because it means that there are lots of new things.

Some great developments are: Gigamesh and its big new bookshop, Lektu and the possibility of buying buys online at moderate prices, the Terra Nova anthologies and all the work Mariano Villarreal is doing, the existence of HispaCon, Sportula as a new publisher, and the new Random House imprint, Fantascy. And there are exciting new voices like Emilio Bueso, Ismael Martínez Biurrun, Felicidad Martínez, Sofía Rhei, Santiago Eximeno.

Rodolfo Martínez: Perhaps the most exciting phenomenon is the appearance of many small publishers who are willing to bet on national authors.

Juan Miguel Aguilera: I would say that one exciting development is the increasing presence of women in our field. Recently I was talking with a friend who wrote a story for my next Akasa-Puspa anthology, and I told her that I thought her approach was fantastic, really innovative. I think female writers are going to help refashion the field.

César Mallorquí: The single most important development is something Elia alluded to: there are more and better writers than ever before.

Let’s take a step back and talk about some Spanish publishing history. John W. Campbell is perhaps the single most influential editor in the history of English-language science fiction. Is there a Spanish John W. Campbell? Who were/are the most important Spanish science fiction editors?

Eduardo Vaquerizo: I could name the people from Nueva Dimensión; Domingo Santos was the principal figure, and the magazine set the standard for science fiction in our country. But for me the single most influential editor was Francisco Porrúa, who had a gigantic presence through the Minotauro publishing house and helped it deliver world-class science fiction. It’s true that Porrúa didn’t publish Spanish writers in his collections, but I think his books opened many minds and led to careers whose goals were high-quality genre writing of literary merit.

Elia Barceló: Domingo Santos and Luis Vigil can be considered, in my opinion, the two most influential science fiction editors in Spain. They started Nueva Dimensión and kept it going for two generations of readers; they opened the world of international science fiction to Spanish readers when Spain was a Third World country, a dictatorship where everything was forbidden. They introduced us to the great American and British writers who were still alive and writing wonders. They even published Russian stories! I really think science fiction exists in Spain because of them.

Later, there were others, of course: Miquel Barceló (fanzine Kandama and then the Nova collection in Ediciones B., and the UPC Award), Alejo Cuervo (Martínez Roca and then Gigamesh). Now Rodolfo Martínez also works as an editor (Sportula). But Santos and Vigil were the old guard and we have lots to thank them for.

Rafael Marín: Domingo Santos, without a doubt. He was a writer, translator, and director of various collections throughout the 70s and 80s. It is to him that we owe the credibility gained by Spanish science fiction authors.

César Mallorquí: As mentioned, I think the two most influential editors in Spain have been Domingo Santos, who among other things founded and co-managed the magazine Nueva Dimensión, and Francisco Porrúa, creator and editor of the magnificent Minotaur collection. I’d also like to mention Miquel Barceló, who edited the Nova collection for Ediciones B.

Juan Miguel Aguilera: No question about it, our John W. Campbell—at least my generation’s—was Domingo Santos. His work enabled the 90s generation to change the face of science fiction in Spain, and this is recognized with the Domingo Santos award, which is issued yearly. After Santos I’d place Miquel Barceló as a critical editor in our history.

The Orbis Library of Science Fiction (1985-1987) collected one hundred titles, mostly translations of English-language science fiction classics, with a few Spanish novels mixed in. Domingo Santos helped curate the selection. How did this collection affect you personally, if it did? What did it do for science fiction in Spain?

Eduardo Vaquerizo: For me the Orbis collection was a kind of mental tin-opener. I was always interested in science and literature and had read Verne and Asimov, but until the Orbis Library came along I hadn’t encountered the big names of English-language science fiction. The collection provided me with concentrated access to top writers. The result was discovery: new ways of thinking about the genre, from poetry to radical adventure, from social criticism to human conflicts. With the Orbis Library Domingo Santos did for novels what he had done for the short story with Nueva Dimensión.

Elia Barceló: I am too old to have been really affected by this collection, excellent though it was. The one which really touched my mind, heart, and soul was the Nebulae series, which I had the good fortune to read in my hometown’s public library when I was in my teens. Later, the publishers Orbis, Nova and Martínez Roca helped me discover new writers and novels, but I was already hooked.

Rafael Marín: Yes, one hundred volumes of a collection primarily dedicated to American science fiction. My novel Lágrimas de Luz appeared as volume sixty-five. An accomplishment and a surprise.

Javier Negrete: I was twenty years old when the collection started, and my interest in science fiction was at its peak, so it was like a godsend. I bought the whole thing, of course, and read most of it. Thanks to Orbis, I discovered authors like Dick and Vance, with whom I’d only been vaguely familiar. And that goes for Spanish authors too, like Bermúdez Castillo—I still remember how much I laughed reading Viaje a un Planeta Wu-Wei or El Señor de la Rueda—and Rafael Marín, an author I would later befriend.

I’ve talked with my friends about this, and a lot of people got hooked on science fiction thanks to the collection’s famous blue volumes. Some of these folks became loyal readers, and some went further and became writers. In my case, I was already writing at the time (I was working on the first draft of my novel La Espada de Fuego), but the Orbis collection sparked my imagination and fueled my creative energy.

César Mallorquí: When this collection appeared in Spain I was already a big genre fan, familiar with almost every title that they included, so it didn’t affect me much personally. But it was an extremely important collection in terms of disseminating science fiction among readers who barely knew it.

Juan Miguel Aguilera: A lot of the Orbis collection was based on the Ultramar collection, also spearheaded by Domingo Santos. The Orbis Library received more publicity and its impact abroad was larger, but here in Spain the Ultramar books, with their wonderful covers by Toni Garcés, are held in higher regard, and I think my peers would agree that they marked the beginning of our Golden Age.

On that subject: It’s been said that the Spanish Golden Age of science fiction occurred at the end of the 1990s. What was your involvement in that Golden Age, as writers and readers?

Elia Barceló: My first story was published in 1980 and my first book in 1989, when I was already living in Austria. I’ve been working in the field of science fiction ever since, though I must admit only part of my work can be considered science fiction because in the intervening years I have expanded into different literary genres.

In any case, 1992 was the moment when, for the first time, I got together with other Spanish science fiction writers in Barcelona, at a short event organized by BEM (the fanzine) that allowed us to meet Joe Haldeman and gave us three days to talk about our favorite literary genre. In the nineties the SF world in Spain seemed to bloom. It was one of these wonderful times when you feel everybody is doing his/her best to contribute. There were lots of fanzines and magazines, new possibilities for publishing, new writers with new ideas, Hispacon every year, the Asturcon in Gijón (held the first weekend of the Semana Negra), the Semana Negra itself (which up to then had been a festival for crime literature), which allowed us to present our latest books, the UPC Award . . . It really was a great time.

I was very active during that decade, although having two kids and not living in Spain didn’t help, but I published three books and a dozen stories, won an Ignotus, contributed stories and articles to all the fanzines and magazines, compiled Visiones Propias II, the yearly anthology of the Asociación de Fantasía y Ciencia Ficción, was guest of honor at a couple of conventions, translated stories from English and German into Spanish, presented lots of books of fellow writers in Gijón, was on many panels, and so on. I was invited twice to Utopiales—the great French Festival held in Nantes—though that might have happened a bit later. Anyway, I was in touch with everybody, I tried to read everything that was being published and to help science fiction in Spain come into its own.

Rafael Marín: I would say that our Golden Age started in the mid-80s, then there was a brief parenthesis at the start of the 90s, and it resumed from the early 90s through to the mid-00s.

Juan Miguel Aguilera: For me it was the start of the 90s, or, more precisely, with the publication of Domingo Santos’ Ultramar collection at the end of the 80s. The first sign of the changes upon us was a novella by Rafael Marín, “Nunca digas buenas noches a un extraño,” which was published in the magazine Nueva Dimensión. At the time I didn’t know Rafael, but I remember thinking that that story was something new, unlike anything that had been published in Spain before. Later the novel Lágrimas de Luz appeared, also by Rafael. The 1987 novel I wrote with Javier Redal, Mundos en el Abismo, is considered by many to be one of the defining moments in the formation of Spanish science fiction as we know it today.

Eduardo Vaquerizo: I think that literature, as any art, happens in short bursts or waves that combine passion with state-of-the-art craftsmanship. The thing is that in the 90s large groups of young people fell deeply in love with the science fiction and fantasy that was being published in Nueva Dimensión, along with the Orbis and Minotauro publishing imprints. We were baby boomers, a generation of youngsters who had grown up reading Verne, Wells, Asimov, Clarke, Sturgeon, Le Guin, Lem, Bradbury, Ballard, Dick and many others. There weren’t a lot of us, but we organized gatherings, usually at cheap Chinese restaurants, where we talked and ate and drank a lot.

We were enthusiastic conversationalists. At these gatherings there would almost always be a publisher present, or someone who produced a fanzine, or perhaps someone who hosted a radio talk show about science fiction and fantasy. We were a hardcore, very active group of fans. I think that was the secret: we were competing, judging each other’s works passionately, and publishing in small, even non-professional markets. But these markets turned out to be a good training ground, and they were quite professional regarding the selection of stories and the editing of fiction. Another powerful lever was the literary prizes, the only way to obtain some money writing science fiction and fantasy for us at the time.

The result was a noticeable rise in quality and in the number of active writers. The changes in the 90s happened as a result of the work done by previous genre fans. They paved the way for us. I’d like to believe that in the 90s we similarly paved the way for newer writers who are flourishing today.

Javier Negrete: I’m a bit skeptical about “Golden Age” labels, as well as those that allegedly define literary generations. That being said, the 90s wasn’t a bad time for science fiction. The UPC award, with its shortcomings—like paying inordinate attention to foreign authors, suggesting an attitude of deference—was really important in getting young or not-so-young authors to write short novels like crazy. The short novel, or novella, is an interesting form, because it forces the author to condense full plots and compelling characters into a small space, and that kind of discipline helps a writer grow.

Conventions like those of Cádiz, Burjassot and Gijón helped diverse authors meet in person. Besides leading to friendships, many of which continue to this day, the cons allowed for an exchange of ideas, projects, dreams . . . An interesting period, to be sure.

César Mallorquí: I was one of the writers that formed the 90s generation we’ve been discussing, so my involvement was significant. Nevertheless, at that time we didn’t have any “generational awareness” whatsoever. We simply wrote what we wanted to write, though we did notice that we were living in a period of great creative stirrings. It was beautiful.

In his 2007 survey of the history of Spanish science fiction (“Notas para una historia de la ciencia ficción en España”), Fernando Ángel Moreno Serrano writes that the 90s saw a growing appreciation for the “importance of language.” Agree/disagree? How important is this awareness today?

Rafael Marín: Writers and readers in the 70s were used to reading translations, in some cases very poor ones. Writers like me who arrived on the scene in the 80s read more mainstream novels by Spanish or South American writers. That influenced our style. Now we write knowing that form and language are important.

César Mallorquí: Until the 90s the few science fiction writers who published in our country were, in general, fans, happy to contribute but somewhat limited from a literary perspective. In the 90s a new generation appeared, better equipped with literary technique, and that was visible in the quality of the texts. Science fiction is, above all, literature, so the importance language is fundamental. That notion continues to be in play today.

Javier Negrete: Yes, I think that in the 90s several authors appeared who, without sacrificing story or plot, paid greater attention to the use of language than in previous decades. Of course, all generalizations are unfair: a writer like Bermúdez Castillo had already written brilliantly.

I suppose the cause of the improvement was that by this time there were more people writing science fiction than before. And with a greater base of writers, it makes sense that even in a statistical way there should be a rising number of authors with a heightened sense of style (I’m thinking of Rafael Marín and León Arsenal) as well as more efficient storytellers who didn’t sacrifice quality (like Juan Miguel Aguilera, César Mallorquí o Rodolfo Martínez).

The same seems to be happening now with authors who emerged after the year 2000. Some of them, like Emilio Bueso, have very well-developed and personal styles, while others like Virginia Pérez create a lot of tension and immediacy—these are just a few examples, of course there are many others. And there’s a great many authors who despite their best intentions don’t reach a quality of craft that I would consider professional. Which is to say, the same situation as twenty years ago. And you see it in other genres too, as confirmed by my experience as a judge for various young adult and historical novel awards.

Eduardo Vaquerizo: I agree. As I said before, thanks to the new wave of Orbis and Minotauro people in the 90s read a lot of new science fiction writers. And we read other things too—other genres, literature in our mother tongue, classics of world literature. Our interest was in literature first and foremost; with science fiction as a special case, unlike more conservative academics and mainstream writers who argue that literature and science fiction are distinct. Science fiction and fantasy are the literature of the marvelous. Literature is created through language, so of course we became interested in language. Writers must hone their artistic and communicative intentions and abilities to push language beyond its formals limits.

Elia Barceló: Moreno Serrano is quite right, in my opinion, but I think this awareness had already formed in the mid-eighties, especially with writers like Rafael Marín, César Mallorquí and myself, all three of us coming not from “scientific” studies but from an academic training in the humanities.

Up to 1980, the average science fiction reader read only science fiction and lacked any (or almost any) knowledge of classical or mainstream literature. Most of the novels he had read—I say “he” because the typical science fiction reader at the time was male—were badly translated American novels by translators who couldn’t even write good Spanish prose. With this “school,” the few Spanish genre writers used to focus on story, idea, usually a simple plot. Style wasn’t a consideration.

When our generation started to write, many of us had university training and a few of us had majored in philology or history. We had read the classics, the great poets, and modern Latin American authors (García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Cortázar, Borges, etc.). Some of us could also read texts in different languages and were not forced to rely on the terrible translations that were typical of the genre.

We developed an awareness of the language we were using and not only that: we became aware that, when writing science fiction, we were writing literary texts. Ideas are important and plot is important, as are all elements in a story or novel, but in literature the core is language: its richness, its appropriateness, the way it is used to convey emotions, ideas, feelings . . . But at that time we had to fight against readers (and publishers, “critics,” etc.) who didn’t see the importance of writing “well.”

I think this awareness is still present today and most young writers know you can only write a good novel if you can use language as a writer, if you’re writing literature. But I also fear that this awareness might disappear in the near future because nowadays anybody can write anything, put it on the Internet and hope it is read by thousands who don’t care if it is literature or not.

Juan Miguel Aguilera: I completely agree with the observation. Rafael Marín, Elia Barceló, Rodolfo Martínez, Javier Negrete, and I, part of the 90s generation, understood that good ideas weren’t enough to write science fiction novels or short stories. The way in which a story is told is as important as the idea. In the end science fiction is a literary genre and there are no excuses for bad writing.

In the essay “Science Fiction from Spain” Mariano Villareal observes that one out of ten new genre releases in Spain is written by a woman. Why are there so few women in Spanish science fiction? Do you see this changing anytime soon?

Eduardo Vaquerizo: At least there is one in this conversation (Elia). I remember my first fan days, my first conventions. There was always was a panel titled “Women and Science Fiction.” These days, women are becoming more interested in science fiction in Spain, because they are taking on more active roles in Spanish society. But yes, there is still a lot of room for improvement.

Elia Barceló: This is one of the most frequently asked questions in Spanish science fiction and one without a clear answer. One often hears that the name of the genre has made girls think science fiction is primarily about science and they have the idea that science is not a girls’ domain. But I don’t really think so, because there are lots of women scientists in Spain, which means that there are lots of women interested in science. But apparently not in fiction or in the mixture of both.

Like most mainstream readers, women do not generally read science fiction and this means that when women readers get to the point when they want to become writers, they write what they usually read: mainstream, crime, mystery, historical novels, romance, etc.

I was lucky enough to be a science fiction reader from the start, and not only that, I had the good fortune of discovering the great women writers of the United States in my youth: Ursula K. Le Guin, James Tiptree, Jr., Joanna Russ, Marion Zimmer Bradley, later Connie Willis. They were amazing! Much more importantly, I didn’t have to be an engineer or an astrophysicist to do it. I could write science fiction with my imagination, my heart, my use of language and any knowledge I might possess about the world.

Nowadays I have the impression that more women are having this kind of experience and getting to write science fiction. But this is only something you do when you are deeply in love with the genre; if that’s not the case, as a young inexperienced writer you try to get as many readers as possible, you want your first novel to be a success and make lots of money . . . and that is not usually true for science fiction, so you try to do something more like El Tiempo Entre Costuras :-)

César Mallorquí: The same thing was true in the United States, for example during the Golden Age. In the beginning science fiction had a predominantly male readership. Pulp covers, after all, would show BEMs kidnapping beautiful girls who were scantily clad, rather than hot semi-naked young men. Modern science fiction reached Spain in the 50s, so we’re behind when it comes to being more inclusive of women in the genre. But slowly and surely the situation is improving and each year there are more female readers and writers. In fact, one of the best Spanish science fiction writers is a woman—Elia.

Javier Negrete: I don’t know the reason, so I can only guess. As a professor, I’ve noticed that more women tend to study humanities than sciences, and in some way—even if it’s just because of the name—they tend to associate science fiction with science. Maybe that’s why the young female writers I know tend to gravitate more towards fantasy than science fiction, or even historical novels, which is also I genre I work in. Will the situation change? I’m not sure. In a way, I’m not sure it needs to: every writer, male or female, should be free to choose whatever genre they like best and to fashion whatever fictional worlds they want.

Juan Miguel Aguilera: Fortunately the situation is changing. As I see it, the most interesting stories in the two anthologies set in my Akasa-Puspa universe are written by women. I’ve always believed that female writers bring a new, fresh perspective to science fiction, something that hasn’t happened in Spain but which is now—perhaps because of the influence of female fantasy writers—underway. My third Akasa-Puspa anthology will feature an even greater number of women.

What impact has the Spanish financial crisis had on science fiction in Spain, besides reducing publishing?

Eduardo Vaquerizo: I think that we have lived through several intermixed crises. The publishing crisis is a paradigm shift crisis. We are at the start of an all-digital world, but we’re lacking the industrial and cultural knowledge to sustain this new direction. Technology has developed more quickly than society has, and now we have new ways of distributing literature without a support system in place, a way to make it economically sustainable. Music has experienced a similar crisis, as well as cinema, and, with 3D printers, the manufacturing industry will be next.

In Spain, I think that the financial crisis has led people to read more, not less, looking for distraction and, perhaps, insight. They read more but don’t pay for what they read, because the system has not adapted to the new paradigm.

Elia Barceló: I’m not sure I’m qualified to answer this question; I live too far away to be aware of everyday life in Spain. The only thing that comes to mind—and I’m not sure if it’s really related to the crisis or to the general state of the world—is the abundance of dystopias we are reading and writing of late. There seems to be a sort of “end of times” feeling that promotes the writing of dark futures full of destruction, ecological chaos, etc. Optimism and a belief in science are things of the past.

César Mallorquí: Yes, I think the main impact can be seen in the themes writers choose, often laden with pessimism. Nowadays dystopias and catastrophes are thriving.

Rafael Marín: The crisis has returned us to the place where we started. Publishers have cut down their publications enormously. A new phenomenon has arisen, that of the fan who self-edits his work and seeks crowd-funding. Or small publishers. There are more people writing, there are lots of small publishers, but we’ve lost some quality along the way, and the chance to chance a wider audience.

Javier Negrete: The combination of the crisis with internet piracy and new pastimes is proving to be devastating for the publishing world and for writers. Midlist authors have practically vanished. And that’s true in SF as well as other genres. Will we bounce back? I’m not sure.

Juan Miguel Aguilera: The first impact was that a lot of readers ran away to fantasy, a more escapist genre. Maybe the crisis made it harder to believe in the future, or real life was deemed depressing enough. But now the opposite is happening and dystopias are proving the most successful subgenre. The most recent anthology to which I contributed is Mañana Todavía (edited by Ricard Ruiz Garzón and published by Fantascy) and it deals with dystopias from the point of view of very different writers, like Rosa Montero, Elia Barceló, José María Merino, Javier Negrete, and me. It’s doing very well.

If I wanted to read the best Spanish science fiction short stories, where would be a good place to start?

Elia Barceló: There are a couple of people you could ask: Julián Díaz, Juan Manuel Santiago, Fernando Ángel Moreno, Santiago Solans, Rudy Martínez and, of course, Mariano Villarreal. They have probably read every SF short story ever published in Spain. I would also recommend the stories published in Artifex and now in Terra Nova. There are also lots of them—very good ones—in forgotten magazines and fanzines, and in Nueva Dimensión if you wanted to start at the beginning.

Eduardo Vaquerizo: The Nueva Dimensión magazines, for older stories, and the fanzines edited in the 90s. The problem, though, is that these are almost impossible to find. Recently the publisher Cyberdark has started a collection of anthologies whose goal is to rescue the best short stories of this period. Cyberdark published an anthology called Dulces Dieciséis with my strongest short fiction of the 90s, along with another volume called El Noveno Capítulo that collected some of Armando Boix’s best stories. They’re planning to edit about twenty more anthologies covering that time. It’s a great idea to make these stories available again.

Of course, there’s also more recent short fiction that’s very good, but it’s pretty easy to find. The logical starting point would be the Internet. There are also several interesting themed anthologies containing strong recent work by current writers as well.

Rafael Marín: Yes, there are good anthologies and author collections out there. Anthologies depend a lot on the tastes and biases of their editors. I think author collections are better at showcasing what writers are capable of, so I prefer collections.

César Mallorquí: There are two more-or-less recent books that offer an interesting panorama of Spanish science fiction short stories: Prospectivas (Salto de Página, 2012), edited by Fernando Ángel Moreno, and Historia y Antología de la Ciencia Ficción Española (Cátedra, 2014), edited by Julián Díez and Fernando Ángel Moreno.

Juan Miguel Aguilera: We’re all very different, so it really depends on what kind of SF subgenre you enjoy. Since we’ve talked about women and science fiction, I’d recommend the story “La textura de las palabras” by Felicidad Martínez, which is set in my Akasa-Puspa universe, and which is so original in its approach that it astounded me. I’d also recommend the anthology we mentioned before, Mañana Todavía, in which you’ll find just about every author who is currently relevant in Spanish science fiction.

Do you think Spanish science fiction has been more influenced by U.S. or European (including U.K.) authors and works?

Juan Miguel Aguilera: At one point U.S. science fiction dominated the Spanish scene completely. But since the 90s I’d say we’ve been finding our own voice. I’m interested in French science fiction—all of my novels appear in France, sometimes even before they do in Spain, and I know a lot of French authors, who unfortunately aren’t as popular in Spain as they ought to be.

Javier Negrete: In my case, I’ve read a lot of U.S. science fiction, some U.K. stuff and a little from the rest of Europe. I think that’s been mostly due to availability. So yes, I suppose the U.S. has exerted the most influence. I tend to like English-language literature in general, not only science fiction but other genres.

César Mallorquí: I concur, the United States has influenced Spanish SF the most, and then the U.K. in second place. Fortunately, one of the accomplishments of the 90s generation we’ve been discussing was to put that influence to good use and adapt its best elements towards the sensibilities and realities of Spain.

Eduardo Vaquerizo: I think that English science fiction—and I’m not separating between British and North American here—led the genre for years. There are a lot of great writers and some masters. That was the principal influence in Spain, but the European tradition has also played a part. For me, for example, Stanislaw Lem was very important. And of course we shouldn’t forget Jules Verne.

Elia Barceló: Science fiction in Spain has been until recently (and probably it still is, though not so strongly) a branch of English-language science fiction that is science fiction originally written in English. The influence of French, Russian, Italian, German, Polish or Scandinavian science fiction is insignificant compared to the influence of North American and British authors.

The greatest influence is probably American, although in the 90s the influence of the British New Thing was important too.

Until 2012 the Ignotus prize, an important Spanish science fiction award, was voted on by members of the Spanish Association of Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Horror (AEFCFT) and by HispaCon attendees. Now anyone can register and vote. What prompted this change? Do you think the Hugo awards should similarly be opened up beyond Worldcon members?

Juan Miguel Aguilera: I’m actually the Spanish writer to have won the most Ignotus awards in the history of Spanish science fiction, as writer and illustrator. It is quite prestigious and particularly helpful when you’re starting out. Making the voting process accessible to more people has perhaps been a move to increase the number of voters, to make things more democratic. I’m not sure if that’s good or not; we’ll see during the next award season!

Elia Barceló: I have not given much thought to the question because I don’t really believe in such things—especially now, with so many ways of influencing the voters’ opinions and the sudden fashions that lead people to vote for this or that just because everybody is talking about it on Twitter.

Eduardo Vaquerizo: Yes, the idea was to obtain more votes, which should in turn make the Ignotus more representative of what people like, more universal in a way. I don’t think the Hugos have this problem because Worldcon fandom is larger. An open voting process could make the prize less specialized, which might be good or bad according to one’s preference. Would you prefer winners who are more famous—more bestsellers maybe, more mainstream writers—or not?

César Mallorquí: As the others have pointed out, I suppose that the reason for the change in the way the Ignotus is selected was the low number of Association members. Regarding the question of the Hugos . . . I’m not sure, to be honest. Worldcon has a lot of members, so it may already represent the general opinion of fans. I don’t think a change is necessary, but I also wouldn’t really see any downside to it.

What single work of Spanish science fiction would you most like to see translated into other languages (including English)?

Rodolfo Martínez: Definitely Viaje a un Planeta Wu-Wei by Gabriel Bermúdez Castillo.

Elia Barceló: I think the best way to show what Spain has to offer is to translate a dozen (or twenty) stories and providing a panorama of different styles and ways of thinking. All of the authors mentioned in these conversations have very interesting visions to share with non-Spanish readers. And, of course, if I do say so myself, my trilogy Anima Mundi might be a candidate for translation.

Eduardo Vaquerizo: I’ll be honest and say that I’d like my own steampunk imperial adventure, Danza de Tinieblas, published in English. Also, El Ciclo de la Luna Roja by Jose Antonio Cotrina (a trilogy), Seis by Daniel Mares, Mundos en el Abismo by Juan Miguel Aguilera and Javier Redal, Consecuencias Naturales by Elia Barceló, and Alejandro Magno y las Águilas de Roma by J. Negrete.

Rafael Marín: Would it be rude to suggest my own work?

Javier Negrete: I’d suggest my Tramórea saga (one has to self-promote, after all), and I’d also pick Mundos en el Abismo by Aguilera and Redal. It’s already been translated into other languages, but not English, and I think it would work well in the U.K./U.S. markets.

Juan Miguel Aguilera: As it happens, a few years ago one of my novels was mentioned on the Locus blog in this context. My 1998 novel La Locura de Dios was quoted as being the winner of the Somebody-Please-Translate Award. So I’m going to listen to the author of that piece pick the same novel for translation into English. It’s already been translated into other languages, by the way; it won the Imaginales award in France and the Bob Morane award in Belgium.

What are your current and forthcoming projects?

Eduardo Vaquerizo: In June Random House, through its Fantascy imprint, will publish my novel Nos Mienten, written in the mood of political turmoil in which we live in Spain today. I’m currently writing a prequel to Danza de Tinieblas, my steampunk uchronia about a Spanish empire that survives into the present. The jonbar point occurs in the 16th century, following a war of succession caused by the death of Felipe II in a hunting accident. It was a very ambitious project because of the richness of the real Spanish Renaissance, mixed with the steampunk and uchronia propositions. I hope to have the prequel finished in half a year or so.

After that, I’m considering writing a techno-thriller about big transport airplanes. But that’s just one of several possible ideas . . .

Elia Barceló: I just finished writing a science fiction trilogy, Anima Mundi, which is a sort of crossover/hybrid novel for readers of all ages. It starts as a kind of love story for young people and gets darker and darker and more science-fictional with every page. The third part, Hijos de las Estrellas, will be published at the end of March.

I’ve started writing a dystopia with a strong gender theme, but there is another (mainstream) novel competing for my attention and I still don’t know which one will get written first.

I’ve almost finished compiling a collection of my short stories (in different genres), and that will be probably published before the summer.

Finally, I’ll be participating in two forthcoming SF anthologies with two short stories. One is finished, the other still in my mind.

Rafael Marín: I’m writing a historical novel. Adventures in the 16th century.

Rodolfo Martínez: I’m finishing La Sombra del Adepto, the fourth novel in a sequence that started with El Adepto de la Reina in 2009. I’m also working on a novel that takes as its starting point my short story “En el Ático,” which appeared in the anthology Mañana Todavía. And in the not-too-distant future I’d like to return to my Encrucijada series: police stories in a pseudo-Roman setting.

Javier Negrete: I’m currently continuing the history of Rome which I began in Roma Victoriosa and continued in Roma Invicta. I can’t talk about other projects I’m working on right now, but I hope to return to science fiction, which continues to be my favorite genre.

César Mallorquí: In September of 2015 a new collection of my fantasy and short stories will appear, Trece Monos, published by Random House. Right now I’m working on a young adult novel, still untitled, which—remember the pessimism we were talking about before?—chronicles the life story of three brothers during the collapse of civilization.

Juan Miguel Aguilera: In addition to my new Akasa-Puspa anthology, which I’ve already mentioned, I’m working on the script of a science fiction movie called Mindgate, which will be filmed in the U.S. The protagonist will be played by Rachael Leigh Cook. This will be my second film; my first was Stranded. However, this time I’ll be directing as well.

Note: A special thank you to Alicia Amaro, who helped with the translation.

About the Author

Alvaro Zinos-Amaro is the co-author, with Robert Silverberg, of When the Blue Shift Comes, which received a starred review from Library Journal. Alvaro’s short fiction and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Analog, Nature, Galaxy’s Edge, Apex and other venues, and Alvaro was nominated for the 2013 Rhysling Award. Alvaro’s reviews, critical essays and interviews have appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Strange Horizons, SF Signal, The New York Review of Science Fiction, Foundation, and other markets. Alvaro currently edits the blog for Locus.

Another Word:
The Precious Five-Star and the Reviewers of Mount Doom

Alethea Kontis

Book reviewers fascinate me.

My first official publishing gig was as a book reviewer for the local free press in Murfreesboro, TN. Every two weeks, I turned in five thousand eight hundred words about my favorite author or tome du jour. Not that it mattered; I didn’t get paid either way. But I got published! (And, eventually, this led to bigger and better gigs . . . including ghost writing book reviews for the New York Times.)

I suspect my history as a professional reviewer is one of the reasons I’m unafraid of reviews for my books. I’m intrigued by both the terrible and the gushing. Bloggers have had epiphanies about my writing that never would have occurred to me. Conversely, one review encouraged a re-listen of my audiobook with an ear for every nuanced mention of sex, alcohol, and lascivious intention. (If you are truly horrified by such things, you probably just shouldn’t read Enchanted. Or AlphaOops.)

The chemist in me can’t help but look at all this business scientifically. Reviews are by their nature subjective and often tell us more about the reader than the book in question. Similarly, reviews reveal trends in the 21st century reading public. Do they crave more back story, or are they impatient to get to the end? Are they tired of dystopia? Are they looking for more “realism” in their fantasy? (This last one still baffles me as much as the young people who refuse to believe in love at first sight.)

With my latest book release this February, the trend I spotted was something I affectionately call “The Precious Five-Star.” Most of my books (happily) have lots of five-star reviews, some four stars, a few three stars, and proportionately fewer two and one stars.

This release, however, seemed to be racking up the four-star reviews in spades. My first thought was, “Mom is going to be furious.” (Dearest is her favorite and she’ll argue passionately with anyone who says otherwise.) My second thought was, “Did my writing suddenly take a nosedive?” And then I started reading all those four-star reviews.

They were glowing.

Reviewers finished the book and immediately started reading it again from page one. New fans were eager to pick up the first two volumes of the series. Old fans loved it as much as book one. All of them said they couldn’t wait to get their hands on every other future book in the series. And every one was a four-star review.

Like other authors who are amused by a trend, I went on Twitter to have a bit of fun. (THIS BOOK CHANGED MY OIL & MADE ME BREAKFAST IN BED! #4stars) Wackiness ensued . . . as did a discussion that surprised me. An author, a reader, and a professional blogger all responded, telling me that they saved their five-stars for “Books That Changed Their Lives.”

Now, I’ll be honest with you. I have never sat down at my computer, cracked my knuckles over the keyboard, and announced, “Today I am going to change someone’s life.” Moreover, I don’t really want you to change. I happen to like you just the way you are. I’ve been telling stories since I was a kid. My purpose now is pretty much the same as it was then: to entertain myself and my friends. If it’s not your cup of tea, there are always other choices on the menu.

But come on . . . change your life?! That’s a lot of pressure to put on an author before even cracking the spine. Nevermind the fact that it is ultimately you who changes your life. If our words inspire you to do so, that’s an honor you give us. We just sit here giggling and weeping over keyboards. You are the amazing, life-changing person in this equation. (In case you forgot.)

It seems that the majority of people reserving space for the Precious Five-Star are intelligent folks who are very serious about their reading. It follows that those of us who are writing for that demographic would have book reviews on the Intrawebs at large with fewer stars than those more unprofessional folks who have shamelessly filled Amazon and Goodreads with a glut of five-star reviews from street teams and random passersby.

My current writer-in-residence, K. Tempest Bradford, is one of those professional reviewers who uses five stars sparingly. She is suspicious when a product has too many five-star reviews. To her, four stars are more believable. But is this what every reader thinks? Does every reader see “three-and-three-quarters stars” and go read the reviews—or even reviews at other sites—before purchasing?

In time, will the Precious Five-Star hurt sales? In the New York publishing world, sales are everything. Slipping sales lead to contracts not being renewed and dropped series and soon the authors that didn’t change your life are no longer publishing. (You may think this an extreme case, but I’m afraid it happens far more often than you’d like to believe.)

One of my romance writer friends discovered another side effect of this Precious Five-Star culture: a blogger said to my friend at a social gathering that she should not expect a five-star review of her work because those are reserved. Really? Is this appropriate author small talk now?

The more I delve into this dilemma, the more uncertain I am about where I stand on the issue. As a child actress, I was taught never to boo someone on stage, no matter how bad the performance, because that person was brave enough to be on stage. As an optimist, I believe that love should be declared loudly and as often as possible. It costs us nothing, and there’s not enough of it in the world, so what’s to lose?

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, and their own score system. As long as people continue to be unique, diverse individuals, reviews will never be standardized (and thank goodness!). But will Precious Five-Stars ultimately become a matter of pride or a source of punishment for authors today?

In 2009, the FTC required that blogs mention they “received a free review copy of [Book] in exchange for a fair and honest review.” Does the book industry need to initiate a Precious Five-Star disclaimer? “Your book might buy me a ticket to Hawaii and drive me to the airport, but unless it flies the plane, it’s not getting five-stars from this review site.”

Now I’m curious. How do you review?

About the Author

New York Times bestselling author Alethea Kontis is a princess, a goddess, a force of nature, and a mess. She’s known for screwing up the alphabet, scolding vampire hunters, turning garden gnomes into mad scientists, and making sense out of fairy tales.

Alethea is the co-author of Sherrilyn Kenyon’s Dark-Hunter Companion, and penned the AlphaOops series of picture books. Her short fiction, essays, and poetry have appeared in a myriad of anthologies and magazines. She has done multiple collaborations with Eisner winning artist J.K. Lee, including The Wonderland Alphabet and Diary of a Mad Scientist Garden Gnome. Her debut YA fairy tale novel, Enchanted, won the Gelett Burgess Children’s Book Award in 2012.

Born in Burlington, Vermont, Alethea now lives in Northern Virginia with her Fairy Godfamily. She makes the best baklava you’ve ever tasted and sleeps with a teddy bear named Charlie.

Editor’s Desk:
Danger! Radioactive!

Neil Clarke

It’s hard to believe that it has been over two years since my doctors implanted my defibrillator. Life as a cyborg hasn’t been what my childhood self would have expected. I can’t run faster, see further, or even lift a car. A few times a year, I become a wireless transmitter, but all I can do is upload heart data to my cardiologist. It’s been long enough now that they’ve decided it was time for me to go in for some thorough testing. Late last month, I spent the better part of a day being run through a battery of tests, one of which left me radioactive enough to set off airport scanners.

My childhood self encouraged me to stomp around and roar. Consider it practice for when the radiation causes me to become fifty meters tall, which would be big enough to stand alongside my new best friend and fellow radioactive menace, Godzilla. That didn’t happen either. Reality can be such a disappointment.

Giant monsters remain a guilty pleasure. However, it’s a coincidence that “Postcards from Monster Island” was published in this issue. It was scheduled long before I knew I’d become a mildly (and temporarily) radioactive cyborg. Everything happens for a reason, so I’m convinced that this is just another sign that the universe enjoys mocking me for my genre affections.

The universe wasn’t the first one to mock me and certainly won’t be the last. One of the reasons my childhood self dreamed so passionately of being a cyborg or giant monster was bullying. I was a small kid, often the youngest in my class, geeky, and smart. In grade school, I was tormented physically and psychologically for years. Of course I’d dream about becoming a fifty-meter creature that could stomp on his enemies and exact revenge with a breath of nuclear fire. When the opportunity presents itself, going from bullied to bully is incredibly easy. We can rationalize anything when we’re embroiled in justified rage, even when it means becoming the things we hate.

I suppose from that perspective, the universe is really laughing at me because it knows that things turned out for the best. No superpowers, but they never kept me down and I still have my dignity and self-respect. That’s something to keep in mind as I move forward.

SSSKREEONK!

About the Author

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

Cover Art: Sleeping Giant

Julie Dillon

About the Artist

Julie Dillon is a science fiction and fantasy illustrator creating art for books and magazines, as well as for her own projects and publications. She has won two Chesley awards, a Hugo Award, and has been nominated for two World Fantasy Awards.